The Real Watergate Scandal

August 1, 2015
Shepard was a young White House staffer in the Nixon administration when the smoking gun tape was revealed, implicating the president in the Watergate scandal. In this follow-up to The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President (2008), which detailed how political opposition was used to drive Nixon from office, Shepard charges federal judges and prosecutors with deliberately misusing the law to topple the president. Arguing that the tapes were misinterpreted, Shepard draws on documents from the National Archives to imply that Judge John Sirica and special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski were part of a political opposition so set on unseating Nixon that they subverted the law. Shepard charges the judge and prosecutors with meeting secretly to strategize how best to remove Nixon from office. Shepard, who has been active in preserving and publicizing the policy legacy of the Nixon administration, argues that had Nixon not been driven from office, he would have been recognized as one of the nation's greatest presidents.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)