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Actually, I did read the "Golden Boy" chapter, and I understood that Dean, who seemed to believe that -- as a White House insider and power broker -- he could charm, convince, or conn anyone into doing anything, wanted to be able to report to his ultra-hot fiance Mo Biner (code name "Clout") that he had wiped clean her past.

That I got.

I assumed, however, that there was more to the story than that. Mssrs. Colodny and Gettlin spend so much time in the early part of the book looking into to the Navy career of Bob Woodward, his job as a briefer for Al Haig, his divorce, his start in the newspaper business, his access to highly-classified information, etc. ... I thought that in the chapters following "Golden Boy," the authors would reveal some even darker secret, some larger plot.

After all, the name of the book, Silent Coup, implies that Nixon's fate resulted from a plot undertaken by shadowy figures who had much to gain by his removal from office.

I too used to listen to G. Gordon Liddy back in the 1990s, and I remember him talking about how he had been sued by Dean and how he had prevailed in that lawsuit. I also remember Mr. Liddy's fulsome disdain for Mr. Dean. Liddy seemed to believe that Dean was the cause of Watergate, that Watergate would never have happened without Dean, and that Dean cynically burned his employer and changed history for the worse in order to save his own skin.