Pete's Got The News About This New Watergate Novel

From one of our most esteemed historical novelists, a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators.

For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated—uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs—it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal’s greatest mysteries (who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?) and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety.

In Watergate, 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 (“The clock is dick-dick-dicking”), 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.

Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his “splendid evocation of Washington,” Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy that surpasses even what he attained in his previous novels, as he turns a “third-rate burglary” into a tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.

Pete says:

"When I was first presented with Thomas Mallon's Watergate, I thought, a new book on Watergate? Is this 1978? What more could possibly be said about the subject? At the time I was sampling three or four other titles and was quite prepared to toss this one aside after a chapter or two. But like Watergate, which grew from a nothing story into the resignation of President Nixon, this book took me from two chapters, to three, to four, then finally into the realm of 'I can't put this one down.' Though we all know the story, what a grand re-telling of the story.

Mallon writes a fictional account of Watergate from the perspective of several key participants. But this isn't 'All the President's Men' by any means. This time we hear from the women as well, what it may have been like to be Pat Nixon, torn by her loyalty to her husband or perhaps to another. Then there's Alice Longworth (daughter of Teddy Roosevelt!?), who seems to know everybody's secrets and is not shy about revealing them, and Rosemary Woods, Nixon's loyal spinster secretary in search of an adequate dance partner. Finally, a tipsy Martha Mitchell proving to be an oracle in the end.

Though fiction, the book reads like nonfiction. You'll find yourself fact checking along the way and looking up the real biographies of a wide variety of characters. Of course you'll recognize Nixon and the 'plumbers,' but so many names -- seemingly lost to time -- are back in all their leisure suited glory and ready for another go round with McGovern and the Democrats. For despite all the chicanery, the backstabbing, the opportunism, the sleaze, (the murders?) the affairs, the late night gin and tonics, who knew that Watergate could be such fun?"