Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon.

• Author: Lukas, J. Anthony

"There was a whiff of the Gestapo in the chill October air," Fred Emery, then the Washington bureau chief of the Times of London, wired his newspaper after Richard Nixon accepted the resignations of his attorney general and deputy attorney general, dismissed the Watergate special prosecutor, and sent a squad of FBI men in to seal off the prosecutor's office, preventing its stunned staff from taking materials home.

Some in London thought his comparison of the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre to the activities of Adolf Hitler's secret police a bit "excessive," Emery recalls now. Since the skeptics, he suggests, included the paper's editor, William Rees-Mogg, one can imagine with some relish the cables on that subject flashing back and forth across the Atlantic. But Emery thought his arresting comparison perfectly apt, and was pleased to find some time later that Leon Jaworski, who replaced Archibald Cox as special prosecutor, had the same reaction that eventful Saturday evening.

Now, two decades after Watergate and its cover-up compelled Nixon's resignation, the indignant Mr. Emery has written a devastating indictment of the 37th president and his inner circle that goes a long way toward supporting that disputed Gestapo metaphor. Indeed, perhaps more than any book that has yet appeared on this much-chronicled subject, Watergate presents a bleak portrait of the chief executive who--in Jaworski's words--violated his presidential oath "by transforming the Oval Office into a mean den where perjury and low scheming became a way of life."

After the warm bath of forgiveness that attended Nixon's funeral this spring, Emery's book and the recently published Haldeman Diaries are icy plunges into reality, stern correctives in our assessment of a president who betrayed the trust of the American people.

The project grew out of Emery's work on a BBC-TV program about the fall of another leader, Margaret Thatcher. A young associate, after listening to Emery's Watergate stories, said: "We have to tell it again." Four years later, this bears fruit in a television series to air this summer on the Disney Channel and in Emery's simultaneously released book.

Series and book are nourished by fresh interviews with such Watergate principals as G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean, Charles Colson, Alfred C. Baldwin, Eugenio R. Martinez, Howard Baker, Archibald Cox, Robert Bork, Leonard Garment, Gerald Ford, Robert Reisner, and mour Glanzer. Emery also draws on some recently released White House tapes and a host of primary sources, all of which greatly enrich his narrative.

Despite his assiduous research, Emery's account does not significantly alter the...