Richard Nixon had finally flown off to San Clemente, something that freshman

Senator James Buckley had bucked much of conservative and Republican sentiment by urging him to do back in March (JLB: "There were many others who knew exactly what I was trying to say and who agreed with me--unfortunately, more of them privately than publicly"). A substantive and often wryly moving discussion (JLB: "We had a little pool in our office in the mail room as to whether I'd be compared with Judas Iscariot or Benedict Arnold or Brutus most often. And I think Benedict Arnold won") of Watergate details, and of how those fit into broader questions of congressional versus presidential power, of the President's ability to conduct foreign policy, and of our tendency, as WFB puts it, "to associate an idea with a person, and if that person lets [us] down, [to] become disillusioned with the idea."