It is hard to explain this failure of judgment, the most critical mistake Nixon ever made. Favoring hush money over full disclosure was a moral lapse, regardless of whether Nixon had committed a crime, but the reasons for his actions are complex and not easy to sort out. It is generally true, as his defenders have argued, that Nixon was continuing to view his problems as political when they were by now legal—criminally so.28 But this explanation begs deeper questions. Nixon suffered from a blind spot brought on by mixed motives, some of them decent but ultimately fatal to his presidency. His
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