by John W. Dean
First published 2014
John Dean served as White House Counsel during the Nixon administration and witnessed Watergate unfold from inside the corridors of power. Decades after the scandal forced a president to resign, Dean returns to nearly a thousand secretly recorded conversations between Nixon and his advisors. He transcribes these tapes and combines them with over 150,000 pages of documents from the National Archives and Nixon Library. Dean reconstructs the timeline of Nixon's knowledge and involvement in the break-in and cover-up. He reveals what caused the Watergate break-in, explains the contents of the mysterious 18.5-minute gap in Nixon's recordings, and shows how the administration's catastrophic errors might have been prevented. The book answers the central question that has persisted for four decades: what did President Nixon know and when did he know it? Dean connects previously unlinked evidence to create the most complete account of Nixon's role in America's most notorious political scandal.
Genres: history, 20th-century, political-science, non-fiction, biography-memoir, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: White House, National Archives, Nixon Library
Period: Watergate Scandal
784 pages · Hardcover · Viking