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Title: Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years by J. Anthony Lukas, Joan Hoff ISBN: 0-8214-1287-6 Publisher: Ohio University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: What Journalism Ought to Be
Comment: Last time I looked, Woodward & Bernstein's "All the President"s Men" had 58 Amazon reviews; Lukas' "Nightmare" had none. Now, that's a travesty. If you have to read just one book about Watergate this book has no competitor. If you have to read just one book to show what good journalism can be, ditto. We say that journalism at best is "a rough draft" and we need to await "the verdict of history." But Lukas put this together in a matter of months and after 30-odd years, it still stands unchallenged on the shelf.
The fulcrum of this book is, of course, the "third-rate burglary" from which Watergate takes its name. But Lukas is far-sighted enough not to begin with that. He gives us the larger context of the early Nixon years: the internal wiretapping, the fund-raising money machine, the systematic campaign of dirty tricks against the 1972 Democratic campaign, both primary and general.
Indeed, for me perhaps the true pivot point is not the burglary at all, but rather that moment in January, 1972, when Gordon Liddy launched "a well-prepared thirty-minute 'show-and-tell'" to introduced "Project Gemstone" -- intended as "a vast intelligence-gathering and dirty-tricks campaign" against the Democrats and (one would have to say) against the electoral process itself. Here it all is: electronic surveillance and wiretapping; breakins; kidnap squads; mugging squads; call girls; sabotage. John Dean says he found it "mind-boggling." But Attorney General John Mitchell was more restrained: "That's not quite what we had in mind," he said. And Jeb Magruder was more proactive: "Cheer up, Gordon," he said, "You just tone the plan down a little and we'll try again."
For my money, that is the point at which any decent public servant would have stood up and shouted "GET THIS GUY OUT OF HERE! Don't let him come within a dung-fork's distance of any public policy issue any time, anywhere, ever again." Of course we know better now: in fact, Liddy's campaign did go forward largely as he had planned it. And it was not a free-lance operation: rather, it was embedded at the very heart of the Nixon administration.
From the introduction of Gemstone we move on moment by moment through the burglary, the coverup, the coverup of the coverup and finally, Nixon's resignation. By that point, almost any reader will concede that Lukas has documented his case. The denoument is the celebrated "smoking gun" -- the text of the tape of Nixon's conversation on June 23, 1972.
"What made the tape so damaging," says Lukas, "was ... the plain, irrefutable language which showed that six days after the Watergate burglary the President of the United States knew a great deal about the break-in, realized that Liddy and [E. Howard] Hunt had been involved, recognized Mitchell's probable complicity, personally ordered a cover-up of the facts, and used the CIA and the FBI to protect his personal political interests."
Watergate was a tragedy, of course, and any honest account is bound to make pretty sordid reading. But at the end, one can find uplift. For however many people behaved badly, quite a lot of people behaved well: famously Eliot Richardson, who resigned as Attorney General rather than fire Archibald Cox; perhaps more subtly Congressman Peter W. Rodino, Jr., who succeeded (at no small efort) in keeping the House hearings decent and honorable; more surprisingly Congressman Lawrence Hogan, conservative Republican from Maryland who upstaged some of his more liberal colleagues by declaring for impeachment (he was offended at what Nixon had done to the FBI). And I'd even save a kind word for Hugh W. Sloan, Jr., a campaign staffer who did, concededly, take part in some of the money-sloshing, but who in the end refused to go along with the coverup.
Woodward and Bernstein have their place in Watergate history, if not nearly as great as their own (well--Woodward's) self-promotion would suggest. If they did not originate much in the way of real Watergate news, they did a great deal to keep the topic on the agenda. But their project also did a great deal of long-term harm, helping to facilitate the growth of a climate of "client journalism" where reporters get cozy with sources and manipulate the process as much as any active participant. Tony Lukas died far too young (and a suicide). As a monmument, he leaves a body of exemplary journalism, of which this is a capstone.
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Title: Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon by Stanley Kutler ISBN: 0393308278 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 May, 1992 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy by G. Gordon Liddy ISBN: 0312924127 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: An American life;: One man's road to Watergate by Jeb Stuart Magruder ISBN: 0689106033 Publisher: Atheneum Pub. Date: 1974 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA by Jim Hougan ISBN: 0394514289 Publisher: Random House Inc Pub. Date: 01 November, 1984 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes by Stanley Kutler, Richard M. Nixon ISBN: 0684851873 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
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