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thirty-two years on the Supreme Court, nearly two decades as the chief justice, reshaping the law in Nixon’s image, until he died in 2005. Nixon named Antonin Scalia as a successor to Rehnquist, as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel—the first real taste of power for the man who has been the most consistently conservative voice in the Supreme Court for the past three decades. Every 5–4 Supreme Court ruling with their names on it—notably, Bush v. Gore , which handed the disputed 2000 election to the candidate who had lost by more than half a million votes—bears the trace of Nixon’s fingerprints.
    Yet three men, and only three, formed the core of Nixon’s inner circle. Two went to prison for crimes committed on the president’s behalf. The third won both the Nobel Peace Prize and condemnation as a war criminal.
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    Harry Robbins Haldeman had been at Nixon’s side as an advance man in the 1960 presidential campaign; he had managed the disastrous 1962 California race; he had remained loyal throughout Nixon’s years of exile. His devotion to the president was superhuman. He worked hundred-hour weeks. He served for 1,561 days as White House chief of staff; in that time, he was physically apart from Nixon for fewer than thirty of those days. Nixon spent more time with Haldeman than with his own wife. No president, and no king, ever had a more devoted servant.
    Haldeman knew his man in intimate detail. He went on full alert when Nixon flagged, stayed sharp when Nixon had had one drink too many, executed the president’s orders when Nixon lacked courage, and scuttled them when they lacked wisdom. Haldeman handled everything. He had a martial air of discipline and order that fitted his military brush cut and his stern and steely gaze. You had to go through him to get to the president. His loyalty was ironclad. But when Nixon let him go, firing him as the Watergate flood tides rose, Haldeman recalled, it was the first time the two men ever shook hands.
    John Newton Mitchell had no experience in law enforcement when he became attorney general of the United States. But he had shown total discipline as Nixon’s campaign manager. From their first meeting at Nixon’s New York law firm, where Mitchell was a named partner, he became fiercely devoted to the man and his ambitions. He would do anything the president asked.
    Mitchell was the unsmiling face of law and order in America, the national police chief. He became a symbol of the power of the government to suppress dissent. He believed that police and federal agents should be able to enter the homes of suspects without warning—“no-knock” laws, as they were known. He pushed for warrantless wiretaps, preventive detention, and other tactics associated with police states. In his most famous political pronouncement (a prophecy fulfilled), he predicted, “This country is going so far right you won’t even recognize it.”
    Nixon wanted Mitchell to strike fear in liberals and leftists with subpoenas and indictments brought by federal prosecutors and grand juries at the command of the Justice Department. Like President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, Nixon sought to use conspiracy and sedition laws against his most vocal political opponents in the name of national security. One of Nixon’s first orders to Attorney General Mitchell was to indict the best-known leaders of the antiwar and Black Power movements. They were tried on political charges that juries found unconvincing.
    To crush Nixon’s left-wing enemies, Mitchell needed the investigative powers of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI since 1924. The Bureau was in theory subordinate to Mitchell. But “Attorneys General seldom directed Mr. Hoover,” Nixon said. “It was difficult even for Presidents.” His increasing inability to command and control Hoover created political frictions fundamental to the disasters that befell his presidency. Mitchell was a lawyer whose