Former White House Counsel John Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost 1,000 conversations, a wealth of Richard Nixon's secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide a definitive answer to the question: What did President Nixon know, and when did he know it? Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred and also what was missing in the mysterious 18½-minute gap in Nixon's recorded conversations. Dean shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time, in light of the revelations about the NSA's widespread surveillance program. "Dean, as always the model of precision and doggedness, has performed yeoman service," wrote Bob Woodward in the Washington Post. "Even for someone who has covered Watergate for 42 years, from the morning of the burglary through the investigations, confessions, denials, hearings, trials, books and attempts at historical revisionism, Dean's book has an authoritative ring."

"Mr. Dean's book will remind people of why Nixon deserves so unflattering a historical reputation.... It should also serve as a renewed cautionary tale about elevating politicians with questionable character to high office.... Dean's resolve to reconstruct this dismal tale of high crimes and misdemeanors is commendable.... In addition to creating a definitive historical record of how the Watergate scandal unfolded, The Nixon Defense resolves some major unsettled questions."—NYTimes