Last month I took a look back at the Watergate scandal in “Watergate revisited.” I am afraid we will have more occasions to chew on the subject in the coming year. At the moment, I want only to add this footnote.
The best book I know of to review our current state of knowledge of the scandal is James Rosen’s The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (2008). Rosen is a dauntless researcher and Watergate obsessive. He worked on the book for some 17 years. It presents in the form of a biography of John Mitchell and is flawed by Rosen’s partiality for Mitchell. So far as I know, however, anyone wanting to update his knowledge on the subject of Watergate can do no better than this book. It is excellent.
Rosen looks back at Watergate through the lens of current events in his March 2018 Examiner essay “Trump, Nixon, and the Deep State.” It puts Rosen’s manifest virtues on display in an essay that brings Rosen’s knowledge of Watergate to bear on the Trumpian present.
Few men emerged from the Nixon White House with their reputations unscathed, let alone enhanced. Pat Buchanan was one of the few, a distinction he achieved in part by vanquishing the Senate Watergate Committee in his televised testimony at the end of the hearings. I recalled Buchanan’s testimony briefly last year in the post “Waiting for Comey.”
Buchanan tells the story of his Senate Watergate Committee testimony in chapter 17 (“Before the Watergate Committee”) of his 2017 memoir Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever, reviewed respectfully in the New York Times Book Review by Joe Klein in “Patrick Buchanan Reveals Himself to Be the First Trumpist.” The book was published in paperback earlier this year; I bought and read it for chapter 17. His account is a vivid and timely contribution. The more things change…
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