There was something oddly hollow and out of focus about last night's main TV-news story on the U.S. Supreme Court's dramatic and potentially ominous decision to postpone its traditional June recess and stay on through July to render what will clearly be an historic judgment, one way or another, on Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's either bold or desperate leapfrog attempt to force an immediate High Court decision on President Nixon's right to ignore a subpoena -- for 64 tape recordings and other White House documents -- from a special prosecutor appointed under extremely sensitive circumstances by the U.S. Senate with his independence explicitly guaranteed by the new U.S. attorney general as a condition of his taking office.
All three networks treated this latest development in The Strange and Terrible Saga of Richard Nixon as a staggering and perhaps even fatal blow to his chances of survival in the White House. The mere fact that the Court was willing to stay over and hear Jaworski's argument, they implied, was a sure sign that at least four of the justices (enough, in this case) were prepared to rule, just as soon as the question is formally presented, against Nixon's claim of "executive privilege" with regard to Jaworski's subpoena. The special prosecutor had apparently won a major victory, and the president was in very deep trouble. Only David Schumacher on ABC hinted, very briefly, that there had been no victory celebrations among Jaworski's staff people that afternoon. But he didn't say why. . .
And, frankly, I'll be fucked if I can either. I brooded on it for a while, but all that came to mind was some half-remembered snarl from the lips of President Andrew Jackson when the Supreme Court ruled against him on some kind of question involving a federal land grant to the Seminole Indians. Jackson, a veteran Indian-fighter, took the ruling as a personal insult. "Well," he said, "the judges have made their decision -- now let them enforce it."
Josef Stalin, about 100 years later, had similar views with regard to the Roman Catholic Church. He had gone into one of his rages, according to the story as I heard it, and this one had something to do with a notion that seized him, after five days and nights in a brutal vodka orgy, that every Catholic in Moscow should be nailed up on a telephone pole by dawn on Easter Sunday. This announcement caused genuine fear in the Kremlin, because Stalin -- like Colson -- was known by his staff to be "capable of almost anything." When he calmed down a bit, one of his advisers suggested that a mass crucifixion of Russian Catholics -- for no reason at all -- would almost certainly raise hackles in the Vatican and no doubt anger the pope.
"Fuck the pope," Stalin mumbled. "How many divisions does he have?"
These stories are hard to nail down with any real certainty, but there is a mean kind of consistency in the punch lines that makes them hard to forget. . . especially when you start pondering the spectacle of a borderline psychotic with the brain of a small-time chiseler and the power to literally blow up the world never more than 60 seconds away from his gnawed-red fingertips, doing everything he can to force a hellish confrontation with the highest judicial and legislative authorities in his own country.
This is what Nixon has been trying to do for at least the past three months -- and, if Stewart Alsop was right, since July 18th of last year. That was the Wednesday meeting at the White House, he said, when "it was agreed unanimously that the tapes should not be released."
I would like to have talked with Stewart Alsop about that meeting, but he died last month of leukemia -- after writing very candidly and even casually, at times, about his impending death from a disease that he had known for at least two years was slowly and steadily killing him. I didn't know him personally and as a journalist I rarely agreed with him, but there was an uncommon sense of integrity and personal commitment in everything he wrote. . . and an incredible sense of style, strength and courage in the way he chose to die.
Stewart Alsop, for all his experience in politics and all his friends in every eyrie in Washington, seemed baffled all the way to his grave by the reality of "Watergate" and its foul implications for some of the ideas and people he believed in. As one of Washington's ranking journalists, he was privy to things like that meeting last July in the White House, where Nixon and a handful of others sat down and gave serious thought to all their possible options with regard to those reels of harmless looking celluloid that had suddenly turned into time bombs. Alsop could understand all the facts of a scene like that, but not the Reality. Like most of the people he grew up with, Stewart Alsop was born a Republican.
It was as much a way of life as a thought-out political philosophy, and along with all the privileges came a certain sense of noblesse oblige.
Alsop understood these things -- which explains probably better than anything else why it was almost genetically impossible for him to come to grips with the idea that the Oval Office of the White House -- under a second-term Republican president who had also been a Republican vice-president, senator and congressman -- was in fact a den of thieves, fixers and felons.
This kind of savage reality was too much for 60-year-old elitist Republicans like Stewart Alsop to cope with. It was like showing up at the White House for your monthly chat with The President on some normal afternoon and finding the Oval Office full of drunken Hell's Angels. . . and The President so stoned on reds that he can't even recognize you, babbling distractedly and shoveling big mounds of white powder around on his desk with the butt of a sawed-off shotgun.
There are not many senior political columnists in Washington who could handle a scene like that. Their minds would refuse to accept it. . . for the same reason they still can't accept the stark and fearful truth that President Richard Milhous Nixon is not only going to be impeached, but he actually wants to be impeached. Immediately.
This is probably the one simple fact, right now, in a story that is going to become so heinously complicated in the next few months that every reporter assigned to it will need both a shrewd criminal lawyer and scholar in the field of constitutional law right next to him or her at all times.
There is no question at all -- even now, in these last moments of calm before the shitrain starts -- that this "Nixon impeachment" saga is going to turn some of the best minds in American journalism to mush before it's over. . .
And that statement will just have to sit there; I refuse to even try to explain it. There will be plenty of time for that; thousands of hours in God only knows how many courtrooms. And Nixon will eventually be impeached, if only because he has the leverage to put the House of Representatives in a position where it will have no other choice.
Nixon's lawyers -- who have already cost the taxpayers nearly $400,000 in legal fees -- have now abandoned all pretense in their efforts to insult and provoke Congressman Peter Rodino's House Judiciary Committee into exactly the kind of quick, angry and ill-considered vote for impeachment that Rodino and committee counsels John Doar and Albert Jenner have been bending over backward to avoid. . . until they can put together enough evidence -- before the hearings are opened to the public and the full House convenes on TV to hear the charges -- to build a far more solid and serious case for impeachment than the one they appear to have now. Nixon would like nothing better than to stampede the House of Representatives into a televised Yea or Nay showdown, based on charges no more serious than Contempt of Congress, Contempt of Court(s) and, by implication, the grossest kind of contempt for everybody in the country with an I.Q. higher than 50.
But not even Ron Ziegler is counting on a farce of that magnitude. On May 27th, the UPI wire carried an official statement by Ziegler, from Key Biscayne, to the effect that formal impeachment proceedings against The Boss would "come as no surprise" to him. Nor would impeachment itself, he implied. So why don't they just get on with it?
Why indeed?
One of the main reasons has to do with all those tapes that Nixon apparently decided quite a while ago that he would never turn over to anybody, anywhere, for any reason at all. Thus far, he has shrugged off subpoenas for more than 100 of his taped conversations -- 64 from Jaworski and a
bout 50 from the Rodino committee. Many of these are overlapping, and nobody in Washington seems to know which set of subpoenas would have legal preference -- or even who will have to decide that question, if it ever comes up in real life.
If Nixon hangs tough on his "stonewalling" strategy with regard to the tapes, not even a definitive ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court can force him to give them up. Noncompliance would put him in contempt of the highest court in the land and constitute further grounds for impeachment -- but why should that worry him? The Court has no more divisions than the pope did in Stalin's time -- and no more real power over Nixon than it did over Andrew Jackson.
It is hard to imagine Chief Justice Burger signing a "no-knock" search warrant and sending a squad of U.S. marshals over to the White House with instructions to kick down the door and tear the place apart until they "find those goddamn tapes."
Special Prosecutor Jaworski is aware of all this, but it doesn't seem to bother him. He wants a ruling from the High Court, anyway, and before the end of July he will have one. It may not make any tangible difference, in the end, but at the very least it will be one more nail in Nixon's plastic coffin. . . and another piece of sharp, hard-nosed legal work by Jaworski, who must be feeling about nine feet tall today -- after replacing Archibald Cox in a cloud of almost universal scorn and suspicion that he was nothing but a hired fixer brought in by Nixon and Connally to "put the cap on the bottle."
Jaworski was a definite sleeper, or at least that's the way it looks from outside his amazingly leakless operation. If he's a Nixon-Connally fixer, he's been pretty clever about it so far and he's fooled a lot of people, including some of the most cynical heads in Washington.
But not all. There are still some people around town who remind you that Houston, Jaworski's home, is a breeding ground for some of the most vicious golf-hustlers in the country -- the kind who will lose the first 15 holes to you for $100 each, then whack you for $5000 a hole on the last three.
Which may be true. But if it is, Leon is cutting his margin pretty thin; he will have to play his last three holes all at once on July 8th, when he argues his tape subpoena case in front of what Washington lawyers call a "bobtailed" U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice William Rehnquist, the fourth and most virulently conservative of the four Nixon appointees, has been either pressured or cajoled by the others to remove himself from the case because of his previous association with the Nixon administration. Rehnquist was an assistant attorney general in John Mitchell's Justice Department before Nixon picked him up by his jackboots and hoisted him onto the Court.
This leaves an interesting line-up to decide the (legal) fate of the tapes; The three right-bent Nixon appointees -- Burger, Blackmun and Powell -- to balance the three-man "liberal bloc": Douglas, Marshall and Brennan. The two critical swing votes will be Byron White, a closet-fascist appointed by John Kennedy and Eisenhower nominee Potter Stewart, a sort of libertarian conservative who recently shocked many of his friends and philosophical brethren by publicly denouncing Nixon's blatant "politicalization" of the Court.
Stewart, far more than White, seems genuinely and even personally offended at finding himself grouped with what he plainly considers four half-bright political hacks who don't know the law from a leach-field. If Jaworski can mount a sound enough legal argument to convince Stewart that Nixon has no basic or inalienable right to withhold the tapes, he will probably win the case even if White goes along once again with Nixon's gunsels. Because there will only be three of them, this time -- with Rehnquist brooding darkly on the sidelines -- and in the case of a 4-4 tie, Jaworski wins. He has already won a verdict on essentially the same question in the U.S. Court of Appeals, and when a lower court verdict is carried up as high as it can go and results in a tie vote, the lower court verdict stands.
Whatever the verdict, it will almost certainly come before the House of Representatives votes on impeachment. . . and if Nixon loses and then decides to defy the Supreme Court, that will give many of the publicly "undecided" congressmen a hard nudge in the direction of voting against him. The final vote will probably come sometime in late August, and if I had to bet on the outcome now I'd guess the margin will be almost 2-1 against the president, although a simple majority would do it.
Nixon would probably agree with me on that, and also on the idea that betting on the outcome of the House impeachment vote right now is more a matter of the point spread than simple winning or losing.
The real test will come in the Senate, where Nixon can afford a 2-1 point spread against him and still win the verdict. Out of 100 votes in the Senate, Nixon will need only 34 to beat the whole rap. . . which is not a really formidable nut to have to make, given the nature of politicians and the ever-increasing likelihood that the final vote in the Senate -- the savage climax to "the whole enchilada" -- will happen no earlier than mid-October, about two weeks before Election Day on the first Tuesday in November.
Exactly one-third of the Senate -- just one vote less than Nixon needs for acquittal -- will be running for reelection this November, and every one of them (either 33 or 34, because three into 100 won't go) is reportedly terrified at the prospect of having to campaign for reelection back home, while at the same time having to participate in a nationally televised trial on one of the heaviest questions in American history, and then being forced to cast a monumentally public vote either for or against President Nixon on the very eve of their own election days.
If it comes down to that, in terms of timing, the Public Opinion Polls will no doubt be a much more potent factor than they have been up to now -- for the same reason that Congress waited until The Polls climbed over 50% in favor of impeachment before getting the process underway. . . and there is not much Nixon can do now to affect The Polls enough to change the House vote on impeachment.
But his ability to affect the outcome of the Senate/Conviction vote is a hard thing to argue with. For one thing, he plans to spend most of the summer flashing around Europe, Israel, Egypt, Russia and anywhere else where they'll talk to him, in what will probably be a fairly effective effort to grab enough headlines to keep "the impeachment story" at least below the fold on most front pages.
Meanwhile, the haggard remnants of his presidential staff will be working about 18 hours a day to suppress and deflate any new evidence that might affect either his standing in The Polls or the outcome of his Senate/Conviction trial. Less than half of those 34 votes he needs for acquittal are up for reelection in '74, and any incumbent president -- even one who's already been impeached -- has a massive amount of leverage when it comes to using the political pork barrel.
There is not much doubt, on the numbers question, that at least 20 the 100 senators will not vote to convict Nixon under any circumstances. . . unless he violates that old law of Indiana politics about being "found in bed with either a live man or a dead woman."
Nixon is not one of your more vulnerable politicians in this area. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine him being in bed at all-- and especially not with anything human.
So we can scratch 20 votes, for starters -- which means he needs only 14 more, and we want to remember here that he'll be dealing almost entirely with Yahoo Republicans and Redneck Southern Democrats. Given the 34/66 cut, he can afford to ignore every man in the Senate who has ever been even remotely suspected of anti-Nixon sympathies. . . so he can write off at least 50 votes with one stroke, which means he will not be far off if he assumes a mathematical base of 50 votes definitely against him, 20 definitely for him, and 30 undecided.
Of those 30, he needs only 14 -- and any man who has spent his entire adult life dealing on the ethical fringes of Washington politics should feel fairly comfortable with those numbers. Any president who can't piece off 14 senators would never have made it to the White House in the first place.
And Nixon has two extremely heavy hole cards: (1) He has personal control over most of the potentially fatal evidence that might be used against him if he ever
conies to trial (the Oval Office tapes, which he retains the option to destroy now or later, if he hasn't already done that. . .) and (2) he has become such a personal embarrassment and political millstone around the neck of the Republican party that he could easily buy at least ten of those votes by agreeing, in secret, to resign the presidency in a gesture of splendid martyrdom within 48 hours after the Senate votes not to convict him on the House impeachment charges.
This solution would get a lot of people off the hook -- especially Nixon, who has nothing to gain from hanging on for another two years in the White House. His effectiveness as president was a wasted hope from the very beginning -- but it has taken five years, two elections and one mind-bending scandal to make the cheap little bastard understand it.
Even Nixon should understand, now, that the only hope for his salvation in the history books is to somehow become a martyr and the most obvious way to do that, at this point in the saga, is to make some kind of a deal with the heavies in his own party to get him off their backs as quickly as possible by trading the guarantee of a dignified resignation for a vote of acquittal in the Senate.
This is a pretty good bet, I think, and unless the Rodino committee comes up with some unnaturally strong evidence before the House votes on impeachment, I don't have much faith in a Senate vote for conviction. A working figure, for now, would be about 60-40 against Nixon. . . but 60-40 is not enough; it has to be 67-33 again, and that will be a hard nut to make.
In addition to the leverage it gives Nixon with the gurus of his own party, the "Resignation in exchange for Acquittal" strategy has a certain appeal for the Democrats -- but only if it can be arranged and finished off before January 20th of 1975. If Gerald Ford assumes the presidency before that date, he will only be legally eligible to run for one more term. But if Ford becomes president anytime after January of '75, he'll be eligible for two terms, and most Democrats in the Senate would prefer to short-circuit that possibility.