Fair Game

...To begin with, let us reassure the President that what is in question is not "the integrity of this office," "the integrity of the White House itself...

...His vows to be worthy of the sacred trust of his office, his protestations that he was talking from his heart, the list of goals for his second term that he set down on Christmas Eve, his advertised love for America and faith in God and prayer and the other phrases with which he garnished his presentation are not likely to bowl over anybody who doesn't tune in on Billy Graham and Montavani...

...I suppose that strictly speaking he will win a decision of not guilty...

...In May the President disclosed that he had "approved the creation of a special investigations unit within the White House—which later came to be known as the 'plumbers.' " He confessed that when he began to suspect "incorrectly" that the CIA had been "in some way involved," his reaction was not to get to the bottom of that extremely serious question, but to instruct all his subordinates to make sure the investigation was not carried "into areas that might compromise those covert national security activities...

...Even the unimpeachable Elliot Richardson has not disappointed the President in his Cabinet posts, managing to slide away from his professed convictions when Administration policy called for something contrary...

...When Nixon started his account of the Watergate case by reminding us that he "was in Florida trying to get a few days rest after my visit to Moscow," he was abiding by one of the customs of television—the opening commercial...

...It will be interesting to watch how Nixon gets along with the ambitious John Connally...

...I am sorry to belabor the obvious...

...Shocked/ 'Appalled' Nixon appeared on television because his cohort was dropping all about him...

...Still, let us take to heart the strictures of Senator James Buckley—who never had an unkind word to say for Joe McCarthy-and not convict the man on the basis of our predilections...

...Is it possible that Ehrlichman mistook the President's meaning...

...And what can the Administration have been thinking when, during the course of the Ellsberg trial, it offered Judge Byrne the Federal Bureau of Investigation...

...Republicans were upset...

...Yet what exactly did the President expect the diligent Ehrlichman to do upon being instructed to start up a little private extra-FBI investigating of Daniel Ellsberg...

...To take the President straight, the Watergate affair may be interpreted as follows: A small group of splendid public servants, perhaps overly zealous in their excellent cause, succumbed to the kind of unfortunate campaign practices that, alas, partisans of all candidates of all parties have always succumbed to...

...But Richard Nixon came to the nation soliciting sympathy and trust...

...It was all too gross...

...It's hard to work up a tear for his "terrible personal ordeal" when ordering the resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam last Christmas...

...He granted that, yes...

...Or that Liddy and Hunt, that dynamic duo, mistook Ehrlichman's meaning...

...or "the integrity of our democratic process...

...What is being most forcefully questioned is merely his own integrity, the integrity of his favored associates, and the integrity of his Administration...

...And Henry responds: "They love not poison that do poison need...

...Let us pray that he has not suffered too grievously while bombing the devil out of Cambodia...

...When the President refers to the "cause they deeply believed to be right...

...The President was, let us grant, "shocked" and "appalled"—not by the event but by the repercussions...

...The faces, though, and the spirit they reflect, remain with one, and we have had no more revealing expression of that spirit than in the President's two major spring pronouncements about the event that has sent his Administration into disarray...

...He asked for them in the deceptive, evasive and hypocritical manner he has used to exhaustion in his years of public life...

...His relationship with Henry Kissinger must be taxing—but Henry travels a lot...

...In his long May statement, wrenched from him by the unending revelations of dirty work by his loyal subordinates, the President adjusted his story...

...The President's campaign to place the likes of G. Harrold Carswell and Clement Haynsworth on the High Court was a means of reducing that body to his measure...

...Perhaps as the Ervin committee continues to bring out the facts and the faces, we shall have a better basis for evaluating the President's role in instigating and covering up the espionage and all the rest...

...Richard Nixon can concentrate on meeting with Leonid Brezhnev and not be distracted any more by the pecadillos of the well-intentioned that have already claimed too much of his time and attention...

...He must shed his robes for the occasion-along with some part of his conception of Executive Privilege...

...Richard Nixon has come forward perfumed in essence of Watergate...

...All that hair, all those colors—strange and frightening...

...But in the course of laying down his defense, in the very act of proclaiming his innocence...

...Now we have seen the faces of the Nixon Administration—bland, beardless, definitely white, and creepier than anything I remember seeing among the Democrats...

...In his present coolness toward young John Dean, Nixon seems to be playing Henry IV as he sends Exton, Richard II's murderer, off to wander through the shades of night...

...Oame by walter goodman Essence of Watergate Gazing on the faces that Senator Sam Ervin has been bringing before us since the middle of May, I am reminded of the very different televised faces from the 1972 Democratic Convention, which frightened the greater part of the nation into the arms of Nixon-Agnew...

...Though we have lately heard much about the deficiencies of the best and the brightest, when a president chooses the second or third best and the less bright to form his palace guard, he does it because he wants men whose loyalty will be all his, who will have no other constituency, no overmastering ideals or troublesome ideas that might compete with a primary allegiance to the chief...

...The revelations about Watergate and associated embarrassments have come so fast and in such a disordered form that no citizen can be expected to keep in mind exactly who did what with whom...

...Like the man they served, they had difficulty in distinguishing between Richard Nixon and the United States of America...

...True, Nixon people did compromise the CIA, the FBI, the courts and the election process—but a single set of swindles does not make a summer...

...Perhaps he will be inspired to issue yet another elaboration of his role in the affair...

...he had played a role of sorts in the unfortunate business, and then proceeded to cloud this role with muddy references to "national security operations" and the obstinacy of the dead J. Edgar Hoover...

...Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Mardian, Stans, Colson, Kalmbach, Chapin, Dean, and who knows how many more were also successful appointments...

...William Satire, who has lately moved his public relations firm to the op-ed page of the New York Times, first reminded us what a terrific investigator young Dick Nixon was, and then cajoled us not to be too zealous in condemning people for Watergate...

...Deplorable—yet now that the unimpeachable Elliot Richardson has been installed at the Justice Department...

...One wonders whether Satire ever gave similar advice to the zealous President, as good a hater as we have had in the White House...

...Deplorable...

...They confirmed their loyalty by compromising their positions...

...The feckless L. Patrick Gray was a perfect choice for the FBI, a man who would burn what needed burning...

...By May the President had concluded: "It now appears that there were persons who may have gone beyond my directives and sought to expand on my efforts to protect the national security operations in order to cover up any involvement they or certain others might have had in Watergate...

...Hoover, that bete noire of the entire Left, appears to have refused flatly to cooperate with anybody in this Administration about anything and has thereby become the only member of the Federal bureaucracy, living or departed, whose reputation has been enhanced by Watergate...

...Not Best, Not Bright Nixon's characterization of the departed H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman as "two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know" may be taken as payment for services performed, or as simple prudence—for who can tell what such people might say if sufficiently irked...

...As for trust, he has earned little of that in the past 25 years...

...I suppose we owe him the sympathy due any man caught in awkward circumstances...

...he is talking about himself...

...The President's heavy emphasis on the integrity of "the American political system" bore the same relation to the subject at hand as the picture of his family, the bust of Abe Lincoln and the American flag lapel pin with which he girded himself on the last day of April...

...From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed...

...Exton, who only acted upon what he thought to be his master's desire, protests: "From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed...

...Perhaps the experienced flack Satire might even now suggest to his former chief that the private tribulations with which he has been regaling the citizenry for a quarter of a century are wearing thin...

...Existing within the narrow compass of his own limitations and suspicions, Nixon could scarcely feel comfortable with the better or the brighter...