KING RICHARD

NIXON AND WATERGATE: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

MICHAEL DOBBS

Scribe, 416pp, £18.99

This book has ‘a cast of characters worthy of a Graham Greene novel – connivers, fabulists, rats, and back-stabbers,’ wrote David Holahan in USA Today. ‘This fast-paced opus would be a rollicking fun read, a beach book even, if it weren’t so doggone real – and if it wasn’t so reminiscent of recent machinations in our nation’s capital. But fun or not, this is an important book at this moment in our tortured political history.’

Although ‘aficionados of Watergate will not find anything new in Dobbs’s account’, wrote Daniel Finkelstein in the Times, with ‘no fresh details and no surprising theories... it is still, however, an absorbing book’. Divided into short chapters, each of which represents a day in Nixon’s presidency from the day of his second inauguration onwards, it has the advantage of concision. ‘I’ve often been asked to recommend a good, brisk and readable single-volume account of Watergate,’ Finkelstein concluded. ‘I think in future I will recommend this one.’ Jennifer Szalai, in the New York

Times, praised Dobbs’s ‘rich and kaleidoscopic’ book. ‘Dobbs has carved out something intimate and extraordinary, skilfully chiselling out the details to bring the story to lurid life’ and he makes ‘vivid use’ of Nixon’s approved secret tapes ‘to convey a White House that seemed to be an unholy combination of the grimly determined and aggressively puerile’. In the Washington Post, Joe Klein enjoyed the author’s ‘keen sense of drama’ and, like Szalai, he appreciated the ‘intimacy’ of his approach. ‘The story Dobbs tells is, by turns, hilarious, pathetic, and infuriating.’