Volume 20, Number 12 · July 19, 1973
The Shame of the Republic
By Henry Steele Commager
The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power
by David Wise
Random House, 356 pp., $8.95
The Crippled Giant: American Foreign Policy and Its Domestic Consequences
by J. William Fulbright
Random House, 292 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Political Prisoners in America
by Charles Goodell
Random House, 391 pp., $7.95
Watergate and all those attendant usurpations, subversions, and corruptions for which the word has become both a symbol and a short cut, is neither a 'deplorable incident'—to use Mr. Nixon's revealing phrase—nor a historical sport. It is a major crisis, constitutional, political, and moral, one that challenges our governmental system. Public attention is, and will long remain, focussed on what happened, but already the interest of publicists and scholars is shifting to the more troublesome question of why it happened. That is really the subject of these three books—all of them written before the Watergate scandal broke, but all in a sense anticipating the psychological and moral problems that Watergate has raised.
Review, 6408 words
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