Nixon’s protests through the scandal had been right in some respects: What he’d been accused of doing was part and parcel in many ways of what predecessor presidents had done. The difference had only been that Nixon had brought the work into the White House itself, removing the arm’s-length deniability that had protected his predecessors. “The whole mess fell on Nixon,” Bryce Harlow said later. “The White House had proven too big, too powerful, too irresponsible, too independent, too self-satisfied and arrogant.” Neither the White House, the FBI, nor the CIA would ever be the same.
