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THE MIND OF WATERGATE: AN EXPLORATION OF THE COMPROMISE OF INTEGRITY. By Leo Rangell. New York: Norton, 1980, 318 pp., $12.95.
The basic theme of this study, which constitutes the author's claim to innovation in terms of psychoanalytic investigation, is contained in the following quotation:
It is no accident that the superego and its functions are the last of the psychic agencies to be studied in depth. Analysts, in their zeal not to be judgmental or to impose their own values, may appear at times to separate themselves unduly from the ethical aspects of psychic life… Actually, the analyst sits equidistant from all three psychic agencies and includes them all within his purview [p. 21].
Approaching the Watergate era, and preceding and following it with studies of social and political events centering on but by no means confined to the person of Richard Nixon, Leo Rangell proceeds to examine these phenomena from the standpoint of a physician. Such a physician would survey the interplay based on unconscious identifications; in this, Rangell specifically singles out what he calls "the compromise of integrity." Clearly, although the adjective is not appended, what is meant is "moral" integrity, for what Rangell repeatedly details, often in the most minute ways, are interweavings of prevarications, evasions, contradictions, denials of previously demonstrable assertions—indeed, a tangled web of what can only be seen as a web of deceit of almost inconceivable complexity. The threads extend back to an innumerable series of events long before Watergate and stretch forward after it. They comprise numerous deceptions from Nixon's behavior during the McCarthy era, to the "Checkers" speech, the Vietnam War, his campaign speeches, and his conduct during the interviews with David Frost.