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SEPTEMBER 19

YESTERDAY, the Washington Post ran a banner story saying that Vice-President Agnew has been discussing the possibility of resigning. The way the Agnew story swept through Washington—the speculation about its truth, its sources, and their motives—is characteristic of the way things work here, especially in recent times. There is the quality of a nervous system about Washington, or, at least, about that part of Washington which professionally concerns itself with official events. Obviously, there are people here who sell shoes and insurance and fix teeth and automobiles and live as people do anywhere else. But there is a constantly growing, bipartisan collection of people here—journalists, politicians, politicians’ aides, lawyers, lobbyists, government workers, hangers-on, and the geological strata of several Administrations’ worth of former officials—who make up what is usually referred to as “Washington,” as in “What does Washington think?” or “What is the mood in Washington?” These people concern themselves with what is going on, whether or not what is going on concerns them. They talk about it over their meals and on their telephones. “Washington” not only does a great deal of talking about what’s happening but also does a great deal of speculating about what might happen. It speculates on the question, say, “Is Teddy going to run?” even though no one—perhaps not even Senator Kennedy himself—really knows the answer as of now.

The news here is more than just news—it is an event, which often affects the subsequent news. The flow of news is to “Washington” what the stock-market ticker tape is to “Wall Street.” People here develop expertise in reading the news, in recognizing signals and spotting shifts in power, and in determining who is leaking what and who is doing what to whom. This, like the speculation, is not just a matter of curiosity. The careers and fortunes of many here rest on their capacity for knowing—or for convincing others that they know—what is what and who is up and who is down and who is on the rise. There are many here who are investors in power—people who aid or befriend a politician, or an important aide or friend of a politician, whose success could enhance their own. Some investors in power propel a Presidential candidate along, fuelling his ambitions and dreams, in the hope of thereby realizing something on their investment. Washingtonians read several newspapers. Washingtonians do not live like other people. On Sundays, when other people are hiking or sailing or doing nothing, many Washingtonians are earnestly going through the thick Sunday papers and watching Meet the Press and Face the Nation. Washingtonians do this even when there is little going on. Someone once said, in a quieter era, “We are in the thick of thin things.” Now we are in the thick of thick things, and at times we are very nearly overwhelmed.

Watergate has been hard on the Washington nervous system. The nervous system responds with some intensity to great, unexpected public events. They alter patterns and assumptions, and that can be disturbing. It is harder to escape the events in Washington, to turn the conversation and the mind to other matters. Most of the people here are here because they want to be; they came from other places and decided to stay. They have an odd combination of idealism and cynicism about the government they watch closely. They impute a certain majesty to the White House and the Capitol, and yet they know that inside those buildings fallible human beings are fumbling their way through the complexities of running the country. They know how fallible those human beings can be, but they still address senators as “Senator” and Cabinet officers as “Mr. Secretary” and think it matters who is Attorney General, and stand up when they hear “Hail to the Chief.” The creation of illusions is part of the process of clothing our government in some dignity. The predisposition to trust our leaders, despite some of the things we know about them, bespeaks an understanding that every free society has to proceed on trust. There is something healthy about our reluctance to shed that trust. We may derive some pleasure from shedding illusions imposed on us by others; there is little pleasure in shedding the illusions we have imposed on ourselves.

Today’s papers report that the White House has invoked executive privilege on a tape of a meeting between President Nixon and milk producers in 1971. It was two days after this meeting that Agriculture Secretary Clifford Hardin, reversing a decision announced thirteen days earlier, ordered an increase in the price support of milk. Following this decision, dairy groups contributed more than four hundred thousand dollars to Republican political committees. Much of the money was given through dummy committees with names like Committee for a Better Nation and Association for More Effective Federal Action Committee. Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, Inc., sued charging that the increase in price supports was in exchange for early contributions to the President’s reëlection. The White House is also claiming executive privilege on a memorandum suggesting a “photo opportunity” between dairy-industry leaders and the President. A “photo opportunity” is when press photographers are permitted a few minutes of picture-taking during a Presidential meeting.

Some of the milk funds were collected by Murray Chotiner, a longtime associate of Richard Nixon’s and now a Washington lawyer. Reading about the milk case last spring, I discovered that one of the dummy committees had been headed by E. Howard Hunt. It was one of those unexpected connections that keep turning up.

The inflation—and who knows what else?—is doing strange things to this country. We have shortages. America is not supposed to have shortages. Shortages are among the things to which we were supposedly invulnerable. There haven’t been this many shortages since the Second World War. Now there appears to be a gasoline shortage—no one seems to know the facts—and the oil companies are advertising on television that we should not buy their products. As of now, there appear to be shortages of lumber, energy, audio- and video-tape, copper, blue-jean dye, meat, paper, bloodworms, gasoline, and tennis balls.

At lunch today, an assistant to the President told me that the worst was over for the President. The situation had, he said, “bottomed out.” The problem for the President now was to reestablish his popularity. The aide said that perhaps the President needed a foreign-policy crisis to divert attention from Watergate and reassert his capacity for leadership in the foreign-policy field.

SEPTEMBER 30

Sunday. Things came unglued last week. On Tuesday, Vice-President Agnew asked the House of Representatives to conduct an inquiry into the charges against him. That same afternoon, Attorney General Richardson released a statement to the effect that he and other officials had been meeting with Agnew’s lawyers “to discuss procedural aspects of the case and options available to the Vice-President,” that the negotiations had broken down, and that the evidence against the Vice-President would be presented to the grand jury. In his letter to the House, the Vice-President said that an investigation by the House provided the best means of “preserving the Constitutional stature of my office and accomplishing my personal vindication.” He suggested that an impeachment inquiry was in order, because “the Constitution bars a criminal proceeding of any kind … against a President or Vice-President while he holds office.”

The Vice-President cited the precedent of a House impeachment inquiry into charges of war profiteering by Vice-President John C. Calhoun. A House committee found Calhoun blameless, and no further action was taken. In the case of Calhoun, however, there were no grand jury or other legal proceedings on the charges taking place. Others felt that another precedent went against the Vice-President’s contention that he could not be prosecuted before he was impeached. In 1872, Vice-President Schuyler Colfax came under investigation for bribery that had taken place earlier in his career. A congressional committee decided that Colfax could not be impeached for crimes that occurred before his election as Vice-President.

On Wednesday, House Democratic leaders rejected Agnew’s request, because, said House Speaker Carl Albert, it “relates to matters before the courts.” Behind the high Constitutional principles evoked by both sides, there were other considerations: Agnew’s hope that the Congress would extricate him from his legal troubles, and the Democrats’ lack of interest in doing so.

On Friday, Agnew’s lawyers moved in court to block the grand-jury proceedings, on the ground that a Vice-President cannot be investigated or indicted by a grand jury unless he is first impeached and removed from office by the Congress. The precedents cited on this question are confusing, and may not even be precedents. Agnew’s lawyers also said that leaks to the press about the investigation had made it impossible for the Vice-President to receive a fair trial. They said that Justice Department officials were responsible for the leaks and were trying “to drive the Vice-President from the office.” The Justice Department issued a statement calling the charges against Department officials “patently ridiculous.”

The case is a skein of conflicting ambitions and exigencies. Richardson, who may have further political ambitions, must maintain a certain distance from both the White House and Agnew. The President is believed by some to want the Vice-President out, because his presence, and a long legal battle, would further scar an already damaged Presidency. But another way to look at it is that as long as there is a Vice-President under a cloud and in the office, the President’s tenure is more secure. Agnew is fighting to save his skin, and he has a very powerful weapon—a following. Agnew has taken to the road to evoke that following. Yesterday, he told the National Federation of Republican Women in Los Angeles that he is “innocent of the charges against me. … I have not used my office,” said the Vice-President, “nor abused my public trust as County Executive, as Governor, or as Vice-President to enrich myself at the expense of my fellow-Americans.” The Vice-President accused Justice Department officials of trying to “destroy me politically through the abuse of the criminal-justice system of the United States.” He said they were doing so in order to compensate for “their ineptness in the prosecution of the Watergate case.” Pointing to Henry Petersen, the Vice-President made an unusual—for the Vice-President—remark about the Watergate case. “A recent examination of his record,” Agnew said, “will show … that he failed to get any of the information out about the true dimensions of the Watergate matter.” The Vice-President said, “I’m a big trophy.” He told the cheering women, “I will not resign if indicted. … I intend to stay and fight.”

In the course of the week, one wise Washington lawyer whom I consulted on the Constitutional question of the impeachment of a Vice-President, professed himself “unwildered” by the rush of events. The Vice-President racing to Capitol Hill, and then his lawyers racing back to the courts. Perhaps the President was “unwildered,” too. Suddenly we were soberly examining “the Calhoun precedent” and “the Colfax precedent”—things most of us had never heard of a week ago.

The Ervin committee resumed its hearings last week. Hunt, released from prison in order to testify, and under pressure from Judge Sirica to coöperate with investigators, was pale and subdued, the disillusioned soldier-at-arms betrayed by friends and by his country. Hunt said, “I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family, as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents.” He told the Ervin committee that payments for legal defense and family subsistence for himself and for his fellow Watergate defendants had stopped before all of the bills had been paid. It was Hunt’s name in the address books of two of the men caught in the Watergate that first linked the break-in to the White House. Hunt, a former employee of the C.I.A., a participant in the Bay of Pigs invasion, seems like a character out of his own forty-odd adventure novels. He was dashing and adventurous, and it was hard to take him seriously, to know what to think about him. It was reported that Hunt, wearing a red wig, had gone out to Denver to see Dita Beard, formerly the I.T.T. Washington lobbyist. What was one to think about that? (Later we learned that the C.I.A. had supplied the wig, and its officials said it was brunette, and objected to reports that it was “ill-fitting.”) Charles Colson testified before a House committee that he had sent Hunt to see Mrs. Beard. Last spring, it was reported that Hunt told the grand jury that, acting on instructions from Colson, and drawing on his own C.I.A. experience, he fabricated cables in an attempt to link the Kennedy Administration with the assassination of South Vietnam’s President Diem in 1963, and tried to leak the cables to the press. What was one to make of that? Hunt also told the grand jury—referring with perhaps unconscious irony to one of Richard Nixon’s triumphs—that there were “technical problems” in preparing the cables “because after the Alger Hiss case everyone was typewriter-conscious.”

The break-in was actually the second one that took place at the Democratic headquarters. The first, on May 27, 1972, was undiscovered and apparently also fruitless. Hunt told the Ervin committee that Liddy “indicated to me in the strongest terms that it was Mr. Mitchell who was insisting” on the second break-in. He said that after taking orders from the C.I.A. for twenty-one years without question, “it never occurred to me to question… the legality, the propriety of anything that might be ordered by the Attorney General of the United States.” The committee released a memorandum from Hunt to Colson, written in July, 1971, on how “to destroy [Ellsberg’s] public image and credibility.” One of the suggestions: “Obtain Ellsberg’s files from his psychiatric analyst.” In a memorandum written in August, 1971, to Colson, Ehrlichman wrote, “On the assumption that the proposed undertaking by Hunt and Liddy would be carried out, and would be successful, I would appreciate receiving from you by next Wednesday a game plan as to how and when you believe the materials should be used.” When Hunt tried to tell Colson about the raid afterward, Colson said, according to Hunt, “ ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it.’ ” (Colson has refused to testify before the Ervin committee.) The raid had failed to produce the psychiatric files. In his San Clemente press conference, the President referred to it as a “dry hole.”

Hunt said that the “parameters of the Gemstone operation” were in two notebooks that he had left in his safe in the White House. Some of the items in Hunt’s safe had been turned over to the former acting F.B.I. director, L. Patrick Gray, who destroyed them. The disclosure in late April of this year that Gray had destroyed the evidence led to Gray’s resignation as acting director of the F.B.I. on the following day. Ehrlichman and Dean gave him the material, Dean saying it “should never see the light of day.” Gray burned the material. The material from Hunt’s safe—including a revolver, microphones in simulated ChapStick containers, bugging equipment, fake cables about Vietnam, a psychological profile of Ellsberg prepared by the C.I.A., and information gathered on Edward Kennedy and Chappaquiddick—left its legacy of damage, and also some of the most striking language of this series of events. Dean has said that Ehrlichman suggested that he shred the sensitive documents, and “deep six” the other material in the Potomac one evening on his way home to Virginia. Ehrlichman denied later that he had made either suggestion. He said that he had never in his life proposed to anyone that they shred papers. He said his practice was to burn them.

Gray had the misfortune of being the acting director of the F.B.I. for a protracted period—he was named in May, 1972, but his nomination was not submitted for confirmation until the following year because, the White House said, the President did not want this sensitive position subjected to election-year politics. And so he was serving as the acting director in the days after the break-in, and also in the following year when the cover-up was coming unravelled. His nomination to be permanent director of the F.B.I. was withdrawn from the Senate in early April. It was disclosed during his confirmation hearings that Dean had sat in on F.B.I. interviews with White House personnel about Watergate, and that Gray had forwarded F.B.I. files on the Watergate investigation to Dean. Gray’s revelations to the Senate Judiciary Committee were also disturbing to the White House, and the subject, Dean has testified, of several meetings with the President. It was during Gray’s extended agony before the Judiciary Committee that Ehrlichman got off another of the memorable lines of this period: “Well, I think we ought to let him hang there. Let him twist, slowly, slowly in the wind.”

Hunt told the Ervin committee of another break-in—one that he and Liddy had planned in 1972—that had not been carried out. The plan was to raid the office safe of Herman M. (Hank) Greenspun, the editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. The plan was drawn up with the coöperation of a security aide to Howard Hughes, with whom, Hunt said, there was a “commonality of interest.” The Washington Post’s, story about Hunt’s testimony says that among the items that Jack Anderson wrote in 1971 and 1972 was one saying that the White House was unhappy about Donald Nixon’s association with an associate of Hughes, and that Bebe Rebozo had once intervened to keep them apart; and that a payment of a hundred thousand dollars had passed from Richard Danner, a Hughes aide, to Bebe Rebozo.

Something else that Hunt said to the Ervin committee stays in one’s mind. He said that he could not “say that the C.I.A. has ever stayed out of domestic activity.” The revelations about the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the White House investigators raise a number of questions concerning the uses of covert agencies in a democratic society. Congressional “oversight” of the covert agencies has been something of a joke. Can we train people in the black arts and then control their practice of their craft?

Last summer, Woodward and Bernstein reported that Hunt had told Ervin-committee investigators that he had been ordered by Colson, within hours after Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace, on May 15, 1972, to break into Bremer’s apartment in Milwaukee. Colson, Hunt said, wanted him to reach the apartment before the F.B.I. did. He said that Colson wanted him to look for evidence that Bremer was connected with left-wing political causes. Hunt, according to the reports, said that the risk of getting caught was too great, and he did not go. Colson denied the reports, calling them “utterly preposterous.” Colson said that he had dined with the President that evening and could not have spoken with Hunt until later. Woodward and Bernstein wrote, “One White House source said that when President Nixon was informed of the shooting, he became deeply upset and voiced concern that the attempt on Governor Wallace’s life might have been made by someone with ties to the Republican Party or the Nixon campaign. If such a tie existed, the source said, the President indicated it could cost him the election.”

A memorandum of a telephone conversation in November, 1972, between Colson and Hunt, taped by Colson, was released by the committee today. It shows Hunt saying to Colson, “There’s a great deal of unease and concern on the part of the seven defendants. … there’s a great deal of financial expense that has not been covered and what we’ve been getting has been coming in very minor [dribs] and drabs. … I thought that you would want to know that this thing must not break apart for foolish reasons. … This is a two-way street and as I said before, we think that now is the time when a move should be made and surely the cheapest commodity available is money.” It shows Colson telling Hunt, “I’m reading you. You don’t need to be more specific. … The less specifics I know, the better off I am, we are, you are.”

Patrick Buchanan, a Presidential speechwriter and the first Ervin-committee witness on the subject of “dirty tricks,” was self-assured and combative. He testified on Wednesday. Buchanan’s memoranda about campaign strategy contained lines such as “We ought to go down to the kennels and turn all the dogs loose on ecology Ed,” and “Who should we get to poke the sharp stick into his cave to bring Muskie howling forth?” Said Buchanan to the committee, “The exaggerated metaphor is really the staple of American political language.”

The Washington Post reported this morning that Tom Charles Huston, author of the President’s 1970 plan for admittedly illegal intelligence-gathering, who is now a lawyer in Indianapolis, has been serving for the past year on a Census Bureau advisory committee on privacy and confidentiality.

OCTOBER 1

Monday. On page 28 of this morning’s New York Times, there is a story about testimony and other evidence gathered for the trial in Los Angeles of a suit against Howard Hughes by a former employee, Robert Maheu. Maheu has given more details of Richard Danner’s delivery of a hundred thousand dollars in cash from Howard Hughes to Bebe Rebozo in 1969 and 1970. He said that the money was delivered in two installments of fifty thousand dollars each. Danner is a former F.B.I. agent, an associate of former Florida Senator George Smathers, and a friend of Rebozo. It was Smathers who introduced Rebozo to Nixon. The Times story also says that in January, 1970, Danner was sent by Hughes to Washington to see Attorney General John Mitchell. In 1968, the Justice Department blocked further acquisitions of casinos in Las Vegas by Hughes. (Negotiations by Hughes interests to buy another casino later went forward, but then fell through.)

Over the weekend, there have been stories about campaign contributions to Mr. Nixon that were revealed as a result of the suit brought by Common Cause to force the disclosure of secret contributions for the President’s reëlection. A story in Saturday’s Washington Post said that Calvin Kovens, a Miami Beach contractor who was convicted, with former Teamsters president James Hoffa, of mail fraud, contributed thirty thousand dollars in cash. It said that Kovens was pardoned eight days after former Senator Smathers called Charles Colson and argued for Kovens’ release. In March, Colson left the White House and joined a law firm in Washington. A few months before he joined the firm, the Teamsters had transferred their business to it from one headed by Edward Bennett Williams and Joseph Califano, which had been counsel to the Democratic National Committee. In 1971, James Hoffa’s sentence was commuted by the President, and Hoffa was released from prison after serving about one-third of his term. Jack Anderson reported in May of this year that the Teamsters raised large amounts of money, most of it in cash, for the President’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns. Much of it, said Anderson, came via Las Vegas casinos financed by Teamsters pension funds. Hoffa was released on terms that prohibited him from participating in Teamsters politics until 1980. In July of this year, Hoffa was reported in the Washington Post to have said he believed that Colson received sizable contributions for the President’s campaign in exchange for keeping him out of Teamsters politics. Colson responded, “No money, not on any occasion, was ever paid to me regarding Mr. Hoffa. The charge would be funny if it was not so serious.”

The information on campaign contributions released last Friday in response to a federal-court order showed that the President’s reëlection committees raised eleven million four hundred thousand dollars in the one-month period before April 7, 1972, when the new campaign finance disclosure law went into effect. The Common Cause suit maintained that the law in effect before April 7th also required disclosure. We had read that lists of those who contributed before that date had been destroyed at the offices of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President. Common Cause, in the course of its suit, discovered, almost by chance, that one list survived—in the desk drawer of the President’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods. There is no way of knowing whether the information that has now been supplied as a result of the suit is complete.

The newly released figures show that sixty million two hundred thousand dollars was raised to reëlect the President. This is almost twice as much as was reported to have been raised for his nomination and election in 1968, and the total of sixty million two hundred thousand dollars does not include funds raised by “Democrats for Nixon,” headed by John Connally, and from certain Republican groups.

Common Cause released a preliminary breakdown of contributions made to Nixon between January 1, 1971, and April 6, 1972. The amounts were: the auto and tire industry, $307,000; chemicals, $950,000; construction, engineering, and architects, $370,000; dairy, $232,000; entertainment, $580,000; financial (banking, securities, and insurance), $4,470,000; food and food processing, $295,000; mining, $125,000; oil and gas, $1,410,000; pharmaceutical and health, $1,120,000; real estate, $1,005,000; textiles, $312,000; transportation (airlines, railroads, and shipping), $425,000; government officials (including ambassadors), $1,011,000; defense and aerospace contractors, $501,000.

The Ervin-committee hearings showed how rivers of cash flowed from contributors to Maurice Stans, former Secretary of Commerce and chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President, and to Herbert Kalmbach, associate chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President and the President’s personal attorney; and to safes and secret funds; and to the “Gemstone” plan for espionage and sabotage of the Democrats; and to the “legal-defense fund” for the Watergate Seven. Stans and former Attorney General Mitchell were indicted, along with the financier Robert Vesco, last May, for conspiracy to defraud the United States and to obstruct an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into Vesco’s financial affairs, and Mitchell and Stans have also been indicted for perjury, in connection with a contribution by Vesco of two hundred thousand dollars. (This case was brought by the United States Attorney’s office in New York and was not part of the Special Prosecutor’s efforts.)

The material released last Friday shows that the President’s reëlection committees spent almost five million dollars in the two days before the new law took effect. According to Common Cause, most of it went in prepayments for services that the committees would apparently rather have had remain undisclosed. Among the recipients of funds listed on Friday with the Clerk of the House were G. Gordon Liddy, Anthony Ulasewicz, Donald Segretti (retained to carry out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats), John Caulfield, Seymour Freidin (one of two journalists retained by Murray Chotiner to spy on the McGovern campaign), and Chotiner.

OCTOBER 2

At the White House, John Love, former governor of Colorado and now in charge of the Administration’s energy program, and Rogers Morton, the Secretary of the Interior, explain to the press a new program of mandatory allocation of propane gas and a plan for federal supply-management of heating oil. This is the first energy allocation since the Second World War. The energy officials say that it will be “temporary.”

The President and Mrs. Nixon dined last night at Trader Vic’s restaurant. Yesterday, the President went for an automobile drive with General Alexander Haig, now his chief of staff. Several of the reporters are edgy, and wonder what’s going on. They also become edgy, and wonder what’s going on, when the President stays secluded.

Last weekend, a special Senate committee issued a report that says there are now over four hundred and seventy statutes in which the Congress has given the President special powers that he may use in a period of national emergency. The report also points out that we have been in a state of national emergency since 1933. Among the things that these statutes say the President may do in a period of national emergency are declare martial law, send troops anywhere in the world, call up the Reserves, seize and control all means of transportation, regulate all private enterprise, restrict travel, and seize property. Some of the emergency powers have been around for some time, and have been put to imaginative use. The Feed and Forage Act of 1861 was passed in order to permit the President to provide food and clothing to Civil War troops and forage for their horses without the specific approval of the Congress. In that period, the Congress met in short sessions; the law was passed, amid a general tightening of restrictions on the President’s powers, to assure that the troops would be fed and clothed while the Congress was not in session. The Feed and Forage Act of 1861 has been used in recent years to circumvent congressional restrictions on paying for the war in Southeast Asia. It has been estimated that more than ten billion dollars was spent for the war by this circumvention alone.

The committee, headed by Senators Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, and Charles Mathias, Republican of Maryland, is considering legislation to repeal the state of national emergency.

There was a time last spring when it seemed that the most dramatic question was whether John Dean would “finger” other members of the White House staff. Now we hear people considering the possibility that both the Presidency and Vice-Presidency will be vacated before their four-year term has been served. Ever adaptive, people here are beginning to consider this heretofore inconceivable possibility. One can hear conversations about what should happen next. There are discussions as to whether Carl Albert, the Speaker of the House and second in line for the Presidency, should step down in favor of someone else who might then be made President. It has been noted that one does not have to be a member of the House of Representatives to be Speaker of the House. Neither Democrats nor many Republicans are interested in having Agnew replaced by someone who would run for President in 1976, and might profit from incumbency. One hears all manner of schemes for filling the highest and second-highest offices in the land.

OCTOBER 3

The President came into the pressroom today. This usually means that he wants to be seen, and heard, and make some point, without submitting to a regular press conference. Because most of the reporters must stand, the President was almost impossible to see—a disembodied voice. A brief glimpse of him showed that he was wearing a blue suit and makeup. The television lights were on, and it was hot in the crowded room. This part of the White House used to hold a swimming pool. Early in the Nixon Administration, it was transformed into comfortable quarters for the press. The press used to lounge around in the West Wing lobby, where there was some opportunity to observe some of the comings and goings there. These new quarters have put the press at a further remove.

Today, the President confirmed an announcement just made by the White House press office that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is going to Peking. But it was clear that the President was prepared for questions about Agnew. That may be why he was there. He praised Agnew’s “distinguished service as Vice-President” and said that he regarded Agnew’s decision to remain in office as “an altogether proper one.” He said that the charges against the Vice-President “do not relate in any way to his activities as Vice-President of the United States.” Nixon said, however, that the allegations against the Vice-President were “serious and not frivolous.” Afterward, the President’s statements were closely scrutinized for their meaning. The President appears to be trapped by, and somewhat frightened of, the Vice-President. Reporters’ conversations with White House staff members confirm this. The President is said to be worried that the Vice-President will turn his constituency against the President. The President is trapped, politically and Constitutionally.

The Presidential candidate bestows the opportunity to run for Vice-President on some grateful politician, but there is no way for a President to oust a Vice-President. The assumption has always been that the Vice-President is in the President’s thrall. It could also be the other way around. Richard Nixon selected Spiro Agnew as his running mate in 1968 in order to build a certain constituency, and kept him on the ticket in 1972 because Agnew had succeeded in doing so. Now that Nixon is in trouble, he needs Agnew’s constituency. It is the conservative constituency of the Republican Party. It was also what George Will, of the National Review, has called the “constituency of the discontented.” Agnew, like Nixon, appealed to the anger and discontent in America. He articulated grievances. His speeches against the media were powerful because they reached that part of people that distrusted the power of the media, and its control in “Eastern” hands. These were old themes, to which Agnew gave fresh currency. His vocabulary articulated the historic streak of anti-intellectualism, anti-liberalism, in America. It was the dark side of populism. It caught the illiberalism of liberalism, liberalism’s own distrust of the people. It was never clear whether Agnew believed these things or not.

Maryland is just down the road from Washington, yet we in Washington were only vaguely aware of Agnew as he rose in Maryland politics. Many of our friends live in Maryland, yet for many of us Maryland is as remote as, say, Illinois or Louisiana and its politics as impenetrable. I first recall hearing about Agnew on my radio, when he was running for governor, and he had a campaign song, to the tune “My Kind of Town.” The first line of his song went, “My kind of man, Ted Agnew is,” and I wondered who Ted Agnewis was. He defeated a many-times candidate who ran on the slogan “Your home is your castle,” which, in that context, was anti-integration, not pro-Fourth Amendment. So we had the impression that Agnew was a moderate. Agnew, the Vice-President, gradually came to be looked upon—as people who might actually attain the office are—as a possible President. His style encouraged that process. There was a certain dignity about Agnew, a peculiar sort of elegance. Erect, with those narrow eyes and silky voice, he was always very neat, well-groomed. In style, he was manicured and mean. It was never clear whether the Presidency was Agnew’s ambition or that of those around him, the investors in power. From time to time, he gave interviews suggesting that he really did not care to be President, and his statements did not sound like the standard demurrers. Agnew said he might prefer to make some money. But he adapted to the trappings of the Vice-Presidency—his own plane, the Palm Springs spa of his new friend, Frank Sinatra.

Agnew was, at first, given an office in the White House. Then he was shunted across the way, to the Executive Office Building. It was said at the outset that he would have an important hand in domestic policy. He ended up dealing with Indians and taking trips and making speeches. When he went out to make speeches, it was said that the President had “unleashed Agnew.” In 1972, there was a slight flurry over whether Agnew would be kept on the ticket or might be “dumped” in favor of John Connally. But Agnew had built his constituency. At the conventions in 1968 and 1972 “Dick” and “Ted” stood arm in arm, beaming and waving to the cheering conventioneers. Now they are locked in a death grip.

OCTOBER 6

A Justice Department memorandum printed in today’s papers argues, by somewhat tortured reasoning, that the Vice-President can be indicted before he is impeached but the President cannot. The memorandum concedes that the Constitution makes no such distinction. The distinction is made, rather, it says, because of “the singular importance of the Presidency.” It says that should a Vice-President who is under indictment succeed to the Presidency, the criminal proceedings could stop and impeachment could begin.

This week, the Providence Journal reported that the President and Mrs. Nixon paid $792.81 in income taxes for 1970, and $878.03 for 1971. Other papers picked up the story. Gerald Warren, who now conducts the White House press briefings, said, responding to queries, “We consider that the President’s tax returns are private, just like any other citizen’s, and we’re not going to comment further.”

The Green Book, Washington’s social register, was published this week. The Haldemans, the Ehrlichmans, the Deans, the Magruders, and the Stanses have been dropped. A press release accompanying publication of the book said that the changes were the result of “an upheaval in Washington officialdom unprecedented without a change in Administration.” In an interview, Mrs. Carolyn Hagner Shaw, who says that she compiles the book with an anonymous five-member board, observed that compiling it this year was “some job.”

This morning, war broke out in the Middle East.

OCTOBER 10

The phone call that comes in the early afternoon saying that the Vice-President has resigned is astonishing. I had thought about the event, even anticipated it. Now reality, as it has done in other instances, other contexts, has betrayed anticipation. We had been getting ready for this, and we hadn’t.

Agnew is on television, coming out of the courthouse in Baltimore. His face is expressionless. He has pleaded nolo contendere to a single charge of federal-income-tax evasion. Moments earlier, he resigned as Vice-President. The judge called the no-contest plea “the full equivalent of a plea of guilty.” Agnew has been sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation and a fine of ten thousand dollars. In exchange, the government has agreed not to press the other charges, of alleged acts of extortion and bribery, the details of which shall be made public. Agnew has told the court that he chose to resign, and not to fight the charges against him, because to do otherwise “would seriously prejudice the national interest.” On television, Agnew is still defiant. He points out, “The principal witnesses of the government are not being fully prosecuted,” and goes on to say, “I will make an address to the nation within a few days.”

On a CBS Special this evening, we see the congressional leaders leaving the White House. Carl Albert, as Speaker of the House, is now first in line of succession for the Presidency. After Albert, the next in line is Senator James Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi. Eastland is now second in line for the Presidency by virtue of having served in the Senate longer than any other member of the majority party. He thereby holds the ceremonial post of president pro tempore of the Senate, who under normal circumstances is third in line of succession.

Walter Cronkite says that “the big question tonight” is who will succeed Agnew. Cronkite lists some names that are being mentioned: Governor Nelson Rockefeller, of New York; Governor Ronald Reagan, of California; John Connally; Representative Gerald Ford, Republican of Michigan, the Minority Leader of the House; Senator Hugh Scott, Republican of Pennsylvania, the Minority Leader of the Senate; William P. Rogers, the former Secretary of State; Elliot Richardson; Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense and now a White House adviser; George Bush, chairman of the Republican National Committee; William Scranton; Howard Baker.

Now the procedure for selecting a new Vice-President will have to be invented. There is no precedent for this situation. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for filling the office of the Vice-President if it should become vacant, says simply, “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice-President, the President shall nominate a Vice-President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.” The Amendment was approved by the Congress in 1965 and was ratified by the required three-fourths of the states by 1967. Now no one is sure how it should work.

When the Congress enacted the Twenty-fifth Amendment, it had other concerns besides filling a Vice-Presidential vacancy. The section dealing with this was in fact added almost as an afterthought. The main concern, which the Amendment also deals with, was the question of what to do in the case of disability of the President. Some think that this section is unclear, too. The Twenty-fifth Amendment was enacted in part because the men who were next in line when Lyndon Johnson assumed the Presidency, after Kennedy’s assassination, in 1963, were very old. Johnson had suffered a heart attack some years earlier. The Speaker of the House, John McCormack, was in his seventies; the president pro tempore of the Senate, Carl Hayden, was in his eighties. We watched them uneasily as they sat, slack-jawed, behind the President when he addressed the Congress.

The Washington Star-News reports that, through a set of transactions arranged by Charles Colson, five thousand dollars in money contributed by the milk producers in 1971 was used to finance the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

OCTOBER 11

Today will be a day of speculation and rumors and attempts to grasp the situation. We’ve never been here before.

Yesterday’s “Dear Mr. President” and “Dear Ted” letters between the President and the former Vice-President are in this morning’s papers. They are at once cordial and guarded, each man protecting his position.

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:

As you are aware, the accusations against me cannot be resolved without a long, divisive and debilitating struggle in the Congress and in the Courts. I have concluded that, painful as it is to me and to my family, it is in the best interests of the Nation that I relinquish the Vice-Presidency.

Accordingly, I have today resigned the Office of Vice-President of the United States. A copy of the instrument of resignation is enclosed.

It has been a privilege to serve with you. May I express to the American people, through you, my deep gratitude for their confidence in twice electing me to be Vice-President.

Sincerely,
SPIRO T. AGNEW

DEAR TED:

The most difficult decisions are often those that are the most personal, and I know your decision to resign as Vice President has been as difficult as any facing a man in public life could be. Your departure from the Administration leaves me with a great sense of personal loss. You have been a valued associate throughout these nearly five years that we have served together. However, I respect your decision, and I also respect the concern for the national interest that led you to conclude that a resolution of the matter in this way, rather than through an extended battle in the Courts and the Congress, was advisable in order to prevent a protracted period of national division and uncertainty.

As Vice President, you have addressed the great issues of our times with courage and candor. Your strong patriotism, and your profound dedication to the welfare of the Nation, have been an inspiration to all who have served with you as well as to millions of others throughout the country.

I have been deeply saddened by this whole course of events, and I hope that you and your family will be sustained in the days ahead by a well-justified pride in all that you have contributed to the Nation by your years of service as Vice President.

Sincerely,
RICHARD NIXON

The Agnew story dominates this morning’s papers, but there are other items of interest. The war in the Middle East is growing worse. The United States government says it believes that the Soviet Union is airlifting supplies to Egyptian and Syrian forces. The State Department says that this would “put a new face on” the Middle East conflict. There are reports that the United States may increase its military supplies to Israel. The 1967 war lasted six days. It is now the sixth day since this war broke out, and there is no prospect of an end.

It is a gray, chilly day. In Washington, the autumns are usually warm and lovely. It is often warm enough here to play tennis, and sail on Chesapeake Bay, through November. Along Pennsylvania Avenue today, there are flags with orange, green, and white stripes, marking the official visit to the United States of the President of the Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouet-Boigny. Some things don’t change. For as long as I can remember, Félix Houphouet-Boigny has been President of the Ivory Coast and has been visiting Washington. As I approach the White House, cannons fire, and a helicopter rises from the South Lawn. The President has seen his official visitor off.

On television, Elliot Richardson is holding a press conference at the Justice Department on the way in which the Agnew case was settled. The Department has released a document titled “Exposition of the Evidence Against Spiro T. Agnew Accumulated by the Investigation in the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland as of October 10, 1973,” which covers forty pages. It tells of the transactions by which Agnew allegedly arranged for cash payments from engineering firms and others with state business in exchange for state-awarded work. According to the charges, some of the payments were made while Agnew was Vice-President. Agnew has claimed that the evidence is false.

Victor Gold, to my surprise, keeps a lunch date we made last week for today. Gold was Agnew’s press secretary for a time, and has just begun to work as a newspaper columnist. His career has been closely tied to that of Agnew. During Agnew’s recent troubles, Gold was an outspoken defender of the Vice-President, and suggested that the Vice-President was the victim of a White House plot—perhaps to replace Agnew with Connally, or, at least, to divert attention from the President’s troubles. Gold has a rather famous temper, but he is popular with the press, because he understands its job and he has a sense of humor. Today, Gold, usually a voluble man, is subdued. He seems to be in shock. We eat at the Sans Souci. The Sans Souci, around the corner from the White House, is Washington’s “see-and-be-seen” restaurant. Today, William Safire, former Nixon speechwriter and now a columnist for the New York Times, is lunching with Patrick Buchanan; Ken W. Clawson, deputy director of the White House Office of Communications, is here; and so is Charles Colson. One day last summer, I saw James McCord lunching at the Sans Souci.

“I should have been more cynical,” says Vic Gold, shaking his head sorrowfully. “I grew up in Louisiana, and when I was twelve years old I saw my governor go to jail.” A bit later, he says, “It’s like Watergate. You don’t know what you’re in.” Gold says that conservatives are telephoning him, very upset. When the former Vice-President said emphatically that he would not resign, they had believed him. Gold says that conservatives are also upset about what is going on at the White House. And some still suspect the President “dumped” Agnew. Gold himself is in a difficult position. After lunch, I walk back with him to his office, at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue. There is a thick stack of slips noting phone calls that came in while he was at lunch. He is being besieged by requests for interviews, television appearances. “Frankly,” he says, pacing the floor of his office, “I don’t know what to do.” On the walls of his office are large photographs of Agnew and Gold conferring, and of Agnew, waving and smiling, emerging from a plane that bears the seal of the Vice-President.

The flags of the Ivory Coast have been removed from Pennsylvania Avenue. Supporters of Israel are demonstrating in front of the White House. Supporters of the Arabs are demonstrating across Pennsylvania Avenue, in Lafayette Park. Six years ago, it was the other way around: Arabs in front of the White House, Israelis in Lafayette Park.

The town is dense with rumors and speculation. A reporter encountered after lunch on Connecticut Avenue says, “It’ll be Warren Burger on Tuesday.” John Connally is believed to be out of the running for the Vice-Presidency, because he would meet strong opposition from the Congress. His change of parties doesn’t make him particularly popular with either one. And there is something about Connally that stirs dislike in politicians. He is big, noisy, and unpredictable. He not only opposes—he rubs it in.

A new word has been given currency—“caretaker.” Words become fashionable quickly here, even when, as in this case, they do not quite fit. In the present context, a “caretaker” would be a Vice-President without further ambitions. If he became President, he would not run again. Some politicians want a “caretaker” for what they see as statesmanlike reasons—to provide stability. Others, of course, have less detached reasons, but few will talk about them out loud. Everyone wants to appear statesmanlike now. The removal of a Vice-President on a relatively “minor” charge is seen by some as making it more possible that a President might be removed on less than grand grounds. If the President selects someone who attracts wide support, a figure of “national unity,” he might have more trouble remaining President. These thoughts must have occurred to Mr. Nixon.

Just before six this evening, the President took off in his helicopter for Camp David, his Maryland retreat. A few minutes later, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott drove up to the White House. Ford told reporters he had come to deliver the House members’ proposals for the Vice-Presidency—a hundred and sixty-three of them.

OCTOBER 12

On the evening news, it is announced that the President made his decision about the next Vice-President at dawn today at Camp David. It is reported that he has chosen from among five men who were under final consideration. He will disclose his decision at the White House this evening. This is earlier than had been expected. Presumably, the information that the choice was made at dawn is included to add drama, but dawn has bad connotations. The President chose Agnew at dawn. At dawn, in 1970, the President went to the Lincoln Memorial to talk about football with the peace demonstrators.

It is also announced on tonight’s news that the Court of Appeals has ruled that the President must turn the tapes over to the court. The court said that for the President to be able to decide what information he must surrender would be “an invitation to refashion the Constitution.” The court said that it had hoped the President and the Special Prosecutor could work out a compromise on the tapes.

Yesterday, Egil Krogh, thirty-four, was indicted for lying to the grand jury about the work of the plumbers. This was the first in what is expected to be a series of indictments obtained by the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox.

It is hard to know what to call the television spectacle that is broadcast from the East Room of the White House tonight. The Cabinet is present. Many members of Congress are also there, including some Democrats—by and large, Southern senators and senior members of the House. The President has played on their institutional confusion. The Supreme Court declined to come. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are there. The President says, as he has said before, that it is “vital that we turn away from the obsessions of the past.” He says, “This is a time for a new beginning.” He succeeds, maddeningly, in drawing us into his guessing game about his choice. It will be someone who agrees with him on foreign policy and defense matters, he says. It will be someone with executive ability. Someone who can work with the Congress. (Maybe Senator Henry Jackson, Democrat of Washington? That would be a stroke, neutralizing the Democrats.) He says that his choice has served in the Congress for twenty-five years. That still leaves a number of possibilities. But the congressional leaders, and then the others in the room, are standing and clapping and cheering. I am embarrassed for Gerald Ford when he does not stand up. There must be some mistake. Can it be Ford? Ford has the reputation of being a somewhat limited spear-carrier for the Republicans. Ford is a clubman, steady, courteous, and well liked on Capitol Hill. There are no sharp edges on him—of brilliance or of meanness. His name was not taken very seriously when it came up in the speculation. But now it is clear that Nixon’s choice is Ford.

The President congratulates his nominee, and the crowd in the East Room is jubilant. “They like you,” the President says to Ford. They do; Ford is one of them. The President and the Vice-President-designate, arm in arm, smile at the crowd in the East Room.

OCTOBER 15

Monday. Behind the statements of several members of Congress today about how deliberate the consideration of Ford must be, there is some embarrassment over the scene in the East Room on Friday night, and there is also the idea that Ford’s confirmation should be delayed until the President’s situation becomes clearer. There is the issue of the tapes. The Ervin-committee staff is reported to have been told four conflicting stories about the circumstances of the payment of a hundred thousand dollars by Howard Hughes to Bebe Rebozo. Some people are questioning why a President in so much trouble should be able to choose his successor. But who else could do it? The Twenty-fifth Amendment did not foresee this situation. Who could?

Today, I asked a Democratic Senate aide who is in the traffic patterns on Capitol Hill why the issue of whether the President obeys a court decision on the tapes was the focus of the impeachment talk. This man knows a lot about not only just what is going on, but what it might mean. “Because it provides a high-minded reason for impeachment,” he replied. “If the President defies the Supreme Court, that would overturn the concept of how America works which has held since Marbury v. Madison.” In Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, the Supreme Court ruled that the Supreme Court did not have to enforce an act of the Congress which it found un-Constitutional. The aide also said that defiance of the Supreme Court was “something clear-cut that the members of Congress could seize on, as opposed to corruption, break-ins, or the Fourth Amendment.”

At lunch, a Republican member of the House said that Ford had been more a “White House man” than a leader of the House Republicans. He also said, “Jerry is popular because he is not a leader. If he were a leader, he would not be popular.”

A Democratic senator said today that he did not think Ford was Presidential material, and that a lot of his colleagues shared his view. I asked him why others did not say so publicly. “Because if they say something nice about him, he’ll be nice to them,” the senator said. “A lot of those people spend their time currying favor. He might be President, you know.”

Agnew, in his television address tonight, suddenly looks like an old man. He seems shrunken, his face more creased. Perhaps it is the gray suit that makes his face appear ashen despite the makeup. The former Vice-President is sitting in a mock office in a television studio. It is painful to watch the former Vice-President speak tonight, but this seems to be something he needs to do. Mr. Agnew says that his plea last week was “not an admission of guilt but a plea of no contest, done to still the raging storm.” He has some bitter words for the Maryland contractors who allegedly participated with him in the kickback scheme, and then did him in. “They know where the questionable propositions originate,” he says. “They know how many shoddy schemes a political man must reject in the course of carrying out his office.” Then the Vice-President gives, in effect, a little chalk talk about the process of corruption of politicians. He explains the “pressures for favoritism” under systems of noncompetitive contract bidding—pressures that exist “at every level of government in this country.” He also explains that public officials “face the unpleasant but unavoidable necessity of raising substantial sums of money to pay their campaign and election expenses.” Then he explains, “In the forefront of those eager to contribute always have been the contractors seeking non-bid state awards.” He says that the series of charges against him “boils down to the accusation that I permitted my fund-raising activities and my contract-dispensing activities to overlap in an unethical and unlawful manner.” Then the former Vice-President says, in a bitter tone, “Perhaps, judged by the new, post-Watergate political morality, I did.” And he calls for “public financing for every political candidate.” This is a more radical reform than almost anyone else has suggested.

After the former Vice-President finishes speaking, Victor Gold, appearing on CBS, is asked what the point was of Agnew’s speaking at this stage. Gold replies, slowly, “I have no idea.”

OCTOBER 16

Just before lunchtime, the news came over the tickers that Marines were boarding an aircraft carrier headed for the Mediterranean. Nobody knows what it means.

At a restaurant, some aides of former Vice-President Agnew are being taken to lunch by reporters. It may be the last time.

The city seems to be reeling around amidst the events and the breaking stories. In the restaurants, the noise level is higher. At the end of the day, someone says, “It’s like being drunk.”

OCTOBER 17

This morning’s papers report that Melvin Laird told reporters yesterday that he had warned the President to expect an impeachment move by the Congress if he rejected an order by the Supreme Court to surrender the tapes. The President, of course, could have known this if he read the newspapers, but it has never been clear to what extent the President reads the newspapers, or to what extent the news summaries prepared under the supervision of Patrick Buchanan give him the bad news. Laird, a former House Republican leader and then Defense Secretary who went to the White House to serve as counsellor in June, is proficient at playing the press, and he is shrewd, and he is enmeshed in Republican politics, and from long habit we read stories about Laird to try to figure out why he is saying what he is saying. We even read stories that do not mention Laird—such as columns by the team of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who are close to Laird—to try to figure out why Laird is saying what he is saying. Laird usually has a reason. It is fair to guess that two purposes of yesterday’s comment by Laird were (1) to send a message to the President, to whom Laird is said not to have much access, and (2) to keep Laird’s public record on the issue of the tapes clear. Laird also said that “several weeks ago” he discussed with Gerald Ford the possibility of Agnew’s resignation and of Ford’s replacing Agnew.

A House subcommittee has just completed hearings on federal spending on the President’s private homes. Among the disclosures during the hearings were that two thousand dollars in government funds was spent for a black-and-white terrazzo shuffleboard court and that eleven thousand five hundred dollars was spent for a redwood, rather than a wire-mesh, fence. The hearings showed that on a number of occasions the improvements were ordered by Herbert Kalmbach or by others handling the President’s private affairs, who later billed the government. We have also read that the government supplied the President’s home at San Clemente with Mexican lanterns designed by the President’s architect.

In the October issue of Fortune, Dan Cordtz writes of the “monarchical life style to which U.S. Presidents have grown accustomed.” He says that “only the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency is harder to calculate than that of the Presidency.” He says that the thirteen-million-dollar White House budget “ludicrously understates” the cost of maintaining the Presidency, and says that the cost may be as high as a hundred million dollars a year. He says that the air fleet now at the disposal of the President, his family, and his staff includes five specially fitted Boeing 707 jetliners (President Johnson had three), sixteen specially soundproofed helicopters, and Lockheed Jetstars that often serve as courier planes to carry mail and staff assistants when the President is away from Washington. The Presidential air-conditioning bill, he says, is increased by Mr. Nixon’s habit, copied by some of his aides, of keeping a fire burning in his fireplace even in summer. Cordtz reports that an official car has been used to provide private transportation to Camp David for the President’s Irish setter, King Timahoe. He also reports that a group of Californians have given the President a golf course at San Clemente.

Early in the Nixon Administration, the Nixons began the custom of having, at social occasions, smartly uniformed trumpeters, their medieval horns draped with heraldic banners, trumpet the imminent approach of the President of the United States.

At dinner, a House Democrat of some influence says that he would like Vice-Presidential nominee Gerald Ford to become President soon. He says he would not mind if Ford were to be the Republican candidate for President in 1976. “It’ll be easy to knock him off,” he says.

OCTOBER 18

Yesterday, officers of three corporations—American Airlines, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company—pleaded guilty to making illegal corporate contributions to the President’s reëlection campaign. Archibald Cox said that some other corporate indictments could be expected.

On the evening news, Senator Kennedy says that Congress should reject Ford’s nomination “if Mr. Ford refuses to acknowledge the obligation of the President to obey the Supreme Court” in the matter of the tapes.