Washington Journal

by Elizabeth Drew

Random House. $12.95

Archaeologists of the distant future, when they come across yellowed pages and crumbling videotapes of the 1970s A.D., may conclude that Americans of that era had adapted from the Chinese a fiendish practice known as the Watergate Torture. How many books and treatises on the late great crisis in American political life will be awaiting excavation by latter-day Dead Sea Scrolls searchers no man can predict. This one, by an intrepid Washington reporter with an excellent eye and ear for the way Washington works, would help the historians understand just what the major, and many of the minor, players were doing and thinking in the eleven months, September, 1973, to August, 1974, in which the political process carried Richard Nixon to his downfall.