I had my first sexual fantasy when I was a freshman in high school. Oh, I’d had crushes before. I lusted after Julie Newmar’s Catwoman on “Batman,” I fantasized about my seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Pink, who wore white lipstick and taught us Bob Dylan songs, and I was so besotted with my Spin the Bottle cohorts Rhonda Hellstrom and Sandy Siegel that I could never meet their eyes in school. But one woman I encountered in the Spring of 1973 brought me to a new level in my sexual awakening.
The gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate Hearings was my favorite TV show that year, eclipsing favorites such as “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Room 222,” and “Bridget Loves Bernie.” Before they concluded in August, the hearings amassed 319 hours of coverage. As a precursor to Reality Television, the Watergate fiasco had more intrigue and backstabbing than any nighttime soap. The ratings would have made the producers of “American Idol” drool—it was estimated that 85% of all U.S. households had tuned in to some portion of the hearings despite Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox’s attempts to ban Watergate testimony from the airwaves.
The facts presented during the hearings were incredible—from the bungled burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters to the question that was increasing in volume with every passing day, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” In addition to following the Watergate burglars’ connections to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the lurid tales of hush money and illegal CIA activities, and the shocking revelation that Nixon had recorded almost every conversation he’d had in the Oval Office, I must admit that I was also closely watching one other critical aspect of the hearings: Maureen Dean.
Have you noticed that we are incapable of going through a national scandal without crowning someone the Honorary Hottie? Fawn Hall, Donna Rice, and Jessica Hahn have taken up this mantle over the years but during the Watergate coverage the position was locked up by the wife of White House Counsel John Dean. Maureen Dean was as alluring as a Hitchcock heroine. Her pulled back blond hair was reminiscent of Grace Kelly and Kim Novak and her ever-changing couture wardrobe was a welcome change from Martha Mitchell’s dowdy ensembles. Maureen’s loyalty to her embattled husband was a real turn-on as she dutifully sat behind him during his testimony. I could feel my heart racing as I ran home to watch the hearings. What would Maureen be wearing today? Would she look into the camera? Gaze lovingly at the back of her husband’s head? I fantasized about her unleashing that tight bun and watching her lush cornsilk-colored hair cascade around her perfectly composed Max Factored face. Sometimes she’d fiddle with the buttons on her white Chanel blouse and I’d think I was going to faint. Oh Mo, my Mo, the sexiest Republican since Jane Russell. How I envied John Dean, Maureen’s third husband, despite the fact that his life and career were imploding before my eyes.
I admit that it was a gleeful pleasure to watch the Nixon White House break apart at the seams, and I counted Sam Ervin, the North Carolina senator who presided over the Senate Watergate Committee, as a personal hero. I still have my membership card in the National Sam Ervin Fan Club, and loved watching him make all of the players squirm in their seats. Ervin became a household name during the hearings and I ate up his folksy analysis of the events, delivered in his Southern drawl. Of John Mitchell and John Erlichman, Ervin said, “I don’t think either one of them would have recognized the Bill of Rights if they met it on the street in broad daylight under a cloudless sky.” About the Watergate scandal in general he noted, “I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.” But I cringed when Sam was particularly hard on Dean, not because I gave a whit about the White House Counsel, but because I knew how poor Maureen was suffering for her man.
To cement her status as the Hot Babe of Watergate, Maureen Dean was later accused by various right wing sleazeballs of being a high class hooker with ties to the mob. The Deans are currently involved in a libel suit against G. Gordon Liddy and others for publishing the preposterous story that the Watergate break-in had nothing to do with President Nixon but was orchestrated by Dean to protect Maureen by removing materials that linked her to a call-girl ring run out of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. I believe the Deans that this story is an bold-faced lie but I admit it would have fed right into the fantasies of one fourteen-year-old boy.
