(5 of 5)
None of the books conclusively answers the lingering Watergate question: How could so many clever men around Nixon profess to believe him long after most of the press and public found his story incredible and his claims of protecting the presidency a self-serving fraud? Breslin, perhaps unfairly, contends that Texan Charles Alan Wright, Nixon's constitutional expert, simply learned too late that "when the client is a liar and you believe him, he takes you down with him." Osborne doubts that Nixon's third lawyer, St. Clair, was ever as naive about the President's guilt as he seemed. White, quoting another Nixon lawyer, Leonard Garment, offers the most plausible clue. "There was this wishful non-knowingness," Garment recalled. "We didn't want to get together and put all the pieces together. We were afraid of what we might find out."
Bitter Mystery. Though the moral side of Richard Nixon's tragedy may still be regarded as a bitter mystery, the mechanical steps that led to it are perhaps easier to explain than these books suggest. He never thought a President could be forced to yield those damning tapes. He apparently believed that the big lie, repeated often enough from the sanctity of the .Oval Office, would prevail. He never understood the Coxes, Doars, Jaworskis, O'Neills, Rodinos and Siricas of this nation. They were too "different."