UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There
Autor Garrett M. Graffen Limba Engleză Paperback – 19 dec 2024
From the bestselling author of Raven Rock, The Only Plane in the Sky, and Watergate (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history) comes the first comprehensive and eye-opening exploration of our government’s decades-long quest to solve one of humanity’s greatest mysteries: Are we alone in the universe?
For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. It’s one of our culture’s favorite conversations, and yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs—and the covert search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life—is told by bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff in a deeply reported and researched history.
It begins in 1947, when two headline-making sightings of strange flying objects prompt the US Air Force’s newly formed Department of Defense to create a series of secret programs to determine how unidentified phenomena may pose a threat to national security. Over the next half-century, as the atomic age gives way to the space race and the Cold War, the mission continues, bringing together an unexpected group of astronomers, military officials, civilian contactees, and true believers who bring us closer, then further, then closer again, to answering one of our most enduring questions: What exactly is out there?
Drawing from original archival research, declassified documents, and interviews with senior intelligence and military officials, Graff brings readers a story that’s “Loads of fun…[a] fascinating deep dive down the rabbit hole” (Publishers Weekly).
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781982196783
ISBN-10: 1982196785
Pagini: 544
Ilustrații: 1x8-pg b&w insert; 1x8-pg 4-c insert
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.59 kg
Editura: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Colecția Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10: 1982196785
Pagini: 544
Ilustrații: 1x8-pg b&w insert; 1x8-pg 4-c insert
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.59 kg
Editura: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Colecția Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Notă biografică
Garrett M. Graff has spent two decades covering politics, technology, and national security. Today, he’s a columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes on leadership, serves as the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute, and hosts the history podcast, Long Shadow, which received a 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award. The former editor of POLITICO Magazine and a longtime contributor to WIRED and CNN, he’s written for publications like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Foreign Affairs, and authored nine books—including the #1 national bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, the FBI history The Threat Matrix, Raven Rock (about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans), and the New York Times bestsellers When the Sea Came Alive (an oral history of D-Day) and Watergate: A New History, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Extras
Prologue: War of the WorldsPrologue War of the Worlds
Just after 8 p.m. on the East Coast on Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of American families tuned into CBS Radio had heard just seventeen seconds of Ramón Raquello’s orchestra playing the tango “La Cumparsita,” live from the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel in New York, when a voice interrupted:
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.
After a note about spectroscope readings and a confirmation by a Professor Pierson at the Princeton Observatory that Farrell’s reports were indeed correct, Raquello’s orchestra returned to the air. A few minutes later, another news bulletin. “Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bulletin a moment ago, the Government Meteorological Bureau has requested the large observatories of the country to keep an astronomical watch on any further disturbances occurring on the planet Mars,” the announcer said, adding that the network was working to set up an interview with the nearby Princeton Observatory.
Again, the orchestra returned. Again, a bulletin provided an update.
And then, about eleven minutes into the broadcast, a breathless series of news reports and man-on-the-street interviews about a Martian craft landing near Princeton, New Jersey, started to play.
Sirens, crowd murmurs, and shouted orders from concerned police punctuated the audio delivered by the field correspondent and a Princeton astronomer who had rushed the eleven miles to the scene. The reporter, Carl Phillips, said breathlessly, “Well, I hardly know where to begin—to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern Arabian Nights.” Phillips was obviously confused and struggling to get his bearings while live on air. “I guess that’s it—yes, I guess that’s the thing, directly in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have struck on its way down. What I can see of the object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of.… What would you say, Professor Pierson?”
The Princeton astronomer was clearly trying to wrap his head around the scene, too. “What’s that?” he said, caught off guard by the question.
“What would you say—what is the diameter of this?”
“About thirty yards,” the professor said.
A cylinder, that is, nearly the length of a football field. Phillips moved on as the police began to push the crowd back and he located the farm’s owner, Mr. Wilmuth, who recounted the experience of the object crashing into the field. They edged closer to the object as Phillips tried to capture on his microphone a strange humming sound coming from inside. Pierson proclaimed the object, whatever it was, definitely extraterrestrial.
Then the top of the craft opened and the Martians emerged.
First came the tentacles.
“Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake,” Phillips declared from the farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. “Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it.”
Moments later, a police officer was reportedly approaching the craft with a white flag—“If those creatures know what that means,” Phillips wondered on air—when the Martians suddenly fired a heat ray, killing everyone nearby and spreading fire across the field from the extraterrestrial craft.
The transmission cut off. The music resumed.
At around eighteen minutes into the hour—8:18 p.m.—the news returned, with reports of burned bodies, mobilized militias and troops, and emergency care rushing to the scene. Another bulletin from Trenton stated that Carl Phillips had been found dead and charred. The radio studio itself, the new announcer explained, had been turned over to the state, as the military operations commenced. Eight battalions—seven thousand soldiers—had surrounded the pit in New Jersey, attempting to surround and isolate whatever the strange creatures were that had caused such destruction.
A Captain Lansing, from the Signal Corps, said that “all cause for alarm, if such cause ever existed, is now entirely unjustified.” The creatures, he promised, could hardly survive the military’s heavy machine-gun fire, but even as he spoke, his voice began to fill with wonder and alarm. “It’s something moving… solid metal… kind of shield-like affair rising up out of the cylinder.… It’s going higher and higher. Why, it’s standing on legs… actually rearing up on a sort of metal framework. Now it’s reaching above the trees and the searchlights are on it. Hold on!”
The field report cut off.
No one ever heard from Captain Lansing again.
Just after 8:24 p.m., listeners were given terrifying news: “I have a grave announcement to make,” the voice said over the radio. “Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.”
By 8:30 p.m., word came that the US Army in New Jersey had been defeated, with just 120 soldiers—of seven thousand!—having survived the heat ray attack. Communication networks were down. More Martian cylinders were reported to be hitting Earth—Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis. People were beginning to flee cities. Martial law had been declared. They were everywhere. The nation was crumbling.
The secretary of the interior, live from Washington, addressed the unfolding national emergency: “I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people.”
And then, around 8:40 p.m., some forty minutes into the broadcast, normality returned as a station identification break made an even more stunning proclamation: “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”
There had not been, listeners soon realized, an invasion, or epic battle, or lives lost. There had not been a Ramón or even an orchestra—just a phonograph record playing in an empty CBS studio, the tango especially chosen for its tedium. The most dramatic night of radio in American history had been a scripted performance.
A spectacular dramatist, twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles had thrived in the entertainment industry amid the darkest days of the Great Depression thanks to a unique artistic collaboration with a producer named John Houseman, forged through FDR’s Federal Theatre Project. In 1937, the pair launched the Mercury Theatre as a place to experiment with innovative productions and adaptations—and before long, the efforts and vision had paid off. Mercury Theatre was a wild success in its first year, and CBS picked it up to air on the radio beginning on July 11, 1938. “On the broad wings of the Federal eagle, we had risen to success and fame beyond ourselves as America’s youngest, cleverest, most creative and audacious producers to whom none of the ordinary rules of the theater applied,” Houseman wrote later.
One of their biggest opportunities came that same year, when Houseman and Welles realized a possible use for the Sunday night literary adaptations lineup, which was still so new that it didn’t even have a corporate sponsor. For the week of Halloween, Welles had wanted to do something bold and new, and “conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” he recalled—“a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.” Adapting H. G. Wells’s old and somewhat heavy-handed science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, to the modern age of radio, he thought, might do the trick. Once it was decided, the Mercury Theatre team had only a week to translate the 1897 first-person novel about a Martian invasion of England into radio fodder and prepare for their roles. (To do so, some actors playing the announcers listened to archival broadcasts of the crash of the Hindenburg, attempting to mimic the growing terror of the announcer’s voice, as the airship had crashed and burned in real time, killing thirty-six people.)
The hard work paid off. It sounded like a real invasion. On the evening of the broadcast, roughly a dozen actors stood behind microphones, playing a score of characters—Welles himself played Professor Pierson, among other roles—and delivering an impressively convincing performance. At the end of the hour, his show complete, Welles took a moment to make a statement. “This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be,” he said cheerfully. “The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!”I
By that point, though, the damage had been done.
In those forty minutes, some chunk of the nation had apparently actually panicked, setting aside the disbelief that events could ever unfold so quickly—that in less than an hour, other beings could make it from Mars and land on Earth, that state leaders and troops could mobilize emergency efforts, identify the dead and triage the wounded, the military launch bombing raids, and ready and deploy artillery batteries in between a few bars of tango music, and issue a national address from Washington. By 8:48 p.m., the Associated Press had felt it necessary to issue a national “Note to Editors” clarifying that any “Queries to newspapers from radio listeners throughout the United States tonight, regarding a reported meteor fall which killed a number of New Jerseyites are the result of a studio dramatization.” The NYPD, similarly, felt the need to release a citywide teletype with the assurance that there was “no cause for alarm,” as did the New Jersey State Police, who reported, “Note to all receivers: WABC broadcast as drama re this section being attacked by Mars. Imaginary affair.”II Newspaper headlines on Halloween and the days after made it sound like America had nearly succumbed to anarchy, fueled by mass hysteria. Telephone switchboards had been overwhelmed, they claimed, and terrified families had fled into the streets—some covering their faces with wet towels to avoid the spreading poisonous gas. The New York Times reported that the broadcast had “disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams, and clogged communication systems.”
In the following days and months—and, really, for the remainder of his life—Welles maintained that he hadn’t meant for the program to run so long before announcing that the events being described were fictional. The team had just been working so fast, and the changes and edits to the scripts had come so late and so quick, he explained, that no one had realized the standard station ID segment, a routine element of live radio, had been pushed back. Instead of hearing the disclaimer on the half hour, as was expected, listeners who had tuned in to The War of the Worlds late hadn’t received any notice that the broadcast was a performance until the bottom of the hour, an inconsistency that only heightened the belief it could be breaking news.
As the years passed, The War of the Worlds became a somewhat-inflated legend of popular culture, cited as a prime example of the power of the media to spread disinformation, and our population’s susceptibility to panic, especially when it came to potential invasion and the subject of aliens. Its recipe of equal parts fact, sketchy details, public confusion, media hype, and outright myth, all helped along by a showman’s instincts and—looming in the background—some government money, would come to define discussion and debate about that very subject for decades to come.
After Welles had turned his microphone off, the Martians may have been done with Earth—but Earth was far from done with the Martians.
Just after 8 p.m. on the East Coast on Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of American families tuned into CBS Radio had heard just seventeen seconds of Ramón Raquello’s orchestra playing the tango “La Cumparsita,” live from the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel in New York, when a voice interrupted:
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.
After a note about spectroscope readings and a confirmation by a Professor Pierson at the Princeton Observatory that Farrell’s reports were indeed correct, Raquello’s orchestra returned to the air. A few minutes later, another news bulletin. “Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bulletin a moment ago, the Government Meteorological Bureau has requested the large observatories of the country to keep an astronomical watch on any further disturbances occurring on the planet Mars,” the announcer said, adding that the network was working to set up an interview with the nearby Princeton Observatory.
Again, the orchestra returned. Again, a bulletin provided an update.
And then, about eleven minutes into the broadcast, a breathless series of news reports and man-on-the-street interviews about a Martian craft landing near Princeton, New Jersey, started to play.
Sirens, crowd murmurs, and shouted orders from concerned police punctuated the audio delivered by the field correspondent and a Princeton astronomer who had rushed the eleven miles to the scene. The reporter, Carl Phillips, said breathlessly, “Well, I hardly know where to begin—to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern Arabian Nights.” Phillips was obviously confused and struggling to get his bearings while live on air. “I guess that’s it—yes, I guess that’s the thing, directly in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have struck on its way down. What I can see of the object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of.… What would you say, Professor Pierson?”
The Princeton astronomer was clearly trying to wrap his head around the scene, too. “What’s that?” he said, caught off guard by the question.
“What would you say—what is the diameter of this?”
“About thirty yards,” the professor said.
A cylinder, that is, nearly the length of a football field. Phillips moved on as the police began to push the crowd back and he located the farm’s owner, Mr. Wilmuth, who recounted the experience of the object crashing into the field. They edged closer to the object as Phillips tried to capture on his microphone a strange humming sound coming from inside. Pierson proclaimed the object, whatever it was, definitely extraterrestrial.
Then the top of the craft opened and the Martians emerged.
First came the tentacles.
“Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake,” Phillips declared from the farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. “Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it.”
Moments later, a police officer was reportedly approaching the craft with a white flag—“If those creatures know what that means,” Phillips wondered on air—when the Martians suddenly fired a heat ray, killing everyone nearby and spreading fire across the field from the extraterrestrial craft.
The transmission cut off. The music resumed.
At around eighteen minutes into the hour—8:18 p.m.—the news returned, with reports of burned bodies, mobilized militias and troops, and emergency care rushing to the scene. Another bulletin from Trenton stated that Carl Phillips had been found dead and charred. The radio studio itself, the new announcer explained, had been turned over to the state, as the military operations commenced. Eight battalions—seven thousand soldiers—had surrounded the pit in New Jersey, attempting to surround and isolate whatever the strange creatures were that had caused such destruction.
A Captain Lansing, from the Signal Corps, said that “all cause for alarm, if such cause ever existed, is now entirely unjustified.” The creatures, he promised, could hardly survive the military’s heavy machine-gun fire, but even as he spoke, his voice began to fill with wonder and alarm. “It’s something moving… solid metal… kind of shield-like affair rising up out of the cylinder.… It’s going higher and higher. Why, it’s standing on legs… actually rearing up on a sort of metal framework. Now it’s reaching above the trees and the searchlights are on it. Hold on!”
The field report cut off.
No one ever heard from Captain Lansing again.
Just after 8:24 p.m., listeners were given terrifying news: “I have a grave announcement to make,” the voice said over the radio. “Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.”
By 8:30 p.m., word came that the US Army in New Jersey had been defeated, with just 120 soldiers—of seven thousand!—having survived the heat ray attack. Communication networks were down. More Martian cylinders were reported to be hitting Earth—Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis. People were beginning to flee cities. Martial law had been declared. They were everywhere. The nation was crumbling.
The secretary of the interior, live from Washington, addressed the unfolding national emergency: “I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people.”
And then, around 8:40 p.m., some forty minutes into the broadcast, normality returned as a station identification break made an even more stunning proclamation: “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”
There had not been, listeners soon realized, an invasion, or epic battle, or lives lost. There had not been a Ramón or even an orchestra—just a phonograph record playing in an empty CBS studio, the tango especially chosen for its tedium. The most dramatic night of radio in American history had been a scripted performance.
A spectacular dramatist, twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles had thrived in the entertainment industry amid the darkest days of the Great Depression thanks to a unique artistic collaboration with a producer named John Houseman, forged through FDR’s Federal Theatre Project. In 1937, the pair launched the Mercury Theatre as a place to experiment with innovative productions and adaptations—and before long, the efforts and vision had paid off. Mercury Theatre was a wild success in its first year, and CBS picked it up to air on the radio beginning on July 11, 1938. “On the broad wings of the Federal eagle, we had risen to success and fame beyond ourselves as America’s youngest, cleverest, most creative and audacious producers to whom none of the ordinary rules of the theater applied,” Houseman wrote later.
One of their biggest opportunities came that same year, when Houseman and Welles realized a possible use for the Sunday night literary adaptations lineup, which was still so new that it didn’t even have a corporate sponsor. For the week of Halloween, Welles had wanted to do something bold and new, and “conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” he recalled—“a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.” Adapting H. G. Wells’s old and somewhat heavy-handed science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, to the modern age of radio, he thought, might do the trick. Once it was decided, the Mercury Theatre team had only a week to translate the 1897 first-person novel about a Martian invasion of England into radio fodder and prepare for their roles. (To do so, some actors playing the announcers listened to archival broadcasts of the crash of the Hindenburg, attempting to mimic the growing terror of the announcer’s voice, as the airship had crashed and burned in real time, killing thirty-six people.)
The hard work paid off. It sounded like a real invasion. On the evening of the broadcast, roughly a dozen actors stood behind microphones, playing a score of characters—Welles himself played Professor Pierson, among other roles—and delivering an impressively convincing performance. At the end of the hour, his show complete, Welles took a moment to make a statement. “This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be,” he said cheerfully. “The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!”I
By that point, though, the damage had been done.
In those forty minutes, some chunk of the nation had apparently actually panicked, setting aside the disbelief that events could ever unfold so quickly—that in less than an hour, other beings could make it from Mars and land on Earth, that state leaders and troops could mobilize emergency efforts, identify the dead and triage the wounded, the military launch bombing raids, and ready and deploy artillery batteries in between a few bars of tango music, and issue a national address from Washington. By 8:48 p.m., the Associated Press had felt it necessary to issue a national “Note to Editors” clarifying that any “Queries to newspapers from radio listeners throughout the United States tonight, regarding a reported meteor fall which killed a number of New Jerseyites are the result of a studio dramatization.” The NYPD, similarly, felt the need to release a citywide teletype with the assurance that there was “no cause for alarm,” as did the New Jersey State Police, who reported, “Note to all receivers: WABC broadcast as drama re this section being attacked by Mars. Imaginary affair.”II Newspaper headlines on Halloween and the days after made it sound like America had nearly succumbed to anarchy, fueled by mass hysteria. Telephone switchboards had been overwhelmed, they claimed, and terrified families had fled into the streets—some covering their faces with wet towels to avoid the spreading poisonous gas. The New York Times reported that the broadcast had “disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams, and clogged communication systems.”
In the following days and months—and, really, for the remainder of his life—Welles maintained that he hadn’t meant for the program to run so long before announcing that the events being described were fictional. The team had just been working so fast, and the changes and edits to the scripts had come so late and so quick, he explained, that no one had realized the standard station ID segment, a routine element of live radio, had been pushed back. Instead of hearing the disclaimer on the half hour, as was expected, listeners who had tuned in to The War of the Worlds late hadn’t received any notice that the broadcast was a performance until the bottom of the hour, an inconsistency that only heightened the belief it could be breaking news.
As the years passed, The War of the Worlds became a somewhat-inflated legend of popular culture, cited as a prime example of the power of the media to spread disinformation, and our population’s susceptibility to panic, especially when it came to potential invasion and the subject of aliens. Its recipe of equal parts fact, sketchy details, public confusion, media hype, and outright myth, all helped along by a showman’s instincts and—looming in the background—some government money, would come to define discussion and debate about that very subject for decades to come.
After Welles had turned his microphone off, the Martians may have been done with Earth—but Earth was far from done with the Martians.
- I. The excitement certainly worked for Welles: His show finally landed a sponsor—Campbell’s Soup—and he landed a role directing a new movie, called Citizen Kane.
- II. With time, more careful study led scholars to wonder how much—if any—real panic ensued. One of them, W. Joseph Campbell, wrote in 2010, “These reports were almost entirely anecdotal and largely based on sketchy wire service roundups that emphasized breadth over in-depth detail.” Did a few confused people panic? Certainly. Did millions? Maybe not.
Descriere
From Garrett M. Graff, the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Raven Rock, a fascinating and eye-opening narrative history that uncovers the secrets of our government's decades-long quest to understand our place in the universe--"One of the rare books on the topic that manages to be both entertaining and factually grounded" (Wall Street Journal).
Recenzii
PRAISE FOR WATERGATE
“Do we need still another Watergate book? The answer turns out to be yes — this one: Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History. It is a remarkably rich narrative with compelling characters, who range from criminal and flawed to tragic and heroic. As someone who played a small role in the drama while I was editing many of The Washington Post’s Watergate stories, I found that Graff convincingly populates and re-creates an extraordinary time in the history of the country and this city. ... fast-paced ... filled with apt sketches of its many characters, major and minor, from all the president’s men, and some of their spouses, to journalists, investigators, lawyers and members of Congress. It vividly re-creates all the key events, from Nixon’s overreaction to the revelation of the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in June 1971 to his resignation in August 1974.... engaging, informative and thought-provoking, more than earning its place on bookshelves alongside the old histories.” —Len Downie, Jr., The Washington Post
“Dazzling. . . A lively writer, Graff explores the dramatic scope of the Watergate saga through its participants — politicians, investigators, journalists, whistle-blowers and, at center stage, Nixon himself.” —Douglas Brinkley, The New York Times Book Review
“Award-winning author Graff aims to give readers the full scope of Watergate — a much bigger, more bizarre story than even remembered — telling the full story from start to finish in this ambitious book.” —New York Post
“A definitive, exhaustive account of the scandal. . . a fascinating, horrifying examination of the Nixon presidency up close—enough to scare the record straight.” —AirMail
“A meticulously researched, expansive history of the Watergate scandal from start to finish, from the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the reverberations that echo through present day.” —Barbara VanDenburgh, USA TODAY
“A brisk, riveting, compulsively readable, comprehensive, up-to-date narrative of the entire tangled affair, and it's hard to imagine it better told. . . . Now the best and fullest account of the Watergate crisis, one unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Monumental. . . effortlessly clarifies the strands of one of the most complex episodes in modern history. . . A masterful, epic look at a story that is still barely believable.” —The Daily Mail
“Loads of fun, and Graff’s agnosticism has the potential to appeal to skeptics and believers alike. . . a fascinating dive down the rabbit hole.”
"One of the rare books on the topic that manages to be both entertaining and factually grounded."
“An entertaining tour through the world of flying saucers, aliens, and weird science.”
“Do we need still another Watergate book? The answer turns out to be yes — this one: Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History. It is a remarkably rich narrative with compelling characters, who range from criminal and flawed to tragic and heroic. As someone who played a small role in the drama while I was editing many of The Washington Post’s Watergate stories, I found that Graff convincingly populates and re-creates an extraordinary time in the history of the country and this city. ... fast-paced ... filled with apt sketches of its many characters, major and minor, from all the president’s men, and some of their spouses, to journalists, investigators, lawyers and members of Congress. It vividly re-creates all the key events, from Nixon’s overreaction to the revelation of the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in June 1971 to his resignation in August 1974.... engaging, informative and thought-provoking, more than earning its place on bookshelves alongside the old histories.” —Len Downie, Jr., The Washington Post
“Dazzling. . . A lively writer, Graff explores the dramatic scope of the Watergate saga through its participants — politicians, investigators, journalists, whistle-blowers and, at center stage, Nixon himself.” —Douglas Brinkley, The New York Times Book Review
“Award-winning author Graff aims to give readers the full scope of Watergate — a much bigger, more bizarre story than even remembered — telling the full story from start to finish in this ambitious book.” —New York Post
“A definitive, exhaustive account of the scandal. . . a fascinating, horrifying examination of the Nixon presidency up close—enough to scare the record straight.” —AirMail
“A meticulously researched, expansive history of the Watergate scandal from start to finish, from the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the reverberations that echo through present day.” —Barbara VanDenburgh, USA TODAY
“A brisk, riveting, compulsively readable, comprehensive, up-to-date narrative of the entire tangled affair, and it's hard to imagine it better told. . . . Now the best and fullest account of the Watergate crisis, one unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Monumental. . . effortlessly clarifies the strands of one of the most complex episodes in modern history. . . A masterful, epic look at a story that is still barely believable.” —The Daily Mail
“Loads of fun, and Graff’s agnosticism has the potential to appeal to skeptics and believers alike. . . a fascinating dive down the rabbit hole.”
"One of the rare books on the topic that manages to be both entertaining and factually grounded."
“An entertaining tour through the world of flying saucers, aliens, and weird science.”