Guilty Until Proven Innocent?

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

AT lunch a former Nixon Cabinet officer glumly wondered whether the President could survive the Watergate scandal. In that way he tacitly signaled his own doubts that Richard Nixon was innocent.

At breakfast in another part of Washington still another former Cabinet officer showed the same doubts. If evidence surfaced linking the President to the bugging or the coverup, he said, he did not want to hear about it or think about it.

All last week Republican and Democratic Senators talked the same way in their private moments. Even some members of the federal judiciary confessed to old friends that although they did not want to believe that the President was implicated their years of experience in the great legal struggles of this nation left them, at this time at least, with the sad sense that Nixon had played a key role in the tragic drama.

If George Gallup's figures are correct--that half the people of the U.S. do not believe the President's protestations of innocence--the percentage of disbelievers in the federal city must run to 80% or 90%. All of this and more, most of it bubbling beneath the surface, point up Richard Nixon's staggering problem of restoring his credibility. While the law states that a man is innocent until proved guilty, the perverse ways of human nature and the singular circumstances of Watergate have reversed this fundamental rule. Nixon now stands guilty in many minds until he proves himself innocent.

This city has remained Democratic despite Nixon's efforts to make it bipartisan, so its feelings tend to be exaggerated. The fraternity of ex-White House aides believes that it would be impossible for a President to remain as ignorant of events as the White House indicates. "You don't lie to a President," said one former White House aide. "I can't imagine any man working with the President who would keep such facts from him," said another.

"I never entered the Oval Office without being awed," insisted one veteran of two Administrations. "You can't lie in that atmosphere. Too much is at stake."

It is this repeal of human nature that baffles even the Republicans who still stand with Nixon. The "I run my own campaign" declaration and the "supercrat" image, which have been so assiduously fostered by the Nixon people for years now, are declared "inoperative." All this defies conventional logic--and that is the President's problem.

There are, nonetheless, a few people who claim that is precisely the case, that Nixon, as no other President in history, lived aloof while his men did the dirty work. We knew that Nixon was isolated, but we did not know how much. While we proclaimed the power of John N. Mitchell and H.R. Haldeman, we fell far short of reality. Perhaps Nixon was subjected to a form of presidential management that the outside world never knew and was never allowed to see. Perhaps these singularly antisocial men imposed their own withdrawal syndrome on the Oval Office, letting Nixon sink excessively into the lonely quiet that he relishes and believes he needs in order to husband his energy. Richard J. Whalen, once a Nixon campaign speechwriter and thinker, quit in disgust before Nixon entered the White House over just that issue--the specter of a President being in a "soundproof, shockproof bubble." Back in 1972 Whalen wrote: "No potential danger is more ominous in a free society than the secret leaching away of presidential authority from the man the people chose to the men he chooses. To whom are they responsible? To him and their own consciences, of course, which is the essence of the danger when a President is protected even from the knowledge of what is said and done in his name."

Not many are buying Whalen's observations yet. But if they are true and that is the explanation for this bizarre episode, then what a terrible tragedy it is for Nixon and the nation that those men were allowed to hide in their offices and keep their special operation such a secret. Had we known more, Nixon might not stand so suspect today. Better yet, giving the President the benefit of every doubt, had there been less White House secrecy, Watergate might never have been conceived.

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