Bridging

Nixon, not long before he was deposed, was quoted as saying at a news conference, "I am not a crook." We all saw immediately that Nixon shouldn't have said what he said. He wanted to assure everyone that he was an honest man, but the wording he used was to deny that he was a crook. Why should he deny that? He must have believed that his audience was entertaining the possibility that he was a crook, and he was trying to disabuse them of this belief. But in so doing, he was tacitly acknowledging that peoplewere entertaining this possibility, and this was something he had never acknowledged before in public. Here, then, was a public admission that he was in trouble, and this signaled a change in his public posture. My inferences about Nixon's ubterance stopped about there, but I am sure that the knowledgeable White House press corps went on drawing further inferences. In any event we all took this utterance a long way.