Politics & Power Quote by Elliot Richardson

Power, Richardson reminds us, is not just the ability to decide. It is the ability to delay consequences. In two brisk sentences he sketches a chilling asymmetry: the vice president enters a legal crisis with an asset unavailable to everyone else - a constitutional lottery ticket that can turn prosecution into leverage. “Next in line to the presidency” isn’t a job description here; it’s a shield, a bargaining chip, a way to change the negotiating table itself.

Richardson’s phrasing carries a lawyer’s cool certainty (“I saw no chance”), but the subtext is moral and institutional: expecting voluntary surrender from someone that close to ultimate authority is naive. Resignation would mean becoming “ordinary” again, exposed to the normal pipeline of “trial, conviction, and jail.” Staying put keeps the doors of clemency, influence, and political paralysis cracked open. The rhetorical move is subtle but sharp: he doesn’t accuse the vice president of criminality directly; he diagnoses incentives. The sentence works because it treats self-preservation as predictable, not sensational.

Context matters. Richardson was a central figure in the Watergate era, when the American system stress-tested its own slogans about equal justice. His intent is to demystify high-office accountability: constitutional succession can create perverse incentives, turning public trust into a personal escape route. It’s less a comment on one man than on a structural loophole: when proximity to power becomes negotiable currency, legality stops being a boundary and starts being a strategy.