Watergate: Nixon's changing stories - 26 May 1973

About a year ago, I was driving across the Mexico desert with an English girl.

We were alone – and I want to put this on record at once, without waiting for snide allegations to be made public by any newspaper, or government official – I had been closely associated with this charming girl for about two years. And I don’t want any sniggers feeding back into the microphone if I say that she was the production assistant to the director on several of the programmes we were filming on a television history of the United States.

She was – she is – a girl who thinks more than she talks. But she has her own decided view of things. And on this drive, out to the centre of the vast wilderness where the first atomic bomb was exploded, I said to her, "Well you have been in America on and off for a couple of years now, what are your main impressions?".

She felt no obligation to say that everything in the garden was lovely, for by then she knew me well enough to know that I don’t think anybody is obliged to like America or France or Britain or any other country. Trying to understand is a little more difficult than wanting to like.

However, she mentioned the directness and ease of the people of all sorts and stations along the way. She was taken with the variety of types, in a continent that has long suffered from the rather obtuse reputation of producing 200million identical humans. Well, we went on about this and that, newspapers, the public officials we had met, and then, after a long pause, she said, "I must say, they never hesitate to use five syllables where one will do".

She was absolutely on the button. It’s the thing I notice most strikingly, the moment I go back to America after a stretch abroad. For instance, a week or so before, we had been up in the 8,000-ft zone of the High Sierra, where the winds move so quickly that you can never be sure for long that black clouds won't give way to brilliant skies, and heat to cold.

We had asked the lady who ran the motel we were staying in what the weather was going to be later in the day. This was more than a polite exchange, because we were filming, and we needed a long spell of hard sunshine in the late afternoon so that the long light would fall right on the false fronts of an old ghost town.

Well, said the lady. it looks pretty fair right now, but they do say there is a possibility of precipitation activity later on. Can you imagine anybody saying that, let alone writing it? "Precipitation activity", is what the American meteorologists say when they mean rain, or snow. By the way, another couple of words that have vanished from American speech are early and late. People say they are either "ahead of schedule" or "behind schedule". Now, this was what my companion had in mind.

And, I am sorry to notice, that this cumbersome stuff is already creeping into English newspapers, and galloping into some of them. I am myself long inured to it and spend an idle hour, about once a week, taking some particularly tangled knot of prose and unravelling it into understandable English.

Of course to succeed you have to discover that the writer or speaker really has something to say, and very often, he, she – more often he – hasn’t, but is using a smoke barrage of polysyllables to cover up extreme mental confusion. This suspicion crossed my mind last week when a White House advisor – and considering what’s happened to most White House advisors lately it’s not surprising he bore an unfamiliar name – Mr Leonard Garment.

Well, Mr Garment had the unenviable job of appearing before the press to explain, or translate, President Nixon’s 4,000-word statement which was intended to clear him of any guilt in the Watergate case or, to be precise, to clear himself of having known about it, or sanctioned any cover-up of the Watergate investigation.

Once, in the very long ago, in April in fact, the president had said that he had no knowledge of the original preposterous episode, the burglary – or if you prefer the American, the burglarising – of the Democratic headquarters, or that, once he had heard of it, that he had any knowledge that his staff was either promising short jail terms to the culprits or using election campaign money to buy off the people who might spill the beans.

Last week the president admitted he had been told about it but he was anxious to see that his own investigation of Watergate did not bring to light two other capers which he and one of his aides had ordered. It involved the tapping of foreign embassy telephones by the CIA and the raiding – surely illegal – of a doctor's file on Mr Daniel Ellsberg. He is the former Pentagon man whose trial for swiping government documents was called off by the judge on the grounds of gross misconduct. By who do you think? By the government. And what was that gross misconduct? Nothing less than the White House order to collar, by any means, the Ellsberg file from Mr Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

Mr Nixon put it this way, "I had to be deeply concerned with ensuring that neither the covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, nor the operations of the special investigations unit of the White House should be compromised. Therefore, I instructed my advisors Mr Haldeman and Mr Ehrlichman, to ensure that the investigation of the break-in did not expose either an unrelated covert operation of the CIA, or the activities of the White House investigation unit."

If you don’t quite get the drift of this, don’t fret. Neither did the press. So next day, they took it up with Mr Garment, and asked him to make all things plain. And this was his reply, "Watergate itself might have certain related transactions that would be a very appropriate subject of investigation, but I think that this states that this particular instruction was designed to avoid having the investigation move unwittingly, if you will, into an area covered by some of the legitimate covert operations that the president was aware of."

By now, the fog settling between the reporters and the mind of Mr Garment grew denser still. And somebody tried to cut through it by reminding Mr Garment that in April Mr Nixon had said he had been constantly assured that no members of his administration were in any way involved. The other night he’d referred to a warning as long ago as last July, from the acting head of the FBI, that top White House men might be conspiring to cover up the Watergate mess of which Mr Nixon had never heard.

Well, Mr Garment was certainly earning his pay last Tuesday, he swallowed again and he gave out this gem, "I think the April speech on television represented the president's knowledge and recollection at that point, stated to the finest point of certainty. And the process of investigation and examination has continued since then, and this statement is a more complete statement".

Well, boiling this down on the assumption that there is something to boil and it’s not all froth, what this seems to say is that when a man says, one month, "I didn’t know", and then the next month says "I did know", that the second statement is, quote, "more complete". You bet. The only hard confession that came out of the president's 4,000 words, was, in his own words. that he "authorised surreptitious entry, in effect, on specified categories of targets, in specified situations, related to national security". Now this has got to mean that the president approved, nay authorised, the bugging of foreign embassies and the bugging, with Mr Kissinger’s knowledge, of Mr Kissinger’s own staff – all in the interests of national security.

Certainly it's nobody’s fault but the president's. I, we, struggle up from this morass of verbiage, take a mental shower, and conclude that the president is now saying, "Sure, I ordered bugging of places and people I am not going to tell you about because of imperilling national security, but I hope you will understand that I am against surreptitious entry and bugging of the Democrats".

What he said nothing about was the huge sums of money fed illegally by his top aides, first into his reelection campaign, and then into covering up the Watergate break in. In short – if we can ever fairly say "in short" about this whole appalling scandal – the president is still asking us to believe that he knew nothing of the desperate and cunning means employed to re elect him, not by flunkies or waiters or household staff, but by the whole top echelon of the White House staff, the men he sees night and day to determine policy domestic and foreign.

Every president has such a ring of day-to-day advisors around him. It was long ago called the "kitchen cabinet" and, since we have brought up the word, I should stress that in a federal system the actual Cabinet has little meaning whereas in a parliamentary system the Cabinet is the core, the nub.

In America, legislation never starts in the Cabinet. That's the great difference. The Cabinet is almost a ceremonial appendage to the presidency. It rarely meets. Even the vice president is kept in touch with policy only by courtesy, only when the president remembers to pass on memos to him.

Kennedy’s kitchen cabinet, by the way, consisted half of the facetiously so-called Irish Mafia, old Boston politicians he had known all his life, and what might be called the graduate school, Harvard mostly, exprofessors of the stamp of Walt Rostow and Ted Sorensen. What Kennedy never had around him, nor Eisenhower nor Truman, nor Roosevelt nor Johnson, were PR men, advertising experts, real-estate fixers and manipulators of stocks and shares. This is the staggering novelty that has brought Mr Nixon down, or might. He has surrounded himself with fixers of dubious ethics whose instinct was to form a politburo inside the White House, apparently contemptuous of Congress and ignorant, or contemptuous, of the Constitution and the American system.

And it’s been saved, if it is to be saved, by the press, which unfortunately has had to resort to some surreptitious goings-on of its own. But you know what they say about "catch a thief". Well, now the Senate investigating committee is going into recess for a couple of weeks – we can all use it – we shall see how the feeling of the country about Mr Nixon settles. We might use the interval to exercise a large bout of compassion on behalf of any public man in a democracy who has made a slip or lied, or been less discreet than Caesar’s wife. A lot of us, I imagine, are very happy today in not to be in public life.

If we recall the memorable aphorism of an Irish American girl, who, looking over some revealed hanky-panky of a New York politician, sighed," I guess the whole truth about any of us would shock all the rest of us".

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