The Nixon Defense

Resumen del libro

A new look at Watergate by one of its key figures, based on previously unavailable information.

The Watergate scandal has forever changed American politics and presidential power, yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has undertaken the work necessary to tell the true underlying story of his Watergate-related activities. This information has been uniquely available in his own contemporaneous words via his secretly recorded conversations, but has not been available because of the arduous task involved in transcribing all the Watergate-related material. Although some conversations have been transcribed, most only partially, over 972 of those conversations exist, some lasting only last a few minutes, others for hours.

This book in effect answers the question posed to author John Dean by Senator Howard Baker when Dean testified before the Senate Watergate Committee in the summer of 1973: What did President Nixon know and when did he know it? While some of this history will be familiar to students of Watergate, much of the information in the recorded conversations and related facts have been ignored, so this book will effectively be an account that has never been told. Given Deans own proximity to these events, he thought he understood the full story of Watergate, but even he discovered he knew only part of it. This is not a book of transcripts; rather it is based on Deans transcripts, which provide the narrative and dialogue revealing how Watergate unfolded in the Oval Office. The book flushes out why the Watergate break-in occurred and what was on the mysterious 18.5 minute gap in the recorded conversations; it connects dots that have never been connected; and the work spares no one from Nixons view of his world, including the author'both when the president thought his young lawyer could do no wrong, and when he became the presidents top enemy whom he sought to destroy.

Dean initially set out to understand how some of the important decisions that were made during Watergate were reached, since those decisions ultimately destroyed a presidency. In looking for answers he realized that he had to address the more fundamental issue of what Nixon actually knew when he made his decisions. His research involved not only the long-overlooked recorded material but was supplemented by material drawn from over 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland and the Nixon Library at Yorba Linda, California. A final section analyzes Nixons actions by drawing on insights and wisdom of experts in the art and science of scandal control as well as in the criminal law, and examines how the mistakes that were made might have been avoided, and how that information might be instructive for others as well.