Richard Nixon's Collapsing Presidency

The full impact of the transcripts is just beginning to seep in. The reaction of the public is now making itself felt on the members of Congress, and the public is dismayed, shocked and appalled.

That assessment by Illinois Congressman John Anderson, chairman of the House Republican conference, accurately summed up the deteriorating situation confronting President Nixon last week. Before releasing transcripts of 46 private conversations with aides, he had somehow deluded himself into thinking that the American people would conclude that the text proved him innocent of wrongdoing in the Watergate scandal. Moreover, he had reckoned that the portrait of a foulmouthed, conniving, amoral President revealed by the transcripts would soon fade from public memory. Instead, publication of the transcripts produced a floodtide of outrage and indignation as ever-growing numbers of Nixon supporters abandoned him in Congress and the nation. Resignation rumors were spawned faster than the White House could deny them, and a mood of crisis gripped Washington. Nixon's moral authority and ability to govern seemed shattered beyond repair. By all the usual political omens, Nixon had lost the most audacious gamble in his political career and with it, in all likelihood, his chance of serving.out his term of office.

The Nixon crisis was most pressing on three fronts:

> In Congress, a consensus was gathering that the situation was intolerable. Some of Nixon's hitherto stoutest Republican supporters were falling. Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania declared that the transcripts revealed a "deplorable, disgusting, shabby and immoral" performance on the part of the President and his former aides. House Republican Leader John Rhodes of Arizona seconded that description. He recommended that Nixon, if his position continued to deteriorate, "ought to consider resigning as a possible option." One liberal Republican, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, broke completely with the President and became the third G.O.P. Senator to call for Nixon's resignation, joining Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and James Buckley of New York. (See story page 24.)

> Newspaper editors and publishers in the Republican heartland studied the transcripts with sinking hearts and mounting dismay. One after another, they reversed then-previous positions and wrote, in sorrow and in anger, editorials calling for Nixon's resignation or impeachment. In a column published by all of the Hearst newspapers, Editor in Chief William Randolph Hearst Jr. said that the President "seems to have a moral blind spot." The Omaha World-Herald saw him "as a man incapable of providing the moral leadership which the United States is entitled to expect from its President." The Chicago Tribune deplored his "lack of concern for high principles" and "lack of commitment to the high ideals of public office." (See box page 22.)