Defending Nixon

Most of the press comment on Richard Nixon's involvement in Watergate is highly critical, and skepticism over the President's disclaimers is widespread among editorial writers and columnists. But a minority have been expressing varying degrees of sympathy with Nixon. They seem to be governed either by a firm belief in his personal integrity or by the conviction that his innocence must--for the good of the country--be assumed unless hard facts disprove it.

A few Nixon defenders have vehemently challenged the press's role in Watergate. Last week Franklin B.

Smith, editorial-page editor of the Burlington, Vt., Free Press, predicted:

"There is going to be a severe backlash against the sordid press McCarthyism and intellectual punksterism of those who sought so mindlessly to tear down a great President, a great office and a great nation." The Dallas Morning News chided "zealous communicators hot on the trail of Watergate" for ignoring the principle that innocence must be presumed until guilt is proved.

The same argument, of course, was often used months ago to knock down press disclosures--until they were borne out by later evidence.

Tortured Rationale. A common theme in the minority report is the admonition to critics of the President to slow down a bit. The Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch describes the nation "as caught in a whirlpool of rumors, innuendoes and unsubstantiated charges that threatens to pull it inexorably to the presently unjustified conclusion that Richard M. Nixon is a politically corrupt liar." Arguing that "in damaging the President, we damage the nation," the Omaha World-Herald said: "It will not wash if some element of the press is obliged at a future time to say 'Oops, our source was wrong about the President's involvement.' " Several lonely voices have constructed a tortured rationale for the campaign skulduggery. Syndicated Columnist Richard Wilson of the Des Moines Register claimed that H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell "conceived of themselves as the conservators of the kind of system they believed most Americans wanted.

Which was not what Daniel Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Jane Fonda, the black militants, welfare chiselers and the campus radicals and George S. McGovern desired. In that mood it was possible to justify means of opposition to the hostile encroachment of hated perceptions which under ordinary circumstances might be avoided." Quarreling with his own paper's critical stance on Watergate, Portland Oregonian Publisher Robert C. Notson painted past antiwar demonstrations as an apocalyptic threat to the country and the President's safety. "This then," Notson wrote, "was the context" for the Watergate bugging.

Depicting the President as an innocent victim of his aides is another theme. "Judging by all the known evidence," Columnist Joseph Alsop said recently, "the President was persistently, flagrantly and arrogantly lied to about this matter, by a whole series of men to whom he had given total confidence." The El Dorado, Kans., Times agreed: "We believe that when the matter became public the President was lied to by the yard by men [whom] he trusted, and who went to disgusting lengths to try to make his campaign for re-election a winning one." In William F.

Buckley Jr.'s National Review, Columnist George F. Will concluded that the Nixon "tough guys poisoned the atmosphere in the White House" with consequences "disastrous for Mr. Nixon, the presidency and the nation."

The New York Times Op-Ed page, most of which has been devoted to knocking the President, has made room for some defenses as well. Ex-Nixon Speechwriter William Safire, whose debut as a regular Times columnist has suffered from the strain of Watergate, weighed in with a conversation between himself and his mother conducted over Mom's chicken soup. "Mom--if you can't be sure the President didn't know, do you think he should resign?" Her plucky reply: "Absolutely not. He has character, and if he didn't know, he should stay on and try to be the best President we ever had." Dwight Eisenhower's son John, a Nixon inlaw, composed a hearts-and-flowers allegory about "the Coach" whose team has committed errors "out of an excessive loyalty to him and the Institution." As it turns out, the man described was onetime Army Football Coach Earl H. ("Red") Blaik, and his dilemma was the 1951 cheating scandal at West Point that decimated his team. Eisenhower noted that Blaik rebuilt his team and retired with honor. The moral: "Is there any reason to believe that our nation's Coach, Richard Nixon, will do less?"

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