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Watergate: The Presidential Scandal That Shook America. By Keith W. Olson. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. x, 220 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-1250-5. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-7006-1251-3.)
Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective. By Louis W. Liebovich. (Westport: Praeger, 2003. xvi, 143 pp. $45.95, ISBN 0-275-97915-6.)
Don't look now, but a new round of anniversaries, "revelations," and books covering Richard M. Nixon's last crisis has arrived. In 2003, as news programs marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Senate's probe of the Watergate break-in, former Nixon aide Jeb Stuart Magruder dropped a bombshell: the president himself had ordered the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Now, as the first presidential resignation in United States history turns thirty, two studies promise fresh insights into this national tragedy.
Keith W. Olson's Watergate is the better of the two books. It is succinct and lively and apt to find its way into courses on U.S. history since 1945. The author's thesis is plain: eighteen months of disclosures of White House misconduct fostered a national consensus in favor of Nixon's removal from office. In other words, no partisan cabal drove Nixon from the presidency. This argument is conventional but compelling, for Olson has plumbed an array of newspapers nationwide to show how Nixon's chief supporters had, by mid-1974, turned against him. In short, as charges of a presidential cover-up surfaced, Nixon lost public support. His unwillingness to surrender the White House tapes, his firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and...