THE CRISIS: Nixon Presses His Counterattack

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Richardson told TIME that the Nixon-Haig version was "very clearly and demonstrably untrue." He helped draw up the Stennis plan, he said, but he threatened to resign when he was told by Haig that Cox would be fired if he did not agree with the proposal. Richardson said he asked for a meeting with Nixon on that Friday morning to present his resignation notes. But Haig met him and agreed to drop the idea of firing Cox, Richardson said. That pacified Richardson.

On that Friday night, however, Richardson received a letter from Nixon linking the Stennis proposal to an order to Cox forbidding him to seek any more presidential documents in court. Richardson said he immediately called Nixon Adviser Bryce Harlow and advised him that he would publicly oppose any such restriction on Cox. Harlow reassured him in a way that led Richardson to think that the White House had retreated again. Within hours the President's statement was released, ordering Cox to desist, and so Richardson resigned. Sworn testimony by Cox as well as two written statements prepared that week by Richardson support the Richardson account.

Unaccountably, Nixon also assailed Cox, contending that he had been in favor of the Stennis plan, and that "we did not know until Saturday [Oct. 20] that he had changed his mind." Yet at the time Cox had released copies of correspondence with Charles Alan Wright, Nixon's counsel, which showed that Cox had raised eleven objections to the plan on the preceding Thursday and that Wright had acknowledged this the same day, then added in a Friday letter: "Further discussions between us seeking to resolve this matter by compromise would be futile."

Nixon's position on the Cox firing was further undermined last week by Federal Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, who ruled flatly that the dismissal was "in clear violation of an existing Justice Department regulation having the force of law and was therefore illegal." Acting Attorney General Robert H. Bork, following Nixon's orders, had abolished the special prosecutor's post, ruled Gesell, as "simply a ruse to permit the discharge of Mr. Cox." This was demonstrated, he wrote, by the prompt recreation of the post. The judge said there was no need to take action to reinstate Cox, since Cox had made no effort to get the job back, and in fact had said he did not want it.

The White House admitted last week that a third tape was now either missing or nonexistent. This was a Dictabelt recording that Nixon had claimed he made after talking to John Dean on April 15. He had offered to make this recording available as evidence of his version of the April 15 conversation, since the White House recording of the conversation itself was "nonexistent"; a recorder, Nixon contends, had run out of tape. But now, Nixon said in a written statement, he had checked his "personal diary file" for April 15 and found some "personal notes" of the conversation with Dean, "but not a dictation belt."