Keaton’s Reviews > Watergate: A New History > Status Update

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.