Saturday, June 18, 2022

Watergate: A New History

Fifty years after the Watergate break-in, Garrett Graff's detailed retelling of the fall of Richard Nixon helpfully expands the narrative to include all manner of violations of law and ethics to make the point that the burglary was a piece of a much larger, multifaceted scandal. All of the Watergate detail is there, but so are explanations of the ITT scandal, milk price-fixing, tax evasion, Agnew, campaign dirty tricks, and meddling in Johnson's Vietnam peace talks. Nixon's idea – if the president does it, that means it's legal – has now metastasized throughout America, and the treatment for this "cancer" (John Dean's word) does not appear to exist.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive