Political Histories: John W. Dean on The Nixon Defense and Rick Perlstein on The Fall of Nixon

John W. Dean on The Nixon Defense and Rick Perlstein on The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.
John W. Dean was legal counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, and his Senate testimony helped lead to Nixon’s resignation. In 2006, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating George W. Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretap program. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Blind Ambition, Broken Government, Conservatives Without Conscience, and Worse Than Watergate. In his latest book, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (Viking Adult; $35.00), Dean connects the dots between what we’ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President Nixon know and when did he know it?
Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller; Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. His essays and book reviews have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Village Voice, and Slate, among others. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. His latest book is The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Simon and Schuster; $37.50).Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America’s greatest city, The Invisible Bridge asks the question: what does it mean to believe in America?