This is a 25 and a half hour audiobook on the Watergate Scandal.

I watched "All the President's Men" a few days before coming to Japan and then read the book soon after that and also Colson's book shortly afterwards.

Recently, I watched a documentary on Netflix "The Martha Mitchell Effect" which had some new sides to the story and somehow I came to this book. A few pages in I decided to rewatch "All the President's Men" as a refresher.

This book is a retrospective which takes into account of all the information that has been made public since the events including biographies, autobiographies, freedom of information requests etc and attempts to make a unified timeline.

"All the President's Men" ends abruptly when the story had become so big that it is was no longer only the obsession of two journalists. This books adds all the currently known details of the background to the story.

Creating a unified timeline is impossible as some sources misremember some details and dates so the author carefully explains the anomalies.

One of the interesting parts is how the legal process against the participants slowly chipped away at the less involved people, exposing their crimes and then leveraging them against those above who committed bigger crimes. Nobody wants to go to jail to protect someone else or increase their sentence by perjuring themselves. The final conclusion could have put the President Nixon in jail had his newly appointed Vice President, who had replaced him as President, not pardoned him.

The Watergate scandal is a bit like Lord of the Rings. There are so many names and subplots that you can't understand everything the first time through so each time you go over the story it makes more sense and you understand it more deeply.

Recommended. Probably the definitive Watergate book.