Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall

MARCH 1, 1974

IN COLD PRINT, and in stark language, the fifty-page indictment handed up by the Watergate grand jury today charges that seven former associates of the President “and other persons to the Grand Jury known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly did combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to commit offenses against the United States.” The first count charges that the conspiracy began on or about June 17, 1972, the date of the break-in at the Watergate, and continued “up to and including the date of the filing of this indictment.”

The past two months have been relatively quiet. To the extent that there were significant events during this period, I’ll touch on them later. Now with the indictment, and concurrent preparations by the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry staff, this struggle has entered a new and still more dramatic phase.

The major attention today is not so much on the details of the indictment as on a sealed report handed to Judge John Sirica by the grand jury foreman, Vladimir Pregelj, and on a locked briefcase handed to Sirica by Richard Ben-Veniste, Assistant Special Prosecutor. Immediately, the speculation was that it contained information about President Nixon and was intended for the House Judiciary Committee. We know already, as a result of a disclosure by the President at his press conference last week, that the grand jury sought to question him and he declined.

Among those named in the indictment today were John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, and Charles Colson. Also indicted were Gordon Strachan, former aide to Haldeman; Robert Mardian, former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice; and Kenneth W. Parkinson, an attorney for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President.

Even though the indictment was expected, it came as a hammer blow. That keeps happening: the impact of the actual event is sharper and more disturbing than was anticipated. We can anticipate the facts but not their impact, their emotional reverberations. So we are unnerved when seven former Administration and reëlection-committee officials— including the President’s closest associates, men who held great power—are indicted. The indictment is for conspiracy to cover up the Watergate break-in. The purpose of the cover-up was to keep the public from finding out the extent of official involvement in the break-in and the surrounding activities and so prevent damage to the President’s chances of reëlection. (John Mitchell told the Ervin committee last summer, speaking of the period following the discovery of the break-in, “I still believe that the most important thing to this country was the reëlection of Richard Nixon.”) In that sense, the cover-up worked.

There are those who believe that the cover-up has proved far more damaging to the President than the discovery of what was being covered up would have. Many discussions have taken place here as to whether the President could have spared himself this agony, and, if so, when. But the problem for the White House, as we keep learning, was that there was so much to cover up. The break-in at the Watergate combined the elements of covert operations, espionage, secret funds, hidden contributions, and aggression against political opponents (real and perceived) which also characterized other activities carried out under the Administration. Perhaps the President was trapped all along. The indictment charges that the seven men and others “known and unknown” conspired “to obstruct justice … to make false statements to a government agency … to make false declarations … and to defraud the United States and Agencies and Departments thereof, to wit, the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), and the Department of Justice, of the Government’s right to have the officials of these Departments and Agencies transact their official business honestly and impartially, free from corruption, fraud, improper and undue influence, dishonesty, unlawful impairment and obstruction.” The defendants, it says, did “knowingly make and cause to be made false statements” to the F.B.I. and the grand jury; they did, “by deceit, craft, trickery and dishonest means, defraud the United States by interfering with and obstructing the lawful governmental functions of the C.I.A.” It accuses them of seeking the release of one or more of the men imprisoned for the Watergate break-in; of destroying records; of “covertly” raising cash and paying it to the Watergate defendants; of making and causing to be made “offers of leniency, executive clemency and other benefits” to Hunt, Liddy, McCord, and Magruder; and of attempting to obtain financial assistance from the C.I.A. for the Watergate defendants. The indictment includes thirteen counts against the various defendants and lists forty-five “overt acts” to describe the conspiracy. Several of the charges are based on the word of John Dean.

When, last June, Dean described the cover-up to the Ervin committee, there was reason to suspend belief, reserve judgment. Dean himself had been deeply involved in several of the less attractive activities in the White House; he had been a true believer, and now this cold, seemingly almost bloodless young man with the pale, pinched face and tortoise-shell glasses, was saving his own skin. Much of what he said seemed suggestive but not conclusive. There were many layers of authority and circles of power at the White House; it was not a place where people dealt openly with one another. Also, many pieces of the story were missing. And, anyway, despite all we were learning, it was hard to accept the notion of an elaborate conspiracy on the part of the President’s top aides, and perhaps even the President, to cover up a crime.

One of the overt acts charged against Colson is the conversation he had in November, 1972, with Hunt, who was asking for additional payments for the Watergate defendants. It was in that conversation that Colson said to Hunt, according to a transcript released by the Ervin committee last fall, “The less specifics I know, the better off I am … we are, you are.” John Mitchell is charged with “knowingly” making “false material declarations” to the grand jury on September 14, 1972, when, upon being asked whether he knew of any plans to spy on the Democrats, he said, “Certainly not, because, if there had been, I would have shut it off as being entirely nonproductive at that particular time of the campaign.” Nonproductive at that particular time. Haldeman is charged with lying to the Ervin committee when he said that in a meeting on March 21, 1973, at which the raising of money to buy the silence of the Watergate defendants was discussed, the President said, “It would be wrong.”

The White House has issued a statement, approved by the President, that the President hopes the country “will join him in recognizing that those indicted are presumed innocent unless proof of guilt is established in the courts.”

The Democratic National Committee yesterday agreed to settle for seven hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars its civil damage suit against the Committee for the Re-Election of the President for the break-in at the Party’s offices at the Watergate. Somehow, it seems a bit unseemly for the Democrats to collect the money. Last summer, Dean told the Ervin committee that the reëlection committee’s lawyers “were very hopeful of slowing down” the Democrats’ suit, “because they had been making ex-parte contacts with the judge handling the case [Judge Charles R. Richey] and the judge was very understanding and trying to accommodate their problems.” Dean said, “The President was pleased to hear this and responded to the effect that ‘Well, that’s helpful.’ ”

A poll commissioned by Republicans which was conducted last month showed that seventy-three percent of the voters in Vice-President Ford’s former congressional district thought Watergate the most important issue in the recent election there. On February 18th, Ford’s seat, which he had held for twenty-five years, and which Republicans had held for sixty-four, was won by a Democrat. Though much was made of the fact that the victor, Richard F. Vander Veen, had called for the President’s resignation, it is also true that he had pointed out that the resignation would make Gerald Ford President. The Michigan election was the second of two special elections held so far this year. On February 5th, in Pennsylvania, a Democrat narrowly defeated a Republican in an election to fill a seat that had been held by a Republican who died.

MARCH 2

Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post that as of now charges have been brought against twenty-eight persons formerly associated with the White House or the President’s reëlection campaign. “In addition,” he writes, “ten corporations or their officers, or both, have been accused of making illegal contributions,” eight of them to the Nixon campaign. And six people are now in jail for Watergate-related crimes: three of the seven original co-conspirators for the break-in; two who were sentenced for “dirty tricks” in the campaign; and Egil Krogh. In January, Krogh, the former White House aide and director of the plumbers, having pleaded guilty to violating the civil rights of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, was sentenced to serve six months in prison.

When he was sentenced Krogh said, as part of a somewhat vague statement, “I received no specific instruction or authority whatsoever regarding the break-in from the President, directly or indirectly.” Specific. Krogh said that when he saw the photographs of Dr. Fielding’s office after the break-in, “the visibility of physical damage was somehow disturbing beyond the theoretical impression of covert activity.” He said that he then recommended to Ehrlichman that “no further actions of that sort be undertaken,” and that Ehrlichman “concurred and stated that he considered the operation to have been in excess of his authorization.” Krogh’s subsequent conversations with the prosecutors yielded little: he could not, he kept saying, remember a number of things.

In February, Herbert Kalmbach, the President’s personal attorney, pleaded guilty to charges of secret and illegal fund-raising, and is now coöperating with investigators. The charges to which Kalmbach pleaded guilty had to do with the 1970 congressional elections, in which the White House was trying to secure an “ideological majority” for the President in the Senate. Kalmbach also pleaded guilty to promising a prospective contributor an ambassadorship in exchange for a donation of a hundred thousand dollars, to be divided between the 1970 and 1972 campaigns. (The appointment never materialized.) The charges did not have to do with Kalmbach’s other strenuous efforts to raise money for the President’s reëlection in 1972, or with his role in raising and seeing to the delivery of money for those convicted for the Watergate break-in. Kalmbach, sad-faced and appearing shaken, told the Ervin committee last summer that Ehrlichman assured him that what he was doing was proper. Now Kalmbach is said to be disillusioned, and is talking.

There is little to guide those who must design and direct the impeachment process. They virtually have to invent it. England, from which the framers of the Constitution borrowed the idea, hasn’t used the impeachment procedure since 1805. Warren Hastings, whose trial on impeachment charges was taking place in London while the framers met in Philadelphia, in 1787, was an ex-Governor General of India—a situation not exactly analogous to that of a sitting President of the United States.

In all of American history, the House has impeached thirteen officials: one Cabinet officer, one senator, ten federal judges, and one President. Of a total of eleven impeachments tried by the Senate, four resulted in conviction, six in acquittal, and one in dismissal. All four of the convicted officials were federal judges, and only two of the convictions—of Associate Judge Robert W. Archbald, of the U.S. Commerce Court, in 1913, and Judge Halsted L. Ritter, of the southern district of Florida, in 1936—took place in the twentieth century. Ritter was acquitted of six charges of substantive misconduct but convicted for behavior that “has brought his court into scandal and disrepute.” The impeachment of Andrew Johnson, ostensibly for his removal of the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, in violation of an act of Congress—the Tenure of Office Act, which was itself later held un-Constitutional—was surrounded by post-Civil War bitterness and partisanship. It is not the sort of precedent that contemporary legislators wish to rely on.

It is the current impeachment proceeding that may be setting the precedents for future generations.

This week, the White House issued a paper setting forth what it views as constituting an impeachable offense. The White House analysis concludes that the Constitutional definition of impeachment—“for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”—inherently requires not only a criminal offense but one “of a very serious nature committed in one’s governmental capacity.” It argues that “the use of a predetermined criminal standard for the impeachment of a President is also supported by history, logic, legal precedent, and a sound and sensible public policy which demands stability in our form of government.” To hold otherwise, it says, would be to expose the executive branch to “political impeachments.”

The paper further argues that English precedents were inconclusive and should be rejected, because even though impeachment had been used in England to deal with what were, in effect, high crimes against the state committed by officeholders, impeachment had also been used there to establish “Parliamentary supremacy,” whereas the framers of the Constitution were establishing a system of separation of powers. And even in England, the White House paper points out, many of the impeachments—including that of Warren Hastings—charged breaches of criminal law. The White House paper argues that the word “high” in the Constitutional definition of impeachment—for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”—applies to “misdemeanors” as well as “crimes,” because otherwise it would have read high crimes or misdemeanors, and that they must be as serious as “treason” and “bribery.” It points out that the Constitutional Convention rejected noncriminal definitions, such as “maladministration,” “malpractice,” and “misconduct.” It points out that the Constitution says that “Judges … shall hold their Offices during good Behavior” but that no such language is applied to the President. It also argues that a different standard should be applied for the impeachment of judges from that applied for the impeachment of Presidents, because judges cannot otherwise be removed from office, while Presidents can be defeated at the next election, are prohibited from running for reëlection after serving two terms, or can be declared incapacitated under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. And in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the paper points out, most of the articles had to do with what the House of Representatives viewed to be a violation of the Tenure of Office Act, which specified that a violation of the Act would be a “high misdemeanor.”

The report of the staff of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry, issued in late February, rejects the argument that an impeachable offense must be a crime. “Impeachment is a Constitutional remedy addressed to serious offenses against the system of government,” the report says. The report notes “three major Presidential duties of broad scope that are explicitly recited in the Constitution: to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,’ to ‘faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,’ and to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ ” All three of these are in the Constitution, the second and third as parts of the oath of office which the Constitution prescribes. The report argues that “the duty to ‘take care’ is affirmative,” and “so is the duty faithfully to ‘execute the office.’ ” It says, “The duty of a President to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution’ to the best of his ability includes the duty not to abuse his powers or transgress their limits—not to violate the rights of citizens, such as those guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and not to act in derogation of powers vested elsewhere by the Constitution.” It argues that these duties cannot be precisely spelled out, nor can the limits on the President’s exercise of power. “Some of the most grievous offenses against our Constitutional form of government may not entail violations of the criminal law,” it says. The report also says, “Not all Presidential misconduct is sufficient to constitute grounds for impeachment,” adding that there is the further requirement of “substantiality.” “In deciding whether this further requirement has been met,” it says, “the facts must be considered as a whole in the context of the office, not in terms of separate or isolated events.”

The Judiciary Committee’s report also points out that the term “high misdemeanors” was defined in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England—to which the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had reference—as “maladministration of such high officers, as are in public trust and employment … usually punished by the method of parliamentary impeachment.” The term “high crimes and misdemeanors” was adopted by the Convention, the report says, after “treason or bribery” alone was considered too narrow and the addition of “maladministration” was opposed by James Madison as too broad. The Constitution did not substitute impeachment for criminal prosecution, the report says, since it specifically did not immunize an impeached and convicted official from criminal liability. The report also points out that in English history the power of impeachment was designed to curb abuses of power by the King’s Ministers, and that the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” was confined to impeachments, and “had no roots in the ordinary criminal law.” The framers of the Constitution, it says, adopted impeachment as one way of seeking to “build in safeguards against executive abuse and usurpation of power.” One reason that the Articles of Confederation had been rejected “was that they provided for a purely legislative form of government,” but in adding an executive the framers explicitly rejected a plural executive, the report argues, “because a single person would give the most responsibility to the office.”

In Federalist Paper No. 70, the report continues, Alexander Hamilton wrote that a plural executive would deprive the people of “the two greatest securities they can have for the faithful exercise of any delegated power … responsibility … to censure and to punishment.” It was, Hamilton wrote, “far more safe [that] there should be a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people.” The report points out that William Davie, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, told the North Carolina ratifying convention that the “predominant principle,” on which the Convention had provided for a single executive was “the more obvious responsibility of one person,” so that “the public were never at a loss” to fix the blame. But several safeguards were added to insure that the single chief executive did not arrogate powers like those from which the inhabitants of the new nation had fought a revolution to free themselves: the safeguards of checks and balances, a limited term of office, and impeachment.

The report also makes the point that the framers of the Constitution debated the question of whether the requirement of standing for reëlection, if the incumbent should choose to run again, would serve as a sufficient check on the executive. One of the framers argued against impeachment on the ground that the executive “would periodically be tried for his behavior by his electors,” and Gouvernuer Morris suggested that an executive could “do no criminal act without coadjutors who may be punished.” George Mason replied that no man should be “above justice,” and that the principal as well as the coadjutors must be punished when great crimes are committed. James Madison, arguing in favor of an impeachment provision, said that it was “indispensable” in order to defend the people against “the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the chief magistrate.” Madison argued that with a single executive, as opposed to a legislature, “loss of capacity or corruption was more within the compass of probable events, and either of them might be fatal to the Republic.” The President “is not the King but the prime minister,” said Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention. “The people are the King.”

In Federalist Paper No. 65, Alexander Hamilton wrote:

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.

There is, inevitably, a certain selectivity with which arguments are marshalled for and against the various interpretations of the purpose and use of the impeachment process. For example, people who favor the broad interpretation of impeachment often quote the first part of Alexander Hamilton’s statement about the political nature of impeachment but leave out the second part. In the end, therefore, the arguments have to come down to some root meanings of what this country is about and how democracy is supposed to work, and to common sense. And in the end, political beings have to make “POLITICAL” judgments. As of now, and more than ever, the Congress seems to dread that prospect.

The White House paper is widely dismissed as taking a predictably narrow view of impeachment, but it does suggest some questions worth considering. If the grounds for impeachment need not be criminal, how is it to be decided whether noncriminal grounds that are chosen have been chosen “responsibly”? If the grounds for impeachment must be criminal, what is to be done about abuse of the public trust or failure to carry out Constitutional duties? What if by the next election it might be too late? It stands to reason that grounds for impeachment cannot be confined to the items in the criminal statutes. There is no chapter in the criminal code covering the activities of Presidents. This is another example—there have been so many examples recently—of how not everything can be codified. In the end, the Constitutional system will always rest on the reasonableness and the sense of responsibility of those to whom it was entrusted. Depending on one’s view of human nature—of the ultimate wisdom of man—one can decide how firm or how precarious a base that is.

After the staff report was released, Peter Rodino, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said, “It has been my view all along that grounds for impeachment need not arise out of criminal conduct.” Edward Hutchinson, Republican of Michigan and the committee’s ranking minority member, said, “There should be criminality involved,” and added that he did not endorse the staff report.

For a time, the Judiciary Committee considered holding meetings to discuss what constituted an impeachable offense, but, for reasons of both philosophy and politics, the idea was shelved. There was no way that the committee could consider this subject without becoming entrapped early in the process in a partisan dispute. Moreover, such a discussion would have involved reducing the intentionally abstract to the concrete. This was a situation in which the maxim “The law arises from the facts” applied. That might seem subjective, but then the concept of impeachment called for subjective judgments. By and large, the members agreed that what behavior constituted an impeachable offense was something on which they would have to decide individually.

At a press conference last week, his first in four months, the President said, “You don’t have to be a Constitutional lawyer to know that the Constitution is very precise in defining what is an impeachable offense. And in this respect it is the opinion of White House counsel and a number of other Constitutional lawyers, who are perhaps more up to date on this than I am at this time, that a criminal offense on the part of the President is the requirement for impeachment.” At the press conference, too, for the first time in our lives, we watched and heard a President say, “I do not expect to be impeached.”

MARCH 3

One senses today, instead of excitement, a subdued atmosphere. Perhaps it is an atmosphere of foreboding. Things are quieter, and grimmer. Large and difficult events lie ahead. People seem to be digging in, getting ready—or trying to. But the rumors and the speculation still sweep through this city. They move along the familiar paths among the press corps, the members of Congress and their aides, interested onlookers (of whom there seem to be an unprecedented number), and even the Administration and former members thereof. They travel by word of mouth in the Congressional cloakrooms and gyms, by telephone throughout the city, and from table to table in the Senate and House dining rooms, the Federal City Club (patronized largely by journalists and Democratic lawyers), and the Sans Souci restaurant. A colleague calls and says that the information in the briefcase given to Judge Sirica is “very damaging” to the President. “It could be over in two weeks,” the caller says. A Judiciary Committee member says that “what with the indictments and the mysterious documents, it could be over before April.”

Widely accepted “truths” about the President’s situation keep shifting. The Congress returned to Washington in January, having found its constituents in an angry mood. The mixed distress over gasoline shortages, inflation, and the questions raised about the Nixon Administration was difficult to sort out, but the politicians sensed the over-all mood and were uneasy. Around the same time, the President emerged from a period of seclusion and vowed to “fight like hell” to stay in office. (One member of Congress quoted him as saying, “There is a time to be timid. There is a time to be conciliatory. There is a time to fly and there is a time to fight. And I’m going to fight like hell.”) The period of Presidential seclusion had seemed both to reflect and to feed a sense of the deep trouble he was in. In the course of that period, the White House had issued two “white papers”—on the I.T.T. and milk controversies—which raised still more questions; a White House plan to make public some transcripts of tapes of Presidential conversations was cancelled; and Operation Candor was declared ended. (A White House spokesman said that release of summaries of the tapes “could lead to confusion in the minds of the American public and further distortion of the matter.”)

The report in mid-January by the experts appointed by Judge Sirica and agreed upon by the Special Prosecutor’s office and the White House about the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the tape of the conversation between the President and Haldeman held three days after the break-in at the Watergate sent shock waves through Washington. The experts said that the erasure was the result of five—and perhaps as many as nine—separate manual erasures. There were reports that the President faced more trouble on his taxes. The Special Prosecutor’s staff was said to have made new discoveries. There was a sense that the net was closing, and there were rumors that the President might resign.

Then the President’s confident delivery of his State of the Union message—conciliatory about domestic programs, noncommittal about the degree to which he would coöperate with investigations into his own conduct, adamant, once more, about getting the issue behind us (“One year of Watergate is enough”)—gave pause to many politicians. They began to think that perhaps he should be taken at his word when he said in his State of the Union speech that “I have no intention whatever of ever walking away from the job that the people elected me to do for the people of the United States.” Shortly thereafter, Capitol Hill was filled with rumors that the President was prepared for a strong “counterattack.” Very thinly veiled warnings went from the White House to some of the media that there might be trouble if what were viewed by the White House as “attacks” on the President continued. The idea spread that perhaps the President would in fact survive, and certainly it was clear that he would “fight like hell”—and this was not the sort of battle in which many people wanted to be on the losing side.

But other processes were also in motion. The staff of the Ervin committee was still at work. The House Judiciary Committee’s inquiry into the President’s impeachment was getting organized. And by now three grand juries in Washington were examining evidence presented by the staff of the Special Prosecutor.

There are press reports today that the grand jury considered indicting the President but did not do so after Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski advised that the Constitution precluded the indictment of a President while he was in office.

A Gallup poll shows twenty-seven-percent approval of the way the President is handling his job. This figure has remained about the same since the beginning of the year. In January, a Harris poll found that only twenty-one percent looked favorably on the way the Congress was doing its job.

As of early March, twenty-six members of the House—an unusually high number—have decided not to run for reëlection. Politics is getting harder on its practitioners.

Yesterday, the President signed into law a bill that requires Senate confirmation of appointments to the posts of director and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Passage of the law was one small move by Congress to regain some of its power from the executive. Last year, the President vetoed a similar bill, and his veto was sustained. In 1970, when the White House was beginning to try to consolidate control over the bureaucracy, a White House aide explained to me at lunch one day, “It works in the Vatican. It works in the Mafia. It ought to work here.”

MARCH 5

This morning, Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader, told reporters that he was not giving any thought to a trial of the President in the Senate. This may have been Mansfield’s idea of the proper thing to say at this moment, but thought about such a trial, accompanied by research, has been going on in the Senate since the beginning of this year. There were, in fact, several senators who believed as early as January that the case against the President was strong enough so that if it reached the Senate—and they believed it would—on the basis of the evidence, and the momentum of the issue, the Senate would convict. But out of a sense of propriety and a desire to appear decorous, they of course would not speak this way for the record. They tried to convey the impression that they were preoccupied with other matters.

MARCH 6

The Democrat, Thomas Luken, defeated the Republican, Willis Gradison, in a congressional election in Cincinnati yesterday. The district had gone Democratic only three times in this century. In California, a traditionally Republican seat was won by the Republican candidate, Robert Lagomarsino. On tonight’s television news, Lagomarsino says that he won “in spite, perhaps, of what has happened in Washington.” At a conference of governors here, Governor Francis Sargent, of Massachusetts, a Republican, said that the country would be better off if the President were out of office and were replaced by Ford.

Two days ago, Harold Wilson, the Labour Party leader, was asked to form a government in England after Edward Heath, the Conservative leader, failed to do so. Neither party won a majority in the recent election. The French government resigned last week and has been reorganized. Golda Meir announced today that she had managed to form a Cabinet in Israel, ending a stalemate of nine weeks. Italy has no government.

In court today, James St. Clair, the President’s new attorney, announced that the President had decided to turn over to the House Judiciary Committee the nineteen tapes and seven hundred documents he had given to the Special Prosecutor. He said that the President would answer written questions from the committee and was willing to be interviewed by a few members of the committee. This offer of material is true to another pattern: when the President appears to be in serious trouble, when the net appears to be closing, he tosses out more tapes, documents, statements. But what he tosses out has never been enough. Moreover, the President has given the Special Prosecutor some items he did not want, and has not given him some items he did want—including some promised material about the plumbers.

St. Clair’s announcement was made in the course of a hearing by Judge Sirica on what to do with the grand jury’s sealed report and what has now come to be called “the bulging briefcase.” In court, St. Clair took no position on the question of referring the grand-jury report. Arguments against a referral to the committee were made by John J. Wilson, the lawyer for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and by other defense counsel, on the ground that their clients might be harmed by pre-trial publicity. (In the age of television, the concept that trials might be harmed by pre-trial publicity seems antique, but it is still with us.) It is widely assumed that Wilson was carrying the argument for the White House, though he denied this.

On tonight’s news, it is reported that although the White House said that the President spoke with Haldeman over the weekend to congratulate him on his wedding anniversary, the anniversary was actually some ten days earlier. Gerald Warren, the White House Deputy Press Secretary, speculated that perhaps the President had just been reminded of it. A prevalent theory is that the President may be acting to protect his former aides, who, in turn, are protecting him. There is even a theory that the aides are working collectively to keep him in office so that in the end, if it comes to that, he can give them Presidential pardons.

At his press conference tonight, attempting to confront the problem of Haldeman’s indictment for perjury for telling the Ervin committee that the President had said “it would be wrong” to buy the silence of the Watergate defendants, Mr. Nixon got himself in deeper trouble. He said that John Dean told him “for the first time on March 21st” that payments were being made to the Watergate defendants “for the purpose of keeping them quiet, not simply for their defense.” And, said the President, “if it was for the purpose of keeping them quiet … hush money, that of course would have been an obstruction of justice.” In August, 1973, the President said he had been told only that the payments were for the defendants’ lawyers and families, and said that Haldeman’s testimony was “accurate.” Tonight, describing the March 21st meeting with Haldeman and Dean, Mr. Nixon said, “We examined all of the options at great length during our discussion. … Then we came to what I considered to be the bottom line. I pointed out that raising the money, paying the money, was something that could be done. But I pointed out that that was linked to clemency; that no individual is simply going to stay in jail because people are taking care of his family or his counsel, as the case might be; and that unless a promise of clemency was made that the objective of so-called hush money would not be achieved. … I then said that to pay clemency was wrong. … I said, ‘It is wrong; that is for sure.’ … Now, when individuals read the entire transcript of the twenty-first meeting or hear the entire tape where we discussed all these options, they may reach different interpretations. But I know what I meant and I know also what I did. I meant that the whole transaction was wrong.”

MARCH 7

John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson were indicted today for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Dr. Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, by arranging for the break-in at his office. The indictment says that the conspirators did “without legal process … covertly and unlawfully enter” Dr. Fielding’s offices, “thereby injuring, oppressing, threatening, and intimidating Dr. Lewis J. Fielding in the free exercise and enjoyment of the right and privilege secured to him by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to be secure in his person, house, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and that they did “thereafter conceal such activities, so as to prevent Dr. Lewis J. Fielding from securing redress for the violation of such right and privileges.”

Also indicted for participation in the conspiracy to deprive Dr. Fielding of his rights were G. Gordon Liddy, Bernard Barker, and Eugenio Martinez, who were also convicted for the break-in at the Watergate, and Felipe de Diego, a Cuban refugee recruited, as was Martinez, by Barker. Barker and Martinez participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Barker, Martinez and De Diego had been in the real estate business in Miami. Liddy has been cited, in addition, for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before a House subcommittee investigating the involvement of the C.I.A. in various events related to Watergate. Liddy has refused to testify anywhere, has been convicted of contempt of court for refusing to testify before the grand jury, and is now in prison. He has also been sentenced for his role in the Watergate break-in.

Also named today as unindicted co-conspirators were Krogh, Howard Hunt, and David Young, an assistant to Henry Kissinger until Young was assigned, with Krogh, to establish the plumbers unit. Hunt and Young had been granted immunity in return for testimony. Ehrlichman was charged, further, with lying to the grand jury and the F.B.I. during their investigations of the Fielding break-in. Among the overt acts listed in the indictment are several memoranda the White House aides wrote, which came to light during the Ervin committee hearings. One of the overt acts was the memorandum written by Krogh and Young to Ehrlichman proposing a “covert operation … to examine all the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst.” This was the memorandum to which Ehrlichman had, after initialling it, added the notation, “If done under your assurance that it is not traceable.” Another was the memorandum written by Ehrlichman to Colson entitled “Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. One,” and asking Colson to prepare a “game plan” for using the materials derived from “the ‘proposed undertaking by Hunt and Liddy.’ ” (We now know that “Special Project M-1” was really “Special Project No. One.”) Ehrlichman, the indictment further charges, had a telephone conversation with Krogh and Young “in which Krogh and Young assured Ehrlichman that the planned entry into the office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding would not be traceable.” Also among the overt acts documenting the conspiracy was the arrangement by Colson to use five thousand dollars from one of the milk funds to finance the break-in. The nineteenth, and last, overt act was that “On or about March 27, 1973, John D. Ehrlichman caused the removal of certain memoranda related to the entry into the offices of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding from files maintained at the White House in which such memoranda would be kept in the ordinary course of business.”

When we heard the news, one Friday in April of last year, in the course of the Ellsberg trial that Hunt and Liddy had been involved in a break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, it made little sense; we were not yet able to fit it in with other events. The Ellsberg trial seemed unrelated to Watergate then. There were so many other events at the time—the Watergate case was still breaking—that we were hardly able to absorb it. When Daniel Ellsberg portrayed himself as a major target of the Nixon Administration, many dismissed this as Ellsberg’s delusion. The connection between the Fielding break-in and other events did not begin to become clear until the President, late in May, 1973, issued his statement that told something about the plumbers and “the Huston plan.” In May, the President said that “because of the extreme gravity of the situation [the leak of the Pentagon papers] and not then knowing what additional national secrets Mr. Ellsberg might disclose, I did impress upon Mr. Krogh the vital importance to the national security of his assignment.” (We have read of how the President instructed those setting up the plumbers operation to read the chapter in Six Crises in which he tells how he, as a congressman, carried out the investigation of Alger Hiss. Mr. Nixon wrote there, among other things, that the Justice Department could not be trusted to do it.) But, said the President in May, “I did not authorize and had no knowledge of any illegal means to be used to achieve this goal.” Perhaps the meaning of the Fielding break-in did not become entirely clear until Ehrlichman gave it definition during the Ervin hearings last summer. It was then that Ehrlichman suggested that the concept that lay behind the Fourth Amendment had “eroded.” And now it is becoming apparent that what have been seen as efforts to cover up the Watergate break-in were efforts to cover up the Fielding break-in as well.

The President has said that he first learned of the Fielding break-in on March 17, 1973. Henry Petersen, the Assistant Attorney General who was then in charge of the Watergate investigation, testified before the Ervin committee that when, in mid-April, he told the President that the prosecutors had just learned of such a break-in, the President said, “I know about that. That is a national-security matter. You stay out of that.”

Following the return of the indictment today, a White House spokesman reread the statement that had been issued with the President’s approval after the indictment of last Friday.

MARCH 8

The President’s latest challenge to the House Judiciary Committee is his most audacious yet. In a letter—released by the committee yesterday—from St. Clair to John Doar, special counsel to the committee’s impeachment inquiry, St. Clair implied that the committee should limit its inquiry to the Watergate break-in and cover-up. “In the President’s opinion,” St. Clair wrote, “the Watergate matter and widespread allegations of obstruction of justice in connection therewith are at the heart of this matter.” In addition, his letter strongly implied that the President would not provide the tapes and documents that the committee requested on February 25th. These items included six conversations involving the cover-up that were not turned over to the Special Prosecutor. St. Clair’s letter also stated that the committee should define an impeachable offense before proceeding with the inquiry. “Furthermore,” he wrote, “before such an inquiry is undertaken, it would seem clear that fundamental fairness would require that the ‘allegations involving the President’ under investigation be identified.” Of the committee’s request for other materials, St. Clair said, “You appear to have requested, in effect, access for your staff to other Presidential papers, conversations and memoranda without apparent limitation.” At a committee meeting yesterday, Rodino called this “a distortion.”

In February, the House passed a resolution affirming the committee’s authority to conduct the impeachment inquiry and to issue subpoenas—by a vote of 410-4. At the meeting yesterday, the committee decided, at the suggestion of Doar and Albert Jenner, the minority counsel, to postpone until later this month any move to subpoena the material. A subpoena would be a major move, perhaps provoking a confrontation. Rodino wants to appear patient, move cautiously, to exhaust—and to appear to have exhausted—other remedies, so as to have the broadest possible committee support behind any moves he makes. It has been an article of faith among Democrats that impeachment must have strong bipartisan support, just as it has been an article of faith among them— sometimes broken—that if the President resigns, it must be at the Republicans’ behest. This puts the Republicans in the vortex.

The Watergate break-in and cover-up constitute one of six broad areas under investigation by the committee staff. Earlier this week, the committee issued a report, ostensibly from Rodino to the members, about the status of the impeachment inquiry. The report is also a reminder of the breadth of the potential case against the President. The list included in the new report is divided into the same six areas as an earlier report: domestic surveillance, including the plumbers, the Huston plan, and wiretapping; intelligence activities and “dirty tricks” conducted for the purpose of the President’s reëlection; the Watergate break-in and cover-up; alleged improprieties in connection with the President’s finances; the use of government agencies for political purposes; and other misconduct, including the secret and perhaps illegal bombing of Cambodia, impoundment of funds, and dismantling of the Office of Economic Opportunity. The staff does not give all of the areas equal weight. The list is based on allegations submitted by members of Congress or on material gathered by the staff. There is no serious intention to consider impeaching the President for dismantling the O.E.O., and there is little interest in taking him on over the bombing of Cambodia. Some members say that this is a “political” issue—one of policy differences. Some say that the bombing is something that the Congress should have known, or done, something about. Moreover, some feel that the vote of the Congress to end the bombing as of August 15, 1973, in effect sanctioned the bombing until then. And there is something else, perhaps, at the heart of it: members of Congress do not want to fight the impeachment issue over the bitter question of the war.

The committee on which the responsibility for conducting the inquiry into the impeachment of the President landed last autumn was then largely an unknown quantity. With a few exceptions, little attention is paid in Washington to House members, much less to the particular characteristics of each House committee. But each committee does have its own characteristics, and in 1973 the Judiciary Committee’s were in the midst of change. The committee had long been dominated by Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from Brooklyn, who had been its chairman (except for two years when the Republicans controlled the House) since 1948. But in 1972, at the age of eighty-four, Celler was defeated in a Democratic primary by Elizabeth Holtzman, who herself joined the Judiciary Committee. In 1973, Celler was replaced as chairman by the Democratic member next in seniority—an unknown figure named Peter Rodino, a Democrat from Newark, New Jersey. Celler had developed the practice of running the committee in tandem with the ranking minority member, William McCulloch, of Ohio, and, as it happened, McCulloch retired in 1972. He was replaced as ranking minority member by Edward Hutchinson, of Michigan, who was even less well known than Rodino. Furthermore, the committee started out in this Congress with an unusual number of new members—eleven.

The Republican side of the committee has a disproportionate number of conservatives, just as the Democratic side has a disproportionate number of liberals. Even the Southern Democrats on the committee—James Mann, of South Carolina; Walter Flowers, of Alabama; and Ray Thornton, of Arkansas—while they are no liberals, are less attached to the old order than their Southern predecessors on the committee were, or than many of their Southern colleagues in the House still are. The preponderance of liberals on the majority side stems partly from the fact that members interested in civil rights and civil liberties have gravitated toward the House Judiciary Committee. This follows a congressional pattern: members interested in promoting legislation that concerns them—members interested in protecting agriculture, say, or members from areas dependent on defense contracts—gravitate toward the committees with jurisdiction over their interests. The result is imbalances in the committee system: the Agriculture Committee is more interested than the House as a whole in protecting agricultural programs, and the Education and Labor Committee is more interested than the House as a whole in protecting education programs and the concerns of labor. The theory has been that the House as a whole acts as an arbiter of these interests, usually by a process of mutual accommodation. The committees, therefore, are highly influential, often decisive, in the final actions of the House. But there is a question as to whether House traditions will apply when it comes to the issue of impeaching the President.

It was, then, on an unformed and disparate group that there suddenly fell such issues as the confirmation of a Vice-President-designate, legislation to establish a Special Prosecutor, and the conduct of an inquiry into impeachment of the President. When the first biographical sketches of Peter Rodino appeared, the other committee members were surprised to learn that he was an amateur poet. Rodino had been “one of the boys”; he had been considered a man of unimpressive talents, and had been better liked than Celler, in part because he was less feared. As a member of the House, he had shown little creativity (he had interested himself mainly in immigration legislation) and almost no leadership (he was responsible for making Columbus Day a national holiday). So when responsibility for the impeachment inquiry fell upon Rodino, the widespread assumption was that he wasn’t up to it. But gradually he began to find his style—low-key, easygoing, but firm—and as time went on he became increasingly adroit in working with other Democratic committee members. Even the committee Republicans began to sense that they would be ill-advised to criticize him. The evolving impression of Rodino became self-confirming, as such things do in Washington: as he was perceived to be more of a leader, he was able to be more of a leader.

Sometime last summer, the House leaders and Rodino saw that impeachment was not the remote possibility it had once seemed. And since there were no recent precedents to go by, Rodino directed his staff to begin to collect information on impeachment. When, last fall, the question became a live one, the Judiciary Committee had published one of the few useful volumes on the subject. Spiro Agnew’s request, late in September, that the House conduct an impeachment inquiry because, he claimed, he was immune from criminal proceedings as long as he remained Vice-President—even though quickly rejected—heightened the committee’s sense that it had better brush up on the subject of impeachment. When resolutions to impeach the President were referred to the committee after the weekend when Archibald Cox was fired, the committee still had to hold confirmation hearings on the first Vice-President selected under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. (House leaders referred the impeachment resolutions to the Judiciary Committee, rather than appoint a special committee, as some House members sought, both because there were precedents for giving the issue to the Judiciary Committee and because the selection of a special committee would have involved a great deal of House politics and, therefore, trouble.) Further, the search for a counsel—a critical matter—took some time, and John Doar was not named until December 20th.

When Rodino named Doar as special counsel, the Republicans wanted someone of note as minority counsel. At the importuning of Tom Railsback, an Illinois Republican on the committee, and with the approval of Robert McClory, the other committee Republican from Illinois, Albert Jenner, the prominent Chicago attorney, agreed, in January, to take the job of minority counsel. Jenner was a flourishing trial lawyer who had been active in the American Bar Association, was senior counsel to the Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy, and was a member of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence—a lawyer well known in the legal circles in which well-knownness counts. He also had been one of the many lawyers considered by Rodino for the job of counsel.

Doar, for at least the first month, had to spend much of his time selecting a staff and working out methods of procedure. By early March, the staff numbered a hundred and one, of whom forty-three were lawyers. The staff went to work on the second floor of the old Congressional Hotel—an office annex across the street from the House office buildings—under arrangements of maximum security. Doar rented an apartment a few blocks away, made it a point not to talk with the press, and fastidiously absented himself from Washington social life.

The committee, sensing that there was no way a coherent investigation could be managed by thirty-eight members of the House, took unusual vows of noninvolvement in the early processes of the inquiry. Only Rodino, Hutchinson, Doar, and Jenner were to have access to the information that was being assembled. In the first weeks of the inquiry, most committee members had only vague knowledge of what the staff was doing. It is, of course, standard practice for congressional committees to rely heavily on their staffs, but these procedures went well beyond that. Thus, the counsel played an unusually strong role—defining the nature and the strategy of the inquiry—and once they were selected the process was under way.

Most of the talk one hears now and much of the press attention focus on what the President said at his latest press conference about the meeting of March 21st. There is speculation about whether the President may be guilty of misprision of a felony for not reporting to the appropriate authorities what Dean had told him about the payments to buy silence. While it is inevitably tempting to some to try to find a specific instance of wrongdoing on the part of the President—the “cookie-jar syndrome”—such an approach gets in the way of understanding the breadth and the depth of the issues and of dealing with them. Maybe it is easier to zero in (as we did just a few weeks ago) on a particular question like “Who erased the tape?” Our minds are getting tired. The focus shrinks into ever-smaller circles, until it lands on a tiny dot.

There is, moreover, a certain absurdity to the discourse about the March 21st meeting. (I held out for as long as possible against thinking of this mosaic of issues in terms of dates of meetings, but the dates have a way of forcing themselves into our minds and our discourse.) In order to talk of the meeting in terms of what the President says about it, one has to begin with a number of assumptions: that it was the first time he learned that money was being used to buy silence; that for almost a year after the break-in the President was either extraordinarily uninterested in what was going on or unable to inform himself about it; that Dean, an underling, could, unbeknownst to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, have made the arrangements to buy silence; that Ehrlichman and Haldeman really believed that the money was going for a “legal-defense fund” for the Watergate defendants; and that, in some sudden access of compassion, those determined opponents of federal assistance to so many would have approved the payment of money for the families and the legal fees of the men indicted for the Watergate break-in. (Ehrlichman, in his testimony before the Ervin committee, likened this fund, with apparent retrospective approval, to defense funds that had been established for Daniel Ellsberg, Angela Davis, and the Berrigan brothers. According to testimony, over four hundred thousand dollars was paid to the Watergate defendants.) And there is a certain absurdity in assuming that the major question is whether, in the midst of all these misdeeds and frantic meetings, the President ever said, “It is wrong.”

Dinner-party conversations these days, when they are not about the President’s fate, are about the movie The Exorcist and about the gasoline shortage. In Washington, as in some states, one has the opportunity to wait in line for gas only on alternative days—odd-numbered days if the last number on one’s license plate is odd, even-numbered if it is even. A woman came up to me at dinner recently and asked, “Are you an odd or an even?” An ad-hoc, berserk system of in-effect rationing, but the President is adamant against rationing. People now tell stories of their adventures in obtaining gasoline with all the detail that might go into an account of an airline trip. And they are just as interesting.

Dean Burch, forty-six, a former aide and close associate of Barry Goldwater, and, until recently, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has just joined the White House staff as counsellor to the President. Laird left on February 1st, and Harlow is leaving soon. The question is why, if the President is in such deep trouble, Burch would want to join the staff, and why, if the President is not in deep trouble, Laird and Harlow are leaving.

The President has lately been at some pains not to give further displeasure to conservatives—or, at least, that is how several of his actions have been perceived. The cross-pressures on Nixon are fiercer than ever. In a vote in the House to impeach or in the Senate to convict, it is the conservatives who could save him or do him in. Even some Administration officials concede that certain of his recent energy policies, including the veto of the energy bill, were designed not so much to please the oil companies as to please conservative senators from oil-producing states. Similarly, the White House recently dropped its support of a relatively mild bill to encourage the states to devise land-use policies when the bill was strongly opposed by politicians from Western states interested in development. Conservatives are taking aim at a possible new arms-limitation agreement, in the hope of shooting it down. Also, after the President’s State of the Union message, which proposed a number of new domestic programs, Human Events, a conservative weekly, ran a headline asking “WHY WERE ALL THOSE REPUBLICANS CHEERING?” It took exception to the President’s willingness to “embark upon sweeping new and untried spending programs, thus escalating the budget ever upwards.” An earlier edition of the weekly, noting that a new family-assistance plan was in the works, was headlined “HOW MUCH CAN CONSERVATIVES TAKE?” The President has not yet proposed his new welfare-reform bill.

The government announced yesterday that wholesale prices rose again in February. The rise put the index 20.3 percent higher than it was a year earlier, and the consumer price index was rising in February, 1974, at an annual rate of 14 percent.

Two indictments, involving eleven people, and a troublesome Presidential press conference in one week. The feeling is in the air that the President is in terrible trouble. But he is still in power, and we are all, in a sense, riding his back. Tomorrow, the seven men indicted last week for the Watergate cover-up will be arraigned. I have decided to take the weekend off and get out of town. It is becoming more important than ever to break free of this nervous system that is “Washington” once in a while—to escape the talk and the rumors and the speculation. The nervous system is getting overloaded these days, and as it becomes more important to get away, there is so much going on that it becomes more difficult to do so. Many here are taking a certain pleasure in the fact that tomorrow men who recently held great power will be brought before the court to be arraigned. It reminds me a bit of the song from Candide: “What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fé.” People ask me if I can bear to be out of town for “the arraignment.” I can.