Politics & Power Quote by John J. Sirica

Revisionism rarely shows up wearing a false mustache; it arrives in the calmer clothes of “moving on.” Sirica’s line reads like an early warning flare: the real fight after a scandal is not only legal accountability, but narrative control. By the time he’s speaking, the burglary is old news and the cleanup is the story. His target isn’t just Nixon’s actions but the emerging, convenient fog around them - a fog produced by allies, exhausted institutions, and a public eager for closure. “Already underway” is the tell: history isn’t revised decades later in textbooks; it gets rewritten in real time, while the paperwork is still warm.

As a judge at the center of the Watergate prosecutions, Sirica isn’t performing punditry. He’s staking out jurisdiction over truth itself. The phrasing is deliberately prosecutorial: “leave the impression” names the strategy (plausible deniability as a political product), while “no doubt” functions like a bench ruling. He narrows the argument to the part that matters most in a constitutional democracy: obstruction of justice. Not the original sin, but the institutional one - the moment power tries to place itself above process.

The subtext is blunt: democracies don’t just collapse from criminal acts; they corrode when elites succeed in laundering those acts into ambiguity. Sirica’s sentence is less a memory than a rebuke, aimed at anyone betting that time, repetition, and fatigue can turn an obstruction into a misunderstanding.