Washington Notebook

...On April 14, 1973, awarm Saturday afternoon, when the Watergate cover-up had started unraveling, Mitchell was spotted leaving the White House from a rear entrance...

...I offered him the choice of facing a shoulder-mounted camera from his captive position or assenting to be interviewed upon arrival at LaGuardia Airport...

...Having embraced Reagonomics, Bush is now accused of déjàvoodoo...

...Two-thirds of Americans say there must have been a conspiracy...

...Thus: Two days after the election the Labor Department announced the lifting of a 45-year-old ban on manufacturing work in the home—a step long under consideration and bitterly opposed by the trade unions...

...However, after Mitchell's death, a Miami-based journalist, Len Colodny, told me that he had interviewed the former Attorney General for more than 75 hours...

...All-inthe-family should make for a smooth transition, yet so far things have been oddly off balance...

...It had been Ehrlichman, advising him that he would be implicated in the investigation...

...He agreed with a tight-lipped, "Okay...

...In Kennedy's case, attention remains riveted on his death—and its circumstances...

...Since the Gramm-Rudman law requires arbitrary cuts, at least onehalf from defense, if the deficit for that year goes over $100 billion, awareness of these numbers before November 8 might have demanded something more from Bush than his famous "no new taxes" lip-reading exercise...

...It is that Oswald read, in the New Orleans Times-Picayune of September 9,1963, an Associated Press interview in which Fidel Castro asserted that he was the target of American assassination plots, and warned that he was prepared to "answer in kind...

...That is why he so forcefully opposed the Iranian arms deal...

...Bush, who promised a stringent ethics bill during the campaign, declined to say if he would have signed this one...

...It also appears somehow easier to suspect a conspiracy than to accept the idea that a young President can be struck down by one demented individual...

...In Algiers, Mohammed Abu Abbas, organizer of the hijacking, was much in evidence as a member of the PLO Executive Committee...

...In the Arafat case, however, acting in the twilight zone of an intraparty transition, Shultz had to consider the problems he might be creating for the new Administration...

...Former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, on behalf of the Agenda for America, and Chairman Alan Greenspan, on behalf of the Federal Reserve, have warned that the deficit is for real and that Bush's response to it does not seem to be...

...Mitchell replied, unblinkingly, "I don't know that term...

...This helps to explain the Secretary's response to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief Yasir Arafat's application for a visa following last month's Algiers meeting of the Palestine National Council...

...The following Monday the Treasury Department announced the first attempt to impose drug testing on private industry...

...He refused to say anything adverse to the President, and he showed contempt for Presidential aides, whom he held responsible for "the White House horrors...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Arafat and the Bush Transition On a visit to Belgrade three years ago, Secretary of State George P. Shultz erupted in anger when Yugoslav Foreign Minister (now President) Raif Dizdarevic, during a joint news conference, suggested that the Palestinian hijackers of the Italian cruise ship A chille Lauro may have had a just cause...

...Mitchell was attracted to thebook's thesis, which is that he was one of the innocent victims of a CIA plot to depose President Nixon by entrapping him in Watergate...

...The assumption of some "they" controlling the life and death of statesmen is a fairly new phenomenon in America...

...At least this gives some meaning to the loss of a leader...

...what a threat [terrorism] is to civilized society...

...only 13 percent are convinced Lee Harvey Oswald did it alone...

...I surmise that Oswald, already a Castro supporter, then designated himself as the Cuban leader's avenger...

...Tuesday it was disclosed that the Social Security Administration has drafted rules making it harder to appeal decisions denying pension, Medicare and welfare benefits...

...It ordered tests for nearly 4 million persons employed in transportation...

...He therefore had it made clear, through background briefings, that the visa denial was entirely a personal decision, taken against the advice of the top echelons of the State Department and without consulting President-elect George Bush or anyone on his team...

...Assessing the subsequent firestorm of criticism at the UN and in Europe, Shultz said: "I am afraid that it's too easy for people to forget...

...Convicted in absentia in Italy of the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, who was shot in his wheelchair and thrown overboard, Abbas joked to reporters that maybe Klinghoffer was "trying to swim for it...

...Once on the ground, he looked into the camera, denied any connection with Watergate and declined even to say whom he had seen in the White House...

...On the same day the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to review Roe vs...

...I have developed my own new-conspiracy theory...

...Before the Senate Watergate Committee, Mitchell turned out to be a frustrating witness...

...Is that a Yankee term from Connecticut...

...President Lincoln was also assassinated, but America observes his birthday...

...Conspiracy theories continue to proliferate...

...Because Vice President-elect Dan Quayle was one of 51 Senators who had signed a letter urging Shultz to reject the visa request, it was considered especially important to dissociate the incoming Administration from the ruling...

...On Thanksgiving eve, President Reagan let it be known that he would pocket veto legislation tightening restrictions on lobbying by former government officials and, for the first time, extending some of them to ex-members of Congress...

...President Reagan, while agreeing with Shultz' action, also stressed that it was the Secretary's sole responsibility...

...Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion...

...That was what John F. Kennedy promised, as we were reminded in the saturation media observance of the 25th anniversary of his assassination last November 22...

...Most people, I have found, reject my scenario, preferring to see darker forces standing in the shadows behind Oswald (if, that is, they are willing to believe that he was the assassin...

...For example, a person with a brain tumor appealing the refusal of disability payments could not amend the filing if it was later discovered that the tumor was cancerous...

...asked sarcastically if Mitchell was conducting "an exercise in stonewalling...

...Indeed, the financial community's lack of confidence that the Presidentelect has any answer to soaring deficits has perhaps been the most trying aspect of the transition...

...In the end, there always seems to be a conspiracy...

...John N. Mitchell Speaklng of Watergate, something drew me last November 12 to attend the funeral of John N. Mitchell, who was Richard M. Nixon's law partner, friend, Attorney General, and re-election campaign chairman...

...Off-Balance Changeover If only in historical terms, we are witnessing an unusual White House transition...

...From Mitchell I got an early lesson in the art of stonewalling...

...Colodny is co-author with Robert Gettlin of a forthcoming book, A Silent Coup: The Removal of Richard Nixon...

...On a hunch I sped to National Airport with a CBS camera crew, and we piled on the next plane about to leave for New York, there finding a very surprised Mitchell...

...Never mind about how Oswald went to Mexico City, seeking a Cuban visa in the expectation of later receiving a hero's welcome from Castro...

...The last line of this reminiscence should read, "He went to his death stonewalling...

...Shultz, supported only by his longtime executive assistant, Charles Hill, and his officer for counterterrorism, Paul Bremer III, was not swayed...

...At the November 25 meeting with his aides where the issue was considered, the Secretary, I am told, was warned to expect a serious negative reaction, including a possible move to convene the UN General Assembly in Geneva...

...I want you to stonewall it" were Nixon's words, preserved in the Oval Office tapes...

...Those who know Shultz say that, although he can be patient with many complexities, he sees terrorism in almost viscerally simple terms of no compromise, no quarter...

...One reason, paradoxically, is that to avoid encumbering Bush during the campaign the outgoing Administration postponed some unpleasant announcements...

...But since 1969 Americans have learned that there can be conspiracies and cover-ups in high places—the secret bombing of Cambodia, Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair, to name a few...

...Next day the Agriculture Department revealed that over 80,000 farmers delinquent in their loan payments may be subject to foreclosure...

...Even after four Presidents fell to assassins' bullets, President Lyndon B. Johnson's National Commission on Violence found in 1969 that the general pattern was of "freelance assassins in varying states of mental instability...

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

...Terrorism is wrong, snapped Shultz, and the international community must deal with it "unequivocally, firmly and definitively...

...Comforts of Conspiracy The one luxury not available to the successor in an intraparty transfer of power is denouncing his predecessor and promising a new start...

...Finally, the news came out that the budget deficit for fiscal 1990, which the Administration last summer projected at $111 billion, now looks more like $137 billion...

...The Big Enchilada" was actually coined by John D. Ehrlichman in the Oval Office in March 1973, as he sat with the President and associates plotting to make Mitchell the "fall guy" for Watergate—a role that John Dean had declined...

...The Big Enchilada," "stonewalling" and "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" are all contributions to our language associated with his name...

...He was then living in New York and had no known connection with the Nixon Administration...

...This is not only the first succession of an elected incumbent Vice President since Martin Van Buren, but the first normal intraparty transfer of power since Herbert Hoover succeeded Calvin Coolidge 60 years ago...