The friends of Richard Nixon

A lawyer in the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, reporter, and best-selling author of fiction (The Friends of Eddie Coyle is perhaps his best known work), George V. Higgins wrote two articles on Watergate for The Atlantic in 1974. In 1975 he adapted those articles into the book length `The Friends of Richard Nixon.' Drawing heavily on court transcripts and congressional testimony, relying equally heavily on his audience's familiarity with the major - and some minor - Watergate figures and the Mafioso organizational structures as represented in the then-popular `The Godfather' movies, Higgins brackets his story chronologically from the beginning of the Watergate cover-up to President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. In contrast to some later histories, there's an appealingly lively immediacy to Higgins' account that compensates for its loose and sometimes unfocused approach. Higgins great strength is his familiarity with the law and criminal prosecution. He succeeds in getting into the head of the original cover-upper, John Dean, at least to the extent of framing the challenges faced by the young Counsel to the President . `Since Dean did not now who was responsible,' Higgins writes, `he was constrained to assume that everybody was responsible and act accordingly.' It didn't hurt, Higgins notes, that Acting Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen, who was prosecuting the Watergate burglars, was naïvely reporting to Dean on the progress of the case. `With those advantages,' Higgins observes, `a thoughtful baboon could obstruct justice. For a while.' [`Friends of Richard Nixon' is filled with such trenchant observations. My favorite is Higgins take on Judge John Sirica's harsh sentence of G. Gordon Liddy. Higgins didn't like Sirica (`A nice guy if you like martinets') and felt he overstepped his role many times. To Higgins Liddy was a `standup guy' and a kook who seemed to realize better than anyone that the fix was NOT in and took it like a good soldier. Higgins goes to great length explaining how criminal trials operate, and he convinces us that Sirica's sentencing of Liddy - meant to scare the other Watergate burglars into perhaps copping a plea and cooperating with the investigation - was harsh in the extreme. `... five (years) would've done that. The seven to twenty was for getting Sirica (expletive deleted by reviewer) off, seven for doing it, fourteen more for doing it on purpose.'] Liddy didn't have a lot of respect for Maximum John Sirica, either. Higgins' final chapters deal with the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Judiciary Committee that was chaired by Peter Rodino, and the post-pardon legal landscape. Higgins' entertaining opinions aren't bolstered by much description - a profile of Senator Sam Ervin in 1975 probably would have been superfluous, anyway. Thirty years on, though, they kind of hang out there in an unsatisfying vacuum. This book is weakest the farther it strays from the legal give and t