Watergate: I love it

Watergate by Thomas Mallon

Sometimes a book is reviewed, and reviewed again, and I place a hold, and then I keep checking its release date because I am impatient for it!

This book is one of those.

And happily, happily, happily, it was worth the wait. (Sometimes those long-awaited books disappoint, and man, does that suck.)

Now, you’re hearing this from a confirmed Watergate geek here. (My other “blog” is a reading map of All the President’s Men, so yes, I’ve got a bit of a Watergate problem.)

So I had an interest in this book’s subject matter already (a plus), but I also had expectations (which can be a minus).

My hopes were high because Mallon and I go way back to Henry and Clara (his novel about the couple who accompanied the Lincolns to Fords Theatre that dreadful night) and Mrs. Paine’s Garage (a nonfiction book about the woman who unknowingly stored the gun used by Lee Harvey Oswald). And the guy’s an excellent writer who knows his stuff.

(photo credit: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith
Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and
 Photographs Division)

Now, he’s fictionalizing plenty-o-stuff here, and you’re either going to be OK with that or you’re not. For example, he manufactures an affair between Pat Nixon and a widower from New York. I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen. And there’s some other stuff like that.

But one of the things I love and adore is that several of the participants in the actual drama lived in the Watergate complex: John Mitchell, Fred LaRue, and Rose Mary Woods. So there are scenes set in the residential area of the Watergate, and it just makes the whole thing come full circle. All these people fretting about the future, there in their homes in the same building complex as the break-in that busted the whole thing wide open.

The story is told from the point of view of those within the administration, so it’s the opposite angle from All the President’s Men (wondrous book—wondrous!) which tells the story from the reporters’ viewpoint. I’m temperamentally inclined to prefer the story told by the good guys, but these bad guys are so fascinating and so weirdly flawed (every last one of them) that the book really worked for me.  


Alice Roosevelt Longworth is a character here, too, in the full sense of the word. She’s known for the enchanting phrase “If you can’t say something nice, then sit next to me”—a person who was vaguely terrifying in real life, but delightful from a safe distance. So there’s some comic relief amidst all that sturm und drang.

Thoroughly absorbing, especially if you’re a Watergate-o-phile.