This will stir the pot: John Dean’s coming out with a new book in August. Here’s part of the publisher’s blurb:

“In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President Nixon know and when did he know it?”

Should be good stuff.

But of course what it provides won’t be “definitive.” That answer died with Nixon himself on April 22, 1994. Take that marketing label with whatever you use to flush stuff down and instead take note of “draws on his own transcripts.”

Ay, there’s the rub.

Transcripts. Here’s what National Archives and Records Administration archivist Samuel W. Rushay, Jr. has to say about them:

“NARA does not make transcripts of conversations on the Nixon tapes and considers transcripts to be an interpretation of the records, which are the tapes themselves. Transcripts are very time consuming to write, error-prone, and unreliable because people hear different things.”

Do they ever. Watch this:

John Dean himself alerted me to this in 2006 when I was finishing In Nixon’s Web. We had many lengthy chats about Watergate and the tapes, and we even had lunch together outside Boston. He pointed out the Kutler mistake you can see and hear in the clip above.

So Dean’s new book should be an interesting… interpretation.

But it’s months away and Dean’s still working on it. We’ll talk more about it when it comes out.

Oh. One more thing.

I didn’t steer you to Nixon and Haldeman talking about Mark Felt just as an example of how tough the tapes are to transcribe. They are but that’s not the reason.

The reason is the conversation itself, the rest of it, and who still wants us to “hear different things” in it.

It gets better. Way better. Stay tuned.