The Nation: New Shocks--and More to Come

As another saddening week in the Watergate scandal unfolded, the events raised new doubts about the Nixon Administration's various vehicles for achieving justice.

The resignation of Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III showed how far the deception had spread among men charged with law enforcement. Gray had failed to win approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee as permanent FBI director largely because of his chummy cooperation with the White House in the Watergate investigation. His eventual resignation thus was certain. But it came suddenly, after he had confided to "friends" that he planned to tell the federal Watergate grand jury in Washington about an astonishing cover-up of potential evidence on his part. This, he said, would implicate two of Nixon's closest aides. At the implied suggestion of John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic affairs adviser, and John W. Dean III, Nixon's chief counsel, Gray claimed, he had burned two files containing the papers of one of the convicted wiretappers, E. Howard Hunt Jr., a former White House consultant.

The papers were among many documents taken from Hunt's safe in the Executive Office Building immediately after the wiretappers were arrested June 17. Counsel Dean had ordered the safe opened, and had examined the papers for six days before turning most of them over to the FBI. But he had withheld two file folders that, according to Gray, he considered "political dynamite" and wanted destroyed. First, Gray told friends, Ehrlichman had suggested to Dean: "You drive over the bridge every night. Why don't you throw them over?" (Dean lives across the Potomac in Alexandria, Va.) Instead, at a meeting in Ehrlichman's office on June 28, Dean had handed the folders to Gray with the remark: "These papers should never see the light of day."

Even though his own agents at the time were searching for Hunt to quiz him about Watergate, Gray obediently took these files home, put them in a closet over the weekend, then carried them to his office and discarded them in a "burn bag" to be destroyed. Although some other FBI officials do not believe him, Gray claimed he did not even look at the papers to see what he was burning. Gray contends that he learned their contents only last month from Henry Petersen, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division. According to Gray, Dean told Petersen that the papers included 1) some of Hunt's reports on Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy's accident at Chappaquiddick Island, and 2) some fake State Department cables contrived by Hunt to implicate President John Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem. All of this presumably could have been used against Teddy's candidacy if the Senator had run against Nixon.

Some FBI agents believe that among the burned papers was a memo based on Hunt's reportedly secret interview with ITT's Washington lobbyist Dita Beard, who had linked an ITT offer of contributions to the Republican National Convention with the Justice Department's settlement of antitrust suits against ITT. This memo, agents believe, was highly embarrassing to the Nixon Administration. It was not clear whether there might have been other Hunt documents in the file that were relevant to the FBI investigation.