Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (July 29) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
About that 18-and-a-half minutes oflost tape.In this 40th anniversary year ofRichard Nixon's gloomy evacuation of the White House, former staffer andever since bte noire Dean (Broken Government: HowRepublican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches,2007, etc.) defends himself against a category of accusation Tricky Dickfrequently leveled against him: "I'm not going to fire a guy on the basis of acharge made by Dean, who basically is trying to save his ass and get immunity,you see." Well, sure: Dean was and is no dummy, and he saw what was coming inthe grim swirl of the Watergate hearings, during which frequently named figuressuch as Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Hunt, Liddy, Mitchell and Dean himself becamehousehold names. By the author's account, Liddynever likable but alwayshonorable, in his own waytook the fall for the foiled break-in and offered tohave himself shot on any street corner in Washington at the president'spleasure; the president declined, but he schemed and maneuvered in otherdirections. Sometimes, Dean notes, Nixon was brilliant in that maneuvering,turning potential losses into double-edged wins, usually Pyrrhic but stilldamaging to the opposition. This account, drawing on notes, scrawls on legalpads and transcripts of taped conversations, makes an odd but compelling strolldown Memory Lane for those who remember the time. Dean provides deft portraitsof the likes of the unctuous Kissinger, the exceedingly odd Al Haig ("he's alittle bit obnoxious and doesn't wear well with people, which would be goodfrom our point of view"), and Nixon himself. And as for that missing tape, theone about which so much was made at the Watergate hearings? It would spoil thesurprise to tell it here, but Dean has the answers. Essential to anyone's library ofNixoniana. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
August 2014 will be 40 years since Nixon resigned from the presidency under the threat of impeachment. Two generations of Americans have grown up without experiencing first-hand the steady storm of revelations of Watergate. As Nixon's legal counsel and to an extent his coconspirator, Dean is ideally placed to examine and analyze a massive trove of newly released Nixon recordings covering the period. For those familiar with the scandal and Nixon's role in it, there aren't any shocking new revelations here. What wasn't known was strongly suspected. Still, it is important to be reminded just how venal Nixon and his immediate cabal had become as the walls closed in upon them. Their discussions as they plot out Nixon's defense are amazingly cynical and amoral. Nixon, in particular, confirms both his guilt and his psychological unfitness for office. He appears paranoid and petty, and his defects clearly have overwhelmed his positive traits. Those unfamiliar will benefit greatly from this work, especially since some die-hard Nixon defenders and revisionists still maintain that Watergate wasn't that bad. --Freeman, Jay Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON JUNE 1, 1972, President Richard Nixon triumphantly reported to a joint session of Congress on the summit meeting in Moscow from which he had returned just hours earlier. He trumpeted the signing of major arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, conspicuously including a long-sought antiballistic missile treaty. "The foundation has been laid," he exulted, "for a new relationship between the two most powerful nations in the world." The Moscow summit, replete with glittering state dinners and chummy conversations at the dacha of the Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev, marked the apex of détente - the daringly calculated strategy of relaxing the tense ideological and nuclear face-off between the United States and its principal Cold War adversary. Just three months earlier Nixon had capped another no less daring diplomatic démarche with a dramatic visit to the People's Republic of China. A week of clinking glasses of mao-tai with Premier Zhou Enlai and swapping political japes with the Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong had culminated in the Shanghai Communiqué, pledging both countries to abandon their historic enmity and work toward normalizing their relations. Détente with the Soviet Union and the fabled "opening to China" were of a single geopolitical piece, the complementary halves of a bold American grand strategy to transform the entire architecture of international politics. As Nixon bathed in the warm applause in the Capitol on that heady June day, he had every reason to contemplate the future with settled confidence and supreme satisfaction. Seldom has pride so preening preceded a fall so far. Less than three weeks later, in the small hours of June 17, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate complex in Washington noticed evidence of an illegal entry and called the police. They quickly arrested five burglars attempting to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Investigators soon linked the burglars to the Republican Committee to Re-elect the President. Smelling a conspiracy whose stench might reach all the way to the White House, United States District Judge John Sirica pressured the Watergate defendants to rat out their bosses. The press, notably Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, probed the murky matter ever more deeply. A special prosecutor began an investigation. A select Senate committee initiated widely televised hearings to determine "what the president knew and when he knew it." Then in July 1973, Alexander Butterfield, the deputy chief of staff, stunningly revealed that Nixon had installed a secret taping system in the White House, in his Executive Office Building suite and at Camp David. Eventually released under Supreme Court order, the tapes wrought Nixon's doom. Most damning was the infamous "smoking gun" conversation on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, when Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, brazenly discussed ordering the C.I.A. to block any further F.B.I. investigation - clearly implicating the president in criminal obstruction of justice, and giving the lie to his repeated and strenuous denials of involvement The House Judiciary Committee began to draw up articles of impeachment Republican elders told the president in no uncertain terms that the jig was up. Nixon relinquished the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974, 40 years ago yesterday. The first president since World War II to visit the Soviet Union, the first ever to visit Communist China, he was also the first to be forced to resign. the tapes that brought Nixon down provide virtually all the evidentiary basis for both of these books. Excepting only some helpful explanatory headnotes, "The Nixon Tapes" consists exclusively of transcribed recordings from the period beginning Feb. 16, 1971, when the taping system was activated, to Jan. 30, 1973, some months before it was abruptly dismantled following Butterfield's startling disclosure. Rightly noting that foreign policy "was what Nixon wanted to be remembered for," the editors artfully cull from the more than 3,500 hours of tapes a fairly coherent documentary record of conversations concerned primarily with international relations - especially the intricate process of constructing the new United States-Soviet-Chinese diplomatic triangle. More often than not Nixon's interlocutor is Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and later (and simultaneously) secretary of state. Indeed, the book might well have been titled "The Nixon-Kissinger Tapes." Though many others, including both Nixon and Kissinger, have written about this pivotal episode, the exchanges published here give a more vivid sense than most accounts of the climate of urgency, risk and anticipation that enveloped Nixon's and Kissinger's effort To witness these two titans of ambition, vainglory and suspicion hammering out their grand diplomatic design while warily taking each other's measure and sharing their often scabrous views of other personalities is to receive gritty instruction in statecraft and psychology alike. One theme that emerges strongly is the salience of the Soviet Union in the new geostrategic geometry that Nixon and Kissinger were devising. Moscow was then seen as the principal mischief-maker in the chronically roiling Middle East. The Kremlin also held the key to resolving the devilishly vexed question of Berlin, occupied and isolated since the end of World War II, divided by a wall since 1961 and an ever volatile flash point. Nixon was no less obsessed by Berlin than was his predecessor John F. Kennedy, who at first thought the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was merely a feint to facilitate a Russian grab of the historic German capital. "Berlin is it," Nixon told Kissinger and Haldeman in 1971. "Compared in the order of magnitude, the Mideast to Berlin, Christ, it's light-years' difference." With regard to China, he said to the deputy national security adviser Alexander Haig, "in the short term, the Soviet thing is infinitely more important" With the Soviets, "we got SALT, we got Berlin and we got the Mideast. ... The Chinese is a long way off." Kissinger agreed. "Our concern with China right now, in my view, Mr. President," he said to Nixon on the eve of their historic journey to Beijing, "is to use it as a counterweight to Russia, not for its local policy.... above all as a counterweight to Russia. And, the fact that it doesn't have a global policy is an asset to us, that it doesn't have global strength yet." The opening to China, in short, appears here as little more than a fulcrum with which to lever the Russians into alignment with American wishes - not, contrary to much popular understanding, as a major objective in its own right. Nixon's and Kissinger's geopolitical ruminations as recorded here make for ironic reading in an era when the Soviet Union has gone extinct and China is emerging as a new global colossus and the principal challenger to American hegemony. They suggest that even the keenest strategic minds are inevitably imprisoned in inherited frameworks of perception and understanding. As for Vietnam, the bloody struggle that consumed a generation, destroyed Lyndon Johnson's presidency while opening the path to Nixon's election in 1968 and dominated all political discourse until overshadowed by the Watergate affair, it appears in these conversations less as a central concern than as an annoying distraction. A strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT), Nixon said, was "the most important goddamn thing. It's more important than whether we have eternal aid to Vietnam, or combat troops, or anything else. ... In order of magnitude the least important is Vietnam. It never, never, never has risked world war." On of the Nixon tape recorders, displayed at the National Archives. "THE NIXON TAPES" ends with the agreement for American withdrawal from Vietnam in January 1973. It's a prelapsarian account that illuminates Nixon's impressive achievements before the fall. "The Nixon Defense" is a classic postlapsarian tale. It chronicles Nixon's pathetic descent into personal ignominy and political hell, beginning with original sin (Nixon's early involvement with the cover-up effort), and ending with expulsion from paradise (his humiliating departure from Washington). The chronicler is John W. Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, who as a star witness for the Senate select committee played a major role in the president's downfall. Later convicted of obstruction of justice, he traded damning testimony against several of his former White House colleagues for a reduced prison sentence. He has spent much of the rest of his life trying to expiate his sins, notably in his memoirs "Blind Ambition" (1976) and "Lost Honor" (1982). Now comes this volume, the product of four years of laborious transcription of some 1,000 Watergate-related conversations, supplemented by Dean's prodigious immersion in the voluminous library of memoirs, diaries and court documents pertaining to the case. Others, notably the historian Stanley Kutler, whose lawsuit compelled the National Archives to release the bulk of the Nixon tapes, have already examined much of this material, but Dean claims that new technologies have enabled him to "hear things they had missed." Perhaps Dean's four-year purgatory in the reeking swampland of delusion, deceit and double-cross that is the Watergate record has provided sufficient expiation at last. Or maybe just vindication, since this book might more appropriately be titled "The Dean Defense," concerned as it is with demonstrating malfeasances much more grievous than his own. But all that digitally enhanced listening has not, frankly, materially enriched the historical record. Dean does venture some tantalizing speculations - that the "smoking gun" conversation was actually about camouflaging a shady campaign contribution, not closing down the entire Watergate investigation; that Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods was probably not responsible for the infamous 18½ minute erasure of a key recording made on June 20,1972, and that - surprise! - the erasure was a deliberate effort to remove evidence of Nixon's involvement in the cover-up just three days after the original arrests. Whether because of his own proximity to the story or through simple insouciance, Dean is a poor guide through the impenetrable thicket of names, dates, acts venal and vindictive, characters shameless and unshriven, crimes high, low and in between that constitute the Watergate story. Few but buffs and truly dedicated specialists will be able to make their way through this often perplexingly detailed account. Dean essentially affirms the familiar story: Nixon probably did not have advance knowledge of the break-in but was deeply involved in the cover-up, early and often. On the second point there has long been little or no argument; Nixon himself later conceded as much. On the first point, conjecture still dwells on the possibility that Nixon lit the fuse that led to the Watergate break-in by pulling a Henry II - letting it be known, just as the annoyed English monarch had allegedly asked if no one would rid him of the turbulent Thomas Becket, that he wanted maximum possible political dish on nearly everybody, and all manner of dirt about his legions of foes, Democrats in particular. At the root of his ravening seethed implacable suspicions about all kinds of people, including Kissinger himself, as well as William P. Rogers, his own secretary of state. Indeed, after wading through so many of Richard Nixon's vulgar and contemptuous characterizations of friends and foes alike, as well as his septic rants about Jews and blacks, readers of these volumes may well feel the need for a long shower, where they might reflect on how it came to be that a man whose character was such a combustible compound of principle and pettiness, cunning both grand and base, ambitions lofty as well as loathsome, political acumen and raw prejudice, was ever allowed to ascend to the presidency in the first place. After his China visit, Nixon had every reason to view the future with satisfaction. DAVID M. KENNEDY is an emeritus professor of history at Stanford University. His most recent book is an edited volume, "The Modern American Military."
