'King Richard' Brings The Watergate Cast Back In Its Own Words-On-Tape
We are still a year away from the 50th anniversary of the famous burglary that added "Watergate" to everyone's political vocabulary. But in King Richard, veteran journalist and author Michael Dobbs stirs memories of the intense personal drama connecting that break-in to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
Dobbs has been listening to a vast store of tape recordings from Nixon's White House that has been released in recent years. It enables him to offer a vivid retelling of both the crime story and the human stories around it.
It was of course supremely ironic that the secret recordings Nixon ordered made in his own home and offices led to his own undoing. It was especially so because the original burglary at the Watergate office complex in Washington was intended to secretly record conversations in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
The irony lives on in allowing us all to relive it now.
Dobbs uses this vivid source, among others, to re-enact the struggles withina better shot than most histories have at reaching younger readers. At the same time, it gives a (much) older generation of Watergate junkies a way to rediscover the dark intrigues of Nixon and his entourage â with notes of relief that we all survived, and perhaps a touch of nostalgia as well.
