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By GAY PAULEY UPI Women’s Editor NEW YORK (UPI) — Now it is Mrs. John W. Dean III who is on trial, a personal one in which she faces a bleak family situation—her husband in pri son, her mother seriously ill in California. The betting in this corner is that 29-year-old Maureen Dean will come through courageous ly. There has to be a spine of steel in this beautiful woman whose husband, former White House counsel, is serving a one to four-year prison term at Ft. Holabird, a federal detention center in Baltimore, Md. Dean went to prison Sept. 3 after pleading guilty to con spiracy to obstruct justice in the Watergate scandal. Three other former top Nixon ad ministration aides, Charles W. Colson, Herbert Kalmbach and Jeb Stuart Magruder, also are confined at Ft. Holabird. Mrs. Dean said the toughest part of the Watergate drama was when her husband went to prison. “I felt that more than anything.”’ The year will pass rapidly, I suggested, as we talked in her New York hotel suite. “I’m not sure,’’ she said. “The first three months have gone so slowly.” At present, Mrs. Dean is shuttling between the couple’s recently acquired home in Beverly Hills, Calif., and Holabird when she may see her husband for a couple of hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Always, she said, the cell door is open and a federal marshal stands by. She will spend Christmas in California because her mother, Mrs. Sidney Kane, 66, of Mar Vista, near Los Angeles, is sick. She did not want to detail the illness. But she and her husband had discussed holiday plans and agreed she should be with her mother. Mrs. Dean came to New York to help promote a magazine interview with Dean, whose testimony before the Senate Watergate hearings helped bring down the Nixon administration. She would “rather not” discuss what the article represented financially. But money is tight with the Deans now, she said, in part because of the expense of traveling between California and Baltimore-Washington. In trips East she usually stays with close friends, the Barry Goldwater Jr. family. There was a profit in selling their large house near the capital and buying a smaller one on the West Coast, she said. And, she’s writing a novel due in May. She has been keeping a diary since 1970 when she moved to Washington— ‘‘where everybo dy talks in shorthand.” The book, while a work of fiction, will encompass ‘“‘my personal feelings’ and maybe ‘help teach people something about power and politics. I’ve learned a lot I’d like to pass on.” Mrs. Dean was a career woman before her marriage to Dean in October, 1972. A product of the Notre Dame Girls’ Academy and Santa Monica City College, she worked as secretary, airlines stewardess, and was an insur ance broker. In Washington, she worked for the Department of Justice and traveled worldwide as member of the department’s commission on marijuana and drug abuse. She was a widow when she met Dean through mutual friends—her first husband was killed in an automobile ac cident. Dean was married previously and has a son. To the question, would this whole Watergate thing plus prison shake their marriage, she answered, ‘‘Oh, God no.” Mrs. Dean looks much the same as she did when a whole nation watched her sitting behind her husband during the televised hearings of the Watergate committee. Only the hair is a little darker, a streaked blonde, now worn sleeked back into a chignon. Maureen Dean seems to hold no bitterness, but feels that former President Nixon should come forth and tell the truth for all these men who gave so much time for the American people. “But I think he will do nothing.”
Newspaper Details
Alice Echo News
Alice, Texas, US
Wed, Dec 18, 1974
Page 3
Full Page
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USA 14 Aug 2026
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