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"The man has been under extraordinary pressure for more than a year," Dr. Silverman says. "Mr. Nixon seems to keep his emotions under such control that we might have expected physical instead of emotional breakdown."
Dr. Silverman believes that the reports of Mr. Nixon's "serenity" between the resignation and the pardon could have been taken as indicators that emotions were bottled up and physical illness was near. Later reports, he adds, that Mr. Nixon refused to allow the afflicted leg to be bandaged, declined the prescribed anticoagulant drug and put off entering a hospital all point toward possible self-destructive impulses.
"It's also interesting that the phlebitis apparently didn't recur until the pardon was in the offing. I have no way of knowing whether Mr. Nixon has any unconscious guilt. But if he does, with the threat of legal punishment now removed, the only punishing force left is himself. That's why pardons can kill."