Welcome listeners to the editor's desk coming to you from First Things World Headquarters in New York City.

And I'm Rusty Reno and I'm the editor.

And I'm, guess what, sitting at my desk. And I have with me Chris Colwell, author of regime, change American style, a very extensive review of a new book about Watergate called Watergate A New History by Garrett Graff.

Chris Colwell is contributing editor at the Claremont Review and author of The Age of Enlightenment,

a very important book about... Age of entitlement.

Avent entitlement, thank you. A very important book about post-60s America.

Welcome to the podcast, Chris. Great to be with you, Rusty.

Gary Graff, you know, and he makes a statement in the book that you quote about how Watergate

and it's denouement represented, and these are his

words, a success story of how government worked in a moment of grave crisis. So I guess my first

question is, why would someone imagine that the Watergate episode involved a grave crisis?

Well, you know, my memories of Watergate are quite vague.

I was alive during it, but I have, you know, to me it is mostly history.

But if there's one thing I remember in the aftermath of Watergate growing up, it was described as a, as an episode during

which the system worked. The system worked. This was the worst, in the view of the way it was described in, in the way it was

described in most newspapers and most television specials, this was a grave constitutional

threat. There was misconduct on Richard Nixon's part that placed the that placed the American constitutional system under pressure and that it was

only thanks to a rigorous, let's say, adherence to the rule of law and that we were able to get out of it. I'm not sure that that

interpretation of Watergate has really stood the test of time. No, I remember very well. I was,

I think, 13 years old in the summer of the hearings when it reached the peak.

Sam Irvin in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings,

and they would be, it must have been sort of the highlights at night or something like that

...