The Crisis the 'Gave' Us the Government We Have Today?
By Steve Donoghue

31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today
by Barry Worth, Doubleday, 2006, $26

"That's the thing about watersheds," legendary Speaker of the House Thomas 'Tip' O'Neill once remarked. "Every bastard thinks he's got one, right there in his pocket."

The watershed in question (if not the bastard) in Barry Worth's spry, engaging new book 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today is of course the Watergate scandal and the backstage wranglings of the then-new Ford administration that resulted in a pardon for former president Richard Nixon.

Worth begins his account on Nixon's last day in the White House and proceeds day by day, chapter by chapter, to the moment when President Ford offered Nixon a "full, free, and absolute" pardon for all illegal actions he took during his presidency. Using this narrow focus as a prism, Worth then takes the reader backward through a concentrated tour of Nixon's White House, and also forward, as his subtitle indicates, to the present day, and current administration.

In describing this period—the collapse of the Nixon presidency, his resignation, and his pardon—as the mother of all 20th century American watersheds, Worth makes a familiar case. In asserting that this watershed “gave” us our current government, he makes a more debatable one.

Worth is an assiduous researcher and, more fortunately, a consummate storyteller. The Billion Dollar Molecule, his report on the formation and early years of the Cambridge biotech company Vertex Pharmacueticals (and its mercurial founder, Josh Bogle), is incessantly fascinating, and The Scarlet Professor, his account of the arrest of Harvard professor Newton Arvin on pornography charges, is a groundbreaking contribution to American social history.

"31 Days" likewise benefits from Worth's light, energetic writing style and flawless ear for the telling quote, the illuminating vignette. His narrative is never in such a hurry that it can't stop for a colorful detail or a telling brush of scenery. The back-story he pieces together is grimly familiar, even 30 years after the Watergate scandal delivered its great psychic gut-punch to national confidence. It’s all here again: the Watergate Hotel break-in, the White House denials and obfuscations, the hush money and dirty tricks, the “plumbers” and impeachment proceedings, and the "enemies list" paranoid enough to include Bob Hope.

Looming over everything else is the White House tapes, the mind-boggling revelation that Nixon had installed an elaborate, secret taping system that recorded (as Worth quotes White House aide Alexander Butterfield) "every word, every joke, every curse, every tantrum, every flight of presidential paranoia, every bit of flattery and bad advice and tattling by his advisors."

Worth is shrewd in his portrait of Nixon, mostly preferring to step back and let the President's own words define him for the reader. In these pages (as in Richard Reeves' 2001 President Nixon: Alone in the White House, on which Worth seems to rely), peppered by the president's guttural refrains of 'goddamit,' Nixon comes across as petty, venal, vain, and lachrymose. He wheedles and blusters by turn, distrusting and back-biting subordinates, many of whom persist nevertheless in revering him. Worth is also adept at reminding his readers that the collapse of the Nixon administration was accompanied by the physical collapse of the man himself, struck down by phlebitis and flights of despair that left many observers—including President Ford—wondering if the disgraced, exiled president might not be a danger to himself.

Side by side with this self-pitying Nixon is a bellicose double: an angry ex-commander-in-chief, demanding "anything that any former President is entitled to….When I travel I expect military aircraft; I expect the same support I provided. I expect communications and medical personnel. Everything they had." However, the Nixon that ultimately emerges is sadder still: a deluded man in denial of his involvement with Watergate.

The book's other main presence is President Ford, who emerges almost entirely wholesome despite Worth's somewhat half-hearted attempts to drum up dark drama involving the timing of Ford's decision to pardon Nixon. The Presidency in exchange for a pardon? A pardon in exchange for the Nixon tapes and papers? It's an interesting little testament to Ford's integrity that even now, such phantoms feel satisfactorily dispelled by one of Ford's flat, nasal denials: "There was no deal, period."

Worth expertly marshals a wide variety of contemporary assessments of the nation's first unelected president, and the composite rendered is of a fair-minded, amiable man thrust into unprecedented circumstances. Perhaps politeness restrained him from passing along Lyndon Johnson's verdict that Ford was a nice guy who'd spent too much time playing football without a helmet. Ditto, Harry Truman's inimitable characterization of Nixon as a "no-good lying bastard."

This sense of politics-as-personal helps the book succeed as a tense, day-by-day political potboiler, though there are some stylistic glitches: Worth's odd proffering of Evel Knievel's failed Snake River Canyon jump as a parallel to Nixon's ruin feels forced; his insistent descriptions of people's clothing can annoy (we all dressed ridiculously in the '70s—why belabor the point?); his repeated phonetic rendering of Ford's pronunciation of 'judgment' ('judg-a-ment') is isolated enough to seem slightly bizarre.

Worth’s greatest strength as a writer is displayed in his large, deftly drawn cast of secondary characters, many of whom are more memorable then his major players. There's embattled Nixon retainer Al Haig, "a tireless regent, whose prideful West Point bearing was never quite concealed by the dark suits he favored." There's Betty Ford, trapped between her tough support of her husband and her own private demons. There's Ronald Ziegler, whose contempt for the press as Nixon's press secretary mirrored that of his boss. And of course there's Henry Kissinger, Nixon's eminence gris, who's consistently depicted as a disinterested patriot concerned mainly with global peace and stability (Oddly, Christopher Hitchens' brilliant, acidic The Trial of Henry Kissinger doesn't appear in Worth's 8-page bibliography).

However, supporting characters, including the familiar faces of Ford’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, also lead to the book's main weakness. In short, it’s a work that doesn’t sustain, or even tenaciously argue, its subtitle: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today

The ambitious central premise is that the lessons Rumsfeld and Cheney took away from those 31 days—e.g., a vicarious zeal for unbridled presidential power, a disregard for legal checks and balances, a penchant for secret-keeping—are now being used to shape the state of the country, that today's administration was somehow irresistibly precipitated by Nixon's resignation and eventual pardon, that the country is reaping what it sowed. Worth even stretches his parallel to the Oval Office itself, with President Bush as his Nixon stand-in. But Worth's 17-page epilogue rushes the argument, offering a thumbnail sketch of the present administration's woes that's long on acerbity and short of certainty.

In fact, another of Worth's supporting cast is the great thumping elephant in the room: Ronald Reagan. Once bandied as a possible running-mate for Ford, Reagan’s two terms in office could just as easily be said to have 'given' us the government we have today. Worth's use of the term 'Imperial Presidency' to link Nixon and Bush is also oddly purblind. The phrase was used daily about Reagan throughout his tenure as president, and his benign toleration of Saddam Hussein certainly did the present day no favors.

When intelligent people make an effort to draw explanations from history, one likes to think the process is more complex than pointing at Dick Cheney's scowling puss on TV and gasping, "Why, it's the SAME MAN!"

Fortunately for Worth, he can save face in the future by lopping off the epilogue. Without it, the book stands as a thoroughly enjoyable, admirably written and researched account of one of the worst political upheavals in American history, a worthy addition to a shelf containing George Higgins' The Friends of Richard Nixon, David Halberstam's The Reckoning, and Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes

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Of course, lopping the epilogue would mean dropping the subtitle—an unlikely event in today’s publishing world, where subtitles have expanded into tentacular nightmares (a quick glance at the morning's paper shows Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top and Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America), encapsulating every 'talking point' of the book in question, presumably for the harried consumer too busy even to read the dustjacket. But then, how to read the book?

Then again, the Watergate crisis struck at the heart of the nation's self-image by dramatically displaying the dark soul of some of those we elect. Ford's pardon of Nixon—thereby all but certainly guaranteeing his own political demise—was an act of raw compassion by a man who sincerely believed it was the right thing to do for his country. And the country survived. Surely there's a subtitle in that.

Steve Donoghue is a freelance writer living in Boston.