From the archives: The Best Evidence Watergate reader (updated!)
the true crime that's worth your time
The 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resigning the presidency is coming up this week, so I've brought a Watergate reader out of the archives for your TBR/bookmarking convenience. Unless otherwise noted, the text here dates from the May 2, 2022 edition of the newsletter, but I've also grafted in other Watergate/Nixonian materials from elsewhere in our archive, along with the dates published.
I'll continue updating this document in future -- scroll to the bottom to find the most recent edit date -- and I hope to include the Tricky Dick docuseries to the master list later this week, plus two more books I'm in the middle of, At That Point In Time (Fred Thompson's memoir of the congressional committee) and J. Anthony Lukas's Nightmare.
To suggest additions, hit us in the comments or email us, editorial at bestevidence.fyi!
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I just started listening to Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History, and it’s fantastic. Because 80 percent of my audiobook listening takes place in the 10-15 minutes before I go to sleep — the rest is in the car — I try to choose titles on topics I already know pretty well. That way, it’s interesting, but not so interesting (or, in the case of true-crime books, upsetting) that I can’t fall asleep or miss my turn or whatever, so I listen to a lot of midcentury literary history; a lot of art history and art-heist chronicles; and a fair bit of Watergate-iana.
I’ve noted here before that the Trump presidency, and its treasonous reluctance to end, saw me using All The President’s Men as an emotional-support-animal movie, and my fascination with the Watergate “scandal” is in no small part about the soothing satisfactions in its narrative. Crime committed, cover-up biffed, investigation thwarted but then triumphant, frumpy power-monger ejected, justice served. It’s not that simple, of course, but the story and the stories of the story have their comforts.
That said, Graff’s thorough but briskly paced account of the end of the Nixon presidency and its hoisting by an array of internal petards is not a great choice to listen to, for me, because it’s…too good. Narrator Jacques Roy is wonderful, imbuing certain laughable or despicable anecdotes with just the right dry or acid tone of voice, and the interweaving of footnotes is also very elegant (many times, the “footnote” notation is executed with a highly enjoyable “so get a load of this shit” timbre). Whole chapters on dimly remembered pre-Watergate subplots like the Chennault Affair give and deepen context, but don’t feel like “I did this research and goddammit we’re all going to plow through it” info dumps.
The problem here is that I feel like I don’t want to set the sleep timer on this one, lest I miss something, so I may have to buy it “for my dad” in text form and then borrow it. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, if you want to dig into some Watergate reading but didn’t know where to start, obviously I’ll recommend you start with this one, which is jam-packed without feeling homework-y, and readable but not babyish.
I’ll also give you a quick list of other books in the sub-sub-genre, and a read/TBR/skip rec for each.
All The President’s Men: The Greatest Reporting Story Of All Time (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) // …If they don’t say so themselves! Look, I’m not here to slag a classic, but if you’ve seen the movie, you’re fine to skip this one, and if you haven’t seen the movie, you should — it saves time, and you can avoid the reminder that good reporting isn’t synonymous with good writing. …TBR
Being Nixon: A Man Divided (Evan Thomas) // Almost positive I’ve mentioned Being Nixon here before, but if you’re a “how, emotionally/psychologically, did we get here” guy when it comes to crime and conspiracy, this book’s for you. I sped through it in a day and a half when it came out; it’s well written and meticulous, but doesn’t overdetermine its theses about anything.
Like, you know Deep Throat’s line in ATPM, “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand”? Nixon was a bright guy, but he wasn’t that complex. Thomas’s take is less nuts-and-bolts than a straight-ahead bio, and goes down smoother for that. …READ
The crime
Watergate.
The story
After I wrote up the Robert Sam Anson reader last month, I snagged a copy of Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon for cheap on eBay. The copy errors I mentioned previously extend, on Goodreads anyway, to the very title of the book, which is rendered as the “UnQUITE Oblivion” of Tricky Dick; a bio on Nixon’s first decade out of office that retained any influence in this decade likely wouldn’t present this amateurishly. (Then again, perhaps “unquite” is apt? More on that in a bit.)
Other readers did find and review the book regardless, and this three-star overview by Christopher Saunders got to the heart of it…in a way:
In its best moments it works as a continuation of The Final Days, offering the same portrait of a shattered, neurotic Nixon on the verge of breakdown. At his worst (and the further the book goes, the worse it gets) Anson tepidly recycles well-worn anecdotes familiar from press articles and other books. His account of Nixon's TV interviews with David Frost, for instance, merely paraphrases Frost's own memoirs on the subject; nor does he offer much insight into Nixon's memoir writing that a standard press release couldn't offer. By the time Nixon reemerges in the early '80s as a respected elder statesman, he's much less interesting than he's ever been. This, sadly, is the Nixon Anson chooses increasingly to emphasize.
I thought better of the book overall than Saunders did, but the point is well taken: if you have any familiarity at all with the Frost/Nixon story, that section is likely to drag or seem like a write-around. I don’t know that period well, so it read fine for me. The whole book did; Anson doesn’t waste time psychoanalyzing or guessing, just presents the facts gathered and moves on to the next thing.
I also take Saunders’s point re: Nixon’s memoir-writing, but really, I doubt that even full cooperation by Nixon with Anson’s book would give the sort of deep understanding of Nixon’s process that Saunders may have hoped for. It’s a hallmark of the man, and part of why we continue to find him and his downfall compelling, that Nixon was 1) deeply and contradictorily weird, in sometimes relatable and sometimes repellent, interior but not introspective Greatest Generation ways; and 2) simultaneously extremely bright about strategy, and completely unable to apply it to his own awkwardness.
And if Nixon had had the desire to analyze his own writing craft, he isn’t a writer per se — so we’d learn little past what Anson tells us, namely that Nixon dictated many hours of tapes and then a staff whipped the transcripts into shape. In other words, I get Saunders’s disappointment, but I also think this is not a reasonable expectation given Nixon’s known personality.
Saunders is right about that last bit, though. In the main, Anson manages not to commit to a position on Nixon’s eventual rehabilitation, but he does seem very relieved that Nixon didn’t lay down in the middle of a freeway in the mid-seventies. More than a few other sources (Woodward and Bernstein; Attorney General Elliot Richardson, per the Jules Witcover doorstop on the 1976 election I’m reading now) viewed a Nixon collapse, physical or emotional, as a very real possibility, and the lifting of that tension in Anson’s case means that he isn’t especially effective at interrogating Nixon’s policy-advisor victory lap in the latter part of the book.
But said book came out at the end of Reagan’s first term, so there’s by chronological definition a lack of historical perspective on the perception of Nixon…
…which, by the time of Nixon’s death ten years later, had mellowed even further. I remember watching the state funeral in the Campus Club TV room and thinking — among other things, including that Ronnie surely couldn’t tell you where he was, or why — that even 20 years after Nixon resigned, and over and above the editorial politesse of waiting for a “celebrity”’s body to cool, it still seemed kind of soon for us as a country to remember him warmly. Our context for Nixon and how to talk about him continues to move around even today, whether respectful or sour or despairing or some combination — but I think the desire to see a former president or disgraced celeb as capable of redemption and contribution, or at least not destroyed utterly by petty striving, can sometimes make it difficult to render that figure as he is.
Nixon was a hard worker with ridiculous name/fact recall, tough and stubborn, a sweet grandpa, and he was a racist, sexist, self-pitying, dishonest, vengeful dweeb who committed felonies. Nixon also identified the cliff democracy should get pushed off of, and handed Reagan the map. That Gingrich and Cheney and Bannon did the pushing isn’t a mitigating factor.
But reading Exile during the lead-up to last week’s “Arraignmas” gave it a depth for me that Saunders, reviewing it in 2017, maybe didn’t get to enjoy. The early back-and-forth between a freshly ejected Nixon and an already overmatched Ford White House about Nixon’s pardon, Nixon’s “statement of contrition,” who got which papers and personal effects, etc. and so on draws its own parallels and contrasts with the country’s current situation (in more ways than one; Nixon pulled some shit with state gifts that has the same whiff as the Thomases’).
Yes, Exile is “gossipy,” as Saunders says, but not maliciously so; like a lot of gossip, it’s at least partly an attempt to understand, to figure out how we got here and bring order out of chaos that way. Doesn’t always work, not always a good look, but that’s another parallel with the Trump gang — the rabbitishly proliferating takedowns of and tell-alls about 45, his staff, his wife, they get written and we read them because we’re trying to understand an almost unprecedented and disorienting state of affairs.
Dave Sr. (still not the Zodiac) and I talk from time to time about the vertiginous feeling of the Watergate era. I was in diapers, but my dad remembers 18 months of reading the paper and feeling like the car had no brakes. I think that’s why I’ve returned so often to Watergate-case materials since early 2017 — it felt the same then as it does now, but it sort of turned out okay, ish? From certain angles? Anyway, I’m lending Dad the book; I’ll report back. -- SDB, 4/10/23; ...READ
The Final Days: The Classic, Behind-the-Scenes Account of Richard Nixon’s Dramatic Last Days in the White House (Woodward and Bernstein) // If you only have time for one “Woodstein” take on Watergate, make it this one. Here again, it’s not the most mellifluous prose, but the “asshole did what?” quotient is extremely high, and since it’s more or less jumping ahead to the end, some may find it more satisfying than ATPM: The Book. …READ
The Last of the President’s Men (Bob Woodward) // Specifically, Alexander Butterfield, the Haldeman aide who revealed that the Oval Office had a taping system. Woodward gets good access to Butterfield and his files and notes — and nearly half the book is those materials, indexed — but the book itself could have sufficed as a Vanity Fair or New Yorker article. It’s fine, but it’s filler-y, and you could Google around for the info just as easily (or find it in Graff’s book). …SKIP
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Rick Perlstein) // A hefty but well-paced overview of Nixon's career; how the dirty tricks certainly didn't start with Watergate (or with the burglars); and the continued warping effects of Nixon's "Southern strategy." The audiobook version as narrated by Stephen R. Thorne is highly recommended and quite a bit less daunting. -- SDB, 8/4/24 ...READ/LISTEN
President Nixon: Alone In The White House (Richard Reeves) // Reeves’s book is good, enjoyable background on Nixon’s first term, which is not irrelevant, and I did like the book, despite thinking it tried maybe too hard to create compassion around the job of the presidency. A solid sit, but it can wait. …TBR
Richard Nixon: The Life (John Farrell) // Very long, very complete, and very good…but not great. Tales of his 1940s congressional campaigning and friendship with Bebe Rebozo don’t drag or anything, but it is a complete biography and you may run out of gas before you get to Watergate. About as good as the Thomas at putting Nixon’s dirty-tricks behavior in context; just takes longer to get there. …TBR
The Selling of the President 1968 (Joe McGinniss) // I guess it’s weird for me to tell you to read this one and TBR-list the Reeves, but I think this one is fascinating reading vis-a-vis the birth of modern “optics” in campaigning; how ill-suited Nixon was for a “surface-based” sale; and how that had started to curdle his attitude towards “just” electoral outcomes starting in 1960 (I mean, really in the 1920s probably, but: you know what I mean). If you get a later PB edition, skip McGinniss’s self-regarding intro. …READ
Ben Stein evidently has a Nixon/foreign policy tome out later this year, which I…will not read; I don’t tend to read the co-conspirators’ memoirs either (I think Dwight Chapin dropped one a couple months back). But if you have other recommendations and reviews, let’s hear them! — SDB
last edited 3 PM, 4 August 2024