A Case of Pneumonia and Confrontation

As Richard Nixon emerged from the South Front of the White House, he seemed forlorn, his shoulders sagging. None of his family were with him. He climbed into his long Lincoln limousine with his new chief of staff, General Alexander Haig. The eight-car motorcade, led by a car full of Secret Service agents, slid off into the cool, clear Washington night. Thirty-eight minutes later, again looking preoccupied and rather alone, Nixon checked into the third-floor presidential suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital. The President, said his personal physician, Dr. Walter R. Tkach, had come down with viral pneumonia (see MEDICINE).

"I suspect it did not come on suddenly," Tkach told reporters at the hospital. "I suspect he felt tired and didn't want to say anything to me about it." Just returned from a 16-day sojourn at San Clemente, Nixon had begun feeling pains in his chest on Wednesday night. He put in a full day's work on Thursday, then finally agreed Thursday night to check into the hospital. Tkach (pronounced tuh-kosh) said that the President would spend from seven to ten days there. He was, said Tkach, "moderately sick." Nixon was given an antibiotic and an analgesic, and cut down his work load to one-quarter of its normal amount. With his pneumonia, he was running a temperature (between 101DEG and 102DEG), and his breathing was slightly quicker than usual.

Nixon has often said, "I never get sick." The timing of the presidential illness, of course, aroused both worried speculation that the condition had been brought on by the strains of Watergate and some cynical words around Washington about a "psychosomatic illness." There was no evidence whatever to suggest that Nixon's illness was more serious--or less serious--than stated.

Complex Battle. Even without his pneumonia, it had not been a happy week for Nixon, whose last unmitigated joy was probably his Inauguration night months ago. Quite apart from the public testimony, the Senate's Watergate investigating committee was bearing down on Nixon in a complex battle to force him to release White House papers that might reveal the inner mechanics of the scandal.

Tennessee's Howard Baker and North Carolina's Sam Ervin were determined to pierce the shell of Executive privilege with which Nixon sought to protect the papers. Letters were exchanged. First, Nixon, on July 6, flatly refused to let the committee see any White House documents. He also stated that he would not agree to testify before the committee.

Last week, during an executive session, the committee agreed on Baker's plan to draft a letter to the President requesting a meeting to resolve the question of the documents. Then Ervin put through a call to the President, who at that moment was trying to ignore his pneumonia. "We really need those documents," Ervin told Nixon. "And we need to discuss the matter with you." Ervin went on to explain that documents dealing with politics or alleged illegal conduct could not be covered by Executive privilege. "What I really want," said Ervin, "is for me and Howard Baker to come down and talk to you about this thing."

Nixon agreed to meet with Ervin--but he pointedly excluded Baker, a reflection of the President's irritation with the Tennessean. The insult raised some eyebrows in Washington, but it did serve to establish once and for all Republican Baker's independence of the White House. The stage, at any rate, was set for Ervin to meet Nixon, after the President leaves the hospital. Ervin said, however, that the committee would not take the issue to court if the President were to refuse to honor a subpoena for the documents. Rather, he explained, the committee would "simply allow the President to take the adverse inference that would be drawn from his action."

The Administration had other miseries with Congress last week. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejected Career Diplomat G. McMurtrie Godley's nomination to be Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs. As Ambassador to Laos since 1969, the committee's majority decided, Godley had been less than cleanly. Chairman J. William Fulbright and some others believe that Godley was involved in running a secret war in Laos during his tenure, and was part of a fraternity of Indochina experts responsible for most of the American mistakes there. The committee emphasized that it did not question Godley's skills and was willing to approve him for a post somewhere else in the world. The White House and the State Department implied that the committee was penalizing a career diplomat for obeying his instructions. But as much as anything, the committee was simply voting to bring some fresh thinking to the nation's Indochina policies.

There was some solace for Richard Nixon. The Young Republicans, meeting in Atlanta, passed a rousing resolution of support. On Wednesday night, ten conservative Republican Senators, led by Nebraska's Carl Curtis, went to the White House for cocktails. A month before, Curtis had stood on the Senate floor and declared: "Our President is an honest and honorable man. I believe in him and I want the whole world to know it." Nixon was grateful, and so last week he invited the ten Republicans to join him in the White House library, where he discussed the budget, the energy crisis, foreign policy and, briefly, Watergate. One Senator quoted the President as saying: "I don't expect people to believe in my morals so much as in my having some common sense. The whole performance was so asinine that I'd hate to have people think I knew about it in advance." And then, ambiguously: "As for covering it up, I don't think anybody would expect me to go around bragging about it."

Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, who did not attend the cocktail meeting, recalls the President's telling him recently on a flight aboard Air Force One: "People can say what they want about me, but one thing they can't say. Stupid I'm not. If I had caught any of these people involved with these goings-on, I'd have fired their asses the hell out of there."

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