"In more than 3,000 recorded conversations, the Nixon tapes famously exposed a president's sinister views of governance that would eventually lead to his downfall. Despite Richard Nixon's best efforts, his vision of a government where he could use his power to punish his political enemies never came to fruition because there were those in his party who defied the president's directives. While many are familiar with the Republicans who turned against Nixon during the final stages of the Watergate saga, They Said No to Nixon uncovers for the first time those within the administration--including Nixon's own appointees--who opposed the White House early on, quietly blocking the president's attacks on the IRS, the Justice Department, and other sectors of the federal government. Culling from previously unpublished excerpts from the tapes and recently released material that expose the thirty-seventh president's uncensored views, Michael Koncewicz reveals how several Republican party members chose loyalty to their roles as civil servants over Nixon's attempts to expand the imperial presidency. Delving into the culture of criminality surrounding Watergate and why it did not succeed, They Said No to Nixon sheds light on the significant cultural and ideological shifts that occurred within the GOP during the pivotal 1970s. To this day, the Nixon tapes are a bracing reminder of the threat to constitutional order posed by a president who wields power without restraint"--Provided by publisher.

Obstruction of justice, the specter of impeachment, sexism at work, shocking revelations: Jill Wine-Banks takes us inside her trial by fire as a Watergate prosecutor. It was a time, much like today, when Americans feared for the future of their democracy, and women stood up for equal treatment. At the crossroads of the Watergate scandal and the women’s movement was a young lawyer named Jill Wine Volner (as she was then known), barely thirty years old and the only woman on the team that prosecuted the highest-ranking White House officials. Called “the mini-skirted lawyer” by the press, she fought to receive the respect accorded her male counterparts—and prevailed. In The Watergate Girl, Jill Wine-Banks opens a window on this troubled time in American history. It is impossible to read about the crimes of Richard Nixon and the people around him without drawing parallels to today’s headlines. The book is also the story of a young woman who sought to make her professional mark while trapped in a failing marriage, buffeted by sexist preconceptions, and harboring secrets of her own. Her house was burgled, her phones were tapped, and even her office garbage was rifled through. At once a cautionary tale and an inspiration for those who believe in the power of justice and the rule of law, The Watergate Girl is a revelation about our country, our politics, and who we are as a society.

The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixon’s senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Price—a member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaigns—joined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Dwight Eisenhower. Price makes a valuable contribution to our evolving scholarship and understanding of the Nixon presidency. Nixon himself lamented that he would be remembered only for Watergate and China. The Last Liberal Republican provides firsthand insight into key moments regarding Nixon’s political and policy challenges in the domestic social policy arena. Price offers rich detail on the extent to which Nixon and his staff straddled a precarious balance between a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly powerful conservative tide in Republican politics. The Last Liberal Republican provides a blow-by-blow inside view of how Nixon surprised the Democrats and shocked conservatives with his ambitious proposal for a guaranteed family income. Beyond Nixon’s surprising embrace of what we today call universal basic income, the thirty-seventh president reordered and vastly expanded the patchy food stamp program he inherited and built nutrition education and children’s food services into schools. Richard Nixon even almost achieved a national health insurance program: fifty years ago, with a private sector framework as part of his generous benefits insurance coverage for all, Nixon included coverage of preexisting conditions, prescription drug coverage for all, and federal subsidies for those who could not afford the premiums. The Last Liberal Republican will be a valuable resource for presidency scholars who are studying Nixon, his policies, the state of the Republican Party, and how the Nixon years relate to the rise of the modern conservative movement.

“People will be arguing over Nixon at the Movies as much as, for more than half a century, the country at large has been arguing about Nixon.”—Greil Marcus Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913, and they shared a long and complex history. The president screened Patton multiple times before and during the invasion of Cambodia, for example. In this unique blend of political biography, cultural history, and film criticism, Mark Feeney recounts in detail Nixon’s enthusiastic viewing habits during his presidency, and takes a new and often revelatory approach to Nixon’s career and Hollywood’s, seeing aspects of Nixon’s character, and the nation’s, refracted and reimagined in film. Nixon at the Movies is a “virtuosic” examination of a man, a culture, and a country in a time of tumult (Slate). “By Feeney's count, Nixon, an unabashed film buff, watched more than 500 movies during the 67 months of his presidency, all carefully listed in an appendix titled ‘What the President Saw and When He Saw It.’ Nixon concentrated intently on whatever was on the screen; he refused to leave even if the picture was a dud and everyone around him was restless. He was omnivorous, would watch anything, though he did have his preferences…Only rarely did he watch R-rated or foreign films. He liked happy endings. Movies were obviously a means of escape for him, and as the Watergate noose tightened, he spent ever more time in the screening room.”—The New York Times

Based on Nixon’s overlooked recordings, New York Times bestselling author John W. Dean connects the dots between what we’ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA’s widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate. In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. 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? Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon’s recorded conversations, and more. In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America’s worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time.

This dissertation is a history of the Republicans who said no to President Richard Nixon's unethical or illegal orders. While many are familiar with the Republicans who opposed the 37th President during the latter stages of the Watergate scandal, there are lesser known stories of individuals within the administration who risked their careers to prevent abuses of power. Before much of the nation learned about the details of the White House's misdeeds, there were officials within the IRS, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) , and the Justice Department who stood up to Nixon. From George Shultz and Johnnie Walters's refusal to audit political enemies to the officials within the OMB (Kenneth Dam, William Morrill, and Paul H. O'Neill) who blocked the President's plan to cut government research funds to universities, civil servants played a role in preventing Nixon from expanding the power of the presidency. Using the Nixon tapes, personal papers, oral histories, memoirs, and White House staff records, this dissertation focuses on the cultural divisions between the President and the moderate Republicans within his administration. Although Nixon tried repeatedly to use the federal government to punish his enemies, many of his plans were stopped by moderates who placed a high value on a culture of apolitical civil service over the President's culture of loyalty. My research shows that Nixon's attempt to expand the punitive powers of the state often aligned him with the more conservative members of his staff and pitted him against solution-oriented moderates across the federal government. These instances of resistance show that opposition to Nixon was much more than just another ultra-partisan battle between the Democrats and the Republicans. Rejecting Nixon's power grab was not just based on political interests; it was sometimes driven by individuals within his administration. Nixon's downfall was ultimately an extension of the nonpartisan stands that moderate Republicans took to protect the federal government from the President's attempts to institutionalize abuses of power.

The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Resisters takes measure of the fifty years since the opening of China and its unexpected effects on the lives of ordinary people. It is a unique book that only Jen could write—a story collection accruing the power of a novel as it proceeds—a work that Cynthia Ozick has called “an art beyond art. It is life itself.” Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to “poor Mr. Nixon” in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change. Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother’s philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history, capturing an extraordinary era in an extraordinary way. Delightful, provocative, and powerful, Thank You, Mr. Nixon furnishes yet more proof of Gish Jen’s eminent place among American storytellers.