Politics & Power Quote by Elliot Richardson

A lawyer’s lament can land like a cultural insult, but Richardson is really describing a vacuum of legitimacy. “It often seemed” is doing quiet work here: he’s not issuing a sermon, he’s reporting the mood of an era when public faith in institutions had curdled. The jab at “rock singers and ball players” isn’t anti-pop so much as a measure of what’s left standing when politics and governance stop producing people we can trust. Celebrities become “heroes” by default because they’re visible, coherent, and (crucially) less implicated in the machinery that’s disappointing everyone.

The phrase “large men of probity” is old-school on purpose. “Large” suggests stature and moral amplitude, not mere fame. “Probity” is the core: integrity as a public utility. Richardson’s subtext is that a democracy can’t run on charisma alone; it needs officials whose credibility survives pressure. The final clause - “called upon for the task” - turns the cultural gripe into an emergency memo. There is a task coming (or already here), and the worry is there’s no one with enough trust capital to execute it.

Context makes the line bite. Richardson served at the highest levels of government during the Nixon years and resigned rather than carry out the “Saturday Night Massacre” order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. He’s speaking from inside the blast radius, diagnosing how scandal and cynicism reroute admiration away from civic virtue and toward entertainment - not because it’s better, but because it’s safer to believe in.