Long famous for his inside sources, Mr. Woodward relies here largely on some 40 hours of interviews with Mr. Butterfield, a draft of an unpublished memoir by that former aide and a voluminous archive of documents that Mr. Butterfield — deputy to Haldeman, and near the very center of the president’s tiny solar system — took with him when he left the White House in 1973.

The resulting book, told largely from Mr. Butterfield’s point of view, often reads like a two- or three-person play, and is a decidedly slender addition to the Nixon and Watergate saga, which most notably includes Mr. Woodward’s and Mr. Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days.” It erases the image of the visionary foreign policy maker that the disgraced president tried to spin in his later years. This volume, however, simply amplifies (rather than revises) the familiar, almost Miltonian portrait of the 37th president that has emerged from the White House tapes and myriad biographies, as a brooding, duplicitous despot, obsessed with enemies and score-settling and not the least bit hesitant about lying to the public and breaking the law.