Roads to Waterloo
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Washington-USA ROADS TO WATERLOO BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to tell the story of the young man who graduated from college in the midst of the Depression and was...
...The items uncovered went beyond those already reported by the General Services Administration...
...Nixon continues to maintain that the need to preserve "national security" compelled these men under his authority to act as they did...
...The amounts were relatively small, however, and the reporter, in a spirit of fair-mindedness, told a Nixon aide about his findings before preparing his story...
...When Kennedy left, Johnson ordered the technicians from the White House Communications Agency (an offshoot of the Army Signal Corps), who had installed the bug, to play back the tape...
...While the television cameras were trained on the Senate hearings, Cox stayed somewhat in the shadows...
...The Administration is aware, though, that it will be much more difficult to keep Presidential tape recordings and papers from his men-who are part of the Executive branch-Than from the Senate Select Committee...
...They found this feeble irony enormously engaging...
...But that could change if Cox prepares a bill of particulars and presents them to Speaker Carl Albert-in effect, dumping the problem in the lap of the House, where, constitutionally speaking, it properly belongs...
...Someone suddenly recalled that Kennedy had held a large brief case on his lap during the entire talk...
...An "excellent idea," the Nixon aide said, promising to speak to the President about it at his earliest opportunity...
...But no action was taken...
...Cox's emplacement here is an extraordinary episode in U.S...
...The name derived from their being housed in Room 16 of the Executive Office Building, which, they discovered, was reconverted for their use from a basement plumbers' shop...
...Unfortunately for the President, Dean's disclosure of the White House "Enemies Project" tends to put the situation in quite another light...
...It was the kind of laughter that Lyndon Johnson's successor in office could not comprehend...
...A member of the Senate Watergate Committee believes there is a moral for him and his colleagues in Johnson's tale that they should keep in mind as they investigate the darker side of the Nixon Presidency...
...To be sure, the President contends that he rescinded his order instituting the plan after the late J. Edgar Hoover refused to go along...
...There was a vacancy in the Blanco County school and the young man, eager to win the post, went before the school board to recite his qualifications...
...and his taking active steps to prevent the apprehension, prosecution and conviction of all those who might have in any way participated in the criminal acts...
...With a planned annual budget of $2.8 million, Cox has hired a 90-member staff, including many professors on leave from the Harvard Law School...
...his concealment of that knowledge, itself a separate crime...
...Since the aide would not explain what had actually happened, the reporter naturally assumed that the President had rejected his "excellent idea...
...And Dean, as it happens, was the fellow assigned to look after domestic intelligence and surveillance matters for the Administration at "that point in time...
...To date, the Lower Chamber has approached the notion of impeaching him with the kind of distaste that Hindus reserve for Sacred Cows...
...It is as if Napoleon, having lost a few big battles, felt constrained to allow an Allied High Commission to meet in Paris while he went off to fight at Borodino, Leipzig and Waterloo...
...For Nixon, the penultimate battle may take place in the House of Representatives...
...The son-of-a-bitch," Johnson said...
...Toward the close of the interview, one of the board members, a grizzled rancher, asked, "By the way, do you teach that the world is round or do you teach that it is flat...
...Nixon's purported crime in this instance consists of his presumed direct knowledge of criminal conduct on the part of this group...
...Nonetheless, most Senators are not prone to confuse magisterial power with ministerial power...
...Should the question be passed on to the Senate, the President could find himself facing his Waterloo...
...They would be joined by the Democratic pragmatists, who would rather deal with a weakened Nixon for the next three years than with a President Agnew...
...their sole tangible link to the rest of the Executive branch is their ability to solicit in-depth FBI reports...
...In 1964, Lyndon Johnson had his office bugged to record the conversation in which he told Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General, that he could not be his running mate...
...Washington-USA ROADS TO WATERLOO BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to tell the story of the young man who graduated from college in the midst of the Depression and was looking for a job as a teacher in Texas...
...He went ahead and wrote his story...
...Everyone present, including the President, had a good laugh...
...To everyone's surprise, the voices of the President and the Attorney General were unintelligible, even though the machinery was found to be in perfect working order and the tape was of the highest quality available...
...What counts in the end, I suppose, is the underlying spirit with which a man approaches the Presidency...
...Ervin is also focusing his attention on the work of the White House Special Investigations Unit, the so-called "plumbers" who were supposed to plug government security leaks...
...I still don't know whether we will come up saying Nixon's world was round or flat," he says...
...But I don't think Nixon could expect much support from the main phalanx of Senate Democrats, from the conservatives of both parties who are taking Sam Ervin's constitutional views to heart, or from the Republicans who have come to believe that the only way to save the party is to dump the President...
...With impeachment still an uncertain and, in any case, distant matter, Nixon's reconstituted circle of advisers is more concerned about his personal detachment from his present plight and seeming insensi-tivity to its consequences...
...But the committee's Democratic chairman, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, firmly believes the world is round...
...In the event of an actual impeachment vote, I think the Nixon loyalists in Congress would stand by him...
...As the Senate's leading constitutional expert, Ervin feels Nixon's admission that he approved the 1970 Domestic Security Plan to bug and burgle ordinary citizens practically amounts to a case of self-indictment...
...Consequently, he is laying down a case to justify the impeachment of the President...
...This is illustrated by the recent experience of a White House reporter who came across documented evidence of taxpayers' funds having been used to improve the President's California estate in ways that had nothing to do with security...
...political annals...
...if there is some awe of the Presidency in the Senate, there is very little awe of Richard Nixon...
...A potentially more lethal threat to the President than the case Ervin has been building against him is the investigation of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox...
...He didn't trust me...
...Epitomizing the Eastern intellectual elitists vilified by Nixon and Ag-new, the Cox team is at once feared and despised by the White House staff...
...Of course, a decision to impeach a President is not going to be faced unless it proves unavoidable...
...The Army technicians surmised that a powerful electromagnetic field had been present in the Oval Office during the Johnson-Kennedy talk and this degaussing field, now vanished, erased the tape while it was being recorded...
...That White House scheme, not sanctioned by law, in all probability was inherently unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment...
...Two of the former plumbers, Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, are already in jail, and several other alumni of Room 16 are currently pleading the Fifth Amendment in fear of probable indictments...
...Although he and his staff are technically connected to the Justice Department, and are paid with Treasury checks, they are absolutely free agents...
...The reporter even suggested the President might well want to state that it was all a mistake and he fully intended to reimburse the taxpayers now that the matter had been properly brought to his attention...
...The young man replied immediately, "I can teach it either way...
...Though Ervin thinks the break-in at Democratic headquarters and the subsequent White House cover-up were deplorable episodes, he does not share the fascination of the committee's Republican vice chairman, Howard Baker of Tennessee, in seeking to find out what the President knew about all this and when he knew it...
...Yet the former Nixon counsel, John Wesley Dean HI, says he knew of no order to pull back...
...Despite the storm signals they are sending up, there is no real evidence that he is heeding them...
...The liaison with Attorney General Elliot Richardson (himself not a trusted figure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) is mostly one-way...
Vol. 56 • August 1973 • No. 16
