Richard Nixon's Seventeen Crises

Is the Watergate case Richard Nixon's "seventh crisis," as an instant and inevitable cliche would have it? Not likely, when it is recalled that the last great trauma in the President's 1962 bestseller Six Crises was the Nixon-Kennedy campaign of 1960--of which he wrote: "Where an individual has carried on his shoulders the hopes of millions, he then faces his greatest test."* Based on the criteria implicit in the cases of the first six, the updated list might look like this:

7) The 1962 campaign for Governor of California, ending with that famous exit line, "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more."

8) The 1968 presidential campaign, in which Nixon's projected margin over Hubert Humphrey steadily narrowed as Election Day approached.

9) The mounting demands in 1969 for an end to the Viet Nam War, culminating in protest marches.

10) The Senate's refusal to ratify the President's Supreme Court nominees, 1969 and 1970.

11) The Cambodian incursion of 1970, followed by campus rioting and the Kent State killings,

12) The May Day demonstrations of 1971 that threatened to shut down the capital.

13) The nation's economic troubles, which in 1971 led to wage and price controls and to devaluation.

14) Daniel Ellsberg's theft and publication of the Pentagon papers, 1971.

15) The ITT affair, 1972.

16) The 1972 impasse over peace negotiations, ranging from the President's decision to mine Haiphong's harbor in May to his resumption of the bombing of the North in December.

By this litany, Watergate would seem to rank not as Richard Nixon's seventh but as his 17th crisis.

--The first five: the Alger Hiss case, the Checkers speech, Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack, the violence in Caracas during Nixon's 1958 trip, the Kitchen Debate with Nikita Knrushchev in 1959

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