A half-century after the Watergate break-in, this anniversary history becomes the standard-setting base line for all future ones.
For all of Richard Nixon’s achievements, the sometimes-unbelievable, always lurid Watergate scandal forever stains his reputation. Graff, the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute, sees the crisis as the result of amateurish fumbling rather than criminal forethought, but he attributes to the Nixon administration the “darker, racialized, nativist, fear-mongering strain of the Republican Party and American politics that would a half century later find its natural conclusion in Donald Trump.” Letting the story speak for itself, Graff intervenes principally to point to inconsistencies in participants’ testimonies or subjects for further investigation, such as a tantalizing thread of links to Chile.
