Chasing Shadows
The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The break-in at Watergate and the cover-up that followed brought about the resignation of Richard Nixon, creating a political shockwave that reverberates to this day. But as Ken Hughes reveals in his powerful new book, in all the thousands of hours of declassified White House tapes, the president orders a single break-in--and it is not at the Watergate complex. Hughes’s examination of this earlier break-in, plans for which the White House ultimately scrapped, provides a shocking new perspective on a long history of illegal activity that prolonged the Vietnam War and was only partly exposed by the Watergate scandal.
As a key player in the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program, Hughes has spent more than a decade developing and mining the largest extant collection of transcribed tapes from the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. Hughes’s unparalleled investigation has allowed him to unearth a pattern of actions by Nixon going back long before 1972, to the final months of the Johnson administration. Hughes identified a clear narrative line that begins during the 1968 campaign, when Nixon, concerned about the impact on his presidential bid of the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese, secretly undermined the negotiations through a Republican fundraiser named Anna Chennault. Three years after the election, in an atmosphere of paranoia brought on by the explosive appearance of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon feared that his treasonous--and politically damaging--manipulation of the Vietnam talks would be exposed. Hughes shows how this fear led to the creation of the Secret Investigations Unit, the "White House Plumbers," and Nixon’s initiation of illegal covert operations guided by the Oval Office. Hughes’s unrivaled command of the White House tapes has allowed him to build an argument about Nixon that goes far beyond what we think we know about Watergate.
Chasing Shadows is also available as a special e-book that links to the massive collection of White House tapes published by the Miller Center through Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press. This unique edition allows the reader to move seamlessly from the book to the recordings’ expertly rendered transcripts and to listen to audio files of the remarkable--and occasionally shocking--conversations on which this dark chapter in American history would ultimately turn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On the 40th anniversary of the infamous Watergate break-in, more information remains unknown aboutquestions remain over former President Nixon's motives in recent American political history (pp. 2-3), but. Hughes, a researcher at the University of Virginia's Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program, provides essential answers with key hours of declassified White House tapes in this book of startling revelations., going Hughes goes back to the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, to the Chennault Affair, a now-obscure little-known Oval Office crisis, The Chennault Affair, where the most political animals of their day battled for the heart and future of the nation (pp. 4-12)that nevertheless had great political consequences. While the 1968 contentious presidential campaign between Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey was in full swing, Johnson tried to fashion a bombing halt with Hanoi as a lure to the Paris peace talks, but Nixon , conspired to sabotage the push to end the Vietnam conflictwar through a series of back-channel ruses and schemes (pp. 14-22, 25-37). Hughes shows how Anna Chennault, Nixon's leading female fundraiser, acted as a conduit between Nixon and Saigon to derail the talks, setting up her boss to win the election, and settle some scores on the Pentagon Papers fiasco, and launch sinister counter-measures against the Democrats like the Watergate burglary to beat back Democratic gains (pp. 46-59, 61-62, 99-103, 110-119, 159-171). Through its foremost practitioners in Johnson and Nixon, If anyone wants toHughes reveals the realities of see American politics as a blood sport, this revealing, controversial sampler of two leading practitioners of presidential power, Johnson and Nixon, in a no holds-barred power grab totally excels.