THE PRESIDENCY: Richard Nixon Stumbles to the Brink

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His resistance set off a frantic last-minute effort to find Ervin and Baker and summon them to the White House. Baker was located at a symposium in Chicago, Ervin at an airport in New Orleans. Both flew immediately to Washington. They were ushered into the Oval Office and urged by Nixon, Haig and Wright to accept the proposal.

Whenever Ervin asked a question about how the agreement might affect court cases and how Cox felt about it, the conversation was diverted to the Senate committee's problems. Repeatedly one of the White House participants pleaded: "The President needs a strong hand in order to deal effectively with the Middle East crisis." Ervin, a longtime hawk in military matters, and Baker, an ideological ally of the President's, decided to go along.

It turned out that they had been had. Preoccupied with getting the tapes for their committee, they did not see the implications of their assent. Nor did Nixon and his aides help them to. As Baker now says, that assent was not intended to underwrite the President's refusal to abide by the appellate court's decision and to order Cox out of the arena. Cox, they felt, had "a different set of problems than we have," and, incredibly, they felt that Nixon was simply making an overture to them concerning their desires for the tapes and that this did not affect Cox's demands. For two savvy Senators, it was a naive performance, and for Nixon a devious one.

Learning that the White House planned a major statement on the tapes, Cox returned to his office in the evening. But no message from Nixon or his counsels was conveyed to Cox. Instead, he got a copy of the President's announcement from a newspaper office. Cox quickly dictated a reply objecting to Nixon's plan, and called his press conference for Saturday. He went home, took two sleeping pills, a rare practice for him, and retired for the night.

The Nixon announcement had contained one order aimed directly at Cox. "Though I have not wished to intrude upon the independence of the special prosecutor," Nixon said, "I have felt it necessary to direct him, as an employee of the Executive Branch, to make no further attempts by judicial process to obtain tapes, notes, or memoranda of presidential conversations."

Next day at his press conference, Cox indicated that he simply could not accept this order, since it totally transformed the rules under which he had been hired. Carefully refusing to be drawn into any blanket characterization of the President's action, Cox praised Elliot Richardson for acting with honesty and restraint throughout the high-stakes negotiations over the tapes. Pointedly, Cox noted that because Richardson had been empowered to select and hire him, he figured that only Richardson could dismiss him. He indicated clearly that he had no intention of resigning. Cox returned to his office, sipped a beer, and replied to a lawyer's question about what the staff should do next: "We ought to rest." He relaxed by walking alone in woods near his McLean, Va., home.