THE SUPREME COURT: A Unanimous No to Nixon

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It was precisely 11:03 Wednesday morning when the marshal's cry of "Oyez, oyez, oyez" rang out in the marble-pillared Supreme Court Building.

The eight Justices sitting in the case of United States v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, et al. appeared from their chambers and sat behind the massive mahogany bench. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger shuffled his papers for a long moment and then began to read the decision constituting the sharp est judicial blow to a President since the court rejected Harry Truman's attempt to seize the nation's steel mills in 1952.

Definitively and unanimously, the court ended President Nixon's effort to withhold evidence from Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski in the Watergate case. Nixon was ordered "forthwith" to turn over tapes and other records relating to 64 White House conversations to Judge John Sirica's district court for use by Jaworski in the upcoming trials of six of the President's aides.

The presence on the court of three conservative Nixon appointees (a fourth, William H. Rehnquist, had disqualified himself from the case because he had been a Justice Department colleague of two of the Watergate cover-up defendants) effectively pre-empted any charge that the President had been the victim of his liberal enemies. As if to emphasize the strictly legal, nonpolitical nature of its decision, the court did not once refer to the ongoing impeachment inquiry. Indeed, the ruling tried to ensure that the 64 taped conversations would not carelessly become impeachment evidence by instructing Judge Sirica to "discharge his responsibility to see to it that until released to the special prosecutor, no in camera material is revealed to anyone."

In clear, nontechnical language, Burger elucidated the rulings of the high court, giving first general principles, then showing how each applied to the President's case:

> The court firmly rejected Nixon's argument that as head of the co-equal Executive Branch of the Government, he was entitled under the Constitution to determine finally the scope of his own privilege. On the contrary, the main theoretical plank of the court's opinion was the assertion of its supremacy in all matters of the law. The Judiciary's power to interpret the law, the decision said, "can no more be shared with the Executive Branch than the Chief Executive, for example, can share with the Judiciary the veto power, or the Congress share with the Judiciary the power to override a presidential veto." Quoting directly from Chief Justice John Marshall's decision in Marbury v. Madison, the court said, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is" with respect to the claim of privilege presented in this case.