Watergate - Softcover

Now with a new afterword by the author, here is the definitive history of the Watergate scandal - based on the most recently released tapes, in-depth interviews with many of the participants, and hundreds of official and unofficial documents, including notes Haldeman omitted from his own published diaries. Emery's comprehensive coverage and penetrating insights clear up many uncertainties that may still remain about the scandal and the extent of Nixon's involvement. Authoritative and compelling, Watergate is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand fully this traumatizing episode in America's history that challenged the integrity of its political system.

To coincide with the 20th anniversary of President Nixon's resignation, Emery (consultant for a Discovery Channel tie-in and former London Times executive editor) provides some new details in engagingly retelling the ``compelling story of botched government.'' It may seem that the Watergate scandal should be well- documented by now, but many of the facts are still unclear, and the accounts of the principals often conflict. Thus, Emery tells a sometimes confusing Rashomon-like narrative, referring first to one memoir, then to another sharply differing one in recounting the major events: the Nixon administration's long-standing program of covert operations against real and perceived ideological adversaries; the bungled May 28, 1972, break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate complex; and the increasingly desperate cover-up by the Nixon campaign and by Nixon himself. But although Emery unearths some new tapes and discusses some new details (his major revelation is that John Mitchell attempted to enter into a plea bargain in which Nixon would be spared prosecution in return for Mitchell's guilty plea), his account clearly reestablishes what other Watergate accounts have demonstrated: that high-level officials in the White House were parties to the Watergate break-in and other secret and unlawful operations, and that Nixon himself was an early party to the administration's and the campaign's frantic (and for a time effective) obstructions of justice. Emery argues persuasively that Nixon's resignation, in the face of almost certain impeachment, resulted from a bipartisan recognition that his administration was guilty of uniquely enormous political crimes (Nixon would never have been in danger of being impeached without Republican defections on the House Judiciary Committee). A first-rate and clear exposition of a complex and bizarre episode that traumatized America and tested the vitality of its political system. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 35,000; authour tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.