Sure, the style is a little dry and factual, with only occasional forays into emotion and sensation. I found it particularly hard to keep track of all the people - so hard that the authors provide a cheat sheet at the beginning of the book. "These are the people, these are the events, and this is how they unfolded," Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein seem to be telling us.

But the story of Watergate between 1971 and 1974, told through the filter of Woodward and Bernstein's Washington Post investigation, is nevertheless a compelling read. It's shocking that these events actually happened, that a presidential administration was so culturally brainwashed and paranoid that they ran an operation of surveillance and burglary that would have made the Kremlin blush. Shocking also that they thought this operation was necessary: they assumed, despite their political success in 1968 and Nixon's consistently high poll numbers, that they were nevertheless under constant fire - and also, that everyone else in politics must be equally corrupt. After living through the first decade of this century, the reactions of those inside the Nixon administration to seeing their names in print, to encountering criticism, to being held accountable for their actions while in public office, serve as eerie an echo from the past of the misinformation and squirming we saw in the events surrounding the Iraq War.

Nixon's people reserved particular ire for the Washington Post, and to a lesser degree Time magazine and the New York Times. The three years of this book are peppered with outbursts from administration officials, from press secretary Ron Ziegler to the president himself, to the effect that these publications were "out to get the president." And of course, within weeks of these outbursts it frequently happened that the papers' claims were verified, vindicated. You almost feel embarrassed for these federal officials, reading their "non-denial denials" and knowing what will surely come next.

The sense that this administration thought itself constantly under siege by treasonous outsiders when it was only really threatened by its own behavior, is emblematic of modern American conservatism when it finds itself in executive power. But the abuses of power here transcend political ideology. Read this book.