The President Shores Up His Command

Stroking determinedly against the Watergate undertow that imperils his survival, Richard Nixon finally moved to give his Administration a new aura of openness, experience and professionalism. With plenty of outside help, he persuaded a highly regarded political pro, Melvin Laird, to become his top domestic affairs adviser. He coaxed a superb organizer, General Alexander Haig Jr., to resign from a brilliant Army career and become White House Chief of Staff. He nominated one of the nation's most proficient law enforcement officials, Kansas City Police Chief Clarence Kelley, to head the FBI. All three will fill vacancies created by the scandal.

In their personal styles as well as their career backgrounds, each member of this crisis-born trio contrasts sharply with the man he replaces. Laird, a 16-year congressional veteran from Wisconsin who argued unsuccessfully against some of Nixon's Viet Nam policies while he was Secretary of Defense, is a far more independent-minded adviser than John Ehrlichman, the congressional critic and highly protective Nixon loyalist whom he replaces.

Although always an obedient aide, Haig is more accessible and has more good cheer than his predecessor, the dour H.R. Haldeman. Says one Nixon aide: "Haldeman issued orders. You work with Haig as an equal." A former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the Johnson Administration and to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon Administration, Haig leapfrogged from colonel to four-star Army Vice Chief of Staff in three years. He had been expected to head the reconstruction of the post-Viet Nam Army.

Kelley (see box next page) seems to have a far keener appreciation of the FBI'S nonpolitical role than did the hapless L. Patrick Gray III, who failed to get Senate confirmation as FBI director because of his cozy cooperation with the White House in the Watergate investigation.

In a less encouraging move, Nixon rewarded the loyalty of his embattled press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, by making him an assistant to the President and giving him the title of Director of Communications. The latter job is being vacated by Herbert Klein, a Nixon associate of some 25 years, who was effectively cut off from White House power by Haldeman and Ehrlichman --and thus is unblemished by Watergate. Klein will become a vice president for corporate relations for Metromedia.

After thus shoring up his command, the President seemed to set out purposely to create an air of normality. In public, at least, he was all broad smiles, and in private his congressional leaders and Cabinet members encountered an animated and attentive President. He listened to their complaints, nodded his head frequently in agreement, asked so licitously: "Are you getting enough political input? Are we keeping in close enough touch with the leadership?"

From within the White House came the word: "The boss says we have turned the corner on Watergate."

Maintaining that same detachment from the reality of the crisis, Nixon picked up a two-year-old speech invitation from Florida Technological University -- to the astonishment of officials of that 6,600-student Orlando institution. He delivered a bland and conventional commencement address without mentioning Watergate or the crisis in Government even once. Instead, he repeated his familiar 1972 campaign theme. "There is somewhat of a tendency to have our television sets in undated with what is wrong with America," he complained. "I think it perhaps would be well to start with the proposition about what is right about this country. In the whole history of the world, there has never been a time I would rather be a graduate than in the year 1973 in the United States of America." The audience, hoping to hear of more topical matters, reacted with only mild applause.

While this degree of optimism seemed strained, the Laird appointment was a concrete and commendable step. It gives the Administration at least a chance to stem the continuing deterioration in its relations with influential politicians of various stripes. As Laird explained to TIME Correspondent Bonnie Angelo, the pressure on him to serve in this Government crisis kept building for weeks and came from Democrats as well as Republicans. "I had planned not to be here--but then I decided that I kind of had to do it," he said. "It was people like Mike Mansfield and Carl Albert and Hugh Scott and Jerry Ford. The Vice President too, and Henry Kissinger and Ed Muskie and my Wisconsin friends, Bill Proxmire and Gaylord Nelson--the damn thing kept accumulating. Last weekend I was with the President at Camp David. Kissinger called me there. I told the President I thought I should do it."

Laird's perspective on his new role is a refreshing one for a Nixon aide. "My major responsibility will be first to be frank and to communicate regularly with the President," he said. "I expect to see him daily. It won't bother me at all to tell him something is a bad idea. I'm not around this town to win games. I've criticized the phony people who monkey around with status games."

Laird conceded that he does not expect to win every intra-White House debate. "I've been in the minority on many issues. You have to decide the position where you can compromise--that's what Government is all about." Not so subtly criticizing past White House operations, Laird stressed the need to cooperate with Congress. "If you just want to fix blame, that's one thing," he said. "But if you want solutions to problems, there's got to be rapport."

That kind of conciliatory talk is overdue at the beleaguered White House, although it may well be too late for one such sensible voice to mend much of the damage. Last week the criticism of Nixon's evasive and still unsatisfactory explanation of his role in the Watergate affair continued to mount. Some of it was coming from the political right, partly because Vice President Spiro Agnew would be an acceptable alternative for such thinkers.

Resign Demands. William Loeb, the ultra-conservative publisher of the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, joined the growing although still small group of those demanding that Nixon resign. "Looking at it from a perfectly coldblooded, hardheaded standpoint," Loeb wrote, "Mr. Nixon has destroyed his credibility and his support, not just with the left wing, but with the average American. They have no confidence in his ability or his skill. They see him as a discredited bungler."

Moderate Republicans also were critical. At the National Governors' Conference along Lake Tahoe, Michigan's William Milliken said of Nixon: "If there's anything that remains unsaid or unknown, he ought to say it, no matter how painful or destructive to him. It has dribbled out--a little each day." Washington's Daniel Evans agreed: "Good grief, it's painful. I wince every time there's a new statement from the White House. I want to believe the President, but I find myself more and more distressed every day as new information comes out. We need a full laying out of what the President knows."

Clearly, Nixon's last attempt to explain Watergate, his lengthy White Paper of May 22, satisfied almost no one who critically examined it. In the document, he claimed that any moves he made that might have looked like an attempt to cover up White House involvement in the various Watergate-related activities were really intended to protect "national security." Even Nixon's new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, declared last week: "I think the national security justification, even as put forward by the people who were directly involved, is not convincing."

Most devastating to that defense was the publication of a series of CIA memos detailing conversations between CIA officials, Acting FBI Director Gray and White House Aides Ehrlichman, Haldeman and John Dean. Repeatedly, these discussions concerned ways in which the CIA could be used to keep the FBI investigation limited or to help keep the arrested Watergate conspirators from implicating higher officials. Always, the conversations were couched in political terms rather than in any regard for national security. The implication of the talks was that 1) Nixon had failed utterly to convey his concern for national security, or 2) these officials on their own had decided that politics was the priority aim, or 3) Nixon's security explanation was contrived after the fact.

Those documents also tended to undercut the emerging White House attempts to portray Ehrlichman and Haldeman as acting on Watergate only in response to the President's concern over security, while lesser aides became over-zealous about political considerations. Pretrial depositions by Ehrlichman and Haldeman in a Democratic civil suit over the Watergate activities were released last week, and in sum they pointed to former Attorney General John Mitchell and Counsel Dean as the high officials most deeply involved.

Furious Infighting. Yet the innocence of Ehrlichman and Haldeman apparently will face a further challenge from Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon's dismissed personal attorney. Kalmbach has told Justice Department prosecutors that he will be a Government witness against Haldeman and Ehrlichman if they are indicted, as expected, for obstruction of justice. Kalmbach handled large amounts of campaign cash that apparently were used to finance disruption of Democratic campaigns and pay hush money to the convicted Watergate wiretappers. He reportedly will claim that Ehrlichman authorized the payoffs and that Haldeman supervised Kalmbach's handling of campaign funds.

As the furious infighting continued among estranged former Nixon officials, Charles W. Colson, who had been a special White House counsel, threw a body blow at a longtime rival for Nixon's favor, John Mitchell. Colson claimed that on three different occasions early this year he told the President that Mitchell had apparently helped plan the Watergate burglary and other aides were trying to cover it up. Colson told the New York Times that Nixon refused to believe that Mitchell could have been involved. This, as Colson interpreted it, meant that Nixon knew nothing about the Watergate plans, as he has publicly contended. But it would also seem to indicate that Nixon was either naively or deliberately disregarding repeated warnings that a cover-up was under way.

Colson, in turn, has been accused by two other aides, according to Watergate investigators, of proposing a burglary of the Brookings Institution in 1971 to obtain some unidentified classified information. Moreover, the investigators say, he then suggested that the burglars "fire-bomb" the place to conceal the breakin. These accusations have been made by John Dean and John J. Caulfield, a former intelligence agent brought into the White House by John Ehrlichman. Caulfield told investigators he considered the plan "insane" and it was never carried out. An associate of Colson confirmed that such discussions had taken place but contended that Colson had only been joking and should not have been taken seriously.

The televised Senate committee hearings on Watergate chaired by North Carolina's Sam Ervin, which resumed last week, seem to be moving rapidly toward pivotal sessions in which the former officials closest to the President will take their places in that highly revealing forum. The only potential hitch is the repeated effort by Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, to prevent full televised airings of the testimony of key witnesses. So far rebuffed by unanimous opposition from the Ervin committee to any delay in its hearings, Cox has now retreated to a court plea that the testimony of John Dean and Jeb Stuart Magruder, the deputy director of the Nixon committee, be permitted in public, but without television cameras present. Cox claims that television so magnifies the publicity that a fair trial in future prosecution of the principals in the affair will be impossible. Ervin, on the other hand, contends that the courts have no constitutional authority to interfere with the procedures of the Senate. (For a discussion of the legal hazards of pre-trial publicity, see THE LAW).

Showdown. It now seems likely that John Dean will tell his full story next week before the Ervin committee.

While his own involvement obviously is extensive, so is his knowledge of the whole affair. Last week, after first assailing stories in the New York Times and Washington Post in which Dean claimed he had met with Nixon some 40 times this year on Watergate as an attempt "to destroy the President," the White House retracted its denial and conceded that there had been, indeed, many such conversations. The Post carried the most damning--and as yet unverified--Dean assertion: that Nixon had asked him personally how much it would cost to keep the convicted Watergate conspirators silent. When told by Dean that it might take $1,000,000, the President is supposed to have replied that this would be no problem.

Nixon has denied any personal participation in attempts to keep the low-level Watergate burglars from telling all they knew. The stage is thus set for a showdown in credibility between the President and his fired counsel. In most situations that would be no great contest. But Watergate continues to enlarge its claim as one of the most unusual --and perilously unpredictable--political events in U.S. history.

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