Commentary (January 1974).

Excerpt:

Months ago, when the scandals of the Nixon administration were fewer and relatively simpler, there was some self-serving talk of a commonalty of error among the Watergate perpetrators, as the arresting officers might have called them, and the radical Left of the 1960’s. Too much zeal, that had been the sin of his people, the President himself suggested in one of his Watergate speeches in the spring; it was a sin and inexcusable, but also venial. Like the zealots of the Left, these people had put their cause above the law. They had been led into their error by the toleration that much liberal opinion had shown for the zealotry of the Left, for draft-dodgers and demonstrators of all sorts. The lesson to be drawn was that the law is sacred, rising above all causes, and no violation of it is excusable, none. A rededication to law and order on all sides, by all factions, was called for. The President indeed had been long calling for it. Watergate, we were left to infer, was actually a vindication of the President’s long-held position, and a reproach to that large body of liberal opinion which had tolerated lawlessness, and ended by infecting even the righteous with it.

 

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Commentary