Time & Perspective Quote by Fred F. Fielding

Paranoia is doing two jobs here: it’s self-protection and self-dramatization. Fielding’s recollection hinges on a small, vivid action Dean “writing it down as if my house was bugged,” a gesture that instantly sketches a world where ordinary conversation has become evidentiary risk. For lawyers, that shift is recognizable: once counsel enters the room, language stops being casual and starts being discoverable, deniable, usable against you. The pen becomes a shield, but also a tell.

The context implied is Washington at its most feverish - an environment where surveillance isn’t just a fear, it’s a governing metaphor. “That was the first time that I found out that he had consulted a lawyer” carries a quiet alarm. In political crises, the moment someone “lawyers up” is when friendships and loyalties are reclassified into liabilities. Fielding positions himself as the late-arriving witness to a changed reality: Dean has crossed from insider confidence to defensive procedure.

Subtext: Dean is testing what can be said, to whom, and in what form. Writing rather than speaking signals both caution and performance. If everything is “bugged,” then everyone is potentially complicit, every room potentially hostile. Fielding’s repetition - “bugged… bugged” - mimics the obsessive loop of suspicion, but it also functions as narrative proof: the fear was pervasive enough to become habit.

The intent is less to diagnose Dean’s psyche than to document a tipping point: when governance starts behaving like a criminal defense. In that gap between spoken trust and written avoidance, you can feel a scandal forming its own internal logic.