THE PRESIDENCY by HUGH SIDEY: A Summer Week in Washington

When it is all over, it may be one of the most eloquent stories that democracy has written. Not Richard Nixon and his squalid crew of fanatics, who created the scandal. But the men, women, nation and system that patiently, fairly and inexorably unraveled the mess and moved to set it right.

The main actors in this part of the Watergate drama form a remarkable profile of America. There is Frank Wills, the black guard who found the tape on the lock of a Watergate building door and called the police. Reporters Bob Woodward, an Ivy Leaguer, and Carl Bernstein, a dropout from the University of Maryland, enlarged that slender thread into the picture of corruption. Judge John Sirica, the Italian American and old welterweight, applied common sense and created a new sense of justice. Senator Sam Ervin, with a little help from St. Paul and Shakespeare, provided the best civics lesson in 50 years.

Archie Cox of Harvard, the blueblooded Elliot Richardson and Bill Ruckelshaus, a Hoosier Republican, gave individual honor a fresh luster. Leon Jaworski, the lawyer from Houston, showed principle and courage. And then House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino, out of the tough precincts of Newark, looking more like a Hollywood bit-player than a pol, steered his committee through investigation, hearing and vote with good will, restraint and dignity.

They still argue in the Washington clubs that it was an accident. Time and time again, we hung by a thread, and only luck uncovered this monstrous assault upon the Constitution. Maybe so. But it is interesting that all through our history those "threads" have held us together. One suspects that if the Siricas and Rodinos had not been there, others just as clear-sighted and determined would have been in their places.

Last week this remarkable odyssey of the American spirit reached a new height. Up on Capitol Hill, there was a town meeting of this nation, perhaps the first like it in our history. All three branches of our Government were at work. So were the people, looking, listening, talking and singing in the mellow summer nights with the great Capitol dome glowing above.

In the early light of Wednesday morning, Chief Justice Warren Burger climbed into his chauffeured Chevy, put up the small portable desk in the back seat, and as he rode over the Potomac River and up the Mall, looked over his notes on what he would say in a couple of hours. Sixty years ago, Burger was a boy in St. Paul whose special summer joy was eating ripe tomatoes off the vine in the family garden. On Wednesday, he read the court decision that put the most powerful man in the world back under law and the will of the people.

Just a block away, Rodino gaveled his Judiciary Committee into session to render their decisive verdict that Richard Nixon should be impeached. There were Southerners and Northerners, liberals and conservatives, black and white, male and female, and they came from California, Massachusetts and most places in between.