First Principles

Yet another of President Nixon's Watergate men was sentenced to jail last week. This time it was handsome, affable Jeb Stuart Magruder, who was given a ten-month minimum prison term for his entanglement in the Watergate affair (see story page 14). In his statement to Judge John Sirica after sentencing, Magruder confessed that the scandal was beyond his comprehension. Said Magruder: "You cannot measure the impact on this Administration or on this nation of Watergate."

Not long ago, Sheldon S. Wolin, a professor of politics at Princeton University writing in the New York Review of Books, was wrestling with the same problem. He found solace, or at least something of a possible silver lining, in an unlikely source. In the third book of Machiavelli's Discourses, the 15th century Florentine sage declares of bodies such as republics that "those changes are beneficial that bring them back to their original principles. And those are the best-constituted bodies, and have the longest existence, which possess the intrinsic means of frequently renewing themselves." This renewal can be accomplished by a "blow from without," by which Machiavelli clearly means a foreign attack or invasion. But the same effect, he says, can be achieved by "internal occurrences" that test the national system of laws. Machiavelli's point --and Wolin's--is that such blows can turn out to be beneficial, providing they recall and restore the republic to its first principles and ideals.

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