On a hot, drizzly Friday in August more than 51 years ago, I stood with other reporters on a temporary riser outside the East Wing of the White House. There, we watched as a disgraced Richard Nixon climbed the stairs to a presidential helicopter, turned at the doorway, extended his arms in a bizarre victory salute, and flew off into history.

A short time later, we were ushered into the East Room, where Nixon had earlier given an emotional farewell speech to his staff. Now we witnessed the swearing-in of Gerald Ford as the 38th president of the United States. In a brief, eloquent address to an overflow crowd of more than 300, Ford called for healing and reconciliation. “Let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate,” he urged.

At the end of the ceremony, Chief Justice Warren Burger, who had administered the oath of office to Ford, put his hand on the shoulder of Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and said with tears in his eyes, “Thank God, it works.” Burger clearly meant the Constitution, the rule of law, the system of checks and balances, and a peaceful transfer of power under the unprecedented circumstances of the Watergate scandal.

It hasn’t been working lately.

Taking my brother-in-law on a Washington sightseeing tour not long ago, I walked with him past the White House, where a crane was at work demolishing the last of the East Wing to make way for President Donald Trump’s grandiose gilded ballroom. A uniformed Secret Service agent wearing body armor, a pistol holstered across his chest, stood guard at a closed gate that had admitted thousands of visitors a year to the “people’s house.” I couldn’t help thinking that, just as the historic structure