The complex character of Tricky Dick

In this Age of Trump, as we cast about for some moment in American history that might help us make sense of the present, the name Richard M. Nixon keeps resurfacing. Nixon, who resigned the presidency in 1974 after being swept up in investigations into the crimes and cover-ups known collectively as Watergate, offers easy comparisons with Donald J. Trump: two corrupt American presidents who left office in disgrace; who considered the press their enemy; who accused the previous administration of surveilling them; who weaponised racism as a way to win elections; who employed the politics of division as a way of keeping power; who possessed and indulged an outsized thirst for revenge.

As investigations now swirl closer to Trump, Watergate prosecutors and the whistleblower John Dean have resurfaced to remember Nixon’s rise and fall. Watergate is America’s ur-scandal, and, in living memory, the closest analogue to the political traumas the country has recently endured. These comparisons make the British-born journalist Michael Dobbs’s King Richard as of the moment as it proves to be ultimately timeless.

It would be next to impossible to frame a tragedy about a man who, say, exists only to exalt himself, and who owes his every victory to family wealth and brazen self-promotion. But it’s entirely possible to compose a tragedy about Nixon, a man whose hardscrabble life and rise from nothing embodies multiple American myths, and that is precisely what Dobbs has done. This beautifully written and stunningly detailed portrait of 100 essential days at the beginning of Nixon’s second term brings the Watergate scandal, its colourful cast of characters and Nixon himself to life in a way we’ve never before seen.

Dobbs’s deep dive into the conversations that Nixon obsessively recorded (3,700 hours of them were released in 2013) gives the book amazing authenticity.