GEORGE WILL: Well, his job today was to cauterize a wound that's really more serious than the Bridgegate name we're giving this and the idea that it's a crisis involving yellow cones on a highway. This was the use of government machinery to punish enemies -- we think, that is. And he's saved himself and cauterized the wound if, but only if, he satisfied the first rule of Crisis Management 101m, which is to get everything out all at once so you don't suffer a kind of water torture of drip, drip, drip.



Second, in rule of crisis management, is don't come out and read a lawyered statement. It was interesting that he came out and used honest, thumping words: sad, embarrassed, humiliated, heartbroken, stupidity. And then third item on the agenda, you act, and he acted by firing someone quite important to him.



The remaining question, assuming that we've heard all the truth here, the remaining question will be is there something in the atmosphere of the governor's office that encouraged rogue behavior on the part of these people? That was the problem in the Nixon White House where they, in so many words, used the machinery of government to punish enemies



BRET BAIER: The culture?



WILL: Yes.



BAIER: We've spent a lot of time talking on this panel about the culture in the Obama administration in a number of different cases that may have led to a number of different things that we've been covering.



WILL: Richard Nixon's simmering resentments, in the sense of embattled paranoia clearly contributed to Watergate, contributed. We don't quite know how yet, but contributed. The question is was there something like that going on in the governor's office?