indsight tells us that keeping Nixon out of the White House by exposing him as a traitor would have almost certainly stopped, or at the very least seriously hindered, the efforts of Nixon’s Big Business patrons to undo the New Deal. 1968 was barely twenty years after the end of World War II, and there were a number of people still alive who remembered quite well how Republicans and conservative business titans tried to topple President Franklin Delano Roosevelt by coup and later tried to sabotage his actions against Nazi Germany. With Nixon down in flames and taking the GOP with him, the Vietnam War would have ended much sooner than otherwise would have happened (sparing a few million Vietnamese and Americans from maiming and death).

The recent retraversal by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of their Watergate reportage is a welcome, albeit flawed, corrective to the decades of efforts by Nixon and his cheerleaders to rewrite history.