WATERGATE'S FORGOTTEN HERO

A historian explores the life of a forgotten 20th-century hero in this biography.

In the plethora of works on the 1970s and the Watergate scandal, Frank Wills is often only mentioned in passing (and even then, rarely named) or relegated to obscurity in footnotes. Yet, as the 24-year-old security guard who first discovered evidence of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., Wills played a singular role in the unraveling of America’s biggest political scandal. In this absorbing biography, Henig offers the first serious and systematic examination of Watergate through the lens of Wills. Despite the historical marginalization of Wills, the African American security guard became a national sensation as Richard Nixon’s presidency crumbled in the aftermath of the Watergate break-in. From making the cover of Jet magazine to appearing in nationally televised interviews, Wills had a brief flirtation with fame. But his celebrity quickly turned into a subsequent lifetime of tragedy where he “lived in the shadow of Watergate” and never missed an “opportunity to express his bitterness and disappointment” with his involvement in the scandal. Essentially blackballed from Washington security jobs by employers who resented him for not keeping quiet or who feared the loss of federal funding by retaliatory Republicans if they hired him—and undermined by the actions of his lawyer/agent in the heyday of his fame—Wills spent the latter decades of his life in poverty. After contracting AIDS, he suffered an early death from lymphoma and a brain tumor. Marshaling an impressive body of research that utilizes private interviews with Wills conducted by author Alex Haley, conversations with the security guard’s family and friends, and a myriad of archival and print sources, this book convincingly portrays the Watergate figure as a 20th-century hero. In addition, the work avoids the trappings of hagiography in its acknowledgments of Wills’ personal shortcomings. And while some of the tangential passages of historical context are at times more distracting than illuminating to Wills’ story, this is a powerful, tragic biography of a man who, in the words of Bob Woodward, was “the only one in Watergate who did his job perfectly.”

A remarkably well-researched and definitive account of an unheralded American hero.