Mr. Kleindienst had succeeded John Mitchell as Attorney General, was asked to

resign at the same time that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were dismissed, and had been threatened with a Watergate-related indictment but was exonerated of substantive wrongdoing. Mr. Brookhiser was still an undergraduate at the time of Watergate but was already at that time a keen student of politics. This fine conversation with a man who suffered from his colleagues' transgressions but holds no perceptible grudge ranges from Watergate itself, to the abuses of the press, to the fundamentals of our political system. RK: "What I really tried to do in my book was to write a love letter to our Constitution and to our institutions of freedom. I tried to point out, particularly to young people, that ours is a political society, that politics is a noble pursuit--" WFB: "It's noble and also ignoble." RK: "But it is a noble pursuit; sometimes it's ignobly pursued--that government is a great privilege and also that we have in our Constitution the means by which, if we are vigilant, we can continue to preserve our freedoms."