The Final Days is a 1976 non-fiction book written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate scandal. A follow-up to their 1974 book All the President's Men, The Final Days concerns itself with the final months of the Presidency of Richard Nixon including battles over the Nixon White House tapes and the impeachment process against Richard Nixon.
Background and writing
Not long after the resignation of Richard Nixon in August 1974, Woodward and Bernstein took a leave of absence from The Washington Post in order to begin work on the book. They originally intended to cover just the last hundred days of the Nixon presidency but then expanded it further back.
While the book was being written, there were some intimations that it was going to be a "blockbuster" in terms of content, but Woodward demurred, saying instead that it would be "a book of a hundred small surprises." (It could also be noted that Woodward wrote the foreword to Marshall's book.)
As noted in the book's foreword, all the information and scenarios depicted were taken from interviews with 394 people who were involved. The content of the interviews was considered on the record, but the identity of the sources remained confidential. Every detail was thoroughly checked, and any information that could not be confirmed by two separate accounts was left out of the book.
In an example of the book's approach, J. Fred Buzhardt co-operated with Woodward and Bernstein during the research for the book, by sitting for eight "extensive" interviews. One person was interviewed as many as 17 times. At the same time, revelations from these excerpts appeared in many newspaper stories.
Critical response
Reviews of the book focused both on the disclosures within it and the methods by which it was written. Regarding the first, the Los Angeles Times said the book was "Fascinating, macabre, mordant, melancholy, frightening...." Newsweek, which ran the excerpts, described it as "An extraordinary work of reportage on the epic political story of our time." This fuller depiction did much to ameliorate the initial denunciations of the book. Reeves also expressed concern over the sourcing matter, saying that they should have gotten some of their sources to go on record. All the same he concluded, "Hell, I trust Woodward and Bernstein," saying "not only are they great reporters," but that some of his own findings in researching the first days of the Presidency of Gerald R. Ford had confirmed some of their reporting regarding the last days of the Nixon one. In a 2018 retrospective ranking by Politico of all of Woodward's 20 books, including his newly released Fear, the ranking of The Final Days was second best, trailing only All the President's Men. The Politico writer said of The Final Days that "This book ... is fantastic, the model for all [by Woodward] that came after." It stayed in the top spot for 18 weeks, and on the full list for 29 weeks total. Altogether The Final Days sold some 630,000 copies in hardcover.
Paperback rights to the book were in April 1976 sold to Avon Books in a record-setting deal for $1.55 million, eclipsing a previous mark for any publisher for non-fiction works held by The Joy of Cooking.
At the same time, the paperback edition of All the President's Men was atop that bestseller list and the film All the President's Men was the biggest box-office success in the land. All of these successes made both authors wealthy. The pair also sat for a joint retrospective '40 years later' interview on their Watergate reporting with CBS in 2014.
In his 1978 memoir RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, the former president gave an account of the famous night-before-resignation-announcement scene that presents it as shorter and more business-like, but allows that his sense of "agony" and "loss" became "most acute" for him that night. Kissinger's 1982 memoir Years of Upheaval calls the Woodward and Bernstein narrative "an unfeeling account" but presents a description of the encounter that is not that far away from theirs. Both Nixon and Kissinger have the encounter starting in the Lincoln Sitting Room but ending in the Lincoln Bedroom.