Watergate was destructive of the national foreign and domestic interest, and was probably unjust. Nixon's full presidential term was one of the most successful in American history. In addition to the foreign policy successes of withdrawal from Vietnam, arms control with the USSR, and new relationships with China and the Arabs, Nixon also achieved the end of conscription, school segregation, the terrible riots, assassinations and skyjackings of the late Johnson era, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, and produced brisk economic growth and a lower domestic crime rate. This was why he was re-elected by the greatest plurality in history (18 million votes). 

On Vietnam, the Democrats had plunged the country into the war on a flimsy legal pretext, conducted the war utterly incompetently, handed an appalling mess to Nixon, and quickly hung their war on him. They then ensured the total defeat of the non-Communist Vietnamese and Cambodians by cutting off congressional funds, resulting in the humiliation of the United States and, for good measure, they crucified the president who almost salvaged their war, by morally over-egging the Watergate affair. 

When President Lyndon Johnson offered the North Vietnamese joint withdrawal from the South in October 1966, he was already conceding defeat. Ho Chi Minh could have taken the deal, waited six months, and reinvaded. The US would not have returned, but Ho thought he could defeat the US itself and decisively advance the cause of international communism. Nixon prevented this. 

Horne covers all of this admirably through his subject's words, and reveals how Kissinger oscillated between the "decent interval" view that Vietnam was hopeless, and the Nixon "peace with honour" view that it might still be saved. Nixon based this view on the fact that the South Vietnamese defeated the Communists in their great offensive of April 1972 with only (albeit very heavy), air support from the US. Kissinger routinely gave senior personnel at the New York Times and the Washington Post to believe that he was with them, telling the journalists Scotty Reston, Joe Kraft, and their ilk that he was saving the world from "the madman" (Nixon), in between urging the strongest reactions on "the madman." Nixon was generally aware of all this, even checking White House telephone logs revealing Kissinger's lengthy calls to those individuals. It is a testimony to Kissinger's indispensability that he kept his job.

Since, on Vietnam, Kissinger's assailants are Nixon's also, he supports Nixon. But instead of sidling up to a realistic argument that the whole Watergate orgy was the theft of a thimble, as Muriel Spark metaphorically wrote in The Abbess of Crewe, Kissinger has kept his alliance both with Nixon's enemies who still rule the liberal media, and with the Nixonians, by dodging the issue under the majestic imagery of the Greek tragedians. Kissinger tells Horne that Nixon was brought down by a "flaw". He wasn't. He inexplicably bungled the impeachment crisis, but he was brought down by his enemies, many of whom were Kissinger's friends. 

Horne rightly describes how Kissinger adroitly handled US foreign policy through the terribly difficult Watergate period, but doesn't consider Nixon's view that an overall Middle East settlement with Moscow would have been possible in October 1973, and  could have been imposed. Nixon foresaw that the Arab states and factions would be more difficult to deal with than the Russians, who were being ejected from the region by Sadat.