Hugh Sloan
----------------------- [excerpt] ---------------- He wished he were in Bernstein's place, wished he could write. Maybe then he could express what had been going through his mind. Not the cold, hard facts of Watergate necessarily -- that wasn't really what was important.
But what it was like for young men and women to come to Washington because they believed in something and then to be inside and see how things worked and watch their own ideals disintegrate.
He and his wife believed in the same things they had before they came to Washington. Many of their friends at the White House did, too, but those people had made a decision that you could still believe in the same things and yet adapt yourself.
After all, the goals were unchanged, you were still working for what you believed in, right? People in the White House believed they were entitled to do things differently, to suspend the rules, because they were fulfilling a mission; that was the only important thing, the mission.
It was easy to lose perspective, Sloan said.
He had seen it happen. He and his wife wanted to get out of Washington before they lost theirs.
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All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. 1974. Simon & Schuster.
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When you're lost in the rain in Juarez
And it's Easter-time too
And your gravity fails
And negativity don't pull you through
Don't put on any airs
When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue
They got some hungry women there
And they really make a mess outta you...
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Lyric excerpt from "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"
next-to-last song on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited album
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