Leonard Garment was the acting special counsel to President Richard Nixon during the final two years of Nixon's presidency. Garment's time as acting counsel is perhaps best remembered by his being able to convince President Nixon not to destroy the secret Oval Office tapes. Garment was also suspected by many of being the notorious "Deep Throat", which was the code name of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's secret informer who kept the two Washington Post reporters appraised of the inner workings in the Nixon White House. In 2005, however, it was revealed that former Acting Associate Director of the FBI, W. Mark Felt, had been "Deep Throat".
Click here to see the rest of this review...
Leonard Garment was born on May 11, 1924 in Brooklyn. Garment was a strange choice to work as Nixon's attorney, as he admits in the book to being a democrat. Garment and Nixon first met in 1963 when they became partners in Garment's Wall Street law firm, after Nixon had moved east after losing the California gubernatorial election. Prior to his career as a lawyer Garment had worked as a professional Jazz musician. During their time in the Wall Street law firm, Nixon would convince Garment to serve as his unofficial ambassador to the Jewish community, and to the state of Israel.
In the 1980s, Garment would go on to serve as an attorney for a high ranking member of the Reagan administration. During this time he taped the phone conversations of his client, and still today believes that tapping phones is a perfectly moral and ethical practice. More recently, Garment helped to create the Jazz Museum in Harlem, New York.
The review of this Book prepared by Nathaniel Ford