The Impeachment Diary: Eyewitness to the Removal of a President

Description

This Eyewitness Account of the Impeachment Process against Richard Nixon Holds Lessons for Our Own Time. James Reston, Jr., took leave from teaching during the summer of 1973 to witness the Senate Watergate Committee hearings as he worked with his coauthor on what became the first full-length book to advocate for Richard Nixon's impeachment. Durin

James Reston, Jr., was the author, with Frank Mankiewicz, of Perfectly Clear: Nixon from Whittier to Watergate. He was the Watergate expert who assisted David Frost in his historic Nixon Interviews, and he consulted with playwright Peter Morgan in the development of the play Frost/Nixon, which was made into the movie of the same name. He is also the author of The Conviction of Richard Nixon and numerous other books, plays, and articles, including A Rift in the Earth, published by Arcade. He resides with his wife in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Walter Dellinger is the Douglas B. Maggs Emeritus Professor of Law at Duke University and a Washington, DC attorney. He served as assistant attorney general of the United States and head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1993 to 1996 and acting solicitor general of the United States from 1996 to 1997. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

"James Reston Jr.'s Impeachment Diary could not be more timely. It reminds us that the Congress can not only remove a lawless president but also restore the traditional rule of law and give voice to the majority will."--Robert Dallek, author of the forthcoming How Did We Get Here? From TR to Donald Trump "An edge-of-the-seat account from inside hearing rooms, court rooms."--Christian Science Monitor "This is such an important book."--Joe Donahue, The Roundtable, WAMC "Reston's 1974 diarymirrors today's impeachment drama."--Raleigh New & Observer "Insightful in raising an issue that has become controversial againas the Democrats investigate Trump: the problem of secrecy in the hearings. . . . One thing both books capture well--Reston's in particular--is the fraught sense of not knowing how it would all turn out. . . . A companionable guide [with] juicy tidbits to offer."--Washington Post "[An] edge-of-your-seat account that conveys a real time sense of uncertainty about what would happen next."--Christian Science Monitor "Timely. . . provides a flavor of what it was like to live through those heady, fearful, historic days. . . . Reston also re-creates the feverish speculation about various possible scenarios. He tells of hearing one story, unverified, that Julie Nixon was urging her father, 'Bring down everybody with you, Pa.'"--Dallas Morning News "If ever there was an 'eyewitness to history' worthy of the name, James Reston, Jr. surely deserves that title. His close-up-and-personal account of the process that drove an American president from office is impossible to put down.To read it is to live it. For those of us old enough to recall from a distance the events that gripped our nation in that fateful time, this autobiographical memoir captures better than our own memories the texture and tempo of a process that has renewed significance today. And for those who didn't live through those events, the chance to do so now as a virtual participant sheds vital light on the history we must make in our own time. Reston's dramatic diary is destined to be the definitive account of what made the process work to remove one lawless president, what almost went wrong, and what lessons to draw from the past as our Constitution's last resort for a presidency gone wrong must be deployed."--Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School "Who knew there was something so fresh and worthy to add to the saga of Richard Nixon's impeachment? Yet Reston, in this thoughtful diary, revives the scenes and rekindles the passions of that historic Washington summer--with all its harrowing correlations to today."--John A. Farrell, author of Richard Nixon: The Life "The diary . . . is entertaining as a page-turning saga. But it is more than that. This account of the only time in American history that a president was forced from office by the impeachment process teaches us valuable lessons about how the impeachment process can work--and how it might not work."--Walter Dellinger, from his introduction