“I think John Mitchell, Nixon’s AG, was at fault”
G.Gordon Liddy came to believe that John Dean was the one who ordered the Watergate break-in.
That neither Nixon nor John Mitchell knew anything about it. Those two thought they were covering for each other when they got involved in the coverup.
After his release from prison Liddy read the book “Silent Coup”, written by a couple of liberal journalists, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, who set out to write a harmony of all of the Watergate accounts. Their book convinced Liddy that Dean was in fact the mastermind of whole affair, and that Dean covered his own hide by implicating Nixon.
Any student of Watergate should read that book. I bought it back when it was published, in the 1990s. I’ve since seen a free ebook copy available on the net.