Revising the Record

...Haig said it was his "understanding from a White House lawyer" (which White House lawyer is unclear, since Counsel James St...

...Too honest, too courageous to quit while he is behind, White has now broken the four-year rhythm of his Presidential books to do an update...

...To grant that, one must-as White does-discount the escalation from an occasional misuse of the FBI to organized plans for the surveillance and targeting of enemies...

...The Nixon men were men of the embattled old culture," White writes, valuing patriotism and the family while abhorring crime and permissiveness...

...Mainly Haig...

...White makes passing reference to a meeting between Haig and Vice President Ford on August 1, 1974...

...If raising the question of their dedication to law and order is too easy a shot, I might point out that Bob Haldeman's crewcut, cited by White as a symbol of cultural clash, did not survive Haldeman's need for a new image...

...White's intimations of a "delicate, almost psychiatric problem" are a prelude to unveiling a new hero-General Alexander Haig...

...It was Haig, "more than deputy President" since February 1974, who learned in July of the final damning tape, decided "there could be no cover up any longer," then "took over" as Acting President on August 1, straining to hold the White House together as he gently, but firmly, led Nixon toward resignation...

...Calling the volume The UN-Making of the President-1974 or The Making of the President (Ford) -1974 would have clearly tarnished a treasured trademark and accented an egregious error a little too painfully...

...Let me say at the outset that the greater portion of the book is as crisp, as masterful, as well-organized a recital of the road to resignation as you will find anywhere...

...He blew it because he went too far in fighting an "ideological" and a "cultural" war...

...As President Ford related this episode to the House Judiciary Committee, Haig presented five options that Nixon could exercise-each a rather horrendous variation of continuing to keep the nation mired in Watergate or pardoning the defendants and himself and resigning-and only one that Ford could exercise, "a pardon to the President should he resign...

...This time, he had been used...

...Revising the Record Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon By Theodore H. White Atheneum...

...White's central point-almost indispensable if anything is to survive of his earlier approving view-is that Nixon personified a conservative wave, embodied a mandate for change, but that he blew it...

...One must-as White does -ignore Nixon's tax cheating...

...The former President is quoted by White (and Safire) as saying, on the night before his resignation, that he did not expect a pardon, and that some of the best political writing has been done from jail...

...This left Nixon with about as clear a signal as he could have expected that Ford would pardon him-which wasn't bad poker-playing for someone with so few chips left...

...For there are too many who would argue that Nixon, complex though he was, remained all of one piece throughout his career, and only fulfilled what was his destiny from the beginning...

...I told him,' said Ford later, 'that I had to have some time to think...

...Safire, describing Nixon as a multilayered cake in his Before the Fall, provides this applicable layer: "...the politician with a long record of losing, then winning, then losing again, but not quitting until he absolutely had to quit-the spectator sportsman, the decision-maker with the guts to go all the way and take all the flak, the negotiator who will wait out the most patient or nervy opponent...

...Still, the trait was hardly new to him, nor is it uncommon to men in high office...

...There was, to be sure, something positively awesome in Nixon's apparent detachment from his troubles, and his dogged determination to cling to power...

...Clair has disclaimed being the one) that "a President did have the authority to grant a pardon even before any criminal action had been taken against an individual...

...Haig reviewed all the options under discussion in the divided White House-full fight, resignation, pledges of pardon-and asked Ford's advice...

...This, it seems to me, is merely in keeping with a current tendency among those who were deceived to find the fault not in themselves but in Nixon, to construct Jekyll-and-Hyde explanations...

...Yet there was no reason for him not to go on manipulating others-evoking temple-crashing scenarios as a weapon-while he bargained for the most advantageous exit terms...

...But did the Nixon men stand for the "old culture," or did they simply manipulate it...

...The third premise is that Nixon had an "unstable personality...

...Nor did the "old culture's" anti-Communism stand in the way of Nixon's pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union and China...

...Who is the authority for this version of Nixon's last days in the Presidency...

...Nixon's llth-hour refusal to face the inevitable may have appeared neurotic or worse to some...

...Alas, White had been undone by the very qualities that had served him so well in his previous President-makings-his warm sympathy for his principals, his urge to come close to them and translate their visions, his ability to project from political personality into historic trends...

...Yet, partly because White must deal both with where Nixon went wrong and with where he himself went wrong, he seems less certain, less persuasive, when he comes to generalize about the Nixon experience...

...Like Senator Joseph McCarthy, Nixon did not advance the conservative cause...

...Reviewed by Daniel Schorr CBS News, Washington Some phrase like "past shock" is needed to describe the feeling of a number of those conned by proximity to Richard Nixon...

...It is what William Safire, the admiring speech-writer, felt when he realized that had he yielded to his impulse for a farewell handshake as he left the White House on March 21, 1973, to chronicle a great Administration, he would probably have barged in on John Dean's recital of the "cancer on the Presidency," and perhaps become an instant co-conspirator...

...If White, having projected Nixon as a great President, now wants us to believe that Nixon was meant to be a great President and simply fell apart under the strain of it all, he will have to provide more evidence than he has...

...No, its title is Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon, and one senses that the breach of faith was not only with the nation, but with the author, who writes that he had "passed successively from loathing for Richard Nixon to respect for him, then to inescapable recognition of his criminal guilt...

...Ford's reaction was to take the bait: "I inquired as to what was the President's pardon power...

...A suggestion of this even exists in the incomplete record...

...And he will not reveal what Nixon was saying and doing while being belled...

...There was no guidance there...

...Theodore H. White is someone else who experienced past shock-in aggravated form...

...rather, he exploited it...

...Subsequently, he learned Nixon had met earlier that March 17 with Dean to assess, not his hopes for America, but his jeopardy from the impending Senate Watergate investigation...

...One must-as White does-play down the ITT and milk fund scandals...

...But such a statement, from the man who would volunteer to people being taped that their conversations were not being taped, sounds like another gratuitous, self-serving remark...

...States of the Union...

...That conclusion, however, rests on several premises, none of which I am ready to accept...

...The first is that greed and corruption are "irrelevant" to an understanding of the fall of Nixon, and that his wiretapping and other abuses of power were not much different than the transgressions of preceding Presidents...

...he had been manipulated by the master manipulator...

...The second premise is that Nixon did indeed represent a conservative tide running in the country...

...On March 17, 1973, he spent two-and-a-half hours with a "reflective, almost serene" Nixon, conducting the last of a series of interviews for The Making of the President-1972 that converted the astute political historian into an admirer of the Chief Executive's perception and goals...

...I somehow suspect that White may have been had again, and that a new myth is possibly being born...

...Having gone this far, Ford told Haig the next day: "I had no intention of recommending what President Nixon should do," not because the discussion of a pardon had been improper, but because a Vice President "should not endeavor to do or say anything which might affect his President's tenure in office...

...Wasn't there...

...White found Nixon "completely self-possessed in command of his job," and felt he rated a place as "one of the major Presidents of the 20th century, in a rank just after Franklin Roosevelt...

...And, like McCarthy, his undoing came when the real conservative establishment turned against him...

...Perhaps, White suggests, he had to blow it, because the ever growing pressure on the American Presidency had become "too much for a weak man to bear," causing Nixon to crack "as a bearing in a giant machine cracks under strains for which it was not designed...