From award-winning journalist and author John A. Jenkins comes a revolutionary exploration of the summer before Watergate—a parallel world of a half-century ago when America faced events and crises strikingly similar to those of today—told through the lives and words of those who lived it.
FIVE MONTHS THAT CHANGED AMERICA
By John A. Jenkins
What does the summer of ’71 tell us now? What can it teach us? What lessons shall we, as a republic, learn and apply to the present day? Is our democratic system preordained to repeat cycles of economic turmoil, political discord, racial mistrust, and geopolitical trauma? Was there an alternate path? Through the lives, thoughts, and actions of some of the key actors of the time as they engaged with epic events and each other, the Summer of ’71 will provide compelling insight and, perhaps, a path to answers.
America is mired in an unwinnable war, half a world away. The president and his FBI have a secret agenda for revenge against political enemies. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators mass at the Capitol, many bent on violence. More than thirteen thousand people are rounded up and detained without charges by a police state run amok––the largest mass arrest in America’s history. Press freedom is under attack. Threats from China and Russia loom. A Black activist on the run becomes a symbol of resilience and resistance for a movement. The Supreme Court takes up Roe v. Wade. All this, more than a half century ago. Events that will unalterably reshape America are unfolding. The rhythm of the past resounds today. This is the summer of ’71.
A NOTE TO READERS
You are about to return to the summer of ’71, a place that may seem eerily like the time you are living in right now. It’s not your imagination. Seeds of turmoil and division were planted then. My objective here is to show you––through the writings and accounts of the main players––how events during the summer of ’71 set up the hyper-partisanship and ideological battles of today. This is a complex, impressionistic history, but it’s all here, and the present-day parallels are striking: a calculating King Lear–like president sowing chaos and bent on revenge; press freedom at risk; surging inflation; Black martyrdom; reproductive rights under attack.
I lived that summer in real time, witnessing many of the events described here. In the summer of ’71, I landed a reporting job at a Washington publisher that today is part of the Bloomberg empire. After World War II, four very shrewd young men bought what was then a failing enterprise from the owner of U.S. News & World Report for next to nothing––a rock-bottom price of $50,000. By the time I arrived in their daily newsroom twenty-five years later, they’d struck gold. We compiled the “official text” of anything and everything the federal government did that affected American corporations, and hand-delivered those reports every business day. There was no Internet or twenty-four-hour news cycle in those days; you had to be in the room to get the official text. Our subscribers were the Fortune 500. This was like having a license to print money, and yet we flew under the radar of the big dailies, like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Which was just fine with the owners. We had our niche.
I quickly learned the importance of primary sources. That’s what this book is based upon––tens of thousands of them. Memories may fade or change, but documents do not. One of the first things I was told that summer by George Cullen, a crusty seventy-one-year-old former Associated Press editor straight out of The Front Page, who smoked a fat cigar and wore a green eyeshade, was the importance of the primary source materials that we gathered. George was wizened and wise. He started out as a telegraph operator for the AP in Jersey City and worked his way up. (When George told me he was the telegrapher who sent the FLASH! across the AP’s national wire that war had been declared, I didn’t realize at first that the war he was talking about was the one from 1917, not 1941.) “Get the documents,” George instructed. “You are not working for a dime newspaper.” Ten cents was the newsstand price of the Post in 1971. The Times cost a nickel more. We charged thousands for a subscription.
On the morning after the biggest economic news since the Great Depression––Nixon’s freezing wages and prices and abandoning the gold standard on August 15, 1971––I suddenly became the available man. Congress was in recess. Lawmakers had scattered, and the workaday press and lobbyists and others who make Washington hum were vacationing. I was thrown directly into the tumult, covering the briefings by H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at the White House, John Connally and Paul Volcker at the Treasury, Nixon’s address to the joint session of Congress, Canada’s Pierre Trudeau pleading for tariff relief (yes, history repeats), and on and on––all things that mattered hugely to the economy and the world that summer.
I was hooked. I’ve been a journalist in the city of my birth, Washington, DC, ever since––but I’ve never known another summer like that one. Fifty-five years later, I can say with confidence that America hasn’t, either––at least not until now.
My purpose here is to show the drama––the pain and the hope––of a summer when America faced some of its greatest challenges at home and abroad. Watergate was still one summer away. But during the summer of ’71, the stage was already being set for the downfall of a president, and the ideological divide of a nation. That’s the defining importance of the summer of ’71.
This book tells the story of that summer through the larger-than-life stories of people who defined it, notably Daniel Ellsberg, Neil Sheehan, Henry Kissinger, Sarah Weddington, and Angela Davis. Each main character has an important backstory that sets them up for the summer to come. You’ll explore that context in Part I. The intertwined threads of the Summer of ’71 begin in Part II. History didn’t stop at the end of the summer; some outcomes remained unresolved. I’ll tie off the characters’ loose ends in Chapter 15: Aftermath.
A few other things to know: Because primary sources are essential to this book, I’ve relied on contemporaneous accounts where possible. Archives and collections, many of which weren’t opened until recently, form the backbone of this book. I have extensively mined those, as you will see in the Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources at the end of this book.
If multiple accounts of a particular event are at odds (such as the starkly differing recollections of Ben Bradlee and Edward Bennett Williams about publishing the Pentagon Papers), I have accorded greater weight to documents created in the moment or closer to when something happened. In some instances, quoted material has been edited or condensed for style, grammar, or clarity.
I don’t intend Summer of ’71 to be an exhaustive or definitive history of all the events described. I’ve also chosen not to recount details already thoroughly documented elsewhere by journalists and historians. For those who want to know more, consult the Bibliography. Mine is an impressionistic view of one fateful summer––told through the words of the key players themselves.
Regardless of what you think about the events unfolding in America today, in these pages you will find parallels between then and now. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of the main players of the Summer of ’71 are virtuous and which deserve their fate––and to consider the many similarities with today.
WHY THE SUMMER OF ’71 MATTERS
Inflation rages. Crime is rising. China poses an existential threat. Roe v. Wade takes center stage at the Supreme Court. Black lives are under attack. Capitol rioters are on trial. Mass arrests are ordered as protesters take to the streets. A scheming, paranoid president seeking reelection battles the press and seeks to subvert not just the political order, but the rule of law itself.
This was the summer of ’71.
More than a half century later, it is hard to overstate the importance of the events that defined the American experience during the fateful five months of May through September 1971. America faced upheaval. The characters in this real-life drama were complex—some virtuous, others deeply flawed, but all of them dramatic in their own ways, and each compellingly drawn.
Fifty years on, it’s apparent now that the summer of ’71 was a scene-setter, not an aberration. Issues and controversies that beset America today—inflation, guns, Roe v. Wade, civil rights, domestic and international terrorism, intolerance—presented themselves, front and center. A president grappled with them all. And, in that moment, solutions seemed possible, but soon would slip away amid historic scandals.
What does the summer of ’71 tell us now? What can it teach us? What lessons shall we, as a republic, learn and apply to the present day? Is our democratic system preordained to repeat cycles of economic turmoil, political discord, racial mistrust, and geopolitical trauma? Was there an alternate path? Through the lives, thoughts, and actions of some of the key actors of the time as they engaged with epic events and each other, the Summer of ’71 will provide compelling insight and, perhaps, a path to answers.
Daniel Ellsberg risks his freedom to seek an end to the Vietnam War. Neil Sheehan and the New York Times expose the lies of a generation of American presidents. Sarah Weddington takes up the cause of reproductive rights and becomes the youngest Supreme Court advocate in history. Henry Kissinger embarks on a secret mission to start diplomatic relations with China. Angela Davis becomes an icon of Black struggle and resistance.
Those are but a few of the characters who make the Summer of ’71 such a compelling story with present-day relevance.
It was in the summer of ’71 that President Nixon began taping his conversations at the White House, making even more complete the historical record of that time. Richard Nixon’s White House tapes comprise 3,800 hours and 7 million pages of transcripts.
This book uses those tapes and transcripts.
Nixon taped everything and everyone in his orbit. With the full availability and indexing of those tapes, his modus operandi becomes clear.
As the first president since the nineteenth century to enter the White House without his party’s control of either body of Congress, Nixon necessarily had to play the role of a conciliative politician. Without strong Democratic backing, no part of his agenda could pass. Incongruously (for a president who was, until recently, without peer in his conspiratorial paranoid nature, his antipathy for the press in general, and his hatred for the Washington Post and the New York Times in particular), that pragmatic imperative actually played to Nixon’s strength. And, by the summer of ’71, Nixon had achieved notable successes—including major environmental and consumer protections, and the opening of diplomatic relations with China. He aspired to do much more on both the domestic and international fronts. The Watergate cover-up wasn’t just his undoing; it canceled those future possibilities, and it erased his legacy.
A generation later, historians continue to reconsider the Nixon presidency and the opportunities he seized or lost.
Through Nixon’s tapes, we now know how one important event of that summer—the Pentagon Papers—fed Nixon’s paranoia and became the precursor to Watergate, the biggest political scandal of the last century. Two summers later, I had a reserved seat at the press table in the Senate Caucus Room for the aftermath: the Watergate hearings.
Of course, there were several other crises brewing. What is significant is how Nixon and his team managed those crises that summer: often boldly, as in Kissinger’s secret trips to China; sometimes inventively, as with Nixon’s plan to replace the income tax with a European-style VAT; and once in a while with epic big plays, such as trying to halt the scourge of inflation by freezing wages and prices. Imperfect solutions. But strategies were being worked on, plans were in motion, and a bipartisan spirit held sway in Congress. It wasn’t Camelot, but there was hope.
Historian Douglas Brinkley called Nixon one of the four greatest environmental presidents, along with Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Whether Nixon truly cared about the environment, or was even curious about it, is a different matter. But he was a pragmatist, and after a series of environmental calamities—smog in big cities, the Santa Barbara oil spill, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River literally on fire—the public demanded action. Nixon put in the work. He had the potential to enact significant policy.
That changed one Sunday in June, with the Pentagon Papers. Nixon’s paranoia, fed by ambitious underlings, got the better of him. He took actions that led inexorably to the creation of a bunch of White House villains known as “the Plumbers,” and later to Watergate. Until the Pentagon Papers hit, there remained real potential for positive change from Nixon’s presidency. But Nixon’s reaction and the ensuing scandal ended that, and set the stage for what we’re living through right now.
This is an amazing true story: an operatic summer of hope and despair that political history has ignored.
Copyright © 2026 by John A. Jenkins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
John A. Jenkins is a multi-award-winning journalist, author, publisher, and entrepreneur. With a specialty in partisans and power, he’s written hundreds of features for major magazines in the U.S. and abroad, including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and The Washington Monthly. A 4-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit, one of the highest awards in legal journalism, he is the founder of Law Street Media, the most widely visited and highly engaged law-and-policy site on the web. Prior to starting Law Street, Jenkins served for 15 years as President & Publisher of CQ Press, the leading political science textbook and reference publishers. Currently, he co-leads the predictive-AI start-up PoliScio Analytics, which he co-founded in 2022. He lives on the east coast and can be found online at JohnaJenkins.com.
