The Ends of Power [antikvár]

June 17, 1972, a Saturday afternoon in Key Biscayne, Florida. I stretched and yawned. Across the terrace of our villa at the Key Biscayne Hotel, Larry Higby, my young assistant, read a book, shielding his eyes with one hand from the glare of the sun.It was the second day of a long lazy weekend in this Florida resort. Two weeks ago I had returned with President Richard Nixon from Moscow where he had worked out the beginnings of the first meaningful disarmament agreement with the Soviets in this century, and had begun a new policy, which was being described as "détente," that could reverse twenty-seven years of cold war. But the conference in Moscowdespite the allure of détentehad been a nonstop round of tough negotiating sessions on every subject from wheat to missiles.The President needed a rest and he flew south on June 16 with a few staff members.It promised to be a unique weekendthe only one in recent memory in which I would have little real work to do. For the first time, Nixon had not gone directly to his Key Biscayne home from which he couldand didtelephone me constantly on matters large or small. Instead, Air Force One had dropped him off in the Bahamas where he went to Walker's Cay, owned by one of his friends, Robert Abplanalp, the aerosol-valve millionaire.Nixon's critics would later point to the coincidence of that one date on which he chose to be out of the country for a weekend.At 2:30 A.M., June 17, while Nixon slept in a luxurious private home in the Caribbean, three Cubans, one Italian-Ameri-can who everyone thought was Cuban, and a man named James McCord, had been apprehended in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, outfitted with gloves, flashlights, sophisticated burglary