| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Watergate: The Presidential Scandal That Shook America. By Keith W. Olson. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. x, 220 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-1250-5. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-7006-1251-3.)

Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective. By Louis W. Liebovich. (Westport: Praeger, 2003. xvi, 143 pp. $45.95, ISBN 0-275-97915-6.)

Don't look now, but a new round of anniversaries, "revelations," and books covering Richard M. Nixon's last crisis has arrived. In 2003, as news programs marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Senate's probe of the Watergate break-in, former Nixon aide Jeb Stuart Magruder dropped a bombshell: the president himself had ordered the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Now, as the first presidential resignation in United States history turns thirty, two studies promise fresh insights into this national tragedy.

Keith W. Olson's Watergate is the better of the two books. It is succinct and lively and apt to find its way into courses on U.S. history since 1945. The author's thesis is plain: eighteen months of disclosures of White House misconduct fostered a national consensus in favor of Nixon's removal from office. In other words, no partisan cabal drove Nixon from the presidency. This argument is conventional but compelling, for Olson has plumbed an array of newspapers nationwide to show how Nixon's chief supporters had, by mid-1974, turned against him. In short, as charges of a presidential cover-up surfaced, Nixon lost public support. His unwillingness to surrender the White House tapes, his firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and his belated release of partial transcripts of the tapes disillusioned and then undermined his political base. Release of the "smoking gun" tape, the conversation of June 23, 1972, during which Nixon ordered his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to enlist the Central Intelligence Agency in thwarting the investigation of Watergate, delivered the coup de grâce. Republican leaders such as Barry Goldwater and right-leaning newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune had, by August 1974, joined with the opposition party and the nation in demanding that Nixon vacate the White House.

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