I just watched https://watergatesecret.com/ and it blew my mind. How realistic are Geoff Shepard's theories. I don't think he needs much steel-manning with such powerful evidence, but what are the strongest citations against it?
A few years ago, I was on a business trip that flew me in to SNA, and I had a few hours to myself. The Nixon museum was nearby, so I figured that might be interesting. I was a bit embarrassed to go in, because, well, I didn't know much about Nixon, but I knew he was definitely a crook.
I learned so much there. Maybe he did make some mistakes, but he did boatloads of good that the general public has forgotten about. Even if you accept at face value every Watergate accusation made against him, it seems a real shame to dismiss everything else he did.
History read alone without reading Sociology is how the older gen parsed reality cause they never had access to as much multi diciplinary info as we do today.
Today we don't read history of one man or one group alone because its like paying attention to a small part of much larger ever changing systems.
Its like studying hurricanes. These dynamical systems are not controllable by anyone because they are so massive and interconnected with things happening much much further away from the center that draws everyones focus.
So how does society cope with that level of uncontrollabilty?
You have to look at what sociologists like Ulrich Beck or Zygmunt Bauman have to say or even Niall Fergusons Square and the Tower.
If you want to stick with film, you could try All The President's Men, 1976
The film was nominated in multiple Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA categories; Jason Robards won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Ben Bradlee. In 2010, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Geoff Shepard is clearly not unbiased. According to his Wikipedia page, he worked in the Nixon administration and that some of his work is co-sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation.
I learned so much there. Maybe he did make some mistakes, but he did boatloads of good that the general public has forgotten about. Even if you accept at face value every Watergate accusation made against him, it seems a real shame to dismiss everything else he did.