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Aug 18, 2021
Watergate's Forgotten Hero
Frank Wills, Night Watchman
Summary
In his new book, Watergate's Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night-Watchman (McFarland & Co., 2021), Adam Henig sheds new light on a widely forgotten but vital actor in the Watergate saga: the twenty-four-year-old security guard was on duty at the Watergate Office Building when he detected a break-in. A high school dropout with only a few hours of formal guard training, Frank Wills alerted the police who caught five burglars, ultimately igniting a national political scandal that ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The only African American identified with the Watergate affair, Wills enjoyed a brief moment in the limelight, but was unable to cope with his newfound fame, living the remainder of his life in obscurity and poverty. Through exhaustive research and numerous interviews, the story of America's most famous night watchman finally has been told.
Adam Henig is an experienced writer and public speaker. His previous books include Alex Haley's Roots: An Author's Odyssey (2014) and Baseball Under Seige: The Yankees, The Cardinals, and a Doctor's Battle to Integrate Spring Training (2016).
E. James West is a research fellow at Northumbria University Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (2020) and the forthcoming A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (2022).
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James West
James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022).