Quick Take
- Narration: Peter Krogh, the author’s son, reads his father’s account with quiet intimacy, a casting decision that adds a layer of meaning the text alone could not carry.
- Themes: Loyalty as a moral failing, institutional corruption and personal complicity, redemption through accountability
- Mood: Confessional and measured, with genuine moral seriousness beneath the political drama
- Verdict: A focused, honest account of how a man with good intentions made catastrophic choices, and what it cost him to understand why.
Watergate has accumulated a library’s worth of testimony, memoir, and analysis over the past fifty years, and I approached this audiobook with the skepticism that the genre can invite: what, at this point, is left to say? The answer turned out to be more personal than historical. Egil Krogh is not trying to rewrite the political record. He is trying to explain, to himself as much as to any reader, how a man who considered himself principled ended up helping plan the break-in that began the unraveling of the Nixon presidency.
The casting of the audiobook is unusual and effective. Peter Krogh, the author’s son, reads his father’s memoir. The choice adds a dimension of accountability that a professional narrator could not have provided: there is something quietly powerful about listening to a son deliver his father’s confession, particularly a confession this specific about where the father went wrong and what it cost the family.
The Meeting That Changed Everything
The memoir’s central scene, Krogh’s July 1971 meeting with John Ehrlichman, when he was handed the folder and the responsibility for the Special Investigations Unit, is delivered with the clarity of a man who has reconstructed that moment many times in his mind. Krogh describes his shock at the assignment, his sense that he was being trusted with something important by a superior he respected, and his failure to ask the question that the entire subsequent history demands: what exactly are we authorized to do?
That failure of interrogation, the gap between what Krogh was asked and what he chose to understand himself to have been asked, is the book’s central moral problem. Blind loyalty, diligence, and dedication are his own words for what drove him, and he uses them with full knowledge of what they mean in retrospect. This is not a memoir that excuses itself. It is a memoir that is trying, four decades after the fact, to understand the mechanism of its own failure.
Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, and the Escalation Logic
The hiring of G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt is the hinge on which the story turns. Krogh is honest about the fact that both men brought with them a set of operational assumptions, about what was permissible, about what national security authorized, that Krogh failed to adequately interrogate. The break-in to the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, which Krogh authorized, is presented not as a moment of personal malice but as the culmination of an escalating logic in which each step seemed to follow from the previous one.
One reviewer who has read extensively on Watergate noted finding little genuinely new in this account, and that is a fair observation for the historically well-read listener. But newness is not really the book’s goal. Krogh’s contribution is not archival; it is testimonial. He is describing from the inside what it felt like to be the person making those decisions, and that phenomenological record has value even when the factual record is familiar.
The Prison Years and the Rebuilding
The final section, covering Krogh’s time in prison and his subsequent effort to rebuild his professional and personal life, is the most quietly affecting part of the memoir. He completed his sentence, regained his law license, and spent subsequent decades working on issues related to integrity in government, a specific, practical form of restitution that reads as genuine rather than performative. The memoir does not conclude with triumph; it concludes with a life that has been reorganized around what the collapse revealed about its previous architecture.
At just over four hours, this is a focused audiobook. It does not try to be a comprehensive Watergate history. It tries to be a personal account of a specific moral failure and its aftermath, and within those limits it succeeds.
Listeners Who Will Find This Most Valuable
Listen if you are interested in the human psychology of institutional corruption, how good people make bad decisions under the pressure of loyalty and hierarchy. Listen if you have an existing familiarity with Watergate and want the texture of an insider’s account rather than a historical overview. Skip if you are looking for new revelations about Nixon or the broader political mechanics of the scandal. Krogh’s story is personal, not systemic.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Krogh express genuine remorse or does the memoir read as self-justification?
The remorse comes across as genuine, and notably specific. Krogh does not blame Ehrlichman, Nixon, or the broader culture of the Nixon White House for choices that were ultimately his own. The self-examination here is honest in a way that distinguishes this from several other Watergate-era memoirs.
How does Peter Krogh’s narration, reading his own father’s words, affect the listening experience?
It adds a quiet emotional layer that a professional narrator would not have provided. The listener is always aware that this is a son rendering his father’s account of his worst decisions, and that awareness gives the more confessional passages an extra weight.
Is this audiobook appropriate for listeners who have also watched the HBO series of the same name?
Yes, and it serves as a useful complement. The HBO series dramatizes the events with considerable creative license; Krogh’s memoir provides the documented record from the primary participant’s perspective. The two accounts are best understood as different modes of engaging with the same material.
What is the audiobook’s position on whether the Plumbers were acting on direct orders from Nixon?
Krogh is careful on this question. He presents the chain of authorization as he understood it, notes the ambiguities in what he was explicitly told versus what he inferred, and does not attempt to shift blame upward beyond what the documented record supports.
