The Communists' Choice

...Today, the balance of military power, the increasing independence of allies, and the general shift of policy priorities from foreign to domestic affairs make the outlook for detente more favorable than ever before...

...One quoted the President's remarks upon returning from the hospital, in which he branded as false all speculation that he might resign as a result of the Watergate affair...

...Two weeks later Za Rubezhom (Abroad), a limited-circulation weekly published by the Journalists' Union, printed "with minor abbreviations" and without comment the text of the President's May 22 statement...

...Perspectives THE COMMUNISTS' CHOICE BY PAUL E. ZINNER We now know from the Ervin Committee hearings that a February 10, 1973, memorandum from H. R. Haldeman to John Dean declared: "We need to get our people to put out the story on the foreign or Communist money that was used in support of demonstrations against the President in 1972...

...but his unimpeachable credentials as an anti-Communist give Moscow and Peking confidence that the commitments undertaken by him will be honored and that an accommodation reached with him will be stable and lasting...

...Republicans, on the other hand, appear to have greater flexibility, since their motives and purposes vis-a-vis Communists are not suspect...

...the distrust that a substantial portion of the electorate felt toward Senator McGovern, and the dissension that ultimately tore apart his camp, were graphically described...

...By contrast, the woes that beset the Democratic standard bearer were aired with unusual frankness...

...And as Senator Lowell Weicker (R.-Conn...

...In July, Watergate was mentioned in-ferentially in two minor news items carried by the daily press...

...During the second half of the year the Communists also avoided embarrassing Nixon in any way, even in his quest for a settlement of the Vietnam conflict...

...Surely, their decision not to take advantage of the near-perfect excuse provided by Nixon reflected their own policy priorities and not their concern for his welfare...

...visit in June, a time when Soviet correspondents fairly swarmed over the country and filed reams of copy with their respective newspapers on just about every aspect of American life...

...The other noted his refusal to comply with the Ervin Committee's request for tapes and sundry documents...

...Recognizing the average Soviet citizen's ignorance of Watergate, the editors of Pravda appended in parentheses a nine-line explanation that the Senate hea,rings were investigating an incident involving the bugging of Democratic party headquarters during last year's electoral campaign...

...The Communists' forbearance on Watergate, like their earlier efforts to bolster the President's position during the campaign, is based on practical operational considerations and a shrewd assessment of certain realities of American politics...

...Then, on the day before the Senate hearings opened, Literatumaya Gazeta, a weekly with a circulation of about 1 million published by the Writers' Union, ran a summary account...

...public opinion polls, and his achievements abroad, including of course the improvement in Soviet-American relations, were approvingly noted as a major source of his popularity...

...Not only is Nixon ready and willing to pursue it...

...He was presented as the odds-on favorite on the basis of accurate readings of U.S...

...Nor did the benign attitude of the Communists toward the President change abruptly on the date of his reelection...

...Yet a careful examination of the facts reveals that in the 1972 Presidential contest the Communists deemed a victory by George Mc-Govern as not only implausible but undesirable...

...of the talks would have rested squarely on him...

...On the contrary, it has continued to the present and has been strikingly manifest in their reaction-or relative nonreaction?to the Watergate scandal...

...What further recommends Nixon to the good graces of the Communists is, ironically, his lifelong record of ruthless, uncompromising anti-Communism...

...at worst it could scuttle the entire enterprise...

...The blame for the collapse Paul E. Zinner, a professor of political science at the University of California's Davis campus, analyzes the Soviet press on the weekly NET program World Press...

...pointed out when he placed the document in evidence, its unmistakable intention was to tar the Democratic party and its Presidential ticket with the brush of Communist support...

...For the history of the Cold War has convinced Peking and Moscow that on the whole Democratic Presidents are less tractable than Republican Presidents...

...Both Peking and Moscow have refrained from using the break-in to depict the American political system as morally degenerate and have been careful not to implicate Nixon in any wrongdoing...

...In no way is this intended to demean or detract from the President's tangible accomplishments...

...Although the committee did succeed in forcing the former White House chief of staff to admit that he had no evidence to substantiate the memo's allegations, it failed to lay bare the inaccuracy of his basic premise that there is an affinity between Communists and Democrats...

...Especially in the case of the Soviet Union, many delicate military and economic issues remain to be resolved, and time is of the essence...

...Significantly, criticism of his Vietnam policies was muted...

...The Soviets, in particular, had a unique opportunity to compound the President's problems by calling off their summit meeting with him because of the bombing raids he ordered against North Vietnam on the very eve of his departure for Moscow...

...Even before the campaign was fully under way, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, by deeds as well as words, began to buttress what was to become the President's most often repeated and most effective appeal: that his personal diplomacy was the key to promoting better bilateral relations with the two major Communist powers and to improving the prospects for a stable and lasting world peace...

...Apart from giving nominal support to the candidate put forward by the CPUSA, they overwhelmingly favored the incumbent, Richard Nixon...

...A change of Presidents in the midst of the current negotiations would at best entail delays...

...After all, Nixon is the man who opened new channels of communication and moved relations with Moscow and Peking from the dead center of confrontation to negotiation and accommodation...

...And the Soviet mass media's coverage of the campaign accorded the President truly extraordinary treatment...

...But it does explode the old myths linking Communists to Democrats and render inoperative the assumptions implicit in Haldeman's memorandum...

...There followed months of absolute silence...

...Ascattering of inconsequential items about Watergate did appear in the Soviet press at the beginning of the year...

...It referred the reader to an article in an earlier issue that quoted various Presidential statements, but otherwise abstained from any critical appraisal of the affair...

...they clearly considered it in their self-interest to make common cause with this President instead of hastening his retirement from office...

...The Soviet blackout of Watergate in mass circulation dailies like Pravda, Izvestia and Trud continued through Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev's U.S...

...Had Peking and Moscow wanted to undermine the President's reelection chances, they could have put off the summit meetings scheduled for the first half of the year and let it be known that, despite their desire to improve relations with the United States, they would initiate their efforts in that direction only after the November 7 election...

...I cannot vouch for the specific content of China's media, but responsible Sinologists report that it was generally similar to the Soviet Union's, although somewhat more curtailed...

...Perhaps this is due to the cloud of suspicion that seems to hang over Democratic dealings with the Communists...