Watergate Library, Vol. I

By Ed Magnuson

by THE LONDON SUNDAY TIMES TEAM; LEWIS CHESTER, CAL McCRYSTAL, STEPHEN ARIS and WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

280 pages. Ballantine. $6.95.

(Paperback 267 pages. $1.50.)

Can Watergate be out as a book already? It can. And against all odds, most of this book is a solid, fast-moving, highly professional job. The four young British journalists who produced it at such breathtaking speed have a refreshingly foreign perspective that often cuts through the confusions to the core of the complicated affair. Their judgments are hard, yet not unexpected. Richard Nixon, they write, is a "not very brainy President." He surrounded himself with "an elite of mean-minded, middlebrow conformists; men who were simply not up to the job of government."

Clinging to a harsh war policy in Indochina, besieged by protests at home, this mediocre crew developed an obsession with manipulating public opinion and hiding its procedures and policies. Tapping the telephones of high officials and newsmen for imagined reasons of "national security" led easily into eavesdropping for political purposes. Once the Nixon agents were arrested inside Democratic National Headquarters, the deceitful cover-up came automatically to apparatchiks who did not even trust each other. The writers leave little doubt that they believe Nixon knew all about the concealment.

Much of the Ervin committee testimony is used as the factual basis for a highly readable chronology, but without tedious reliance on long quotations. The writers hold to a minimum all of those cluttering qualifications that blurred the news reports as the affair originally unfolded. The crafty evasions of John Ehrlichman, the astounding forgetfulness of Bob Haldeman, the dogged denials of John Mitchell are generally tucked between parentheses. The authors clearly consider them nearly irrelevant and feel that the truth might be better served by not reading the parenthetical matter--as indeed it would.

Even for the reader and television viewer who has been hooked on Watergate, there is some value in this tidy package. Who can clearly remember what John Caulfield said to James McCord while parked in a car beside the Potomac, or how Jeb Magruder tried to talk Hugh Sloan into committing perjury? That kind of thing still matters.

Yet the final chapter, picking up fragments of testimony and Ervin committee detail not covered in the earlier narrative, is rushed and superficial. Gambling, the authors even wrote that the conspiracy trial of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans opened in New York City; in fact it was postponed. Watergate is an unfinished story. This book, however, bears brisk witness to an important fact: it is far too early to forget or forgive. . Ed Magnuson

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