Witnesses to a Spreading Stain

Sam Ervin pounded his gavel for the last time at 4:45 in the afternoon and then, after a round of handshakes and picture taking, he took the gavel with him as he departed for a surprise party to celebrate Herman E. Talmadge's 60th birthday. After 37 days, 33 witnesses, 7,573 pages of transcript and nearly 2,000,000 words of testimony, just about everybody felt it was time for a rest.

In its final week before the month-long recess, the committee heard testimony from three men who, until a few months ago, were the nation's top law-enforcement officers. The three had been charged with investigating the Watergate case; and yet, in the crucial six weeks last spring when the case was breaking open, they found that they were repeatedly being manipulated by the White House.

The critical period began on March 20, when Watergate Defendant James W. McCord Jr. wrote a letter to Federal District Judge John J. Sirica charging that political pressure had been exerted upon the seven defendants to plead guilty. By the time it ended, with President Nixon's television announcement on April 30 of the resignation of John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, 17 present or former Nixon staffers were under investigation by the Justice Department and a federal grand jury.

Last week's first witness was L. Patrick Gray III, the former acting director of the FBI, who appeared a pathetic figure as he described how, in 26 years of service in the U.S. Navy, he had been taught to say "Aye, aye, sir." Gray was asked about his earlier account of a telephone call to Nixon on July 6, 1972, in which he had warned that certain White House aides were trying to "mortally wound" the President by interfering with the FBI and the CIA (TIME Aug. 13). To this astonishing assertion, Nixon merely replied: "Pat, you just continue to conduct your aggressive and thorough investigation." Had Gray been surprised by this curious retort? "Frankly," he said, "I expected the President to ask me some questions." Indeed, he waited for two weeks to answer the questions that were never asked, and then, when he heard nothing further from the President, he concluded that he had been an "alarmist."

Eight months later, Gray recalled, Nixon telephoned him to offer encouragement concerning Gray's difficulty in obtaining Senate confirmation as permanent FBI director. What struck Gray as "eerie" about the conversation was the way the President pointedly said: "Pat, remember, I told you to conduct a thorough and aggressive investigation." To Gray, who knew nothing at the time about Nixon's practice of tape-recording his own conversations, it seemed to be some sort of attempt to put the comment on record.

On April 26, Nixon let it be known that he was "concerned" about the reports that Gray had burned Watergate documents that had been given to him by Ehrlichman and John W. Dean III. Gray decided the next day that he should resign. "I said early in the game," Gray told the committee, "that Watergate would be a spreading stain that would tarnish everyone with whom it came in contact--and I'm no exception."

No Records. Next to the witness stand came Richard G. Kleindienst, the former Attorney General, and Henry E. Petersen, who is still the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the criminal division. Both men said that they had been dismayed by the amount of White House interference they got on the Watergate case--particularly from John Ehrlichman. Kleindienst recalled how Ehrlichman had telephoned Petersen late last year to demand that Justice Department prosecutors stop trying to "harass" former Secretary of Commerce Maurice H. Stans, the Nixon finance chairman. Kleindienst said he warned Ehrlichman that such intervention could be interpreted as "obstruction of justice." He also threatened to resign, Kleindienst said he told Ehrlichman, "if the President tells me that you have the authority and the power to give specific instructions to people in the Department of Justice." In reply, said Kleindienst, Ehrlichman assured him that "it will never happen again."

Early this year, Kleindienst testified, Ehrlichman came to him seeking "technical" advice about the possibility of lenient sentences or presidential pardons for the Watergate defendants. Ehrlichman "did not have much of a knowledge of the criminal justice system," said Kleindienst, and asked such questions as "What happens when somebody is convicted of a crime? . . . When are you eligible for a pardon? When do the circumstances arise for Executive pardon?" (Ehrlichman has denied under oath that he sought a guarantee of Executive clemency for the Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt Jr.)

Later, when Kleindienst told Petersen of this conversation, Petersen declared that the Watergate defendants were almost certainly going to do "jail time," and said that he would strongly oppose any efforts for clemency. According to Petersen, Kleindienst, who was leaving on a trip, replied: "Tell those crazy guys over there [at the White House] what you just told me before they do something they will be sorry for."

Petersen, a career civil servant and a registered Democrat, was by all odds one of the committee's most refreshing witnesses. What struck him most about his early investigation of the case, he remarked, was how suspiciously everybody seemed to act. "There were no records. Things were destroyed. They didn't act like innocent people. Innocent people come in and say: 'Fine, what do you want to know?' It was not like that."

On Sunday, April 15, after going over the case with other Justice Department officials until 5 a.m., Kleindienst and Petersen met with Nixon and told him they believed that ranking officials of both the White House staff and the Committee to Re-elect the President were involved in the conspiracy. The President, as Kleindienst recalled it, was "dumbfounded"; to Petersen he seemed concerned but calm. Kleindienst said that he had "wept" upon learning that his friend and former superior at the Justice Department, John N. Mitchell, might have been involved, and that the President himself had consoled him. "I don't think since my mother died when I was a young boy that I ever had an event that has consumed me emotionally with such sorrow," he said, "and he was very considerate of my feelings."

At this meeting, Petersen urged the President to dismiss Ehrlichman and Haldeman because, Petersen said, he was certain that their continued presence on the White House staff would be a "source of vast embarrassment." In stressing the depth of the national concern over Watergate, the blunt-speaking Petersen also mentioned during the same meeting that his own wife, "who is no left-wing kook," had asked him whether he thought the President was involved in the coverup. Even more pointedly, Petersen told Nixon that if the Justice Department should turn up any evidence of presidential involvement, he would not only resign immediately but would "waltz it [the information] over to the House of Representatives"--where impeachment proceedings begin. On April 30, after announcing the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon telephoned Petersen to say: "You can tell your wife that the President has done what needed to be done."

Petersen also furnished some additional insight into the President's attitude toward the disclosure that White House "Plumbers" Hunt and Liddy had been involved in the September 1971 burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Petersen testified that when the subject of Ellsberg --though not specifically the burglary--was raised, Nixon replied: "I know about that. That is a national security matter. You stay out of that."

Petersen insisted that he and the Justice Department could and would have solved the entire case. Indeed, he said, it was already 90% solved when Archibald Cox was appointed last May to take over the affair. "Damn it!" cried Petersen. "I resent the appointment of a special prosecutor!"

For the next five weeks, the center of the Watergate controversy will move to federal district court, where both the Ervin committee and Special Prosecutor Cox have filed suit to obtain White House tape-recordings of presidential conversations relating to the case. Six presidential lawyers last week filed a brief rejecting all demands for the tapes. Whatever the outcome, the appeals will probably go to the Supreme Court, perhaps as early as next month.

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