Heading Closer to Impeachment

The processes pushing toward the impeachment of the President gained momentum. A startling election upset in Michigan last week handed over Vice President Gerald Ford's long-safe Republican House seat to a Democrat who had campaigned all-out against Nixon --a warning of the increasing political risks entailed for any Congressman who eventually votes to absolve the President without a Senate trial. The bipartisan legal staff of the House Judiciary Committee issued a well-researched report declaring that a President can be impeached for official misconduct that stops short of a clear-cut crime. Then the committee finally began its cautious pursuit of the White House tapes, documents and other evidence that could make impeachment all but inevitable (see box following page).

This week the most important of the three federal grand juries investigating the Watergate scandals is expected to issue major indictments. The indictments, involving the Watergate wiretapping of Democratic national headquarters and the conspiracy to conceal that crime, could well include some surprising names. Most of the likely defendants are expected to be former close Nixon associates whose past public statements support the President's own declarations of innocence. If, as expected, they are formally accused of being part of the cover-up conspiracy and charged with various counts of perjury, Nixon's Watergate position will be seriously undermined. Only the resulting trials--or pleas--can determine individual guilt, but the official and detailed web of accusations could be devastating.

Deep Loyalty. Because of previous public testimony and investigations, attention focused on at least seven men as the chief targets of the grand jury investigating the Watergate conspiracy.

Some have been dickering with the staff of Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski in hopes of exchanging their knowledge for relatively light charges.

Probably the most talkative so far has been Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon's personal attorney and a major campaign fund raiser. Also flirting with a deal was John Ehrlichman, formerly one of the President's closest aides. Says a White House colleague of Ehrlichman's: "John knows that if he fights for months in the court and then draws a heavy sentence, he just sinks further into debt and postpones the day when he can again support his family."

Ehrlichman's White House twin, H.R. Haldeman, was showing no signs of cooperation at all. Equally uncommunicative was John Mitchell, Nixon's most influential political adviser and former Attorney General. Says one of Mitchell's associates: "He is no more going to hand up Richard Nixon than Teddy Kennedy would have handed up Bobby Kennedy, or vice versa. The loyalty is that deep." Also among the likely targets of the grand jury are L. Patrick Gray, the former acting director of the FBI; Maurice Stans, Nixon's highly successful fund raiser and former Secretary of Commerce; and Charles Colson, easily the investigator's most tantalizingly elusive suspect. He sent Jaworski a 40-page memo explaining why he should not be indicted.

The new indictments will add to the dismaying number of Nixon agents--20 men so far--who have been charged or convicted of Watergate-related crimes. In addition, eight business executives have been charged with making illegal corporate contributions to the Nixon reelection campaign.

The latest indictment came last week when Jake Jacobsen, an Austin, Texas, lawyer and longtime political associate of John Connally's, was accused of making a false statement to one of the three grand juries. A leader in the Democrats for Nixon movement, Jacobsen told the grand jury that he had received $10,000 from a big lobby for milk producers in 1971, shortly after they had benefited from Nixon's decision to raise the Government's support price on dairy products. The indictment charges that Jacobsen lied in telling the jurors that he put the money in a safe-deposit box and never touched it thereafter. Investigators apparently have evidence that he did use it in some fashion. They also have evidence that he was handed the money to pass along to some of the Administration officials who had advised Nixon to raise the price supports. The indictment signaled that the Jaworski staff knows more about the milk-price scandal than has been revealed--and that more seems certain to emerge.

The President's own image was hardly enhanced last week when Mitchell and Stans, the two former Nixon Cabinet members who had done as much as anyone to elect him to his two terms in the White House, went on trial in a New York federal court. They are charged, among other things, with trying to help Fugitive Financier Robert Vesco out of his troubles with the Securities and Exchange Commission in return for his secret $200,000 cash contribution to Nixon's re-election campaign. The first former Cabinet officials to be indicted since the Harding Administration scandals of the 1920s, they could not have been cheered by the news that Prosecutor Jaworski was temporarily holding up other Watergate indictments until the jury for their trial was chosen and sequestered. That could only mean that one or both are to be indicted again. Whatever the new indictments may suggest about the President's culpability or innocence, the House Judiciary Committee now has a clear guide from its legal staff on what types of presidential acts can be considered grounds for impeachment. As presented in a 49-page report by Chief Counsel John Doar and Minority Counsel Albert Jenner Jr., the grounds are indeed broad. While they must involve "grave misconduct," the impeachable acts need not be criminal. The report contends that criminal law sets a "general standard of conduct which all must follow," but "in an impeachment proceeding, a President is called to account for abusing powers which only a President possesses." Thus an impeachable offense is an action that tends to "subvert the structure of government or undermine the integrity of office and even the Constitution itself."

Reviewing precedents, the report notes that in the history of the republic the House has voted 13 impeachments of federal officials, including President Andrew Johnson, and that in at least ten of these cases "one or more allegations that did not charge a violation of criminal law" were invoked. The most prevalent grounds were "undermining the integrity of office, disregard of constitutional duties and oath of office, arrogation of power, abuse of governmental process, adverse impact on the system of government." Adds the report: "Clearly, these effects can be brought about in ways not anticipated by the criminal law." The reason that impeachment powers were created, the study says, was to "cope with both the inadequacy of criminal standards and the impotence of courts to deal with the conduct of great public figures."

The White House revealed that it planned to present a brief, based partly on a Justice Department study, arguing for a far more restrictive definition of impeachable offenses. Yet House Republican Leader John Rhodes seemed to side with the Doar-Jenner view, declaring that "a violation of the oath of office or a clear violation of the Constitution" would be impeachable.

As the Watergate processes moved toward these new stages, presidential aides displayed fresh signs of nervousness. Nixon's chief of staff, Alexander Haig, shrilly assailed a carefully qualified report in the Washington Post. It said that some of the court-appointed experts studying the subpoenaed presidential tapes had reported finding "technical indications" that two of the recordings might be re-recordings rather than the original tapes. That would suggest that the tapes may have been altered to present misleading evidence.

"We are going to take it on like no other story has been taken on," declared Haig. "We will probably go on national television. This is a humdinger--blasphemous speculation."

James St. Clair, Nixon's chief Watergate defense counsel, later conceded that one member of the panel of experts had reported that he suspected such a re-recording might have taken place, although St. Clair said that other technicians consulted secretly by the White House (and never named) had found no signs of such alterations. The anonymous experts had, moreover, challenged the technical panel's finding that an 18 1/2-minute gap in one White House tape had been caused by at least five separate manual manipulations of the erase and record buttons on a Uher-5000 tape recorder. At issue is whether there is scientific evidence that the erasure had been made deliberately rather than accidentally.

Another expert, Allan D. Bell, president of Dektor Counterintelligence and Security Inc., propounded a theory that a known defective component in the recorder could have produced start and stop markings on the tape by interrupting the flow of current to the erase and record heads of the machine. This did not mean, however, that the court-appointed panel (chosen by the White House and the prosecutors) had not considered this possibility, conducted tests and ruled it out. Even if Bell were right, the suspect recorder still would have had to have been manually set to record or erase for the full 18 1/2 minutes before the component would have produced the signs that have been interpreted as those of multiple manipulations. Thus deliberate erasure would still remain a strong possibility.

More doubts arose about the validity of evidence turned over to Jaworski by the White House. The FBI is studying documents given to the prosecutor in which portions have been crudely cut out, apparently by scissors. TIME has learned that one such document was a memo to Ehrlichman from Egil Krogh and David Young, the two top members of Nixon's team of White House "plumbers." The memo suggested ways to get more information on Daniel Ellsberg, the main defendant in the Pentagon papers case. A paragraph recommending that "a covert operation be undertaken to examine all the medical files still held by Ellsberg's psychoanalyst" had been snipped out. So had Ehrlichman's penciled notation of approval of covert action "if done under your assurance that it is not traceable."

A burglary to seek such files was later carried out by the plumbers. The ineffective nature of such alteration of evidence was demonstrated by the fact that a copy of the memo containing the missing sentences had been subpoenaed from Ehrlichman by Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee, and was pointedly discussed during the Senate hearings.

That committee voted unanimously last week to conclude its public hearings. "The train has already passed our station," noted Senator Herman Talmadge. Having performed a historic educational function in its 16 weeks of public hearings last year, the committee will tie up some loose ends by hearing more witnesses in private and then issue its report. Expected to be critical of the President, it is due before May 28. The Senate last week voted to extend the life of the committee to that date.

President Nixon, apparently embarked on a strategy to stave off House impeachment or conviction in the Senate by solidifying his hard-core support, made another appearance in the South. The region is so relatively friendly that some of his more cynical supporters suggest that its northern boundary should be called "the Mason-Nixon line." Since a two-thirds vote in the Senate is required to remove a President from office, Nixon would have a good chance to survive if he could secure the support of most of the South's Democratic Senators and add them to his bedrock Republican backers.

Appearing with Alabama Governor George Wallace at an "Honor America Day" in Huntsville, Nixon was warmly received by a crowd of 25,000. "God bless you, Mr. President--you are among friends," Wallace said. Nixon could not resist a gross rhetorical alteration of reality in blaming the press and political partisans in Washington for spreading the notion "that America is sick, that there is something wrong with this country that cannot be corrected."

On the contrary, responsible Washington reporting has suggested only that something is wrong at the highest levels of the Government--and that this can, and should, be corrected.

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