10 Books About Watergate and/or Richard Nixon to Warm Your Heart During the Cold Months

1.     All the President’s Men (1974) by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

All the President’s Men, more than any other book, captures the romance of Watergate: good vs. evil, the dogged hunt for the truth; figures in the shadows; coded messages; two neophytes (one vaguely resembling Robert Redford, the other looking a little like Dustin Hoffman) rousing the dangerous, secretive organization.

One of the first books written in the style of the New Journalism, which combines non-fiction with the story-telling techniques of fiction, All the President’s Men remains in our memory because it was written to (and because it was made into a movie). Woodward’s and Bernstein’s book has become a fable, an actual legend, stirring in our unconscious.

Who can recite the contents of any of the three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon approved by the House Judiciary Committee? But if I said, “Deep Throat would be a cool person to hang out with, but I wouldn’t want to tell him any of my dark secrets,” you would know exactly what I was talking about – unless you saw the wrong movie.

 2. One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (2015) by Tim Weiner

       This is the best book about the Nixon presidency (well, at least among the thousands of books about RN that I’ve read.) Two things set this book apart: 1) the account of how during the 1968 presidential campaign Nixon sabotaged Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks with North and South Vietnam by promising the South Vietnamese a better deal upon his election; and 2) Weiner’s focus on Nixon’s drinking and insomnia and how they might have affected how he conducted himself as president.

One night he took his presidential insomnia on the road, ordering his valet to drive him to the Lincoln Memorial where young war protestors were still milling around at 4:30 in the morning. Nixon decided he would engage the kids in a friendly debate about the relative merits of Ho Chi Minh and How Shy Nixon, although he mostly looked at the ground and mumbled, according to one student.

 

3.      The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (2014) by John Dean (yes, that John Dean)

Reading the Nixon Defense is like poring over the entire archive of the Watergate tapes with John Dean looking over your shoulder, telling you what passages to highlight, which remarks are funny and why, and what he was doing whenever Nixon and Haldeman were conversing about him in the Oval Office.

That’s what happens when a 784-page tome consists almost entirely of White House tapes, transcribed and edited by Dean and his assistants (with occasional footnotes and comments). Dean claims that he pared down the collection of tapes to avail us of only the most important ones.

He focuses on Nixon’s preoccupation with producing a white paper which will serve as a public explanation of Watergate without implicating Nixon or his top aides. Of course, that was impossible.

Irony abounds: Nixon figures out early on that FBI Associate Director Mark Felt is Deep Throat. He decides not to go after him because he fears Felt will respond with a missile barrage of Watergate leaks. Speaking of hazardous communications, the P discusses destroying the tapes a number of times with Haldeman, at least the political ones. Haldeman never really follows up.

 

4.       Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (2007) by Robert Dallek

 

How about a couple of humorous tidbits from Partners before we hit the serious stuff?

It was July 1971. Henry Kissinger, the only person in the universe Nixon trusted to carry out his global political strategy, sneaks into Paris for meetings with the North Vietnamese. Nixon was desperate for an immediate exit from the Vietnam War, and he believed, in his charmingly paranoid way, that Kissinger’s negotiations needed to be conducted in upmost secrecy. To this end, Kissinger was given the code name General Kirschman. Who says Nixon didn’t have a sense of humor?

Nixon is meeting with some of his men in the Oval Office. Kissinger, typically, is late for the meeting. Someone (probably Ehrlichman, who couldn’t stand Kissinger) complains that Kissinger is always late. To which Nixon responds, “Is that a Jewish thing?”

The most striking assertion in this book is that, while Nixon was politically disabled and seriously depressed over Watergate, the US response to the Yom Kippur War was carried out alone by Kissinger and Alexander Haig – even the decision to raise the American military alert to DefCon III, the highest peacetime warning. As Dallek has it, Kissinger “centered control of the crisis in his own hands” … and “did not consult Nixon.”

 

5.      The Final Days (1976) by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

 

After the thrilling, anxious chase that resulted in the original Washington Post stories and eventually All the President’s Men, Woodstein (or Bernward if you’re partial to the one with long hair) reclined on the sofa, felt the tingle of their new-found fame and fortune and had a few laughs at the P’s expense. They called their new project The Final Days because it tracked the desperation and bizarre behavior of Nixon’s last days in office, how the leader of the Free World reacted as his power disintegrated.

I picture Bernward sitting at their Smith-Coronas with their notes by their sides, laughing their heads off: laughing at the futile trip to Egypt to turn attention from Watergate, laughing at the P talking to a portrait of Lincoln in the White House, laughing at RN’s asking Henry Kissinger to pray with him in the Oval Office. (Confused, Kissinger prays the Amidah. Nixon bellows, “No, Jew Boy, daven on your knees, like a goy!”)

 

6.   Washington Journal: The Watergate Scandal, 1973 – 1974 (1974) by Elizabeth Drew

 

Imagine you had an aunt or family friend (an aunt or family friend who was a Phi Beta Kappa at a top East Coast college and was talented enough to write for one of the most storied magazines in the nation’s history) sending you letters from Washington in the year of Nixon’s resignation, preempting Congress’ certain impeachment of him.

She tells you how it feels as the boat snakes its way to the resignation. She describes the surreal and the scary, the tug-of-war between president and Congress, the mind-blowing revelations.

Drew lived the “Constitutional Crisis,” and her “letters” give you a seat on the boat.

 

7.      In Search of Deep Throat (2000) by Leonard Garment

      Garment’s game in In Search of is to pin down Deep Throat’s identity, based on Garment’s knowledge of many of the men proposed publicly to be the real McCoy (including Garment himself!) and how Throat is described in All the President’s Men.

Garment, for instance, rules out Al Haig – a favorite of the Deep Throat speculators – because he’s doesn’t fit the physical description in Bernward’s book. Besides, Haig is too flappable to be Woodward’s Mystery Man. (“I am in control of this parking garage!”)

After auditioning then ruling out a number of other prime suspects, Garment chooses an unlikely one, John Sears, a young political operative in Nixon’s ’68 campaign and later manager of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 (until being replaced by William Casey) presidential campaigns.

Woodward told Baltimore Sun columnist Jules Witcover that Garment’s elevation of Sears was “ridiculous.” Even more hilarious is the fact that Sears is the person who persuaded Nixon to choose Spiro Agnew as his running mate, according to the same column.

The real Deep Throat, Mark Felt, stood up five years after Garment published his book, putting to rest forever one bold suggestion.

8.     Witness to Power (1982) John Ehrlichman

     I don’t remember much about this book – in fact I don’t remember anything about it. I read it for a college class on the presidency back sometime not too long after Witness hit the bookstores (in the days before the Barnes & Noble monopoly). The assignment was to compare two presidents. I chose Nixon and Lincoln. My friend Steve told me that was a silly idea. Hey, they were both Republicans.

The title gets this book off on the wrong foot. Ehrlichman was definitely more than a witness. He was a co-conspirator. He was convicted in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. He should have used a more honest title, like Helper to Power.

 

9.      ???? (????) ?????????

I do remember this book; I just don’t recall the title or the name of the author. I always thought there was more to the Watergate story than the break-in, cover up and sundry malfeasance, such as the previously mentioned psychiatrist’s office break-in, wiretapping and messing with the heads of Democratic presidential candidates.

Things like Nixon trading higher milk prices for the milk lobby’s campaign contributions and the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation giving huge donations in return for the settlement of its anti-trust case with the Department of Justice were noted in other Watergate books but only briefly.

I thought this book would discuss in more detail these potential crimes. It did not. Nevertheless, this is an excellent overview of the entire scandal, from the initial wiretaps, the Senate Hearing and the Judge Sirica’s U.S. district court trials to the tapes’ revelation and the resignation. I would appreciate it if this book would contact me at my email address and identify itself, if it happens to read this review (not likely).

10. Crazy Rhythm: From Brooklyn and Jazz to Nixon’s White House (1997) by Leonard Garment

 

I read this memoir while waiting for In Search of Deep Throat to return to the library. It’s not strictly a Watergate or Nixon book, but nobody should hold that against it. Crazy Rhythm, one of my all-time favorites, is easily the best-written book on this list.

Garment actually knew Nixon, and his rendering of The Old Man (I think that’s how Haldeman and Ehrlichman referred to him) almost makes him human. Garment met Nixon when the future P came to work for the Wall Street law firm that employed Garment and John Mitchell (yes, that John Mitchell).

Garment’s relationship with Nixon produces some endearing scenes: Garment encouraging the scorned politician to run again for president in ’68; Garment teaming up with Nixon on a Supreme Court case; Nixon calling to reassure Garment that his anti-Semitic remarks in the publicly released transcripts did not represent his feelings for him or their friendship; Garment stepping down as Nixon’s attorney at the height of Watergate after urging Nixon to resign and being refused an audience with the president.