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- Author: Thomas Mallon
- Publisher: Pantheon
- Published: February 2012
- ISBN-10: 0307378721
- ISBN-13: 9780307378729
- Format: Hardcover
- Copyright: 2012
- Subject: FICTION-GENERAL
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Product Description
For all the monumental documentation that the Watergate scandal generated – uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs – it falls, at last, to a novelist – one of our most esteemed historical novelists, at that – to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal’s greatest mysteries (i.e., who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?). Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now, moving readers from the private cabins of Camp David to the klieg lights of the Senate Caucus Room, from the District of Columbia jail to the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelt’s sharp-tongued ninety-year-old daughter, and into the hive of the Watergate complex itself, home not only to the Democratic National Committee but also to the president’s attorney general, his recklessly loyal secretary, and the shadowy man from Mississippi who pays out hush money to the burglars. Here, Mallon achieves a scope and historical intimacy that surpasses even what he attained in his previous novels, picking up along the way, high praise from the late Christopher Hitchens for his “splendid evocation of Washington.” Not to be missed. 432p.
Editorial Reviews
Revisiting the history of the '70s with our favorite cast of characters. Mallon casts a wide political net, starting at the time of the Watergate break-in and ending (except for an epilogue) just after the time Nixon resigned. In between he reconstructs the whole insalubrious episode and how it played out for the prime suspects. Players like Presidential Aide Fred LaRue are also given prominent space, and there's a special affection Mallon seems to have for Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's hapless secretary (or Executive Assistant, as she became) who notoriously erased 18 minutes of taped conversations in the Oval Office...or did she? Other favorites include Martha Mitchell, whose boozy garrulity got her husband, Attorney General John Mitchell, into even deeper trouble. Mallon takes us to the salons and dinner parties of the Highly Connected, like Alice Roosevelt Longworth, where the unfolding of sordid incidents serves as relish to the meals. Pat Nixon emerges as a sympathetic character, disturbed by her husband's machinations yet powerless to stop--or even to comprehend--them. We witness the hubris and self-satisfaction of Nixonites as Sam Ervin is named to head the investigating committee. (He's dismissed as an "old, unenergetic southerner who lacked any particular animus toward Nixon"). Elliot Richardson is ingratiating, whipsmart and super-ambitious--and craves even more political power when Spiro Agnew resigns in disgrace. And we're reintroduced to characters time has almost forgotten: Leon Jaworski, Judge John Sirica and Howard Hunt, who frequently consumes milk to keep at bay effects of a troubling ulcer. While billed as a novel, this book reads more like a documentary of a fascinating yet unlamented time. Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
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