In Watergate, Thomas Mallon’s exceedingly entertaining, panoramic re-telling of the eponymous presidential scandal now forty years old, Richard Nixon’s downfall is framed as the inevitable, near-farcical conclusion of one of our most tragic national epics: the 1960’s. As the novel opens in 1972, Nixon is cruising toward a second term with an all-but-inevitable election victory over George McGovern. He has every reason to believe that his decades of hard work are finally going to pay off and he will finally be able to move past the painful, crushing defeats. After all, the bêtes noires of the previous decade have been vanquished— assassins’ bullets and Chappaquiddick have neutered the Kennedy’s, Lyndon Johnson is a long-haired recluse back in Texas, Vietnam is in its final (albeit protracted) death rattle, and the Iron Curtain has been revealed to be made mostly of scrim. Yet, the past is the great unseen, parasitic antagonist of Mallon’s novel. So powerful in fact, that it consumes the characters more so than the cover-up itself. The scandal metastasizes up the chain of command and soon not even the perpetrators are sure what really happened during the night they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex or, in fact, why they did so. As the novel marches towards its well-known conclusion (no need for spoiler alerts in this book review), “Watergate” – the place, the crime, the cover-up, the scandal – reveals its true form as a wrathful, deadly and ethereal phantom, come to take its final revenge. Just when you thought it was safe to leave the 60s… While previous fictional works that tackled all-things Watergate have often been presented from clearly defined points-of-view, Mallon structures his novel like one of Shakespeare’s history plays, seamlessly guiding us around all tiers of...