In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee uncovered a plan that had been hatched three years earlier by a man named Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison to the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), a group chaired FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to monitor “left wing radicals.” The Huston Plan, as it was known, laid out detailed operations to burglarize the homes and conduct electronic surveillance of these co-called radicals and even detain anti-war protesters in camps to be created in western states. President Richard Nixon signed off on the plan only to rescind his approval a few days later under objections from Hoover himself. It was one of a number of nefarious plots uncovered during the investigations, including the actual burglarizing of Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, an order to bomb the Brooking s Institute and the Watergate burglary itself. The Huston Plan was one that was never carried out but went directly to the president who signed the order. I bring this obscure bit of Watergate lore up because it was the Huston plan that precipitated a very important historical question posed to Nixon by David Frost in their interviews in 1977. Frost asked Nixon: So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations and the Huston plan or that part of it was one of them where the president can decide that it’s in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal. Nixon famously replied, “well, when…