Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate

On the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break in: A dramatic, revealing new account, focused on the long and tangled relationship between President Richard Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms.

On June 17, 1972, police arrested burglars inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. The devastating revelations that followed led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the imprisonment of many involved in the break-in, its planning, and its coverup.

Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate by Jefferson Morley reveals the untold story of the Watergate scandal: The deadly dance of Richard Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms, the president determined to subordinate the CIA to White House control and the spymaster determined to serve without surrendering. What they had on each other was explosive: a shared interest in four assassination conspiracies whose bloody legacies haunted U.S. foreign policy and American politics. Both used their knowledge as leverage to achieve their goals. Both would fall from power but, in a measure of Helms' cunning, the president fell faster and farther than the spymaster.

While the FBI and Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein followed the trail of the money back to the Oval Office, the burglars' connections to the CIA and Helms went surprisingly unexplored. Deeply researched and drawing from long-overlooked tapes of the era, Scorpions' Dance presents the Watergate scandal as the manifestation of a power struggle between White House and CIA that began long before the burglary and played out behind closed doors as the FBI, the press, and Congress pursued Nixon. It shows how Helms served as Nixon's enabler and largely escaped detection, and sheds light on the power struggle between the presidency and the intelligence community that continues to this day.