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In his April 1975, 25th Freud Anniversary Lecture of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, 'Lessons from Watergate: a derivative for psychoanalysis', Rangell (1976) says the following:
The searing experience of Watergate is viewed not as the psychopathology of a man, or the group psychology of forty men under the ex-President, but as reflecting psychic processes at the base of the population pyramid. The people supported Nixon for a quarter century during which his character traits were known, and were in collusion with the cover-up to the end during the two and half years of Watergate. The theory is advanced that this was due to an identification with Nixon based on the universal wish to triumph over the superego. Ego–superego conflicts are as ubiquitous and ongoing in mental life as the struggle between ego and id. The latter results in neuroses, the former in compromises of integrity. The 'syndrome of the compromise of integrity' is on a par with neurosis in human affairs (p. 37).
This succinct statement represents not only a highly-condensed summary but a kind of conceptual table-of-contents for Dr Rangell's rich and carefully-documented volume, The Mind of Watergate: An Exploration of the Compromise of Integrity.
In reading this simply-told complex narrative, it is crucial to keep in mind the author's caveat that his story is not viewed as 'the psychopathology of a man'; for this is not just another 'Nixon' book or 'Watergate' book, even though we are reminded repeatedly of the many details of the crime and of the conspirators, certainly Nixon among them, who came so unbelievably close to concealing those criminal activities. For Rangell, the emphasis—an emphasis which for the reader becomes a constant thread which the author never permits him to ignore—is the collusion between Nixon and his 'constituency'. It is a collusion which permitted a significant segment of the American public not to see what was evident, and to forget that which had been seen.