Nation: The Seventh Crisis of Richard Nixon

THE enormity of the defeat was shattering enough. At a time when a confluence of pressures was already upon him, Richard Nixon experienced the most serious reversal of his young presidency with the Senate's surprise rejection of his second nomination to the Supreme Court. The setback was a sharp blow to the President's national prestige, especially since he had only a week before raised the Senate vote to the level of a test of wills by denouncing senatorial opposition to his presidential prerogatives. The Senate's action at least called into question the viability of his Administration's so-called Southern strategy, and it raised serious doubts about the usefulness of his Attorney General, the architect of that strategy and the man who has twice recommended losers to the President. Moreover, the defeat showed that Nixon's White House, far from being the dust-free, efficient machine that so many had expected it to be, is not only increasingly embattled but in many ways remarkably prone to malfunction.

Still, the President could have absorbed the blow quietly, picked a more suitable candidate for his third try at the court and hoped that the affair would eventually blow over. Instead, displaying signs of the zest for political roughhousing that was his hallmark in the 1940s and '50s, Nixon decided to slug it out with the Senate. The conflict that he thus launched could have greater impact on his Administration —and on the country—than the Senate's rejection of Clement Haynsworth Jr. and George Harrold Carswell.

Twenty-seven hours after the vote on Carswell last week, Nixon faced reporters in the White House press briefing room. Beside him was Attorney General John Mitchell, his presence apparently an indication of Nixon's continued trust in him. The President's jaw was taut. His eyes were angry, his words clipped. "I have reluctantly concluded," he declared, "that it is not possible to get confirmation for a judge on the Supreme Court of any man who believes in the strict construction of the Constitution, as I do, if he happens to come from the South." He accused his opponents not only of regional prejudice, but of "hypocrisy" and of subjecting Haynsworth and Carswell to "vicious assaults on their intelligence, on their honesty." He said that he would be forced to nominate a judicial conservative from outside the South, thus denying that section of the nation its just representation. Later, in a written statement, he gave Southerners his "assurance that the day will come when men like Judges Carswell and Haynsworth can and will sit on the high court."