The Nixon Defense
What He Knew and When He Knew It
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
Based on Nixon’s overlooked recordings, New York Times bestselling author John W. Dean connects the dots between what we’ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened
Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA’s widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate.
In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President
Nixon know and when did he know it?
Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon’s recorded conversations, and more.
In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America’s worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The secret conversations of President Richard Nixon chronicle an unfolding scandal in intimate detail in this absorbing history of the Watergate cover-up. Dean (Blind Ambition), Nixon's White House counsel and a central figure in events, recaps hundreds of taped recordings of discussions between Nixon and his aides, many never before transcribed, on the brewing Watergate affair from the June, 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters to the July, 1973 dismantling of the recording system. The discussions transition quickly from confusion over the arrest of Nixon campaign operatives to an improvised plot to conceal the burglars' connections to the White House and other Nixon Administration misdeeds through a farrago of hush-money and perjury whose deceptions compound over time. Dean weaves deftly edited excerpts of dialogue and shrewd commentary into a densely detailed but very readable narrative of the conspiracy as its principals cobble it together. He's hardly a disinterested observer; much of the book centers on Nixon's "defense" against revelations Dean offered to investigators , culminating in his sensational televised Senate testimony , and is thus also Dean's defense of his own actions. Still, this is one of the best and fullest accounts of the Watergate cover-up, one that conveys in Nixon's own voice the casual criminality of his troubled presidency.
