Watergate investigators and Nixon - 26 October 1973

For several weeks now, I've been hearing in my mind's ear a voice. It is my voice. It is speaking to you at this moment and it's saying, "I am standing in a harshly beautiful landscape, in a dry land, spiky with the plants that get along with little water, the Saguaro cactus and the pineapple cactus and the feathery pampas grass. And I'm looking at stone carvings. The ruins of an ancient civilisation that yet have a kind of dramatic life in the towering figures and the grimace of gods as forgotten as the people who worshipped them.

I am in Mexico. And I don't know much and, for the moment, care less about what is happening 1500 miles or so to the north in Washington D.C.

Well, that voice hasn't troubled me much in the past week or so. It's rather literary tone was rudely shattered by the voice of Richard M. Nixon ordering the Attorney General to fire the Special Watergate Prosecutor Mr. Cox. By the Attorney General's refusing to do it, then resigning. By Mr. Nixon then ordering the Deputy Attorney General to fire the Prosecutor and getting the same answer. And a second resignation. And then finally the President's telling the Solicitor General that he was now under the law. The acting Attorney General. And that he should get rid of Mr. Cox. The Solicitor General did it. Whereupon President Nixon abolished the investigating team of the Special Prosecutor, along with his job, and put under lock and key the vast file of evidence that had been compiled about Watergate and related skulduggery by Mr. Cox and his 80 legal assistants. In other words, the suspect locked up the police.

Need I say that the harsh ruins of Mexico and the grimace of such gods as Quetzalcoatl will have to wait.

I'm sitting here in New York pondering the harsh orders of President Nixon. And contemplating the grimaces of a Congress talking about and taking the first deliberate steps towards impeachment.

Well, I have a friend who says he wishes that all news stories in the papers would begin with the sentence "Richard Nixon is a rat". And then having vented that downright bit of emotion, they might go on to report as unemotionally as possible the facts. My friend has a point. There is, at the moment, there has been for many months, a huge amount of wishful thinking. You might say, wishful hating. In the Press. Mixed in with the running account of what is happening and what under the Constitution could happen and could not. I know that this diligent mixing of fact and opinion is no news to you. It is, if anything, more common in European reporting than anywhere. And the fact is that most American newspapers are still as responsible as any in keeping the reporter and the editorial writer as far apart as possible.

But before we yield to the pressure of our bubbling prejudice, whether it is to look on Mr. Nixon as a tyrant or to look on him as a man greatly wronged, I think it's necessary to review, as simply as possible, what's happened. And to try and see what went wrong in the view that the Congress took of the job that Mr. Archibald Cox was to do. When Mr. Nixon set him up as a Special Prosecutor to look into the Watergate affair.

You may recall that last spring, the United States lost its chief law officer. Attorney General John Mitchell. He resigned under the fire of mounting evidence about his possible complicity in covering up the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington. He was later indicted by a Grand Jury on another matter, a case involving financial fraud. And he's now awaiting trial. President Nixon then attempted to restore public confidence in the office of the Attorney General by nominating Mr. Elliot Richardson. This was a move welcomed by both Parties for Mr. Richardson had been an intelligent and humane Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and a responsible Secretary of Defence. And as so many shabby and devious men who had worked in the White House began to resign or be fired or find themselves under indictment, Mr. Richardson stood out as an honourable man of great intelligence. The one figure in the Nixon administration that all the Democrats could trust.

Now the President nominates. That's to say he chooses. Cabinet officers and Supreme Court justices and ambassadors. But, under the Constitution, the Senate ahs to hold hearings, question the nominees and in the end decide to confirm or reject them. Long ago Mr. Nixon smarted from the Senate's rejection of not less than two of his nominees for the Supreme Court.

There was never any question about the confirmation of Mr. Richardson. There was no question. But there was a careful pause during which the Senate Committee looking into his credentials, the Senate Judiciary Committee exacted from him a promise. And the thunderbolt of a week ago, the resignation of Mr. Richardson, was, I believe, sparked by that promise. During the confirmation hearings last May, the Judiciary Committee got Mr. Richardson to promise that the Special Watergate Prosecutor, Mr. Cox, would be allowed in his investigations to be absolutely free to subpoena evidence from any source, including even the President himself. Mr. Cox, Mr. Richardson promised, would be free of any supervision by the Attorney General's office, the Department of Justice. And would indeed have full authority even to challenge and fight any claims the President might make to what we now call executive privilege. Which Mr. Nixon has taken to mean is the President's privilege to keep to himself and release to nobody, not to a Congressional Committee, not even to the Courts, any presidential papers, memoranda, records of conversations which he, the President, might deem to be confidential or related to national security.

Ah! It is not a graceful thing for a commentator even to whisper "I told you so!" And I hope I'm not doing it. But way back there in May, I remember wondering on what authority the Congress could give to any officer of the executive, the presidential branch of government, the power to command the President himself. I looked over the Constitution and saw that in the 25th amendment the Congress can set up a body to judge the fitness, literally the physical or mental fitness, of a President to remain in office. But I couldn't remember or find anywhere else a Constitutional grant of power to the Congress to get from the Attorney General, or any other employee of the President, a promise to be independent of his boss. However, lawyers and Congressmen said that it was valid. Since Mr. Nixon had himself concurred in the notion of Mr. Cox's absolute independence.

By the way, I'm still fishing for the document, the letter or the speech in which Mr. Nixon laid this guarantee on the line.

Well, anyway, at the time, there's no doubt Mr. Nixon was extremely eager to prove that the White House was not covering up the Watergate mess or covering-up the earlier cover-up. He wanted to show that he had nothing to hide and, undoubtedly, one way or another, he assured Mr. Richardson that Special Prosecutor Cox was a man on his own. Free to delve and dive into any evidence he came up with. On this understanding, the Senate confirmed Mr. Richardson as Attorney General and Mr. Cox went to work with his 80 assistants.

The earlier chapter of the plot is familiar enough but may have dimmed in memory. The Senate Select Committee that was set up to probe into Watergate came to the conclusion that the great question which harried the country for many months "Was the President implicated? And if so, how much?" Could best be answered by listening to the tape recordings of nine conversations, held in the White House, several of them between the President and Mr. John Dean, the former White House aide. The man who more than any other had accused the President of knowing about Watergate and helping to cover it up.

A federal court decided that it had no power to release the tapes to the Congressional Committee. But the same judge did order President Nixon to release the tapes to the Court. Which would pass on what it took to be relevant to Mr. Cox and his team. The issue was now at only one remove from the judgment of the Supreme Court. The President could turn over the tapes or he could refuse, and bow, as he promised to bow, to the final ruling of the Supreme Court. At this point the President did neither. He proposed a compromise. Whereby the tapes would be heard in private by a certain Senator. Senator John Stennis. A Southern Democrat. A friend of Mr. Nixon but a man allowed by all Parties to be of unimpeachable honesty. He would decide what concerned Watergate and would let Mr. Cox see the full transcript. He would also decide what concerned national security and he would pass on a written summary of that without the text.

The Senate Watergate Committee was willing, after several backings and fillings, to go along with this. But Special Prosecutor Cox was not. Nor was Judge Sirica. The Chief Judge of the United States District Court in Washington who ordered Mr. Nixon to turn over the tapes to him.

Through all the seething speculation and legal arguments and newspaper comment, the White House made its defiance of the Courts very clear indeed when a legal aide to the White House crisply summed up the President’s position. Which was... that the President cannot be convicted of a crime and cannot even be indicted so long as he's in office and has not been impeached by the House. And then removed from office by a two thirds vote against him in his subsequent trial by the Senate.

That was the moment when impeachment became not a threat but a practical possibility. When the Congress came back from holiday a week ago, many impeachment resolutions were offered in the House and the Senate Judiciary Committee has started looking into the justification, if any, for starting the formalities of impeachment.

Suddenly, the President changed his mind. And the country stirred under a huge sigh of relief. He will let Judge Sirica hear the tapes in full. For a day or two, it did look as if we had a President who, like some General of a revolutionary hunter, was going to declare, as the Supreme Court of Chile declared last week, that henceforth the law would be what the General said it was.

But the Press exploded. And so did the American Bar associations. The Congress had had enough and, most important of all, Judge Sirica did not quail. He was ready to cite the President for contempt. And the President gave in. There are from all indications many more black storms ahead for Richard M. Nixon but, after this first one, as Senator [Irvine] likes to say, "The country is not in ruins. The Constitution is in effect. And the Republic still stands!"

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