Daily Inspiration Quote by Fred F. Fielding

It reads like the bureaucratic version of a car crash: chaos in the passenger seat, while the driver insists he was just trying to follow traffic laws. Fielding’s line is doing careful work. “This drama” is a distancing tactic, shrinking what sounds like an internal power struggle into mere theater. Not a crisis, not a possible obstruction problem, just “drama” - a word that makes adult misconduct sound like petty squabbling.

The names matter. John Dean and John Ehrlichman aren’t random colleagues; they signal Watergate’s inner circle, where legal risk and political survival were constantly negotiating custody of “the contents.” Fielding, as lawyer, positions himself as the sober custodian in a room full of operatives. “While I was trying” frames him as the lone professional attempting compliance. Trying, not necessarily succeeding. It’s the language of plausible innocence: intention over outcome, effort over effect.

Then there’s “give the contents to the FBI,” which lands with a thud because it’s both specific and evasive. Contents of what? A file, a safe, tapes, documents - the vagueness protects. He gestures at cooperation without pinning himself to a concrete object that could be tracked, subpoenaed, or contradicted.

The subtext is defensive triage. Fielding wants you to see him as an intermediary caught between factions, not an architect of concealment. In a scandal defined by who knew what and when, he’s writing his own alibi in real time: if wrongdoing happened, it happened in the “drama” around him, not in the compliance he was “trying” to execute.