TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/72elect/72elect.019

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                                                                                November 19, 1973

THE CRISIS

The Pressure Builds on the President


     Multiple crises, both personal and national, were surely at
hand, and the embattled President was determined to demonstrate
that he was in control of them. In a rush of Washington meetings
Richard Nixon looking flushed and haggard but speaking with
animation, explained his plans to deal with the oil crisis to his
Cabinet, congressional leaders, business executives, Governors
and mayors. He bantered with the Governors about football, asked
Maryland's Governor Marvin Mandel what was wrong with the
Baltimore Colts, and laughed at Mandel's reply:  "They lack
energy."  Three times he told the Governors that the nation must
"bite the bullet" to meet the crisis.

     At the end of a forceful televised speech on the energy
problems, the President shifted to his own crisis, noting the
calls for his resignation over what he termed "the deplorable
Watergate matter."  But he vowed:  "I have no intention whatever
of walking away from the job I was elected to do."  Later he made
a surprise appearance at a dinner honoring his wife Pat, and
hugged her in a rare public embrace. He also got off some weak
jokes("I'm sorry I'm late; I could only drive 50 miles an hour"),
and told a story of having visited his dying mother in the mid-
'60s. Trying to bolster her, Nixon had said:  'Mother, don't you
give up."  Mrs. Nixon lifted herself on one elbow and replied:
"Richard, don't you ever give up."

     Big Plunge. There was no indication last week that Richard
Nixon was giving up in any way, even as his troubles continued to
grow. Depressed mainly by the energy shortage but influenced by
the President's Watergate uncertainties, the stock market took
its biggest plunge in more than a decade, dropping 24.24 points
on a single day on the Dow Jones industrial average. Officials
of the New York Stock Exchange quietly circulated a contingency
plan on the floor to close the market instantly if Nixon should
resign. Half a world away, a similar small omen appeared in the
pages of Pravda, which for the first time began readying Soviet
readers for Nixon's possible exit. In private, Soviet officials
were spreading the line:  "Our relations with the U.S. are based
on Washington policies, not on the President."

     In Congress, Nixon suffered his worst defeat since the
rejection of two of his Supreme Court nominees. The Congress
overrode his veto and placed new limits on his war powers. Top
officials of the AFL-CIO launched a campaign to get the union's
13.5 million members to demand the President's "immediate
impeachment."  The union's convention had called upon Nixon to
resign, but since he apparently will not, the AFL-CIO statement
said, there are 19 reasons why he should be impeached. Among
them:  "He has consistently lied to the American people;" "He has
violated the Constitution and his sworn obligation to see that
the laws be faithfully executed;'" "He has used the office of the
Presidency to attempt to put himself above the law.:  The United
Mine Workers union also urged that Nixon resign or be impeached.

     Moreover, despite two weeks of hearings before Federal Judge
John J. Sirica, White House lawyers and witnesses failed to allay
doubts that two of the President's subpoenaed tapes never
existed. Indeed, a TIME-Yankelovich poll shows that 55% of
Americans do not believe the President's story on the missing
tapes and, more vitally, less than half the public wants him to
continue in office. TIME has also learned that there is deep
concern within the White House that other documents sought by
Watergate prosecutors will turn out to be missing. Most suspect
are the loosely guarded papers of former aides, particularly H.R.
Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.

     Other difficulties for the President are building. Federal
Judge Gerhard A. Gesell is preparing an order that will declare
the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to have been
illegal. The judge presumably will rule that the dismissal
violated regulations instituted by former Attorney General Elliot
Richardson. The decision, in a suit initiated by Consumer
Advocate Ralph Nader and pressed by three members of Congress,
will not lead to the reinstatement of Cox, but will represent a
judicial scolding of the President.

     A White House aide conceded that there is great worry that
some of Nixon's former associates may turn against him to save
themselves from possible jail sentences. Most feared, he said,
are Egil Krogh Jr., who last week filed suit for access to
Ellsberg burglary papers still sequestered in the White House,
and former Attorney General John Mitchell.

     New Discourse. While such judicial hurdles still lay ahead,
one unfinished bit of Watergate court business was cleared up.
Judge Sirica gave the six original Watergate burglars and
wiretappers sentences far lighter than the 35 to 40 years he had
provisionally imposed on most of them; he apparently was
satisfied that they had told whatever they knew about the crimes.
Minimum sentences ranging from one to 2 1/2 years were given to
E. Howard Hunt Jr., James McCord Jr., Bernard Barker, Frank
Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez (G. Gordon Liddy,
who has been totally uncooperative with investigators, is serving
a minimum six-year, eight-month sentence.)

     As the legal machinery continued to deal with Watergate, the
national debate turned with surprising swiftness to a new level
of discourse. It centered less on whether Nixon should remain in
office than on which would be the less harmful means of his
removal:  resignation or impeachment and trial.

     Mew calls for resignation came from such diverse sources as
Massachusetts' Republican Senator Edward Brooke, the Detroit
News, the New York Times and the Denver Post. "The Right Report,
"an ultraconservative Washington newsletter, claims:
"Conservatives are in almost unanimous agreement that President
Richard Nixon should not be impeached, but a significant majority
wishes he would resign -- after Representative Gerald Ford has been
confirmed as Vice President."  Argued the Times:  "He has been
trying to 'tough it out' for too long at too great a cost to the
nation. As long as he clings to office, he keeps the presidency
swamped in a sea of scandal and the American public in a morass
of concern and confusion."

     Discarding Tradition. Yet resignation as a resolution of
the crisis was also sharply challenged as going beyond the
Constitution and allowing too many uncertainties to remain about
the precise nature of the President's transgressions. Among
those making the point was Republican Senator Howard Baker, vice
chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, who said that to
suggest resignation was "to discard the American tradition,
indeed the English tradition, of the presumption of innocence."

     One of the nation's most influential conservative
columnists, James J. Kilpatrick, also rejected resignation, but
urged the House to impeach. "The time has come, much as a
longtime admirer regrets to say it, to proceed with the
impeachment and trial of Richard Nixon," wrote Kilpatrick.
"Nothing else will clear the poisonous air and restore a sense of
domestic tranquility."

     Although the debate is valid and valuable, the Constitution
offers no barrier to resignation. Article II specifically
envisages it in the clause:  "In case of removal of the President
from Office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to
discharge the powers and duties of said office..."Some of the
preference for impeachment comes not only from conservatives but
from Nixon's old enemies. And some of the latter seem motivated
more by a desire to punish the President than to reach a
resolution of an intolerable crisis in Government.

     As the pressure grew, Nixon at week's end turned from the
energy crisis to take specific steps to check the adverse flow of
opinion. He was getting a wide range of friendly advice that the
time had come to lay his cards on the table, but it was not clear
what he could do -- or what good it would do at this late hour.
Still he summoned top Republican members of Congress to the White
House and talked to them spiritedly about his Watergate problems
for nearly two hours. Representative John B. Anderson, chairman
of the House Republican Conference, said that he was "very much
encouraged" by the meeting. Nixon, he said, had indicated that
he would make some public accounting of what is on his subpoenaed
tapes after they have been screened by Judge Sirica and given to
the Watergate grand jury. Nixon has also invited the 28 members
of a national Republican "coordinating committee." convened by
Republican National Chairman George Bush, to meet with him this
week to discuss the impact of the scandal and how to try to shore
up his shaky presidency.

_______________________________________________________________
THE TAPES
Now a White House Inaudibility Gap

     The confident White House lawyers had expected to clear up
all doubts in about three hours of testimony. But as the second
week of the unusual fact-finding hearings in Federal Judge John J.
Sirica's Washington courtroom ended, the astonishing White House
claim that two of the President's subpoenaed tapes had never
existed remained a matter of controversy. Each time the battery
of White House lawyers closed one testimonial gap, a new one
opened.

     The extraordinary drama pitted an experienced team of White
House attorneys against two aggressive 30-year-olds from the
special prosecutor's staff. Most of the tough questions were
posed by Richard Ben-Veniste, a brash, curly haired lawyer with
an imposing recall of past Watergate-related testimony. Last
week, when the President's feisty personal secretary Rose Mary
Woods was called, the questions were asked by Jill Vollner, an
attractive miniskirted attorney whose queries were delivered with
a gentle touch.

     The testimony demonstrated again that President Nixon was
speaking most loosely when he assured the Senate Watergate
committee last July that the tapes are "under my sole personal
control."  Miss Woods had listened to some of the recordings at
the White House, at Camp David and at Key Biscayne. H.R.
Haldeman, Nixon's former chief of staff, received a bundle of
tapes at an aide's home in Maryland and took them to his
Georgetown residence. Once described by a White House official
as being stored in the residential section of the White House,
the tapes were now said to be kept in the Executive Office
Building under the supervision of John C. Bennett, an assistant
to Nixon's chief of staff, General Alexander Haig.

     Bennett, a retired major general who took over custody of
the tapes from the Secret Service after the existence of the
recording system was revealed last July, sounded militarily
meticulous in testimony about his tape-guarding role. He placed
notes of tape withdrawals in envelopes in his office safe and
sealed them in such a way that "I would know if they had been
opened."  He also placed "two keys" to another safe that held the
tapes in similar envelopes. Bennett seemed incredulous when Ben-
Veniste recalled that Secret Service men had claimed that there
were three keys. Asked if he could be entirely certain that all
tapes returned were identical to those that had been withdrawn,
Bennett replied candidly:  "Nope. No way."

     Haldeman added a new puzzle. He said that he had requested
a single recording on April 25 (of the March 21 talk between
Nixon and John Dean), but Ben-Veniste noted that White House
records indicated that he was given 22 tapes. Haldeman agreed
with the record and said that the number of tapes he got was not
surprising, although he could not explain it. (At least 25 times
in the course of his three-hour testimony, he used the phrase "I
do not remember" or "I do not recall.")  He said that he returned
all of the tapes on April 27 or 28, and was "very surprised" to
learn that the Secret Service did not log them as returned until
May 2. Haldeman also indicated that he thought his former White
House colleague John Ehrlichman knew about the President's
recording setup well before it was mentioned in public testimony;
Ehrlichman had testified flatly at the Watergate hearings that he
did not know.

     The most disturbing testimony, however, centered on the
possibility that the tapes that do exist may prove to be of such
poor quality that key portions may be inaudible. No less than
seven microphones, for example, had been hidden in the
President's Oval Office, and noises near any one of them
apparently could obscure spoken words. When a china coffee cup
was placed on Nixon's desk, said Haldeman, it became "an ear-
splitting problem for anyone listening to the tapes."  Smiling,
he turned to Judge Sirica, who is expected eventually to hear
seven of the tapes, and said, "I warn you in advance."  Sirica
smiled too.

     Very Dull. Miss Woods, answering calmly but testily, said
that she had labored for more than 31 hours to type a transcript
of the contents of a single 90-minute recording ("A very dull
tape, frankly," she said). At first she had no foot pedal to
start and stop the play-back machine. "I don't think anyone
knows what a hard job this is, "she said. Overall, she claimed,
the "quality was very poor."  When the President put his feet on
his desk, it sounded "like a bomb hitting you in the face.
Boom!"  Sometimes Nixon whistled, sometimes four people talked at
once. She said that it was impossible for her to catch every
word, "and I don't believe anyone else could either."

     That was the first hint that the tapes might prove
unreliable. Alexander Butterfield, the former White House aide
who had first revealed the system's existence, had told the
Senate Watergate committee that the microphones picked up
conversations in Nixon's two main offices with great clarity;
even "low tones," he said, were audible.

     As last week's sessions proceeded, Judge Sirica warned that
no inferences should be drawn until technical experts analyze the
various claims about the tapes. "This may well be the most
important and conclusive part of these hearings," he said. Both
sides are now preparing for technical testimony.

_________________________________________________________________
Rose Woods:  The Fifth Nixon


     When Rose mary Woods met Richard Nixon in 1947, she was a
secretary for a House committee studying the Marshall Plan and he
was a freshman Congressman serving as a committee member. She
noticed him because, after a committee junket to Europe, Nixon
turned in the only expense account "titled, totaled, signed and
all properly done."

     Miss Woods obviously made an impression on Representative
Nixon as well. In 1951, after he had gone to the Senate, he
asked her to become his personal secretary. Now 55, Rose Woods
has held that position (now elevated in title to executive
assistant to the President) ever since. She is on such intimate
terms with all of the First Family, in fact, that she is often
called "the fifth Nixon."

     Miss Woods' cruel working hours and scant personal life have
gradually been rewarded with increased responsibilities, a staff
of her own (three sub secretaries work in her office) and
occasionally a chance to influence the thinking of the President.
Nixon is said to regard her as a shrewd judge of politics.

     Her most important clout is in helping exercise the
gatekeeper function of deciding who should get through to the
Boss -- and woe to anyone who tries to interfere with her preserve.
Among those who did early in the Nixon Administration was White
House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, who tried but failed to
proclaim his total control over the White House staff by having
her office moved farther away from Nixon's.

     The third of five children born to an Irish-American family
in Sebring, Ohio (pop. 5,000), she remains especially close to
Brother Joseph, a member of Illinois' Cook County board of
commissioners. After joining Nixon's staff, she began to share
in no small way the ups and downs of his career. A member of the
vice-presidential motorcade that was stoned by Venezuelan
Communists in 1958, Rose quickly donned dark glasses "so those
people wouldn't see me cry."  In California, after Nixon's losing
presidential race in 1960, she bought a convertible and began to
live a more relaxed  West Coast life. Then, when Nixon joined a
New York law firm, it was another unquestioning move and a cozy
Manhattan apartment. In Washington, she bought a co-op in, of
all places, the Watergate complex.

     Fiercely loyal to Nixon, she has dressed down more than one
newsman for stories that were critical of him; last week, asked
by a reporter if she still considered Nixon an honest man, she
replied in her best Irish temper:  "That is a rude, impertinent
question. And the answer is yes."  But she is normally good-
humored, especially during the occasional evenings of ballroom
dancing and other social affairs that she loves. Though she has
never married, a regular on the party circuit says that "she has
gone out with lots of fellows."  Other evenings, including many
Thanksgivings and Christmases, are spent at quiet family dinners
with the Nixons. Yet all these bonds of closeness have still not
completely solved the enigma of her boss. "After 22 years, I
still don't know Richard Nixon," Rose recently confided; to a
friend. "I don't think anybody does."