Observations on Garrett M. Graff's "Watergate: A New History" and the Nixon-Trump thing
Finished it (mainly the audio, though I also have the Kindle) last week. I enjoyed the backstory in the book, which is what it mainly is though there are some new details added. I don't recall hearing before that Nixon strongly suspected Mark Felt as Deep Throat. Given his apparent suspicion, one question that remained with me was why Nixon never went after him. Overall, though, it's a good book. I've started in on "All the President's Men" now to get Woodward & Bernstein's take on it. One thing about Graff's book that rankled me was his going after them in a couple of places as if he was determined that his (Graff's) book be the accepted history of Watergate. I don't think anything will ever replace ATPM. What Graff does, as I said, is provide a lot of back story. The audio, interesting enough, also includes all the footnotes (and there are a ton of them). They actually weave in pretty seamlessly and I was kind of surprised he didn't just make them part of the book.
But another thing (and probably the natural thing) was to compare Nixon and Trump. And it's not all that surprising that Nixon, as bad as he was, comes out looking better than President Dopey. For one, Nixon, for all his crookedness, did have some ethics where Trump had none. Nixon actually tried to do a few good things, where again, Trump didn't. I never thought when we all were so paranoid during the Vietnam War days about the Nixon admin. that anything could be worse. But it (Trump) was.
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