Watergate: The Hidden History
Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking investigation into the events of the Watergate Scandal, complete with fascinating new material, all “exhaustively researched” in the author’s customary style (The New York Observer)
While Richard Nixon's culpability for Watergate has long been established, what's truly remarkable is that after almost fifty years, conventional accounts of the scandal still don't address Nixon's motive. Why was President Nixon willing to risk his reelection with so many repeated burglaries at the Watergate—and other Washington offices—in just a few weeks? What motivated Nixon to jeopardize his presidency by ordering the wide range of criminal operations that resulted in Watergate? What was Nixon so desperate to get at the Watergate, and how does it explain the deeper context surrounding his crimes?
For the first time, the groundbreaking investigative research in Watergate: The Hidden History provides documented answers to all of those questions. It adds crucial missing pieces to the Watergate story—information that President Nixon wanted, but couldn't get, and that wasn't available to the Senate Watergate Committee or to Woodward and Bernstein. This new information not only reveals remarkable insights into Nixon's motivation for Watergate, but also answers the two most important remaining questions: What were the Watergate burglars after? And why was Nixon willing to risk his Presidency to get it?
Watergate: The Hidden History reexamines the historical record, including new material only available in recent years. This includes thousands of recently declassified CIA and FBI files, newly released Nixon tapes, and exclusive interviews with those involved in the events surrounding Watergate—ranging from former Nixon officials to key aides for John and Robert Kennedy. This book also builds on decades of investigations by noted journalists and historians, as well as long–overlooked investigative articles from publications like Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One vast conspiracy begets another in this meticulous but unconvincing theory of the Watergate scandal. Historian Waldron argues that Vice President Richard Nixon was the "driving force" behind joint CIA Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1959 1960. Waldrop further says that, as president, Nixon instigated the Watergate break-ins, undertaken by his "Plumbers" unit of old CIA Cuba hands, mainly to find a dossier that he feared could expose those earlier schemes. The author presents an exhaustive, lucid chronicle of Cuba and Watergate machinations and decades of Nixon sleaze: dirty campaign tricks, quid-pro-quo Mafia bribes, burglaries, and other felonies by his White House staff. But Waldron's central claims about Nixon's involvement in Castro-assassination plots and his Watergate motives are shaky and based largely on stray, ambiguous comments by marginal figures, "associate"-tracing through degrees of separation, and much rank speculation, all backed by confusing source notes. (Much of the book is a rehash of his similarly massive and implausible Legacy of Fear, which argued that the Mafia assassinated President Kennedy.) Readers will learn a lot from Waldron about America's Cuba policy and Nixon's many misdeeds, but the author's search for a narrow logic behind Nixon's omnidirectional paranoia and criminality distorts more than it clarifies. Photos.
