WATERGATE: Moving in Committee and Court

We have gone forward assuming good faith and cooperation. As regards the President himself, we have been respectfully patient. Yet there comes a time when patience and accommodation can begin to undermine the process in which we are engaged. We shall not be thwarted by inappropriate legalisms or by narrow obstacles to our inquiry.

With those words, Chairman Peter W. Rodino Jr. declared that his House Judiciary Committee would no longer tolerate the White House failure to deliver 41 tape recordings of presidential conversations that the committee had requested on Feb. 25 for its impeachment inquiry. Without dissent from any of the 38 committee members, Rodino said that the evidence must be submitted this week or it would be subpoenaed. Such a legal step would weaken the President's frequent public claims that he is voluntarily cooperating with the committee.

A showdown was thus rapidly approaching over the committee's ability to extract evidence from the White House. Any failure by Nixon to comply with the subpoena would carry serious implications for him. Refusal to produce legally subpoenaed evidence creates an assumption that the withheld material is damaging to the withholder's case. In a sense, such an act forfeits the law's normal presumption of innocence until proved guilty. Rodino does not intend, however, to seek any immediate contempt of Congress citation against the President if he fails to honor the subpoena. That possibility would be held in reserve until the committee determined whether it already had evidence warranting impeachment charges.

New Jersey Democrat Rodino's exasperation over White House dawdling on the request for evidence was shared by the committee's ranking Republican, Edward Hutchinson of Michigan. He said that he could not understand why Nixon and his chief Watergate lawyer, James St. Clair, were resisting. "We're not after irrelevant matters," Hutchinson declared. "We're not after state secrets." Rodino explained that the committee wanted only "specific evidence of specific acts of specific relevance to our inquiry." The committee had waited "40 days and 40 nights" and still did not have a satisfactory White House reply, complained Texas Democrat Jack Brooks.

The committee's chief counsel, John Doar, sent a letter to St. Clair specifying in greater detail than before just what it wanted and why. The letter asked for 41 tapes, mostly from March and April of 1973 and all potentially relevant to the committee's study of whether Nixon was a participant in the conspiracy to conceal the origins of the Watergate wiretapping-burglary. While St. Clair had complained that this involved "thousands of hours of conversation," the Doar staff estimated that it covered only 26 hours.

The Judiciary Committee's pointed push for evidence, combined with the revelation by its staff that public hearings on the evidence could begin as early as May 1, suggested that the investigators now have a clearer idea of the directions that the inquiry will take. This new focus has followed the committee's receipt of a briefcase containing findings of fact and supporting evidence compiled by the Watergate grand jury that indicted seven former Nixon agents for conspiracy in the coverup.