Watergate - Fred Emery

I was re-reading All the President's Men recently, and I realized one of the reasons I have read it so many times is I am trying to make sense of the whole Watergate affair. And All the President's Men is not the best vehicle for that. It tells the story from the perspective of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward - so you learn what happened as they learn it, in bits and pieces, and never get the whole chronological picture. So I went looking for a definitive account of Watergate and found this.

Wow. This is a good book. Nixon is lucky the Watergate burglars got caught when they did, because they weren't very good at what they were doing, and their plans were getting bigger and stupider. They considered firebombing the Brookings Institution to cover stealing classified documents from the Institution's vault, kidnapping and drugging anti-war leaders to prevent them from leading demonstrations, and murdering a newpaper columnist, Jack Anderson, because a column he had written allegedly lead to the death of a CIA operative.

Fred Emery, the reporter who covered the Watergate scandal for the Times of London, lays out how the Nixon White House got to the stage of Watergate and its coverup. The break-in doesn't make sense by itself, it only makes sense in the large context of paranoia and law-breaking. He explains how Nixon obstructed justice and abused the power of his office. It's too bad Nixon's reputation was rehabilitated toward the end of his life, and after his death, because he really didn't deserve it.

Watergate
Fred Emery
1995
Available from Amazon