What is the best book to give me a real grasp on Watergate? I’ve just finished All the President’s Men, and while I know have a good idea about how the story evolved in the Post, I’m still pretty damn fuzzy on the actual timeline and what really was done by the people involved, beginning to end. Plus it doesn’t follow all the way to Nixon’s resignation.
There are a ton of Watergate books at my library; I’d like to only read one or two more to round out my understanding of what exactly happened.
Watergate (1994) by Fred Emery, hands-down. He was the London Times Washington correspondent at the time, but this was written to accompany the series he made for the BBC at the time of the 20th anniversary. They managed to persuade most of the original participants to be interviewed on camera and the resulting TV series was superb.
The book is thus written by a distinguished foreign journalist who covered the original events, but is also targeted at an audience that he can’t assume know the background or the full timeline. He thus choses to tell the story chronologically from the start to the end. The narrative is fairly light on analysis - Emery doesn’t have much of an explicit argument to develop - but he is writing in the wake of most of the memoirs and, as I say, had interviewed virtually everybody, so he has been able to weigh the different accounts.
It’s hardly the final word on the subject, but it’s an excellent and comprehensive guide through the whole chain of events.
And, of course, The Final Days does allow Woodward and Bernstein to memorably tell the end of the story, right up to the departure of the helicopter.
Twiddle, be warned: The Final Days is nothing like All the President’s Men. While AtPM reads like an exciting, fast-paced detective story, with keenly observed examples of journalism craft, TFD is an unbelievably detailed (and unbelievably boring) recap of almost every imaginable detail from Nixon’s last days in office. It’s kind of like porno for political geeks.
The book indulges in excruciating minutiae to such a degree that I’m surprised they didn’t tabulate the number of Nixon’s bowel movements. It has absolutely none of the people/characters from AtPM, nor the sense of excitement in solving a mystery. I found it to be a painful, uninteresting slog.