Mounting Momentum for Impeachment

It was a rough Watergate week for President Nixon. A grand jury report and a satchel of evidence on his role in the cover-up conspiracy were turned over to the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment investigators. Then, after a short delay, Nixon backed down and submitted to a subpoena for more evidence from Leon Jaworski, the persistent special prosecutor, rather than face a new, and probably losing, court battle. Almost as surely, he will soon be forced to stop resisting similar requests from the impeachment committee for more tapes and documents.

Those setbacks for the President occurred under the pressure of rising public protests from members of Congress against what appeared to them to be legalistic maneuvering by the White House to withhold evidence. Largely as a result of these tactics, impeachment sentiment was gathering momentum in the House--and even leaders of the Senate talked matter-of-factly about the probability of a trial in that chamber later this summer to determine whether Nixon shall remain in office (see box next page).

The shift in sentiment was illustrated last week by the pointed remarks of Mike Mansfield, the ever-cautious Senate Democratic majority leader. Mansfield observed: "I talk to House members, and they think the votes are there" for impeachment. This, he suggested, is partly because of "the dilatory tactics" of Nixon and his men in dealing with the Judiciary Committee, headed by New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino. Moreover, said Mansfield, he did not want the President to resign, as suggested by Republican Conservative Senator James Buckley, and indicated little enthusiasm for any legislation granting him immunity from prosecution if he were to leave office. "This matter should take its course," Mansfield said, meaning a full Senate impeachment trial. "We should not have another Agnew situation," he added--a reference to the Vice President's being allowed to plead nolo contendere to income tax evasion, then to resign and be granted immunity from further federal prosecution.

Other Senators spoke in a similarly ominous vein. West Virginia's Democratic Senator Robert Byrd--a conservative whom Nixon once considered for a Supreme Court vacancy and who is highly regarded by the Southern Senators Nixon is most ardently courting --charged that the President was trying "to mislead the people and to sabotage the legitimate and constitutional impeachment inquiry." Republican Senator Howard Baker, a member of the Senate Watergate committee, declared that the "legalisms and narrow issues" adopted by Nixon had hurt rather than helped his survival chances and that he must surrender all "relevant" evidence to the Rodino committee. One of Nixon's most vocal supporters, Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott, has also privately warned Nixon through the President's chief Watergate counsel, James St. Clair, that the President must yield all relevant evidence.

Some other influential Senators were not ready to speak out publicly--yet. But their attitude was increasingly unsympathetic to Nixon. Said one Senate Republican: "Over the past ten days, the feeling has been pervading the Senate that there is going to be a trial. Individual Senators are studying the impeachment process. You have trouble getting the books out of the library; they're all checked out."

At a rally of Midwestern Republican leaders in Chicago, even Vice President Gerald Ford seemed to be criticizing the President. Addressing the Watergate issue, he declared: "Never again must Americans allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents like CREEP (The Committee for Re-election of the President) to bypass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election."

Outwardly undaunted, Nixon continued to court a conservative constituency. He invited Mississippi Senators James Eastland and John Stennis to the White House for breakfast. He staged a ceremony for Southern Senators and Congressmen as he signed a $100 million appropriation for Mississippi River flood-control projects. He addressed a Republican congressional dinner and hosted a farewell gathering for his departed aide Melvin Laird.

But the rising congressional impeachment pressure could not be ignored, and Nixon gave up some tactical territory. He and St. Clair had for so long resisted a request by Jaworski for 27 tapes and various documents that the special prosecutor finally issued a subpoena to get some of the documents. St. Clair first asked last Monday for a delay in the subpoena's return date, and Jaworski agreed. As the new deadline approached on Friday, Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler offhandedly announced without explanation that the subpoenaed evidence would be surrendered. The documents, dealing primarily with the use and possible abuse of Nixon campaign funds, were delivered to Jaworski in a small brown package (no U-Haul trailer was required).

Historic Turnover. The turnover of the grand jury's evidence, on the other hand, was transacted with lavish security and given all the attention of a historic event. No fewer than 22 uniformed police of the Federal Protective Services formed a double line as three members of the Rodino staff--Chief Counsel John Doar, Minority Counsel Albert Jenner and Assistant Counsel Robert Shelton --arrived at Washington's Federal Courthouse to pick up the evidence. The crush of newsmen, however, diverted the Committee lawyers away from this protective corridor as they moved from their car up the courthouse steps. In a second-floor jury room off the chambers of Federal Judge John J. Sirica, two of Sirica's law clerks arrived with the bulging satchel (bought by the special prosecutor's office for $37.95) containing the grand jury material.

The lawyers then examined the contents. These included a 1 1/2-page letter from the grand jury requesting transmittal of all the evidence to the Rodino committee; a 13-page list of some 50 findings of "fact" about the President's Watergate activities; and references to tapes and documents in the briefcase that support the findings. As each reference was read by the attorneys, Todd Christofferson, Sirica's law clerk, pulled the appropriate file from the briefcase. After the two-hour checkoff, Doar and Jenner signed a statement that they had received all the material cited by the grand jury.

Under elaborate rules established partly at White House insistence, only Doar, Jenner, Rodino and the Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican member, Edward Hutchinson, had immediate access to the material. All four spent hours studying it, but would not talk about its contents.

Whatever the import of the grand jury evidence, the Rodino committee is still expected to push hard for 42 other tapes that Doar and Jenner had requested from St. Clair on Feb. 25. So far, according to Ziegler, no one at the White House has even listened to these tapes or, for that matter, determined how many of them actually exist. Some are certain to be nonexistent, he indicated, because they involved meetings on Sunday, April 15. That is the date on which one conversation between Nixon and Dean was not recorded because, Nixon contends, a recorder wired into his Executive Office Building hideaway ran out of tape. Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Warren claimed that it was "a matter of court record" that tapes of ten conversations could not have been made because of this. The court records, on the contrary, show that Nixon's telephone was not hooked up to the same tapeless recorder and therefore at most only five tapes of requested conversations could logically be missing.

Both St. Clair and Ziegler have insisted that the House committee must first specify the scope of its investigation before the White House will supply any more tapes or documents. House Republican Leader John Rhodes last week endorsed one possible compromise under which St. Clair and the top Rodino staff lawyers would jointly review the requested evidence to seek agreement on what parts are relevant. If they cannot agree, the committee counsel's view would prevail. "The White House certainly should accept that," Rhodes said.

Perhaps. But relations between the White House and the committee were hardly helped by yet another Ziegler attack, this time implying that the committee was dawdling in its investigation. He suggested that the committee ought to be "working nights" to speed the inquiry. In fact, the staff has been working nights to index and digest the material that it now has. It includes some 700 documents and 19 tapes of conversations that Nixon had given Jaworski. It was only last week that the White House completed the transfer of the material to the Rodino committee staff. The committee evidence also includes testimony from the Senate Watergate committee and other congressional investigations, as well as the new grand jury lode. Once all this material has been studied, the staff will brief the full Judiciary Committee on its findings.

Scandalous Conduct. Nixon sustained another blow last week when it was revealed by the Washington Post that former Attorney General Richard Kleindienst was bargaining with the staff of Prosecutor Jaworski to avoid indictment on a felony charge of perjury. At his confirmation hearings in the spring of 1972, Kleindienst had testified that no one at the White House had brought pressure on him in any way to influence the Justice Department's settlement of its antitrust suit against ITT. He later revealed that Nixon himself had phoned him and asked him not to carry the case against ITT to the Supreme Court. Apparently, Jaworski's staff prosecutors are willing to let Kleindienst plead guilty to a misdemeanor rather than a felony, giving him a better chance to avoid disbarment.

Kleindienst thus could become the second Attorney General--and third Cabinet member--in the Nixon Administration to face criminal charges. John Mitchell and former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans are already on trial in New York on one campaign funding case (see story following page). A guilty plea by Kleindienst would be another dismal record for an Administration that is breaking all precedents for scandalous official conduct.

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