Watergate: A New History

 

Watergate: A New History – by Garrett M. Graff

So I’ve probably read about 10-15 books about the infamous Watergate incident.  My guess is that there are well over 100. We must remember that most of the “president’s men” that were implicated in the scandal ended up writing personal memoirs, so such a high volume of accounts shouldn’t be too surprising.  But in 2024, the million-dollar question I asked was: “Do we really need ANOTHER book on Watergate?”  Well, maybe not, but that doesn’t take away the fact that this book is, in fact, an excellent account. In fact, it may be the best of the rather large bunch.

What we must remember about history, is that as time moves forward, more information is uncovered; more sources are found, and in the instance of Watergate, we still have several principles who are still alive and may be willing to now divulge what they know.  The biggest thing that this account has in its favor is that we now all know who journalist Bob Woodward’s secret source was.  For decades, he was only known as “Deep Throat”, and if you saw the 1976 film “All the President’s Men”, you saw just how consequential said source was.  In fact, there were a few books written that seemed to ONLY focus on figuring out the identity of the mysterious individual. (John Dean attempted this with his book “Lost Honor”.  Sadly, it wasn’t a very good book, and like most, Dean got it wrong; He surmised Alexander Haig.)  Anyway, Woodward finally told us several years ago that his clandestine source was acting FBI Director Mark Felt.  Such knowledge DOES in fact, give this book a bit more focus since this has now been revealed and Felt is given a lot of page space since he was such an important player.

Author Garrett M. Graff doesn’t really make the main focus of this book the “what” so much as the “why”.  Although it’s mainly known by scholars, the actual Watergate burglary was only one of a plethora of “dirty tricks” that Nixon and his team concocted to destroy his enemies, promote his agenda, and satisfy the 37^th president’s persistent paranoia. We read about such unpleasantness before Nixon even takes office such as the Chennault Affair, and many of his earlier stumblings such as the Pentagon Papers incident and the Huston Plan.  In fact, as this book reminds us, there has never been a consensus as to what the Watergate burglars were actually trying to achieve when they were caught with prefabricated bugging equipment inside the Chairman of the Democratic Party’s headquarters office that fateful night.

I would argue that the biggest factor of the scandal is that there were simply too many crooks running around with too many fingers in too many pies.  Sure, if one or two people are guilty in such a high-level crime, it might be possible to contain the truth and execute some sort of cover up, but the guilty parties of Watergate were in the dozens, and with all of evil oozing everywhere, there was no chance of containing it.  Of course it didn’t help when it was discovered that Nixon set up a taping system in the Oval Office that recorded every conversation that occurred. 

The book walks us through it all, concluding with Nixon’s resignation and the immediate aftereffects. We are then reminded that since the incident, journalists have never fully trusted the Oval Office, and Watergate added a certain color to all administrations that made us all highly skeptical of any news story that seemed slightly off color. (Bob Woodward wrote a great account back in the 1990s of the subsequent presidents and their “scandals”.  I believe the title was “Shadow”; worth checking out.)

One problem that this (and all Watergate) book(s) has is that there are an awful lot of people to read about within the pages and it’s hard to keep all of the names straight.  Fortunately the author includes a nice pictorial supplement in the book that gives us a visual of most of the major players, but it’s still an awful lot to digest.  I’m not sure readers in the 2020s know who people like Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchel, and John Dean were, so one might get a tad lost.  I will say, again, that this is simply a sad fact and not something any author can control nor make anything easier for the reader.  Again, they were just too many people involved, and if we really do want a comprehensive account such as this, such detail is necessary.

This is a great book for someone who knows little about the tragedy, but I would also highly recommend it for someone (such as myself) who’s already read an awful lot on the subject.  There are new insights, new stories, new speculations, and sometimes it really is better to examine history 50 years (yes, it’s been that long) after the fact rather than immediately after the incident has been brought to light.