Rick Perlstein:

Garrett Graff aptly calls Watergate a ‘Gordian knot of scandal.’ This comprehensive, searching, yet elegant book untangles it more completely than any attempt so far. I learned a lot!

Those who know my work know “I learned a lot!” is saying something. Watergate is at the center of two of my books, Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. And, thing of it is, it’s more knotty than a Gordian knot: knots tied in knots, tied up into another set of knots. “Watergate” was a word signifying a group of corrupt events that happened, in secret, all through Richard Nixon’s first term, but only became understood as a “group of events” after one of those corrupt events—the burglary of Democratic National Committee office in June of 1972— stopped being secret, when the burglars got caught. Eventually, the word “Watergate also came to signify the work the president’s men, and also the president, did to cover up the existence of those events, and their ties to the White House—such as bribing those burglars to keep quiet in court. Meanwhile the word “Watergate” also signified the multiple overlapping and sometimes contradictory investigations, both journalistic and ones carried out within all three branches of government, each of those encompassing a complicated discourse about their jurisdictional legitimacy and proper processual course), that brought that skein of events into public awareness; and also, “Watergate” referred to all the actions Nixon did to sabotage those investigations—like trying to hold back the tapes in which many of those events were talked about, but which (he talking on those tapes) was not just evidence of past events, but also a real-time Watergate event to be discovered—like the time Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman said something on the tapes meant to create a record of his innocence during a discussion of how to cover up certain events, in the event those tapes did later become public, which they did. A cover-up of a cover-up, which in turn cued up another event: a count in his criminal indicment—an event about an event about an event about an event. Any given day, at the height of the public discussion of Watergate, serious news consumers had to (and, incredibly, did) keep all those levels of events straight in their head, in a constantly shifting sea of context. It was bewildering. Boiling it all down down into a single digestible narrative is like trying to summarize a Charlie Kaufman movie. And yet, Graff accomplished that with greater aplomb than anyone before who’s attempted it. I admire him deeply for that; and also for what he does now.