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“The prospect of Mr Nixon’s departure had already been accepted by friends who, until the last hour, had expected the most durable politician in postwar America to stay the course to the bitter end. To his political enemies it was a judgment, however belated, on all his works and ways. Most of adult America has spent its political life making up its mind, one way or the other, about Richard Nixon. Now that, too, seemed to be over.”
“Mr Nixon, with the rest of mankind, may now reflect on how simply the Watergate scandal could have been swallowed, digested and eliminated 25 months and 17 days ago if he had conceded then that his subordinates had been doing wrong things with wrongly obtained money, and if he had promised that it would not happen again. Instead he gave orders to stop the Federal Bureau of Investigation from pursuing the money trail that led through Texas and Mexico to Coral Gables and the Watergate burglars, and he maintained from then until Monday that he had known nothing of any of it before March 21st of last year...”
“So much for Mr Nixon with his achievements and his misdeeds, his qualities and his defects. The congressional tortoise has overtaken the presidential hare, but this does not mean a huge swing in the pendulum or centre of gravity of American government.”
