Violation of the Public Trust

The men who have served in the inner councils of American Presidents form a special fraternity. They may depart from Washington, but they never quite leave the White House. Their lives are forever influenced by their interlude of power and flavored by their reminiscences.

Last week these men, from as far back as Franklin Roosevelt's era, were in a collective state of shock as they pored over the transcripts of Richard Nixon's Watergate conversations. They found it inconceivable that a President of the U.S. would lead discussions in the Oval Office about breaking the law, destroying his own men, corrupting the Government's agencies.

There may have been times over these past 200 years when a President has had dark thoughts--and perhaps questionable conversations--about how to counter his opponents and to lift himself out of crises. But there is a body of bipartisan opinion among the men around former Chief Executives that the presidency has never before experienced such a squalid episode.

"Ike wouldn't have understood what they were talking about," says former Speech Writer Emmet Hughes. "Anybody who would have engaged in even a 60-sec-ond exchange like those would have been thrown out."

"I used to listen to Franklin Roosevelt talk about his problems," recalls former Administrative Assistant Jim Rowe, "but there was never anything like this."

Wily Lyndon Johnson once ordered an aide to send a handsome young staff member out to appeal to a lady legislator for her support. "Let nature take its course," the President suggested. Johnson used all of his persuasive powers and sometimes threatened economic retaliation and the hot breath of the Lord on his detractors, "but he never suggested in any way that the law should be broken," says his former aide, Joe Califano. "In fact, no matter what we did, Johnson wanted a legal opinion to be sure it was O.K. with the law."

Clark Clifford, an adviser to several Presidents, remembers that "on Truman's desk was the famous sign 'The Buck Stops Here,' and there was another sign quoting Mark Twain: 'Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.' That is what Mr. Truman did." Clifford can still hear the ring of Truman's voice in 1948 when his Gallup was at 36%, and he was told he faced certain political defeat unless he changed his stance on civil rights to woo the South. "I am not going to change one single policy," said Truman. End of discussion.

After the Bay of Pigs, Ted Sorensen, John Kennedy's counsel, gave a backgrounder to newsmen pointing out that the operation had begun under Eisenhower and was carried out by holdovers. It was one of the few times that Sorensen irritated Kennedy. "Don't do that," he rasped. "We made this mistake." Before the successful conclusion of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Kennedy was certain that his failure to heed the early warnings from Republicans such as Homer Capehart and Kenneth Keating about the missiles would bring Democratic defeats in the fall. Some aides wanted to deprecate the Republicans, but Kennedy refused. "Capehart," he told Sorensen, "is the Winston Churchill of our time."

Earlier Presidents have acted quickly to fire erring aides. Truman brought in Newbold Morris to clean up the Department of Justice. But Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, one of Truman's friends, would not cooperate, and after two months fired Morris. That same day Truman fired McGrath.

Eisenhower never knew the whole story of Sherman Adams. But when Meade Alcorn, the Republican national chairman, came to his office and said Republican leaders were demanding "the Adams mess" be cleaned up, Ike accepted the verdict. He told Alcorn to tell Adams he must go.

In the White House last week they were most worried that all the swear words that Nixon used would upset a lot of Americans who thought he rarely cussed. That concern is really almost meaningless in the current context. What produces despair is that men given the responsibility for doing so much for this nation would spend so much time and energy contemplating the violation of that trust.

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