Having come out on both sides—for covering up and coming clean—Nixon did not choose either. Rather, he continued to wander into his own past. “Eisenhower—that’s all he ever cared about. Christ. ‘Be sure he was clean.’ ” Nixon began to think back to his own humiliation in 1952, the Fund Crisis and the agony of the Checkers Speech. Nixon would not be a self-protecting prig. “I don’t look at it that way,” he said to Mitchell, who as usual said very little. “And I just—that’s the thing I am really concerned with. We’re going to protect our people if we can.”32
