Keith Olson's Watergate Book Reviewed

Review/Analysis of Watergate: The Presidential Scandal that Shook America

Olson begins his tale of Watergate by noting that “Richard M. Nixon intended to shape national policies according to his political agenda and his personal likes and dislikes” (5). The main theme here is that Nixon did not serve the interests of the American people but rather his own interests. The Watergate scandal revealed the reality of this situation to the nation, and the nation pushed back—including members of his own political party—so that he ended up resigning from office. That is the theme that Olson focuses on in his book Watergate: The Presidential Scandal that Shook America. However, politics being complicated, and the US government having a vast treasure trove of secrets, can one really rest easy in adopting such a simple view of the Watergate episode? Perhaps there was more going on than Nixon’s own personal interests. Perhaps Nixon was as much a victim of Watergate as the DNC offices that his plumbers were allegedly targeting.

One must consider, after all, that two Kennedys had been assassinated, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. The 1960s were a horrible period in America. People literally thought the nation had turned into a banana republic. In fact, that was Eisenhower’s reaction when hearing that Ruby shot Oswald on live TV (Talbot). Nixon may not have had anything to do with any of those assassinations—but one thing is clear: the scandal of Watergate surely pales in comparison to every single one of those murders. Yet the outreach and scorned heaped upon Nixon is more than is heaped upon almost any other president—except perhaps Donald Trump. But readers could easily draw parallels between Olson’s characterization of Nixon and the popular press’s characterization of Trump in the White House. Both presidents have been painted as being personally motivated to lie, cheat, conceal, and deceive.

Olson does a good job of making the case against Nixon. He sets the man up as one who hated leaks (like another recent president) and who conspired to shut down leakers in his administration who might betray some secret to the press. He also makes the argument that Nixon was more focused on controlling the narrative about his own presidency than he was in serving the people he was elected to serve: “Nixon’s reaction to the inevitable leaks, however, not only exceeded in degree the responses of his predecessors under similar situations but also broke the law and offered a grave portent of events to come” (Olson 10). Olson describes Nixon as a man who cared about two things and two things only: his own image and control over others.

For instance, Olson states that during Nixon’s reelection campaign, the president “exhibited the same characteristics that shaped his approach in other aspects of his administration: concern about public image; desire for knowledge about the plans and activities of opponents; and heavy reliance on public opinion polls, both to gauge public reactions and to guide further decisions” (23). But the way Olson puts it makes it seem as though no other president in history did the same. It is well known, at least among some people in the US, that Trump’s campaign was spied upon by the DNC in what could easily be called a reversal of the Nixon situation, which saw the Republican administration spying on the DNC. Additionally, why wouldn’t one want a president to care about opinion polls when making decisions? Wouldn’t it be better for the president to gauge public reactions for the purpose of guiding further decisions than to not do so? How is this a fault of Nixon?

In short, let Watergate be a scandal—but a more sympathetic portrayal of a president should not be beyond one’s reasonable expectations. It is not necessary to vilify a man to the extreme, to see everything he does as heinous and out of proportion to context. This is not an attempt to defend Nixon or his character—but a book on the subject of Watergate should be impartial and balanced. Nixon was not the only one to engage in dirty politics, and it should not be assumed that others in office at the time were not just as guilty. The times were loaded with corruption. Yet Nixon ended the Vietnam War. How many presidents could have ended the wars in the Middle East since Bush began them after 9/11 yet did not? Obama’s drone strikes, Trump’s invasion of Syria (for the oil, as he callously stated), and Biden’s assurance that US forces would remain there for the time being. One could argue that Biden at least pulled out of Afghanistan, but he seems intent on starting WW3 with Russia, does he not? The point is that Nixon should not be viewed or portrayed or condemned as totally abominable or corrupt. There is a lot more going on with Watergate than most chronicles like Olson’s will attempt to explain—and that can be said as fact simply by looking at some of the plumbers involved in the break-in and their connections with intelligence going all the way back to the 1960s. Hunt, for instance, like had much to tell about a certain assassination, as Talbot reminds his readers.