If the large power voluntarily abstains from using its full power or feels the strategic situation to be such that it cannot do so, it in effect loses the advantage of being a big power.
The Watergate reforms did work well for many years, and if improved and broadened, these reforms can have real and major impact on the system today.
There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
Though every legal task demands this skill, it is especially important in the effort to frame public policy in a way that is properly responsive to human needs and predicaments. The question is always: How will the general rule work in practice?
I hope you will respond to the crisis of confidence that Watergate has created by opening up your administration and reaching out to people in a more magnanimous spirit.
It often seemed like we had become a nation where the only heroes were rock singers and ball players and that there were no large men of probity who could be called upon for the task.
If there are flaws they are in ourselves, and our task therefore must be one not of redesign but of renewal and reaffirmation, especially of the standards in which all of us believe.
