Politics & Power Quote by Richard M. Nixon

A confession disguised as a shrug, Nixon's line is engineered to turn moral indictment into procedural inevitability. "I played" casts politics as a game: competitive, rule-bound, and, crucially, impersonal. That framing invites the listener to judge him less like a citizen and more like a professional athlete who simply understood the league. It is also the classic Nixon move of shifting the argument from character to craft.

The sly center sits in "as I found them". It implies an inherited ecosystem of dirty hands and backroom norms, suggesting that any scandal attached to him is really a scandal of the era. The phrase asks for absolution by context: don't blame the player, blame the system. Yet it also smuggles in a claim to realism, even sophistication. Nixon isn't saying he liked the rules; he's saying he was too serious to pretend they didn't exist.

Coming from a president whose name became shorthand for abuse of power, the line reads as both defense and diagnosis. It hints at the mid-century political culture of hard-edged partisanship, surveillance anxieties, and an executive branch that had been expanding its reach long before Watergate forced the public to look closely. Nixon's specific intent is to normalize himself: not uniquely corrupt, just unusually candid about how power actually moves. The subtext is darker: if these are the rules "as found", then changing them was never the point. Winning was.