Word: mollenhoff
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...Disaster chronicles the mushrooming use of executive privilege by the Nixon administration to obtain greater power while it was concurrently hiding the means of gaining that power. From the outset of the author's short-lived government experience through the Watergate stonewalling, Nixon and his boys--especially his boys, Mollenhoff suggests--utilized the tool of executive privilege out of misplaced zeal, naively blind to the processes and ethics of government. An addiction which led to their downfall...
After a series of unsuccessful efforts to clean up the machinery of government--Defense Department and NASA contracting, conflict of interest problems, questionable land deals, tax evasion--Mollenhoff resigned in May, 1970, frustrated by his lack of clout and effectiveness. "I had never realized before," he reflected in the interview, "that even though you have a title and an office in the White House, you can get boxed out to the point of having no authority or influence. One had to be on the inside to get the full flavor of the enormous power and great reverence for the President...
Upon leaving the White House, Mollenhoff rejoined the Des Moines Register and Tribune as Washington bureau chief; the rest of his narrative deals with his role as a journalist during the unfolding of events which finally climaxed in Nixon's resignation. His position was ticklish; as a former government official he was not always favorably regarded by other journalists, and as a journalist he was avoided by loyal government officials. Even so, Mollenhoff did have an unusual amount of personal access to several Watergate personages--John Dean, Richard Kleindienst, Jeb Magruder--and he also had a clearer idea than most...
...MOLLENHOFF did not intend to write a piece of "Watergate literature." He sees the Nixon experience as "simply a warning of what can still happen. When Nixon left, there was a tendency to put it all behind us, but we are not over that hump yet. It is important for everyone to learn a lesson, to understand that this was not just two young reporters from the Post, but that it took tremendous drive from a lot of people to bring it into the open--and that the investigation still would have fallen on its tail without John Sirica...
...Mollenhoff's gradual shift from pro-Nixon optimism to active opposition and vocal criticism is not engulfed in ideological aversion or vindictive "I-told-you-so" triumph, as are the views of so many Watergate litterateurs. Mollenhoff's experience can be viewed as a mirror of the thought processes of most Americans during the Nixon debacle, the majority who elected Nixon out of confidence in his ability to erase the mistakes of the Johnson years, people who were initially unwilling to accept the disclosures of illegal practice, but who gradually found their doubts eradicated by the snowballing evidence of wrongdoing...