Charles N. Shaffer, Jr., did just about everything right in representing John W. Dean III, the onetime White House counsel whose riveting testimony before a Senate committee in 1973 directly implicated President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate break-in and coverup, leading to Nixon’s resignation the following year. But Shaffer, who died at age 82 at his home in
In his 1975 book, The Accountability of Power, Walter Mondale described why he had abandoned his campaign for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination in midstream. “I simply did not have the overwhelming desire necessary to do what had to be done to get elected,” he wrote. By 1981 Mondale had put that hesitation aside. He was ready to do