|
A security guard in Washington, D.C., Wills found tape over the lock on one of the doors in his building. He pulled it off, thinking employees were breaking the rules for easy passage. When he later found the door lock taped again, he called the police. Together, Wills and the police discovered burglars in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The year was 1972, and the building was the Watergate. The subsequent scandal over the Republican-sponsored burglars brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon and made every scandal a "-gate". He later played himself in All the President's Men, a movie about the burglary and its fallout. Wills died September 27 from a brain tumor. He was 52. From This is True for 24 September 2000 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Bob WoodwardCarl Bernstein List Price: $7.99 Amazon Price: $7.99 Editorial Review: THIS IS THE BOOK THAT CHANGED AMERICA Beginning with the story of a simple burglary at Democratic headquarters and then continuing with headline after headline, Bernstein and Woodward kept the tale of conspiracy and the trail of dirty tricks coming -- delivering the stunning revelations and pieces in the Watergate puzzle that brought about Nixon's scandalous downfall. Their explosive reports won a Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post and toppled the President. THESE ARE THE AUTHORS WHO INTRODUCED US TO THE WORDS "DEEP THROAT."  By: Geoff Shepard List Price: $27.95 Amazon Price: $18.45 Editorial Review: The controversial book that will change how people think about Watergate Drawing on his insider knowledge and previously unpublished documents, Geoff Shepard shows that it didn’t take long for Ted Kennedy and his allies to smell blood after the Watergate break-in. They set out to exaggerate and prolong the scandal, not merely to destroy Richard Nixon, but to undermine the entire Republican Party and pave the way for another Kennedy presidency in 1976. In the process, working closely with a willing media, they pioneered the politics of personal destruction, which has tarnished our country ever since. Shepard reveals how this Kennedy conspiracy included members and staffs of the Senate, the House, the Justice Department, and the Special Prosecutor’s office. They used delay tactics and obfuscation to postpone the indictments and avoid trials of the handful of real Watergate criminals. Shepard argues that the abuses of power by Kennedy’s cronies dwarf those of the administration they savaged. Among those he singles out for reevaluation are Republican turncoat John Dean, Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, reporter Bob Woodward, and a young lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee named Hillary Rodham.  By: John W. Dean List Price: $14.95 Amazon Price: $10.17 Editorial Review: The most facile presidential comparison one could make for George W. Bush would be his father, who presided over a war in Iraq and a struggling economy. Some "neocons" reject the parallel and compare Bush to his father's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, citing a plainspoken quality and a belief in deep tax cuts. But John Dean goes further back, seeing in Bush all the secrecy and scandal of Dean's former boss, the notorious Richard Nixon. The difference, as the title of Dean's book indicates, is that Bush is a heck of a lot worse. While the book provides insightful snippets of the way Nixon used to do business, it offers them to shed light on the practices of Bush. In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution. Dean sets out to make his point by drawing attention to several areas about which Bush and Cheney have been tight-lipped: the revealing by a "senior White House official" of the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband questioned the administration, the health of Cheney, the identity of Cheney's energy task force, the information requested by the bi-partisan 9/11 commission, Bush's business dealings early in his career, the creation of a "shadow government", wartime prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, and scores more. He theorizes that the truth about these and many other situations, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, will eventually surface and that Bush and Cheney's secrecy is a thus far effective means of keep a lid on a rapidly multiplying set of lies and scandals that far outstrip the misdeeds that led directly to Dean's former employer resigning in disgrace. Dean's charges are impassioned and more severe than many of Bush's most persistent critics. But those charges are realized only after careful reasoning and steady logic by a man who knows his way around scandal and corruption. --John MoeThe most facile presidential comparison one could make for George W. Bush would be his father, who presided over a war in Iraq and a struggling economy. Some "neocons" reject the parallel and compare Bush to his father's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, citing a plainspoken quality and a belief in deep tax cuts. But John Dean goes further back, seeing in Bush all the secrecy and scandal of Dean's former boss, the notorious Richard Nixon. The difference, as the title of Dean's book indicates, is that Bush is a heck of a lot worse. While the book provides insightful snippets of the way Nixon used to do business, it offers them to shed light on the practices of Bush. In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution. Dean sets out to make his point by drawing attention to several areas about which Bush and Cheney have been tight-lipped: the revealing by a "senior White House official" of the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband questioned the administration, the health of Cheney, the identity of Cheney's energy task force, the information requested by the bi-partisan 9/11 commission, Bush's business dealings early in his career, the creation of a "shadow government", wartime prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, and scores more. He theorizes that the truth about these and many other situations, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, will eventually surface and that Bush and Cheney's secrecy is a thus far effective means of keep a lid on a rapidly multiplying set of lies and scandals that far outstrip the misdeeds that led directly to Dean's former employer resigning in disgrace. Dean's charges are impassioned and more severe than many of Bush's most persistent critics. But those charges are realized only after careful reasoning and steady logic by a man who knows his way around scandal and corruption. --John MoeNobody knows more, both from first hand experience and legal expertise, about the abuse of presidential power and their dangers than John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon. In WORSE THAN WATERGATE, Dean delivers a stunning indictment of the current Bush administration, and issues an urgent alarm to the nation: the Bush team's obsession with secrecy and their willingness to deceive make them even more dangerous than Nixon's. Dean brilliantly explores Bush's emphasis on image over substance; his angry, mistrustful personality; his excessive fear of leaks; his reversing the work of his predecessors in opening up government; his imperial governing combined with deeply flawed decision making; and his serious abuses of national security secrecy. From refusing to explain the precarious health of the powerful vice president to hiding the identity of those setting the nation's energy policy, from obstructing 9/11 investigations to unprecedented secrecy in the name of fighting terrorism, Dean exposes the dangers of a presidency that is using weapons of mass deception against the American public.  By: Bob Woodward List Price: $17.95 Amazon Price: $12.21 Editorial Review: There are two ways to look at this bestseller by Watergate scoopmeister Woodward. First, it's an original take on Clinton's sex scandal, framing it as the latest consequence of Nixon's assault on the U.S. political system. Woodward sketches each president's tussles with scandal managing after Watergate permanently turned up the press heat on the White House. Ford lies about a meeting concerning a potential deal to pardon Nixon, but remains convinced he did nothing wrong. Carter's pious advocacy of truth telling backfires when he's confronted with conundrums involving his pal Bert Lance, the fallout from CIA-provided hookers, and cash for King Hussein. Reagan's men try to make him understand the lies and shocking wrongness of the Iran-Contra debacle, but he simply, stubbornly doesn't get it. And by the time prosecutors interview Reagan in 1992, he's so ill he can't remember his own oldest friends and advisers. All provocative stuff, some of it new. But most readers will flip to the book's second half, a fly-on-the-wall account of the backroom mud-wrestling in both the Clinton and Starr camps in the Monicagate morass. It's a trove of racy facts (mostly from anonymous sources). We read that Clinton called Nixon a "war criminal," yet tried to minimize Watergate in his Nixon eulogy, that he disgusted Ford and Jack Nicklaus by cheating while golfing with them, and that he kept falsely assuring aides, "I'm retired! [as an adulterer]." We hear Hillary's alleged words of agony and see the pain on Bill's face after Chelsea reads The Starr Report on the Internet. Starr comes off like RoboCop without the human side. Woodward calls him "pathetic and unwise" in rejecting his staff's urgent demand not to send the lurid details of presidential sex to Congress. "I love the narrative!" Starr weirdly exulted, according to Woodward's new Deep Throat (or Throats). Since Monica was interrogated at Starr's mother-in-law's apartment, which he called "Grandma's place," ethics expert Sam Dash suggested they call it "Operation Red Riding Hood." What sharp teeth everyone in this book has! To tell the truth, Woodward doesn't really knit together 25 years' worth of scandals into a single strong narrative. But the Clinton part is the closest thing yet to what we all crave: a tale of Monicagate with some of the flavor of a John Grisham thriller. --Tim Appelo A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Twenty-five years ago, after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Gerald Ford promised a return to normalcy. "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," President Ford declared. But it was not. The Watergate scandal, and the remedies against future abuses of power, would have an enduring impact on presidents and the country. In Shadow, Bob Woodward takes us deep into the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton to describe how each discovered that the presidency was forever altered. With special emphasis on the human toll, Woodward shows the consequences of the new ethics laws, and the emboldened Congress and media. Powerful investigations increasingly stripped away the privacy and protections once expected by the nation's chief executive. Shadow is an authoritative, unsettling narrative of the modern, beleaguered presidency. Twenty-five years after Nixon's resignation, the reporter who helped break the story explains how Watergate--the premier scandal of our time--has indelibly altered American politics, culture, and the presidency.  By: Bob Woodward List Price: $23.00 Amazon Price: $5.99 Editorial Review: Bob Woodward's secret man is no longer a secret, now that former FBI assistant director W. Mark Felt and his family have revealed that he was Deep Throat, Woodward's legendary anonymous source for his Watergate reporting. Soon after Felt made his identity known, Woodward, who "is prone to complete his homework before it is due or even assigned," according to the afterword by his reporting partner Carl Bernstein, himself revealed that he had been working on a manuscript in preparation for that moment, one that would after 30 years tell the inside story of their mysterious, and history-changing, relationship. Certainly you get in The Secret Man the cloak-and-dagger details you'd expect--and are likely already familiar with from both the book and the superb movie of All the President's Men: the late-night garage meetings, the red flag in the flower pot, the whispered warning that lives were in danger. Woodward retells the still-riveting story of his and Bernstein's unearthing of the scandal with efficiency and with the last puzzle piece in place. And he is able both to explain some of Felt's motivations, as an FBI loyalist disgusted by Nixon staffers trying to run roughshod over his agency, and to trace some of his remarkable bureaucratic tactics, including commissioning an FBI leak inquiry and deflecting it away from himself. Most fascinatingly, he gives a warts-and-all account of his shameless youthful cultivation of Felt, beginning with their first encounter when Woodward was a bored Navy lieutenant on the make, just three years before being assigned to cover the arraignment of five men in business suits arrested in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. But in a crucial way this doesn't seem to be the book that Woodward had wanted to write, for Felt remains a mystery. A shadowy father figure during the Watergate period, Felt soon distanced himself from Woodward after running into legal trouble of his own, and they fell out of touch in the intervening years. When Woodward finally reestablished contact in 2000, Felt had lost most of his memory, and any understanding with his former source, with whom he was so closely tied in both his private and public lives, remained poignantly but frustratingly unreachable. --Tom NissleyIn Washington, D.C., where little stays secret for long, the identity of Deep Throat -- the mysterious source who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break open the Watergate scandal in 1972 -- remained hidden for 33 years. Now, Woodward tells the story of his long, complex relationship with W. Mark Felt, the enigmatic former No. 2 man in the Federal Bureau of Investigation who helped end the presidency of Richard Nixon. The Secret Man chronicles the story in intimate detail, from Woodward's first, chance encounter with Felt in the Nixon White House, to their covert, middle-of-the-night meetings in an underground parking garage, to the aftermath of Watergate and decades beyond, until Felt finally stepped forward at age 91 to unmask himself as Deep Throat. The Secret Man reveals the struggles of a patriotic career FBI man, an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau's legendary director. After Hoover's death, Mark Felt found himself in the cross fire of one of Washington's historic contests, as Nixon and his men tried to dominate the Bureau and cover up the crimes of the administration. This book illuminates the ongoing clash between temporary political power and the permanent bureaucracy of government. Woodward explores Felt's conflicts and motives as he became Deep Throat, not only secretly confirming Woodward and Bernstein's findings from dozens of other sources, but giving a sense of the staggering sweep of Nixon's criminal abuses. In this volume, part memoir, part morality tale, part political and journalistic history, Woodward provides context and detail about The Washington Post's expose of Watergate. He examines his later, tense relationship with Felt, when the FBI man stood charged with authorizing FBI burglaries. (Not knowing Felt's secret role in the demise of his own presidency, Nixon testified at Felt's trial, and Ronald Reagan later pardoned him.) Woodward lays bare his own personal struggles as he tries to define his relationship, his obligations, and his gratitude to this extraordinary confidential source. The Secret Man is an intense, 33-year journey, providing a one-of-a-kind study of trust, deception, pressures, alliances, doubts and a lifetime of secrets. Woodward has spent more than three decades asking himself why Mark Felt became Deep Throat. Now the world can see what happened and why, bringing to a close one of the last chapters of Watergate. |
About the HUs
About This is True
Prev: Health skeptic John H. Renner Next: Cancer researcher Michael Smith |