Status Updates From Watergate

I'm about to give up on this book. What's keeping me going is summit fever but I'm literally not even halfway through. It's too many words and I feel like there are better ways to impart the information than this book smh

xxvii –

alright, I just have to say this. it is.... SO funny to me... that after 2 pages explaining all the ways other people have screwed up factoids, numbers, names, in their watergate books.......


and then the very first thing in the prologue. is an incorrect date.

amazing. no notes. perfect.

anyway, june 13, 1971 was a sunday, not a saturday, and tricia nixon got married on the 12th

xxv – left the full verbal soup where it’s important

(cont)

alert to the opportunity to pass the torch to some unwary aide who wandered in more or less by accident,” he recalled.

(cont)

Ehrlichman said. “Our minds were probably drifting off to other things.” Kissinger too came to see as central to his role the strange experience of soaking up the president’s “nervous tension. One would sit for hours listening to Nixon’s musings, throwing an occasional log on the fire, praying for some crisis to bring relief, (cont)

xxiv – “He would turn the same rock over a dozen times and then leave it and then come back to it two weeks later and turn it over another dozen times,” Ehrlichman explained. *

* Even his own staff came to realize that their role in most of their conversations with Nixon was simply to absorb him and let him process out loud. Their presence was almost extraneous. “Probably you’d grunt at the right times,” (cont)

xxiv – Alexander Haig’s memoir, which largely covers a period when there were no corresponding tapes of White House meetings, differs significantly from available evidence in key moments.

xxiii – H. R. Haldeman mis-assigns Washington Post star political reporter David Broder to the crosstown rival Star.

[well, garrett, actually dave broder DID work for the star, starting on the 1960 election with everyone's favorite loser, this guy's boss]

xxii – a success story of how government worked in a moment of grave crisis when America was at the peak of its power in the twentieth century

[oh please]

xxii – “Power is Washington’s main marketable product,” wrote Jack Anderson in 1973 in the midst of Watergate. “Power is the driving force that brings together people of different philosophies and varying interests in the constantly evolving battle for control.”

xx – Instead, the key players slipped, fumbled, and stumbled their way from the White House to prison, often without ever seeming to make a conscious decision to join the cover-up.

xx – Instead, the key players slipped, fumbled, and stumbled their way from the White House to prison, often without ever seeming to make a conscious decision to join the cover-up.

xix – criminality of an unprecedented and sad breadth

xviii – The first conspiracy was deliberate, a sloppy and shambolic but nonetheless developed plan to subvert the 1972 election; the second was reactive, almost instinctive—it seems to have happened simply because no one said no.

[again, idk about this one chief—plenty of people deliberately said yes to the cover up. garrett, ik you know this. come on man]

xvii – 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.

xvii – “The Nixon presidency was an intense one—hardworking, determined, wide-ranging, organized, and creative,” concluded his close advisor and onetime cabinet secretary Maurice Stans. “I don’t believe any man could have been more determined to do the best possible job as president.”

"" – He tried to position his government at the forefront of equal opportunity—hiring a presidential staff assistant focused solely on bringing more qualified women into government, tripling the number of women in policy-making roles, recruiting one thousand women into previously male middle-management roles, and bringing the first-ever female military aides into the White House.

[alright, well, idk this one, chief]

xvii – transformed the Post Office into a quasi-private government enterprise

xvi – he shaped, escalated, prolonged, and eventually wound down the Vietnam War