I give this book 4 out of 5 Political Stars! I decided to pick up this title because I wanted to know more about what happened with the Watergate scandal. I am glad I made this choice, not only because this book was very informative but because I was able to hear stories and see perspectives from people who lived through it and were impacted by this scandal. I loved hear everyone's stories and how it effected our lives and how this changed America. I thought this was a great read because a lot of the things that were discussed seemed to be repeating themselves in our current political state. Even though I may not have agreed with everyone's perspective I enjoyed seeing everyone's and learning more about this treacherous scandal. This period of time woke up a lot of Americans and showed them that we can't always trust our political leaders.

I have read many books about Watergate beyond just the more famous titles. I found this one very interesting and I liked that it included memories of many people from that era, as well as many modern day people who expressed their opinion and memories of this event. As I read it, I couldn't help but think about current events and politics which helped make the reading more interesting and the subject still relevant. For those who know alot about Watergate, and those who just know its a part of history, I think all will find this a great read.

Thanks to RiverdaleBooks.com and NetGalley for a copy of this book for my honest review.

The title and cover of ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Watergate* (*But were Afraid to Ask)’, are obviously inspired by David Reuben’s ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But were Afraid to Ask)’, which is rather ironic as the latter predated both Deep Throat the film and the Watergate informant.

Moreover, whereas Reuben’s book took the form of questions and answers, the book by O’Connor and Perkins follows no consistent pattern ranging from a chapter of quotations (‘Celebrities on Watergate and Nixon – Then and Now’, which rather unhelpfully only tells the reader when a small minority of the quotations actually date from) to a chapter on subsequent scandals lazily given a –gate suffix, to one presenting a selection of (loosely) Watergate-related recipes.

In the acknowledgements the authors praise their assistants for “searching every conceivable database to put together a book on Watergate in such a short period of time” and the book certainly seems to have been thrown together very hastily, with the result that there are very obvious gaps in coverage. Thus the chapter entitled ‘The Great Works of Watergate’, for example, which deals with fictional representations of Nixon and Watergate, omits any reference to the 1977 feature film ‘The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover’ or the classic 1977 TV miniseries ‘Washington Behind Closed Doors’ or the John Ehrlichman novel ‘The Company’, on which it was based (let alone the 2004 Manic Street Preachers song ‘The Love of Richard Nixon’).

It isn’t very long before one asks why this book was written, given that 2017 represents no Watergate-related anniversary. The answer seems to be provided by the introduction, where Perkins refers to Watergate as a “precedent” and tells us that “We survived Watergate and Richard Nixon. We will survive Russiagate and Donald Trump.” Chapter Ten makes the alleged parallels explicit, as it’s entitled “Game of Quotes: Nixon or Trump”.

I suppose if Trump is impeached then there’ll be increased interest in Nixon and Watergate but that seems to me to be a pretty poor reason for producing this particular book, especially when it is so uncertain in tone and focus, as well as contradicting its title by its manifest failure to deliver even half of what you always wanted to know about Watergate.