All people live by myths, writes Theodore H. White. Nowhere, however, are myths more important than in America. Take away the myths of other people and Frenchmen will remain Frenchmen, Englishmen Englishmen, and Chinese Chinese. Nationality descends from their loins. But take away myths that bind Americans together, with their differences of race, culture and tradition, America would dissolve, he writes, "into a sad geographical expression where whites killed blacks, blacks killed whites and Protestants, Catholics, Jews made of their cities a constellation of Belfasts." This was what the Nixon crisis of 1973-1974 threatened as the nation realized that the myth of their president as a man of law had been betrayed-that equality before the law might now become a fiction;that Vice-President Agnew was a grafter;that the national intelligence agencies had slipped from control;and that, for the first time in their history, a president would have to be removed...

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