The 38th President

Watergate could have turned out quite differently. In this novel, it does. The story is told by a fictitious White House official who becomes entangled in a web of bribery, blackmail, arson and espionage. He conspicuously fails to follow his own good advice: Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post.

After the fact, history may seem preordained, but it is not. At the beginning of Nixon’s second term in 1973, who would have thought that, if Nixon were...