How The Good Guys Finally Won

 

How The Good Guys Finally Won – by Jimmy Breslin

I must make a note of myself not to attempt to read “current event” books that are 50 years old.  This is a book that is loosely (very loosely) written about aspects of the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon back in 1974.  This book was written very shortly after the event, and history really hadn’t had time to digest the players, the motivations, and the events.  I’ve actually read a lot of HISTORY books about Watergate that were well done, but this really isn’t a history book since much of the history hadn’t actually happened yet.

This book really isn’t even much of a linear account.  My guess is that Jimmy Breslin, a political correspondent during the time, decided to record a lot of observations and goings on that was occurring during the 18 months or so prior to the Nixon resignation.  There are simply too many players here in the pages, too much jumping back and forth in time, and too much meticulous detail about inconsequential people and events that takes away from any sort of concise narrative.

The main player in this story is Massachusetts Democrat Tip O’Neil.  Now, you could argue that every member of congress that served in the early seventies has their own Watergate story, but O’Neill, to my knowledge, never really had a major part in the process. True, he was a major personality, and it is somewhat interesting to see him work the political strings behind the scenes, but this book never really seems to go anywhere, and we read much more about Tip than we do Richard Nixon.  There’s no real beginning, middle, nor end.  It simply feels as though we’re eavesdropping on a multitude of cocktail parties that took place in Washington D.C. with the major movers and shakers during the time of the Watergate scandal.  Now, Tip was a key player that started the whole “Impeach Nixon” movement started, but too much detail is spent on the particulars that most readers really don’t care to read.

Perhaps the intent of this book was to be more about “atmosphere” and less on “linear facts”, but if so, I guess I should take the blame for not being aware of exactly what the point of this book was.  I didn’t feel like there was any sort of consistent theme throughout this story.  The Watergate scandal has been documented ad nauseum, and there are even a few “conspiracy theory” stories out there (see the book “Silent Coup”), and I guess I was hoping for some sort of telling of the Watergate story through a different set of eyes.

I guess if I had been a political insider or junkie around 1976, a lot of the anecdotes and stories told here may have resonated with me, but I felt this thing was overall a boring account that never piqued my interest to want to know more about anyone featured in this book.  There are so many major players in the Watergate scandal, and I felt most of them were at least mentioned in this book, but there was no insight as to what made any of them tick nor what their motivation may have been.  Again, it seems as though the author assumes his reader already knows this, but the only people who would know such details are the political addicts of the 1970s.   If you don’t really know much about H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, John Dean, Jeb Magruder, and/or John Ehrlichman, well, you certainly won’t learn about any of them here.

I’ve only read one other book by this author, the telling of the brand-new New York Mets baseball franchise that was a trainwreck when first conceived.  Although that one was a “current” event book as well (The Mets became a team in 1962, the book was written in 1963), that one at least held my interest.   I would recommend a hard pass on this book, especially if your goal is to learn anything at all about Watergate.