The Fall of Nixon

Watergate and the Crisis of American Democracy, 1972-1974 James Prescott Marlowe

James Prescott Marlowe

• Publisher: Chiify
• eBook ISBN:
  9798905160318
• Year: 2026

Shortly after midnight on June 17, 1972, a security guard found tape covering a door latch in the Watergate complex. He called the police. The five men arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters were carrying surveillance equipment, sequentially numbered bills, and a direct connection to Nixon's re-election committee. What followed was the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. James Prescott Marlowe traces the full arc of Watergate across twenty-four chapters — from CREEP's sixty-million-dollar dirty tricks operation through the cover-up's mechanics, the hush-money pipelines, and John Dean's warning to Nixon of a "cancer on the presidency." W. Mark Felt, passed over for the FBI directorship, guided Woodward and Bernstein's Washington Post investigation from inside the bureau as Deep Throat. The Saturday Night Massacre — Nixon firing special prosecutor Archibald Cox, triggering the Attorney General's resignation — accelerated the collapse. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon that executive privilege is not absolute. Sixteen days later, Nixon resigned. The book captures the end in full: the East Room farewell, the double V-sign on the South Lawn, Gerald Ford's "our long national nightmare is over," and the pardon that cost Ford the 1976 election. It closes with the reforms Watergate forced — campaign finance law, FISA, the Church Committee's intelligence oversight revolution — and the constitutional precedent on executive privilege that still governs American law. Watergate proved democratic institutions can hold even the most powerful official accountable. It also proved that outcome is never guaranteed.

Table of contents

• Author’s Note
• Contents
• Prologue: The Break-In
• PART ONE: THE CRIME (1972)
• PART TWO: THE UNRAVELING (1973)
• PART THREE: THE END (1973-1974)
• PART FOUR: THE CAST OF CHARACTERS
• PART FIVE: THE BROADER WATERGATE
• PART SIX: LEGACIES
• Epilogue: The Pardon
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author