The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon

Stanley I. Kutler

Aug 2013 · Sold by Knopf

About this ebook

This is the first truly comprehensive history of the political explosion that shook America in the 1970s, and whose aftereffects are still being felt in public life today. Drawing on contemporary documents, personal interviews, memoirs, and a vast quantity of new material, Stanley Kutler shows how President Nixon’s obstruction of justice from the White House capped a pattern of abuse that marked his entire tenure in office. He makes clear how the drama of Watergate is rooted not only in the tumultuous events and social tensions of the 1960s but also in the personality and history of Richard Nixon.
 
Kutler examines Nixon’s confrontations with the institutions he feared and resented—the Congress, the federal agencies, the news media, the Washington establishment—and how they mobilized to topple the President. He considers the arguments of Nixon’s defenders, who insisted that Watergate was a minor affair, and the contention that the President did nothing worse than his predecessors had done. He offers compelling portraits of the President’s men—H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Charles Colson, John Dean; of his adversaries—Judge John Sirica, the U.S. Attorneys, Special Prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski; and of the legislators who would stand in judgment—Sam Ervin and Peter Rodino.
 
In the course of his engrossing narrative, Stanley Kutler illuminates the constitutional crisis brought on by Watergate. He shows how Watergate diminished the moral level of American political life, and illustrates its continuing detrimental impact on the credibility, authority, and prestige of the Presidency in particular and the government in general. His book underlines for the American electorate the significance of Watergate for the future of our political ethics and the maintenance of our constitutional system, as well as for the place of Richard Nixon in American history.

About the author

Stanley Ira Kutler was born in Cleveland, Ohio on August 10, 1934. He graduated from Bowling Green State University and earned a doctorate from Ohio State. He joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty in 1964. He taught there for 32 years until he retired in 1996. In 1992, he filed a lawsuit with Public Citizen against the National Archives and Records Administration to win the release of more than 3,000 hours of conversations tape-recorded in the Oval Office during Richard Nixon's presidency. As a result of his suit, 201 hours of tapes related to unethical or illegal activity were released in 1996. The 340 hours of Nixon tapes were released in 2013. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon, and The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War. He wrote a play entitled I, Nixon and created a television program with the comedian Harry Shearer entitled Nixon's the One. He also edited the Dictionary of American History and founded and edited the journal Reviews in American History. He died from heart failure on April 7, 2015 at the age of 80.