Tim Stanley at Literary Review:
Does the world need another history of the Watergate scandal? If it’s this good, yes. Michael Dobbs’s tense facto-thriller covers the first hundred days of Richard Nixon’s second administration, from the triumph of re-election to the moment when things ‘fell apart’ in mid-1973. Dobbs stalks the president around the White House, watching and listening – much like the taping system Nixon installed to protect his reputation but that, in the end, destroyed it. We hear him make bigoted comments and plot to conceal the truth, as well as lie to the faces of men he professes to love – and to himself as well.
Tricky Dick probably didn’t order the burglary at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972: responsibility lay with the Committee for the Re-election of the President, which was separate from the White House.
more here.