TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/70s/70conspi

Text File | 1990-12-01 | 12KB | 210 lines

                _`^b                                                    a««White House Conspiracy

  [White House-appointed Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox sued to
obtain copies of tapes relevant to the Watergate investigation. The
case was heard by Judge Sirica, who ruled that no man, even a sitting
President, is immune from a grand jury's demand for evidence. On the
matter of Nixon's claimed executive privilege, Sirica would examine
the tapes and issue a ruling.]


                                                   (October 29, 1973)

  With astonishing speed in a frantic Washington weekend, an effort
by President Nixon to compromise in the battle for his tapes and to
preserve the authority of his office crashed toward a fateful climax,
leaving his survival in the Oval Office in grave doubt and pitching
the nation into one of the gravest constitutional crises in its
history. There were these stunning developments in rapid sequence:

>>Nixon revealed that he would refuse to comply with an appeals-court
order directing him to yield his controversial tapes and documents to
Federal Judge John J. Sirica for in camera inspection. Nor would he
carry his case to the Supreme Court. Instead, he proposed to make
available summaries of relevant portions of the tapes. These would
first be authenticated by Senator John C. Stennis, whom he would let
hear the tapes in their entirety.

>>Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox held a televised news conference
to object to this Nixon "compromise" on the tapes and to declare that
he would ask the courts either to cite Nixon for contempt or to
clarify why the President's out-of-court offer was unacceptable.

>>Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who under heavy
Senate pressure had appointed Cox and given him a free hand to
investigate all Watergate-related crimes, to fire Cox. Richardson
refused and resigned on principle.

>>Nixon ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to
dismiss Cox. Ruckelshaus also in conscience declined. So Nixon fired
him.

>>Nixon then appointed Solicitor General Robert Bork acting Attorney
General and directed him to fire Cox and abolish Cox's entire
operation, including his staff of more than 60 attorneys, who have
been investigating the pervasive scandal for five months. Bork obeyed,
and within hours the nation witnessed the spectacle of FBI agents
sealing off the offices and papers of the two top Justice Department
men as well as those of Cox and his aides.


                                                   (November 5, 1973)

  The week was propelled through its course by public protest against
the President unprecedented in its intensity and breadth. Individual
Americans demanded Richard Nixon's resignation or impeachment in
275,000 telegrams that overloaded Western Union circuits in Washington.
Much of the legal profession, most of organized labor and many key
religious leaders joined the assault. Nearly two dozen resolutions to
at least begin impeachment proceedings were introduced in the House
of Representatives. At the shocked White House, even the President's
loyal chief of staff, Alexander Haig, termed the conflagration "a fire
storm."

  Buckling under the massive pressure, the President once again
abandoned a position that he had repeatedly proclaimed as inviolate,
dramatically agreeing to yield up his long-guarded tapes. Nixon's
announcement at his press conference-again a result of irresistible
pressure-that he would let Acting Attorney General Robert Bork appoint
a new special Watergate prosecutor was not reassuring. In declaring
flatly that the new man, yet to be named, would never be given any
"presidential documents," but only "information" from such documents,
Nixon seemed to give him even less authority than Cox had been
promised.

  What the President still seemed unable to comprehend in all of
these maneuvers was the gravity of his predicament, especially in the
Congress, which holds his political future in its hands. The push to
impeach is firmly under way in the House of Representatives, and the
measured and deliberate way that it is being conducted is all the more
ominous for Nixon. Leaders of the Democratic majority are determined
that the inquiry will be unhurried, cautious and complete, both to
ensure its fairness and to provide ample time at each stage to educate
the American people on what is being done.


                                                   (December 3, 1973)

  Reading nervously from a slip of paper, Special Presidential
Counsel Fred Buzhardt told Judge John J. Sirica in a Washington
federal courtroom that 18 minutes of conversation on one of those
tapes was impossible to hear. It had been mysteriously obscured by an
unwavering "audible tone." The President, Buzhardt conceded under
questioning, had been told of this before he spoke to the Governors.

  The newest tape revelation was especially embarrassing to the White
House, since it was the fourth recording promised to the court that
now is claimed to be either wholly nonexistent or partly inaudible.
Moreover, this tape is the same one about which Nixon's personal
secretary, Rose Mary Woods, had testified in Sirica's court three
weeks ago. She said she had spent 31 1/2 hours trying to transcribe the
conversation. While she mentioned various troublesome sounds,
including bomblike noises when the President put his feet on his desk
near a hidden microphone, she made no mention of such a large segment
of conversation being obliterated by a persistent tone. If the
obscuring sound had been present when she heard the tape, she
presumably would have informed the court.


  [As the months passed, the House Judiciary Committee, charged under
the Constitution with deciding whether impeachment proceedings against
a President should take place, also moved inexorably forward, filing
suit to obtain its own copies of presidential tape recordings.
Meanwhile, the new Watergate Special Prosecutor, Leon Jaworski,
directed a grand jury to indict seven White House aides.

  (They) unlawfully, willfully and knowingly did combine, conspire,
confederate and agree together and with each other, to commit offenses
against the United States...(They) would corruptly influence, obstruct
and impede...the due administration of justice...and by deceit,
craft, trickery and dishonest means, defraud the United States.]

                                                     (March 11, 1974)

  With those words, a federal grand jury composed of 23 American
citizens last week presented a grave and most exceptional charge: a
criminal conspiracy existed "up to and including" the present at the
highest levels of Richard Nixon's Administration. The accused include
four of the President's most intimate and influential former official
and political associates. And by clear implication in the language of
the indictment, the jurors disclosed their belief that the President
has lied about at least one potentially criminal act of his own in the
still-spreading scandal.

  Seven of the President's former associates were indicted, and four
of them were accused of lying a total of eleven times to grand juries,
the Senate Watergate committee or the FBI. These are the men on whose
testimony the President's own profession of innocence has heavily
relied. Significantly, no perjury charge was made against John Dean,
Nixon's former counsel and the one who had directly accused the
President of being an active participant in the cover-up scheme. The
grand jury has heard some of the tapes of conversations between Dean
and Nixon-and apparently is convinced that Dean's version of those
disputed talks is the correct one.

  The indictment spares no harsh words in describing the cover-up
conspiracy involving the seven indicted Nixon associates "and others
known and unknown." The aim of the conspiracy, the indictment claims,
was to conceal the identity of the persons responsible for the
Watergate wiretapping, as well as "other illegal and improper
activities." Toward that end, the seven tried to prevent officials of
the CIA, FBI and Department of Justice from transacting "their
official business honestly and impartially, free from corruption,
fraud, improper and undue influence, dishonesty, unlawful impairment
and obstruction."


  [The seven were Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, White House Special
Counsel Charles Colson, HEW General Counsel Robert Mardian, Haldeman
Aide Gordon Strachan and Washington Attorney Kenneth Parkinson.

  "Never before in the history of the presidency have records that
are so private been made so public. In giving you these
records--blemishes and all--I am placing my trust in the basic
fairness of the American people."]

                                                       (May 13, 1974)

  With those words in his televised address to the nation last week,
Richard Nixon declared the greatest bet of his lifetime of high-risk
politics, making a desperate and dangerous wager on his place in
history. The stakes were nothing less than his survival in office and
his ultimate image as a man and as a President. In still another
effort "to put Watergate behind us," to show once and for all "that
the President has nothing to hide in this matter," he announced that
he was making public 1,254 pages of transcribed tape recordings of his
personal conversations about the Watergate scandal with his most
trusted aides.

  That was not what had been asked of him. He was acting against the
deadline of a subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee, which is
weighing his impeachment, for the actual tapes of 42 White House
conversations. But he would or could not deliver the tapes, for
reasons he did not explain in his speech. Instead, the President chose
to gamble that he could defy the subpoena and go over the heads of the
Congressmen to protest his innocence directly to the American people,
basing his case on the enormous mass of evidence contained in the
150,000-word transcripts.

  Even with the hundreds of "inaudible" and excised passages, the
transcripts provided an extraordinary look at Nixon in private. His
conversations were often bizarre, involving hours of foggy and
imprecise musing. Instead of a tough, calculating, incisive Nixon, the
transcripts revealed a lonely, aloof President who could not remember
dates, could not recall Watergate Conspirator E. Howard Hunt's name,
and who forgot that another of the convicted conspirators, G. Gordon
Liddy, was in prison. In the transcripts, Nixon made few decisions,
issued few orders and almost never exhibited the quick, encyclopedic
mind that associates claim he has.

  The transcripts showed a President creating an environment of
deceit and dishonesty, of evasion and cover-up. In public, Nixon was
pictured as detached, too busy with the affairs of state to probe
Watergate. In private, the transcripts showed that he wanted to know
every detail of the scandal's effect on the press and public.

  Given the enormous hazards for Nixon in the transcripts, it seemed
baffling that he released them at all. He may have felt that he had
little choice. Having resolved not to turn over the tapes to the
Judiciary Committee, he had to make some extraordinary gesture to
avoid almost certain impeachment for defying Congress.