Watergate: A New History

by Garrett M. Graff

In an era when the newsweeklies dominated American life, Nixon filled the cover of TIME a total of fifty-five times—more than a year’s worth of magazines over the course of his political career, more than any other figure in history. He was, as would become clear, the hinge upon which the entire American Century turned, the figure who ushered out the expansive liberal consensus of the New Deal and the Great Society and brought to the mainstream a darker, racialized, nativist, fearmongering strain of the Republican Party and American politics that would a half century later find its natural conclusion in Donald Trump.