To Our Readers: An Editorial: The President Should Resign

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The catalogue of the President's involvement in illegal or grossly improper acts has become all too familiar. He approved the so-called Huston plan, which permitted illegal means (including burglary) to combat radicals. He established the "plumbers" unit, ostensibly to plug leaks, and it used illegal methods (wiretaps, forgery) to embarrass or spy on political foes. He impeded an investigation of the plumbers on specious national-security grounds while his aides tried to use the CIA and FBI to help the coverup.

He had a job offer (chief of the FBI) dangled before the judge presiding over the trial of Daniel Ellsberg. He withheld knowledge of the Ellsberg-psychiatrist burglary from that judge for at least a month. His aides offered Executive clemency to some of the Watergate defendants; others, including his personal lawyer, used campaign contributions for payments to Watergate defendants.

President Nixon's most recent actions come as a staggering climax to all that went before. We devoutly hope that it is the climax. When he originally refused to hand over the White House tapes either to the Senate Watergate committee or to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, his argument for the confidentiality of the President's deliberations certainly deserved consideration. Then the court narrowed the issue in such a way that confidentiality could be largely safeguarded: only the judge was to hear the tapes, and only for the purpose of deciding whether any parts were potential evidence in the cases arising from Watergate. If the President had wanted to contest this ruling, he had a clear opportunity to have the matter settled in the Supreme Court, by whose decision he had earlier said that he would abide.

Instead, the President and his lawyer worked out the "compromise" under which summaries would be provided (they would not hold up as evidence in court), and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was to be forbidden any further recourse to the courts in seeking presidential papers. Cox sensibly refused, and was promptly fired in flagrant violation of the President's pledge to the Senate, through then-Attorney General-designate Richardson, that Cox would be independent and could be dismissed only for gross improprieties. That brought on the resignation of Richardson and the dismissal of his principal assistant, honorable men who both refused to carry out the President's order to fire Cox. After an outpouring of indignation from Congress and country, which saw Nixon as defying the courts and setting himself above the law, came the President's abrupt reversal and his decision to hand the tapes to the court after all. And only a few days ago, there was the sudden claim that two crucial tapes do not exist.

Now the President has found a new Attorney General and a new special prosecutor, equipped with not quite convincing promises of independence. Both are reputable men, but it seems to us that these appointments, or even the possible appointment of a prosecutor by the court, can no longer clear away the hopeless miasma of deceit and suspicion.