Politics & Power Quote by Elliot Richardson

There is a lawyerly chill to Richardson calling something a "monster" and then refusing the easy release valve of slaying it. The line is both confession and containment strategy: the creature is already alive, already loose in the civic house, and the job is not heroics but governance. "Most important task" signals triage, a hierarchy of duties where everything else becomes secondary to preventing the thing from running the state.

The power of the sentence is in its double posture: alarm without panic, moral clarity without melodrama. "Attempt" is doing quiet work here. It lowers expectations while sharpening responsibility, the kind of word a public official uses when he knows the forces in play are bigger than any one person. Richardson isn't promising victory; he's promising to take the wheel.

The subtext is classic mid-to-late 20th-century American anxiety: sprawling executive power, national security machinery, surveillance, secrecy, and the bureaucratic momentum that outlives any election. Richardson, best known for his role in the Nixon-era crises and his willingness to resign rather than break the chain of law, is speaking from inside the apparatus. That insider status makes "democratic direction and control" feel less like a slogan and more like a demand for re-anchoring: legitimacy comes not from efficiency or expertise, but from accountability.

"Under" is the key preposition. The monster can't be wished away; it has to be subordinated. The line argues that democracy's real test isn't purity, it's whether it can command its own power.