The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Tricky Dicky’s culture wars
Secret tapes released decades after Watergate paint a vivid picture of Nixon’s divided America
396pp, Scribe, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £14.39 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Fittingly for an event hailed as journalism’s finest hour, the Watergate scandal has generated enough books to fill a presidential library. Half a century on from The Washington Post investigation that brought down Richard Nixon, there are at least 60 major works on the subject, from academic doorstoppers through to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s original classic, All the President’s Men.
So at a time when publishers might otherwise be focusing on the misdemeanours of the Trump presidency, it is perhaps surprising to see the saga getting yet another big outing in King Richard, by BritishAmerican author Michael Dobbs. An ex-Washington Post reporter himself, Dobbs is already known for respected reconstructions of other key moments in recent history, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But what new is there to chew over about Watergate, one might wonder?
Quite a lot, actually. In 2013, after 40 years of legal battles, US government archives finally released some 3,700 hours of secretly recorded tapes from inside Nixon’s White House, chronicling every word of his attempts to cover up Watergate.
Given that the scandal broke after Nixon aides were caught planting eavesdropping devices in the Democrat Party HQ, it is richly ironic that Nixon was himself “bugged”. Yet the tape recorders weren’t installed by some whistleblower worried that “Tricky Dicky” was going rogue. They were put in by Nixon himself, who wanted a historical archive for his memoirs, convinced they would show him as a giant among leaders.
Dobbs focuses on this monumental hubris, recreating the Nixon regime’s spectacular unravelling in the 100 days from his second inauguration of January 1973. It was during that period that the cover-up began to fray, and Nixon’s own aides – by then fearing jail – buckled under pressure, turning first to drink, then to lawyers, and finally to the witness box against him.
Dobbs retells the story as a classical tragedy, taking us into the Nixon court, and showing how the humble-born grocer’s son was doomed by both his own insecure personalKING ity and the wider political events.
While the tapes that give
Dobbs his source material provide few new revelations, the details they offer allow him to create a vivid picture. We hear about Nixon’s love of ordinary, God-fearing provincials, and his hatred of the liberal press and Ivy League elite, especially those Commie-loving, anti-Vietnam War longhairs who were sapping America’s strength. The social divisions that tore America apart in the Trump years, Dobbs reminds us, are nothing new. Indeed, as he points out, it was Nixon’s sense that he alone could save America from itself that led to Watergate in the first place. At the time, he was riding high on the international stage, bombing his way to a peace accord in Vietnam – a war inherited from his Democrat predecessors – and confounding the snobs in the foreign policy establishment with his bold diplomatic outreach to Mao’s China.
That, though, merely convinced him that in a dangerous, Cold War world, the ends of Watergate justified the means. As he ranted to one aide: “The press has got to realise that whatever they think of me... I’m the only one at the present time in this whole wide blinking world that can keep it from blowing up.”
Still, while Dobbs makes the reader almost sympathise with Nixon – the hallmark of a good dramatist – the madness of the Watergate cover-up is still remarkable. Parts of it read like a script from The West Wing, where the bad guys are in charge. Nixon aides dished out millions of dollars in hush-money at secret drop-off points, making so many clandestine pay-phone calls that one of
them carried a bus conductor’s coin dispenser.
At one point, Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, laments that hiding the trails of dirty money was something only “Mafia people” could do well. “We don’t know about these things,” he tells Nixon. “Because we are not, you know, criminals.”
America begged to differ: Nixon was impeached, his aides were jailed, and Washington’s moral standing in the world was left damaged. Many readers of Dobbs’s book may well sense history repeating itself in the Trump years – yet perhaps it is best seen simply as a highly readable, self-contained account of Watergate and why it mattered. If All the President’s Men was the first rough draft of Watergate history, this is the polished rewrite. Older readers will enjoy its deft mix of personality, history and politics – and younger ones can spare themselves from ploughing through the dustier volumes on the Watergate shelf.