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Haldeman every fact that connected one action with another was
smashed against a stone wall of denial or forgetfulness. These men
empowered to say the last word had authorized nothing, given no
instructions.
Nixon himself advanced the theory that no human instructions
were necessary. Hunt, McCord, the Cubans had acted in response to
the voice of history. They had absorbed the vibrations of lawlessness
generated in the 1960s by antiwar demonstrators, hippies, and civil
rights activists. Reacting against these outrages, they had become law–
less themselves - a case, to follow Nietszche, of gazing too long into
the abyss, so that the abyss gazed back into them. Thus corrupted by
the enemy, they became "overzealous" in behalf of their cause: the
reelection of Richard Nixon. History pointed them in the right direc–
tion but failed to instruct them as to just how far to go. Having over–
shot their mark, they found themselves surrounded by policemen in
the Watergate offices and from then on history had nothing more
to say to them.
In his scheme, Nixon made clear, "overzealousness," even in
behalf of the most worthy of aims, is conducive to crime, and he
condemned illegality on the part of "either side." He did not go as
far as FDR did when he told John
L.
Lewis "a plague on both your
houses." Nixon in his statement was not being irritably evenhanded;
he was only supporting the evenhandedness of the law. His burglars
had fallen in a righteous cause, as had those finest of public servants
Haldeman and Erlichman, and the demonstrators certainly lacked
the justification of these high-minded patriots. Still, "overzealousness"
had produced crime, the crime of getting caught - and the penalty
was forfeiture by the criminals of their connection with their ideal,
the President. In becoming the means by which plots against the
enemy were dragged out into the open, they had themselves given aid
and comfort to that enemy. They had forced Nixon's hand, since to
approve their behavior he would have had to affirm that a central
principle of his policy was that the Democratic Party ought to be
destroyed.
Could Nixon have any other view? Since the thirties, the Amer–
ican right has been dreaming of a revolution that would end the
svstem out of which came the "twenty years of treason" represented
l~y
the New Deal. Nixon arose out of this dream. Evidence wa.,
