The scandal known as Watergate has proven unusually resistant to historical reinterpretation. Revisionist narratives of the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the entire Eisenhower presidency for that matter have appeared, leaving us with clashing accounts or sometimes a new synthesis. In contrast, a simplistic narrative of what was in fact a very complex scandal remains remarkably intact in the public mind. The critic Wilfrid Sheed noted this as early as the late 1970s, when he observed, tongue in cheek, that “Folks may be getting fuzzy about the Watergate details, but at least they remember the movie: a couple…

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