The Week

One scenario: Nixon resigns. Spiro Agnew is duly sworn in as Pres. He names Nixon as his Vice President. Agnew is then impeached. Nixon succeeds to the Presidency. This allows him not only to make a fresh start but, since a period as Vice President has intervened, to elude the constitutional prohibition against running for a third term. Nixon runs in 1976 and carries all fifty states. He runs again in 1980 and wins. By 1984, the statute of limitations has run out on all crimes committed in 1972. Nixon retires majestically to San Clemente, the mortgage for which turns out to have been underwritten by Chou En-lai.

Even the political journalists found themselves including the sort of details without which no write-up of a debut would be complete: “Attired in a dark pin-striped suit with a white shirt and a blue polka-dot tie, Mr. Kissinger stepped to the podium and, with his hands clasped behind his back in an unusual pose for a speaker before the Assembly, read his statement.” Nor were the guests gathered at the global cotillion to meet the season’s leading debutant neglected: “The Assembly was vibrant with excitement in a way it has rarely been in recent years. His remarks were received enthusiastically.” And those remarks were, in truth, perfectly chosen for the place and the ceremonial occasion, a visible proof that the tact of the new Secretary is worthy of his skills: formed into philosophically unassailable generalities that could not rouse irritation or deepen division with the audience, and might, even, revive here and there a worn ideal or stir a twinge of hope.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Gallup

One scenario: Nixon resigns. Spiro Agnew is duly sworn in as Pres. He names Nixon as his Vice President. Agnew is then impeached. Nixon succeeds to the Presidency. This allows him not only to make a fresh start but, since a period as Vice President has intervened, to elude the constitutional prohibition against running for a third term. Nixon runs in 1976 and carries all fifty states. He runs again in 1980 and wins. By 1984, the statute of limitations has run out on all crimes committed in 1972. Nixon retires majestically to San Clemente, the mortgage for which turns out to have been underwritten by Chou En-lai.

Even the political journalists found themselves including the sort of details without which no write-up of a debut would be complete: “Attired in a dark pin-striped suit with a white shirt and a blue polka-dot tie, Mr. Kissinger stepped to the podium and, with his hands clasped behind his back in an unusual pose for a speaker before the Assembly, read his statement.” Nor were the guests gathered at the global cotillion to meet the season’s leading debutant neglected: “The Assembly was vibrant with excitement in a way it has rarely been in recent years. His remarks were received enthusiastically.” And those remarks were, in truth, perfectly chosen for the place and the ceremonial occasion, a visible proof that the tact of the new Secretary is worthy of his skills: formed into philosophically unassailable generalities that could not rouse irritation or deepen division with the audience, and might, even, revive here and there a worn ideal or stir a twinge of hope.