Game Plan for Disaster: An Ombudsman's Report on the Nixon Years (inscribed first edition) [signed] [first edition]

When Richard Nixon became president, he declared that he wanted "an administration of open doors, open eyes, and open minds". He persuaded the author, a lawyer and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who long had observed the corrupting influence of secret decision-making, to become special counsel to the president. Charged with seeking out and alerting the president to mismanagement and wrongdoing in the executive branch, Clark R. Mollenhoff (1921-1991) accepted the post and within a few weeks was embroiled in the first of a series of disputes with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and the others (this first case involved their efforts to free Jimmy Hoffa from jail). Mollenhoff watched while this small group of zealots tightened their grip on power, the fraud they perpetrated on the nation, on their own party, and on the people was fatal to the administration they had worked so hard to elect. The armor within which they worked was "executive privilege" - a concept nowhere envisaged by the Constitution and as destructive to democracy as, in the end, it was to themselves. So Mollenhoff resigned and returned to his job as Washington bureau chief of the 'Des Moines Register' and 'Tribune', and became one of the most knowledgeable, forceful, and fair critics of the administration. His book is a highly personal account of how it happened and why - the obsession with secrecy and the arrogance in power which led the president and his men inexorably to all that "Watergate" came to mean. It deals with case histories and with the consuming personal rivalries of men such as Ron Ziegler, John Dean, and Richard Nixon himself. Its thesis is the danger inherent in secret decision-making which leads to frauds, favoritism, self-deception, and a demeaning of the Congress and of the people - in the end to the destruction of governmental integrity