I have attempted to read Watergate about two dozen times. And I just don't think I can get through it (yet).

I have familiarity with the Watergate scandal, but I don't think I have a good enough understanding of all the players involved to be able to read this book and make sense of it. The book is so detailed, I forget who people are from page to page. (I have a PhD and extensive experience in synthesizing information and tracking details; I'm still struggling.)

DNF for now (again) - I plan to view the HBO special, White House Plumbers, as well as read some summaries to have a better understanding of more of the people involved in Watergate before I try this book again. I might also sketch out some notes for reference.

I'd recommend a good background in Watergate prior to attempting Garrett M. Graff's tome - or that readers Google as they go, to keep track of everyone. This book is detailed; it's easy to forget a name from chapter to chapter.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. However, I am no longer interested in pursuing titles on this subject

Look, this is clearly a great book. It's Watergate in such detail that I've never seen before, and I'm a history buff and avid Woodward/Bernstein fan. However — and it's a big however — this book is LOOOOONG. I've had it for review for over a year, and while I keep returning to it — it's certain a good book — at its length of 832 pages, it's really difficult to finish unless you're a complete history nerd. I'm a big fan of Garrett M. Graff after reading The Only Plane in the Sky, and I definitely think this book would be more finish-able if it were much, much shorter in length. The Only Plane in the Sky was so memorable in part because of its eyewitness testimony that gave an emotional gut-punch. With Watergate, it's much drier — despite the detail, there's simultaneously nothing in here that I hadn't heard of before in other histories. If you're a huge Watergate/Nixon history buff, I'd say this book will be paradise for you. If you're an average reader, or even an average history nerd, I'd pick All The President's Men over Watergate any day.

It took me a full year to read this 800 page history of Watergate and I never would've read a book like this by any other author (Graff wrote The Only Plane in the Sky, my favorite nonfiction book of all time). Graff uses newly discovered documents, transcripts, etc to tell the sprawling story of Watergate in the first single volume history in decades. This book is exhaustive (This thing was so much bigger than I ever realized with so many pieces, players, and tangents) and if you try to remember all the names and timelines and various subplots, you’ll go crazy. Once I stopped trying to keep close track of everything and just let the basic just of things wash over me, I really enjoyed it. Graff’s writing is clear and accessible and makes this VERY complicated history easier to take in. Excellent recommendation to have in your back pocket for Dads, Uncles, and Grandfathers.

A substantial new history on an event and era that has shaped much of contemporary US politics. Graff shows us just how much was actually happening/going on, in a gripping and intelligent manner. Definitely recommended.

WATERGATE by Garrett M. Graff is the first complete synthesis of the iconic political scandal. Watergate made “gate” a suffix, and its media coverage inspired generations of journalists. Graff’s book opens with Mark Felt revealing on his deathbed that he was the famous “Deep Throat.” Graff quips that “it’s hard to know whom to trust when you’re telling a story where nearly every major player ended up being charged with lying, perjury, or obstruction of justice.” engaging 832-page narrative helps readers to understand an attempt to cheat in the 1972 presidential election, the notorious coverup, and the historic media coverage.

Garrett Graff has been a favorite non fiction writer of mine ever since I read the phenomenal “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11. Reading this book solidified that. Filled with well-researched details and organized in a way that reads like fiction, this book, whose subject is one of the most well-known in our recent history, sheds light on things I didn’t know and connections I hadn’t made. While reading it, I called family members and told them to write this title down and pre-order/buy/borrow immediately. Don’t let the size intimidate you - every page is needed and I would have read 100 more. Book discussion groups - jump on this one! Thanks to Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster for the copy. Incredible!

i loved garrett graff's book on 9/11 and i was hoping this would a similar format but i suppose this was a bit older so there's maybe not as many people still around to interview. it was v dense!!! so much time and effort went into this. and now it's time to rewatch all the presidents men

I thought that I knew and understood the history of Watergate. However, with the benefit of several decades Garrett Graff has been able to write a new chronicle that encompasses the scope of this horrific period in our countries' story.. Bringing to light new material, and illuminating the narrative with in depth character studies, he is able to demonstrate that the tincture of time is a benefit to clarity! A must read for anyone interested in American history.

This was a fabulous book. I lived through the Watergate era, which informed me pretty well as to what it was all about, but this book filled in a lot of the fine points that I missed or didn't fully understand.

Garrett Graff is an absolutely brilliant journalist and historian, and I continue to be blown away by his work. Watergate is thorough yet readable, and the way he takes a massive amount of history and distills it down into a single (albeit lengthy!) text is truly admirable. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to any history lover!

Graff is probably my favorite non-fiction author of all time. He takes already important and investigated topics and humanizes them. I learned so much from this book, but it never felt like work. I will read everything this man writes forever.

We got married on June 17, 1973, one year to the day after the break-in at the Watergate, and drove home to the MidWest from the East listening to John Dean calmly tell the Ervin Committee and the world about the rot at the center of our government. I don't know if the shock and horror of what was revealed can adequately be conveyed to those who grew up afterwards, and who have lived through all or part of the subsequent half-century.

Trump and his GOP cult didn't come out of nowhere and nothing. Richard Nixon and his accomplices broke something vital in America and it remains broken to this day. The Nixon Administration remains the most corrupt in American history, rivaled only by that sink of corruption, Donald Trump.

This book, "Watergate: A New History," is terrific. Garrett Graff is an excellent writer and this thoroughly researched tome explains a lot of things that even I, who thought I knew a lot about the period, either didn't know or had forgotten. I found it very interesting that he started with the Pentagon Papers, as I had never followed those particular breadcrumbs.

This is a dense book, filled with names, dates and places. For someone new to the subject it might help to take the odd note-and some of those notes would end up very odd indeed. The whole criminal enterprise is almost unbelievable, but it is all true. This comprehensive accounting of such an important period in American history is essential reading, and I heartily recommend it.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

Although I absolutely loved The Only Plane in the Sky, this one was a bit too dense for me. The writing was too clunky for me right now.

Watergate to me is history. I was born after the break-in at the Watergate hotel, but before Nixon resigned and have no memories. Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an Advanced Reader’s Copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Sometime after we got cable TV in my tweens, I saw a movie about the Watergate scandal starring Martin Sheen as John Dean, who worked in the White House and was the first to spill the beans on all the shenanigans going on there. About the same time I picked up a copy of All the President’s Men by Woodward and Bernstein , the reporters who doggedly covered the story of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up. Then I saw the movie based on the book starring one of my favorites, Robert Redford, and wondered what everyone else wondered: Who was Deep Throat, the high-placed official who was feeding the reporters leads and confirming facts they had uncovered.

Fifty years later, Watergate: A New History attempts to provide the whole story for the first time. It’s a meticulously researched story that starts in 1971 with the leak of the Pentagon Papers. There’s deep deep background on this story, so much so that it’s not until 20% into the book that we actually get to the break-in at the Watergate. Then the book really picks up.

I think the weight of evidence, interviews and testimony does bog down the book at times, but then you realize to yourself, “Holy cow!” There were so many people involved in the crimes and cover-up surrounding the Nixon administration. And I learned that the Washington Post was not the only paper doggedly covering the story. They may have been the first and investigated thoroughly, but there were plenty of angles that other newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and New York Times picked up and uncovered more dirt. It was interesting to find out that there was some creative license given to the book of All the President’s Men, and as we all know, the movie embellishes and changes things to make them more dramatic.

Deep Throat outed himself in 2005. He was deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt. I was surprised to learn that the White House knew he was the leak, or rather, the head of the leaks at the FBI. Felt also used several loyal aides to contact various news outlets and confirm, deny, or provide new information or show them which directions the reporters should follow. I was in the throws of motherhood (two toddlers and enrolled in university) when this information was released, so I didn’t know much about Felt or his side of the story.

As I read this definitive history of a subject that changed the American Presidency, I could not get over the wealth of information available, from Nixon’s secret tapes to Congressional testimony to author interviews of subjects, to excerpts from the newspapers that covered the story as unfolded. Disseminating that information must have taken the author years!

I read this book in a few days because I was just approved for an ARC from NetGalley last week, but normally this is a book that should be given more time to absorb the enormity of the high crimes and misdemeanors that happened 50 years ago that brought down a president and changed journalism, and in truth, the whole country for all time.

Professor Graff with the distance of time and the assimilation of new information a fuller picture can be known with the revelation of the identity of "Deepthroat" Mark Felt. It truly was a smarmy time in America's History only rivaled by the recent past of 2020. Graff of course had the intention to show that political scandal and the fragility of our Republic is not a new occurrence.

It is to our collective detriment that William Shakespeare had not lived long enough to pen the Tragedy of Richard Nixon. Nixon is no Hamlet, to be sure, but a story where a paranoid, power-hungry leader is imbued with the spirit of both Macbeth AND Lady Macbeth? Where literally 10 different people could be a stand-in for Falstaff? Where the president and Henry Kissinger engage in a delicate tete-a-tete like two star-crossed lovers doomed to fail? Sign me – and every 12th grade English teacher across the country – up.

Still, even without a literary makeover, the narrative that was Richard Nixon’s presidency – not to mention his decades of public life before and ignominy after – is one of our great modern tales. There have been many fine books written about Nixon, Watergate and “All” of his “Men,” but Garrett Graff’s Watergate: A New History is poised to become the definitive book about his rise to the White House and incredible fall from it. For Graff, “Watergate” is not merely the scandal that started with a bungled DNC office burglary, but the culture of an Administration with no precedent in American history, and he expertly weaves together decades of research into a Dickensian epic spanning from the Chennault Affair to the spy games of the inscrutable Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to the tireless work of prosecutors and the Saturday Night Massacre and, finally, to those batshit crazy tapes.

Of course, even with great material, a comprehensive history of any subject could be an unbearable slog without the right guide, but Graff’s steady hands make Watergate: A New History a page-turner. When you crack the spine on this book, you already know how the story ends, but the ride is so [expletive deleted] exhilarating.

Thanks to Net Galley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

As someone that grew up well after the Watergate affair, I was so excited to get access to a comprehensive history of the scandal, thanks to the publisher. Garrett Graff did a great job weaving a number of standalone news stories into a coherent narrative.

Graff does it again. I have thoroughly enjoyed his past works, especially his book on 9/11. He has a gift of making inaccessible history more accessible. In this case, he takes a very complicated web of people and events and manages to turn it into a gripping narrative. The strength of the book is in its coverage but density. He looks at Nixon but also devotes space to Felt and the plumbers. His treatment of the events cover a wide span, not just the break in itself but frames the context well.

Much of what has been written about Watergate has been so esoteric that there hasn't been a good readable history for this important story (other than All the President's Men, which, it could be argued, serves as a primary source more than a historical narrative).

This is a great entry point for people who want to learn more about this history in-depth, more than the erroneous belief that "Nixon ordered a break in and covered it up" line.

The best histories that become popular are well-written thrillers, and this reads as one (but, this should come to no surprise- Graff is an exceptional writer).