This extraordinary book had an extraordinary genesis. In July 1973, for the first time in its history, The New York Times Magazine devoted a full issue to a single article: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lukas's account of the Watergate story to date. Six months later, a second installment ran in another full issue. Later the Times asked him to write still a third issue on the impeachment. This piece never appeared because it was overtaken by Nixon's resignation. But Lukas's painstaking reporting on Nixon's last months in office appears here, twenty-five years after his resignation, for the first time in paperback, along with added information on every aspect of Watergate.

Widely acclaimed as a major text of the Watergate saga, J. Anthony Lukas's Nightmare, with a new foreword from presidential historian Joan Hoff, is an investigative masterwork highlighted by in-depth character sketches of the key players. As described by Publishers Weekly, “The result is a model of measured judgment and of careful selection and synthesis, and it is presented with such masterly narrative skill that one reads the old familiar story as if it were all new and fresh.”

For students of history coming to these events for the first time, Nightmare reveals in depth the particular trauma of a nation in turmoil; for those who remember, it is once more brought to life.