Author, journalist and historian Garret M. Graff wasn’t even born in 1972 when the Watergate scandal unfolded 50 years ago, ending in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974.
But Graff, 40, has become one of the country’s foremost experts on that scandal and will speak about those events and his latest book, Watergate: A New History, at the eighth annual Palm Beach Book Festival, which is set for Saturday in the University Theatre at Florida Atlantic University. The session will be moderated by Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times.
This year’s theme is “History and Hollywood.”
“We are thrilled to be working with the Palm Beach Book Festival to bring these New York Times bestselling authors to Boca Raton,” says Michael Horswell, dean of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at FAU. “We pride ourselves on bringing these types of cultural opportunities to our community and our students.”
Other New York Times bestselling authors include Princeton professor Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of America, in a session moderated by Leigh Haber, Oprah’s Book Club editor; Tony- and Emmy-winning Scottish actor and singer Alan Cumming speaking about his latest memoir, Baggage, moderated by Joseph Papa; and Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Oliver Stone, best-known for his films, Platoon, JFK and Born on the Fourth of July, discussing his memoir, Chasing the Light, moderated by screenwriter Allan Loeb.
Stone will receive the first World Changer Award, given to someone who has “rattled a few cages,” in the words of founder Lois Cahall, a former newspaper reporter. Cahall is happy the festival is live this year, after the past two years of hosting remote festivals.
She credits Horswell and Polly Burks of FAU for keeping the festival alive over the past few challenging years, and sponsor Marta Batmasian of the James and Marta Batmasian Family for her dedication to literacy.
“Michael, Polly and Marta are my holy trinity,” says Cahall. “They have all worked so hard for me behind the scenes. I couldn’t have done it without them.”
Graff, who also is the director of cyber-initiatives for The Aspen Institute, has written The Threat Matrix, the national bestseller Raven Rock, and The Only Plane in the Sky, the first comprehensive oral history of Sept. 11, 2001.
“The Watergate story we thought we knew is not what really happened,” says Graff from his home – a renovated 1800 carriage house in Burlington, Vermont — explaining why he wanted to explore this well-dissected era in American history. “In some ways this is a story well-covered but poorly told,” he said. “My goal is to tell the whole story start-to-finish, rather than looking at it in one slice.”
“Watergate is the most fascinating story we can ever tell of how power works in Washington,” Graff says. “It is an amazing story of how power ebbs and flows across a city whose entire raison d’être is the application of political power.”
He notes that it’s been 25 years since anyone sat down to write a soup-to-nuts narrative of all the events leading up to Nixon’s resignation, referencing Stanley Kutler’s The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon, in 1992, and Fred Emery’s Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon, in 1994.
“So many new revelations have come out,” says Graff. “There have been newly declassified files, an impeachment roadmap from the special prosecutor’s office which came out two years ago, the identity of Mark Felt as Deep Throat and more details about the Anna Chennault affair.”
Anna Chennault was a Chinese-American and prominent member of the Republican Party and of the U.S. China lobby. Nixon used her as an emissary to South Vietnam to dissuade them from participating in the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 in an effort to sabotage the talks and to sway the presidential election in his favor. Graff makes the point that this interference in the peace talks walks Nixon “right up to the line” of treason.
Graff says he thought he understood Watergate and was surprised to see how little he actually knew. He spent two years researching and writing the 800-page book and came to realize that Watergate was not just an event or a series of events, but a mindset.
The floors of his office were covered with piles of hundreds of books on Watergate, volumes of congressional hearings and testimonies, and at least three dozen memoirs written by key participants. “What we now shorthand as Watergate is really an umbrella of a dozen distinct scandals,” says Graff.
Graff illustrates how all these events — the Chennault affair, the Pentagon Papers, the burglary and break-in of the Democratic National Committee, Nixon’s dirty tricks and tax fraud — are linked. He notes that Nixon’s famous line, “I am not a crook,” is in reference to tax fraud allegations that grew out of a congressional investigation, and not in reference to his attempt to cover up his role in the Watergate break-in.
Having spent the past five years working as a journalist covering the Robert Mueller investigation into former President Donald Trump and covering his impeachment trials, Graff says he was interested to revisit the Nixon presidency and its abuse of power and see how and why Washington pulled together then and why it’s so polarized now.
“Watergate is the hinge upon which the 20th century turns,” says Graff, a third-generation journalist. “It’s a huge turning point that ushered out the liberal New Deal consensus and ushered in the Reagan Revolution and reshaped how Washington does business. It led to a focus on investigative journalism, a collapse of trust in American institutions and caused Americans to distrust their institutions and the presidency itself.”
“This is something we’re still reckoning with today,” he says, noting that most likely there will be a Volume Two, focusing on the residual effects of the interplay between our legal and government institutions and how and why our checks and balances were threatened over the past five years.
“During Watergate, every institution, from the press, the FBI, the courts, the House, Senate, the executive branch, etc., played its unique role to force the resignation of Richard Nixon from office,” Graff says. “No institution could have done it alone. Watergate is the story of how the U.S. government and its checks and balances worked to protect American democracy.”
“That is a large part of the appeal of this legacy,” he says.
The Palm Beach Book Festival will take place Saturday, March 12, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., in the University Theatre, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus. Tickets are $25 per session and can be purchased at www.fauevents.com or by calling 561-297-6124. Parking is included with cost of admission.