This Masterful 42-Year-Old Book Goes a Long Way in Explaining Politics Today
It’s easy for the avid follower of today’s politics to think that what’s happening now in America under Trump is a one-off—a never-before descent into subterfuge, propaganda, governmental overreach, and lawlessness. Reading J. Anthony Lukas’s Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, then, is not only viscerally riveting but oddly comforting. We have been through this before (though, granted, barring the odd enemy-nation-state-meddling-in-our-elections part).
Lukas’s nonfiction book, first published in 1976, is a masterpiece of both reporting and blow-by-blow-by-blow narrative writing centered around the Nixon administration’s reckless, and sometimes flagrantly illegal, schemes involving deceitful propaganda, money-laundering, wiretapping, and breaking-and-entering schemes targeting political opponents. The centerpiece, of course, is Watergate—the conception of it, the planning, the execution, the cover-up, and, ultimately, the investigation, the unraveling, and the ultimate dissolution of the Nixon presidency.
It’s a story that we all, to greater or lesser degrees, think we know. All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein? The more recent film The Post? Check, check, check. Nightmare, though, shows the story to be infinitely darker and more widespread than anything you’ve likely come across. And while Nixon and Trump aren’t the same person by any means—among other differences, Nixon practiced law, served in World War II, and had a long history in politics before ultimately being elected president in 1968—the two men share not only a rampant paranoia about well-heeled establishment types dominating and humiliating them but a penchant for surrounding themselves with fevered ideologues willing to cut any corner or ignore any pesky notion of ethics in the service of their missions.
The book pauses now and then for brief, potted character studies as new people are introduced to the narrative, but in other regards, it reads almost like a real-time unfolding of events as they happened—albeit with the benefit of Lukas’s almost microscopically detailed shoe-leather reportage. (Among other scoops recognized only years later, Lukas essentially identifies Mark Felt as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” source—about 30 years before Felt admitted as such to the world.) At times, the incompetence and insanity of the so-called “Plumbers” carrying out the break-in at the Watergate is almost comical: G. Gordon Liddy, who helped mastermind the plan (of which the Watergate break-in was but a small part), first pitched his overall scheme as a million-dollar operation involving kidnapping anti-war demonstrators and shuttling them to Mexico, and hiring prostitutes and a houseboat to lure Democratic campaign officials before photographing them for blackmail.
Of course, we know what happens in the end, though you likely didn’t actually know how we got there (in short: far less due to Woodward and Bernstein’s scoops and far more due to the effective, methodical, and brave action of scores of people inside of the U.S. Justice Department). And while Nixon and our current president differ in so many regards, they do seem to share one key characteristic (aside from the aforementioned paranoia and hiring of like-minded lackeys): They both seem to have spun a web of deceit so insanely complicated that it’s impossible for them to keep track of or cover up it all.
Lukas himself is another story for another time—he wrote a handful of award-winning, deeply reported investigative books before committing suicide (as did, years earlier, his mother and, apparently, his mother’s mother) after a long history of depression in 1997. One can only hope that once the Trump administration is in our rearview mirror, someone of his caliber produces a work such as Nightmare. Until then, though, we have this.
