ABSTRACT
Elsewhere in the same interview, he blamed his downfall on his softness: if only he hadn't sought to protect Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and others (i.e., the "real" culprits), he would have let them have them sooner and there would have been no cover-up. Very late in
g I his life he told Monica Crowley, a sympathetic young biographer, that ^ he was brought down because they changed the rules. Wiretapping and
political skullduggery that were permissible when Democratic presidents engaged in them suddenly became criminalized when Nixon practiced them (Crowley 1996, 287). To the end of his life, Nixon, who continually worked football metaphors into his public remarks, needed to believe that Watergate was a rigged Super Bowl in which the opposing team stole the ball, kept his side illegally bottled up, got all the calls to go in their favor, and won the game by a point. "Nixon never did admit final defeat," according to one biography, "because he never believed that he was finally defeated, only temporarily set back" (Volkan, Itzkowitz, and Dod 1997,105).
