Determined to prove a villain
Anthony Howard
WATERGATE: THE CORRUPTION AND FALL OF RICHARD NIXON by Fred Emery Cape, £20, pp. 542
el ust as there will always be Kennedy assassination 'buffs', so the Watergate saga retains the capacity to 'hook' at least my generation. What those too young to remember anything about it are making of the current, admirably documented BBC 2 series I have no idea; but for anyone old enough to have lived through it, even at a remote distance, the essentially Jacobean drama once again being unfolded on Sunday evenings has made for required viewing.
Fred Emery, the Washington correspon- dent of The Times during the relevant peri- od, had a ringside seat for the entire story. That has given his commentary to the TV programmes an additional weight and authority — and those qualities are not wanting in this written narrative, which is in essence the book of the film. But somehow the sense of pace and excitement — yes, and sometimes of ludicrous farce, too does not transfer easily to the printed page. Perhaps Woodward and Bernstein in their two instant books, All The President's Men and The Final Days, cleaned up on that. In any event, this painstaking — and, no doubt, more accurate — reconstruction of what really happened in a demon-ridden White House 20 years ago lacks the imme- diate readability that they brought to their story.
The trouble is that Emery is basically engaged in sifting the evidence — or, to put it more bluntly, working through the transcripts. It is his misfortune to possess a
prose style that does not enable him to conceal this. Too many paragraphs begin with some such sentence as 'From here on versions part company at crucial points'. Even this, though, is preferable to his resort at more dramatic moments to the historic present — as in 'Haldeman listens as Nixon goes through three telephone calls'. The more fastidious reader, too, could probably have done without chapter openings like 'John Dean's new intimacy with the President was Nixon's Ides of March. It was not so quick as Casca's thrust at Caesar, but ultimately it was fatal'. Nor, at a less high-flown level, is a sense of excitement necessarily heightened by so jejune an announcement as 'It was a bomb- shell'.
At least, however, it can be said on this book's behalf that it comes at a particularly useful moment. If there was a danger of Nixon's death having led to a sea of for- giveness washing away all his sins, then it does its own part to avert it. (The Halde- man diaries also promise to play a helpful role in this respect.) The one thing that the former President's British champions ranging from Jonathan Aitken to Lord Longford — seem never to have been able to grasp is that Watergate was no isolated, bizarre episode. It was part of a pattern of conduct that characterised the man. Indeed, in many ways, the dirty tricks that preceded Watergate were much worse than the sleazy circumstances attending that bungled burglary and break-in.
Emery is especially effective in bringing out the consistently squalid nature of Nixon's motives — whether in seeking to dig the dirt on Teddy Kennedy, trying to destabilise poor Ed Muskie's candidature, employing every available improper means to get his revenge on Daniel Ellsberg or, perhaps worst of all (Sy Hersh's recent rev- elation in the New Yorker), attempting to link his ultimate 1972 presidential oppo- nent, the hapless George McGovern, with the would-be assassin of George Wallace. All in all, it is a record of high crimes and misdemeanours that would have done cred- it to Richard III.
Where Emery's narrative fails is in not offering any adequate explanation of what made Nixon into the victim of paranoia that he clearly was. After all, in 1972 he had nothing to fear — except, as was once famously said by one of his predecessors, fear itself. Alas, it was fear that consumed him — the sense which stayed with him throughout his life that the world was against him and, left to itself, would never give him a fair shake.
The irony was that, as a political mind, he was certainly not inferior to any of his contemporaries: it was just that he had this dreadful inferiority complex. Watergate was the direct consequence of that, just as the extraordinary process of fanatics, wal- lies and dimbats who presently parade across the TV screen every Sunday night were its casualties.
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