Not a Single Note of Joy

Months of struggle, of strategy, of sacrifice all paid off in a landslide victory for President Richard Nixon in 1972. On election night his aide Charles Colson was in the place he had always wanted to be. The picture Colson draws of that night contains three figures: chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, arrogant and sullen; Nixon, restlessly gulping scotch; and Colson, feeling let down, deflated, “a deadness inside me.”

Three men at the power pinnacle of the world, and not a single note of joy discernible in the room. “If someone had peered in on us that night from some imaginary people in…