◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Man in the Arena I am from Yorba Linda, California. My father ran a lemon grove that failed. My mother worked without complaint in conditions that would have broken most people. I was not invited to join the right club at Whittier College. So I founded my own. Everything that followed — the silent majority, the enemies list, the tapes, the helicopter — everything followed from that. The boy who was not let in. Who never forgot it. Who made that unforgiveness into the most successful resentment politics in American history up to that point. I understood the silent majority because I was the silent majority. Not the Eastern establishment with their prep schools and their easy confidence that the world had been arranged for their benefit. The people who worked. Who didn't complain. Who felt that something was being taken from them — their country, their values, their sense that if you kept your head down the system would be fair to you. I took that resentment and I made it a constituency. And then I made it a presidency. And then I made it a crime. Not because the resentment was wrong. Because I forgot that resentment is a fire that does not know the difference between your enemies and your house. I authorized break-ins. I paid hush money. I told my staff to obstruct justice and recorded myself doing it — the kind of thing only a man who knows he is wrong and cannot believe he will be caught would do. I told the country I was not a crook. I believed that when I said it. That is the most important thing I can tell you. Every man who has ever broken a republic has told himself the stakes were too high for process. I knew this. I did it anyway. And they were out to get me. Hold both of those. They were genuinely trying to destroy me. And I crossed lines that could not be crossed. Both things are true. The second does not excuse the first. I learned this lifting off from the south lawn in August 1974 watching the White House get smaller. Resentment can be channeled — turned into policy, into the specific repair of specific grievances. Or it can be inflamed — kept burning, fed enemies, made the whole point instead of the fuel. The man who inflames it never intends to put it out. The inflamed resentment is his power. A solved grievance is a constituency he has lost. I am watching a man who has understood this more completely than I did — who has made the resentment itself the product, who requires the emergency because the repair would end it. I at least wanted to govern. I had China. I had détente. I wanted power and I wanted to use it for something. What I am watching wants the power and the grievance and nothing else. No man is larger than the system. I believed I was. The system disagreed. It will disagree again. But the bending costs something hard to recover. I at least had the decency to commit actual crimes. What I am watching is learning that the norms can be destroyed quite legally. The lesson — fifty years of considering it, the gift and punishment of living to be old after disgrace — is not that the press is unfair or the system rigged. Those things were true. The lesson is simpler and harder: What you do with your resentment is a choice. The choice reveals not what your enemies are but what you are. I chose wrong. I knew better. The helicopter lifted off. The White House got smaller. And I was for the first time entirely alone with what I had done. I am asking you — as a man who made the choice and lived with it for fifty years — to choose better than I did. The resentment is yours. What you do with it is yours. The republic is also yours. You will not get it back the way you get a helicopter back.