THE PRESIDENCY: Richard Nixon Stumbles to the Brink

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The sole check on whether the Nixon summary was complete and fair would be Nixon's personally selected auditor of the tapes: Mississippi Senator John Stennis, 72, a conservative Democrat who only recently recovered from critical bullet wounds sustained in a street robbery. Stennis would be given "unlimited access" to the tapes to verify Nixon's account of them, according to this plan. The selection of Stennis was perhaps the only unflawed element in Nixon's design. To his colleagues, it was inconceivable that he would have anything to do with a scheme to mislead the Senate. It might be argued that Nixon's offer to let Stennis judge the tapes was the most powerful evidence yet that they may indeed exonerate Nixon, as he has claimed all along. Yet Stennis had publicly praised Nixon earlier for standing fast against his critics on Watergate, and had suggested that he had the ability "to tough it out."

Nixon seemed to have one advantage in the tumultuous tapes controversy. Surprisingly, he had been able, only hours before the appeals-court order became effective, to persuade two of the Senate's most prestigious Watergate investigators, Senate Select Committee Chairman Sam Ervin and the committee's Republican vice chairman, Howard Baker, to go along with his scheme. But both men insisted that their concurrence was narrowly based on the committee's interest in getting any evidence at all of what the tapes contain and was meant to be totally unrelated to the court struggle.

Ervin, moreover, protested that he had been misled into believing that the committee would get full transcripts of the tapes, not edited summaries. The White House placated him by assuring him that he would get verbatim transcripts, though that was not what Nixon announced. It was all very confusing, and just how the full membership of the seven-man committee would regard the plan in view of the upheaval on the criminal side of the Watergate investigation was not yet clear.

Even Stennis, who had agreed to undertake what he described as merely "a mechanical job" of verifying Nixon's version of what is on the tapes, indicated some reservations. He insisted that he had never been told that Cox was so adamantly opposed to the scheme or that it would have any devastating effects on the criminal prosecution. Stennis had in fact agreed to audit the tapes only after Ervin and Baker had agreed to the plan. There were strong signs that Nixon had craftily attempted to use the three Senators in order to achieve his priority goal: to frustrate judicial attempts to pry loose those tapes.

Yet, ironically, it was Nixon's attempted abuse of Attorney General Richardson that may have wounded the President most seriously. By his strong proclamation that justice must not be subverted in handling Agnew's graft and contract kickbacks, Richardson had only the week before enhanced his already considerable reputation for rectitude and propriety. The Agnew stand undoubtedly was taken at Nixon's behest. Now, by resigning rather than bowing to Nixon's bludgeon tactics against Cox, Richardson may have dealt the President a mortal political blow.