Faced with the unraveling of his presidency, Richard M. Nixon could not fathom how it had all happened. “You look at Watergate and all that was involved,” he groused to Vice President Spiro Agnew. “What was it? A crappy little thing. There’s nothing there — they didn’t get anything. It hurt us in the election. We would’ve got three or four percent more. What in the name of good God is this all about?”

The reader might wonder the same thing, encountering journalist Garrett M. Graff’s doorstopper of a Watergate book. It’s all there: the pantheon of Nixon administration characters, from John Mitchell to G. Gordon Liddy to John Dean; the Cuban burglars and the Nixonian paranoia. And yet at the end of the book, what remains is as much a mystery as ever. “We’ll never really know the full truth of Watergate,” Graff concludes.

This is not for lack of research. Watergate: A New History offers an exceptionally detailed account of the Watergate saga, and an important revisionist one in certain key ways. Most notably, Graff downplays the investigative journalism of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — immortalized in the 1976 movie All the President’s Men starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman  — noting that many other newspapers were onto the Watergate story at the same time.