Impeachment Maneuvers

...The implication-that Ford thinks he would be an incompetent President-Is ludicrously self-deprecatory...

...The visits to the home districts merely confirmed what was already apparent to them, namely that Nixon's decision to hold office at all costs could lead to their own forced retirement from public life...

...If, for James Boswell, politics was nothing more than the means of rising in the world, for Richard Nixon it is nothing less than the means of preventing his fall from it...

...Naturally, the score would have to be settled with the presumed conspirators come Election Day...

...Two strong impressions emerge from talks with these troubled politicians: -They would prefer to campaign in 1974 with Gerald Ford instead of Richard Nixon in the White House...

...Should the matter reach the courts, on the other hand, there is at least a 50-50 chance they will refuse jurisdiction on the grounds that in an impeachment proceeding Congress must perform all the judicial functions...

...The new line is that some bad people, like the AFL-CIO leadership, have seized upon the unfortunate Watergate business in an effort to keep it going and destroy the President...

...The White House wants an early showdown because it believes an impeachment effort now would fail...

...As of now, they are not prepared to vote for Nixon's impeachment...

...Let the courts decide the issue, the President's partisans will say...

...For surely the White House plans to give some documents and withhold others...

...Nixon hopes the Democratic Left will take umbrage at this final calumny, wrest the issue from the leadership, force a showdown on the floor-and lose...

...Some politicians ask how Nixon could possibly defy a constitutionally privileged inquiry in the House before which all claims of executive privilege must necessarily fall...

...On the record, most of the vulnerable Republicans contend that the evidence at hand-Including an adulterated White House tape-Is still insufficient to warrant such drastic action...

...The President's notion of defending himself with the truth, or such segments of the truth as could be acceptably revealed, died at birth, mourned only by those concerned Republicans who had midwifed Operation Candor...

...If their position amounts to a contradiction, it is not the only one in what is shaping up as a bitter struggle over the President's future...

...Nixon has at least 25 diehard loyalists there, an unshakable base to which he would have to add only 10 or so votes...

...For the same reason that Nixon is unlikely to give potentially incriminating information to Democrats he is equally unlikely to resign if impeached...

...According to veteran observers, the President would have no choice but to honor such subpoenas since the right of Congress to receive this information is so abundantly manifest (the legal reason) and since Nixon's failure to comply would itself be construed as an impeachable act (the political reason...

...They believe that the Vice President's elevation would usher in a period of relative good feeling in the country and permit them to keep their seats in Congress...

...Although most politicians who went home were relieved to find that fuel prices and shortages were causing more consternation than was impeachment, their relief may prove short-lived...

...Despite the tremendous volume of materials presented so far, they calculate that none of it is sufficiently damaging for impeachment...

...It is a price that Nixon is apparently unwilling to pay...

...Or, in the words of a White House speechwriter, as read by the Vice President in Atlantic City last month: "Their aim is total victory for themselves and the total defeat not only of President Nixon but of the policies for which he stands...

...This suits Ford because his favorite constituents, the rank-and-file Republicans on Capitol Hill, desperately want the issue off the boards well before the midterm elections...

...The President's hero, Woodrow Wilson, once said, "There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight...

...And people like Attorney General William Saxbe, who is playing it down the middle, will tend to go along...

...If the Judiciary Committee cannot get what it wants from Leon Jaworski, the special Watergate prosecutor, it will surely try to do so on its own through subpoena powers...

...No matter how it ends, the country is paying a frightful price...

...In truth, their visits merely left them dangling, since the decisions they reach on impeachment necessarily involve institutional relationships with other politicians as much as relationships with the voters...

...Should this occur, Bella Abzug would prove a more faithful, if less witting, ally of Richard Nixon's than Barry Goldwater...

...This year, however, quite a few editorial budgets were stretched to enable reporters to learn what members of Congress think about what their constituents think...

...The White House strategy, in any event, is to delay a resolution of the impeachment issue until, through some now unseen miracle, the country tires of the struggle or Nixon's enemies commit some fatal mistake or events on the world stage take an unexpected turn that serves to preempt impeachment and bring about Nixon's political resurrection...

...If there are such men, Richard Nixon is not one of them...

...Should impeachment remain an issue in the fall, marginal candidates will pay the price, no matter what stand they take...

...Thus their price for speeding up the proceedings is the smooth conveyance of all unobliterated White House tapes, as well as other relevant documents, to Peter Rodino's Judiciary Committee...

...In particular, reporters tested the sentiments of the more politically vulnerable Republicans, because they undoubtedly hold the key to the President's fate...

...That was how President Andrew Johnson got himself impeached...

...The soundings were undertaken on the premise that the House won't impeach Richard Nixon unless it comes under strong grassroots pressure to do so...

...Yet the more pertinent question is what other politicians are prepared to do if he resists...

...If they can crush the President and his philosophy, they are convinced that they can then dominate the Congress and, through it, the country...

...Now that Congress is back in session, it is clear these marginal Republicans really didn't learn much from the voters during the long holiday recess that they couldn't have fathomed from the public opinion polls readily available here...

...House Democrats, however, will not press for impeachment until they feel it stands a good chance of succeeding...

...In 1968, when the House passed the Tenure of Office Act, it included a key provision holding that a President's failure to comply would be taken, on its face, as a high crime or misdemeanor, the constitutional definition of an impeachable offense...

...But if the House votes to impeach him, the President's hole card remains the Senate...

...In most of these marginal GOP districts, the hardcore Nixon constituency-those voters who would probably stick with him to the last -Stands at about one in five...

...The President's men want Congress to act on the basis of the already established public record...

...Privately, they fear that Nixon could survive an impeachment battle in the House...

...House Democratic leaders tend to concur with this assessment...

...As of now, the odds that the Senate would muster the necessary two-thirds majority to remove him from office are not very high...

...Consequently, the matter of obtaining evidence becomes crucial to both sides...

...Those who wonder how Presidents get Vice Presidents to say such things need only talk to Hubert Humphrey about his speeches on Vietnam...

...Judging by the polls, an even larger number of voters are prepared to rebuff any Congressional contender who lacks the guts to rebuff Nixon...

...At least three out of every five Americans surveyed say they no longer trust Nixon...

...Yet there is no overwhelming cry in the country for his immediate ouster-a fact that looms large in calculations on all sides...

...They believe that Nixon must be implicated directly in a criminal felony, such as the obstruction of justice, before the House would act...

...Since it is not in the President's nature to confess or recant, regardless of the evidence against him, likely as not his supporters would remain convinced that he had been hounded from office through an ultraliberal Establishment plot, to use the current White House jargon...

...Having done so, they argue, he could regain a measure of popularityyand with the powers of his office intact-take political revenge on the pro-impeachment legislators...