Handing the Ball to Bill Saxbe

When, at the most recent presidential news conference, Richard Nixon sought to downplay the gravity of his continuing crisis, he noted acidly that in the days following his decision to resume the U.S. bombing of Hanoi last Christmas there were charges by some that the President had "lost his senses." Nixon neglected to point out that the most prominent politician to offer this instant psychoanalysis was a fellow Republican, Ohio Senator William Bart Saxbe, and it was neither the first nor the last time that Saxbe chose to unload his blunt thoughts about the Administration. Yet last week, in still another of the political lurches that Washington has been witnessing almost daily, the President nominated Saxbe, 57, to become Attorney General. The man designated to serve as the nation's chief law-enforcement officer warned his new boss: "You have to take me warts and all."

One unexpected wart, it quickly developed, was a constitutional technicality that seems to make Saxbe ineligible for the office until special legislation is passed by Congress, and possibly not even then. Since Saxbe was a member of Congress in 1969--when legislators voted to raise Cabinet salaries from $35,000 to $60,000 annually--he is forbidden by Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution to hold a Cabinet post until his Senate term expires next year. However, Acting Attorney General Robert Bork claimed that Congress could enable Saxbe to take his new job by passing "remedial" legislation, probably a bill temporarily reducing his salary to the old level (as a Senator, he earns $42,500).

That snag aside, unless his confirmation gets tangled in the struggle between the White House and Congress over the selection of a new Watergate special prosecutor, Saxbe should have little trouble in winning the approval of his fellow Senators on the Judiciary Committee. Few potential nominees could make that claim since committee members are seething with anger over Nixon's dismissal of Archibald Cox, whose job they created last May as part of an agreement reached during the confirmation of former Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

While Saxbe is scathingly critical of Nixon's handling of the Watergate investigation, his views are not especially at variance with those of the White House. He has criticized the Ervin committee hearings for putting on an unnecessarily flamboyant show and charged that Cox "was more interested in a lawsuit" than in pursuing the Watergate investigation. "There are certain affairs of the President that neither Congress nor the courts can invade," says Saxbe. "There is a power to impeach the President, but it was not contemplated in the Constitution that the President can be horsed around the courts of the country."

Still, in choosing Saxbe, the President was forced to overlook an extraordinary record for candor displayed by the Ohio Senator, frequently at the Administration's expense. Shortly after arriving in Washington, Saxbe visited the White House and told Nixon that he had been elected to end the Viet Nam War and that "if he hung onto it, it would be his war." The Senator did not receive another White House invitation for more than four years. That was doubtless fine with John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, the President's two top advisers at the time, who were referred to as "those two Nazis" by Saxbe. More recently, Saxbe likened Nixon and his claims of nonawareness of the Watergate cover-up to "the man who plays piano at a bawdy house for 20 years and says he doesn't know what's going on upstairs."

Filibuster Foe. Saxbe was no easier on his colleagues in the Senate. "The first six months I kept wondering how I got here," he says. "After that I started wondering how all of them did." Saxbe counts as his main achievement in the Senate his co-sponsorship of a rules change that effectively ended the filibuster. He grew increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of business in the clubby upper house, and last month, to no one's surprise, announced that he would not seek another term.

The President could hardly have found a successor with greater contrast to the elegant Richardson. A hefty, rumpled man who chaws tobacco and plays the washtub fiddle for relaxation, Saxbe grew up on a farm near Mechanicsberg in southwestern Ohio, where he still maintains a home and a herd of prize heifers. He served as a bomber pilot in World War II and ran successfully for the state legislature in 1947, while he was a law student at Ohio State University.

Saxbe rose steadily through State ranks--speaker of the house in 1953-54, attorney general in 1957-59 and 1963-68. But he never lost his love of the land and his country directness. A favorite expression when someone is talking nonsense: "He ain't wrapped too tight." Various inept politicians, Saxbe scoffs, "couldn't run a chicken downstairs with a broom."

A retired member of the Ohio National Guard, the Attorney General-designate stirred his first controversy by hinting that he might stop the review of the Kent State shootings that had been ordered by Richardson. Saxbe has outspoken views on capital punishment (for) and gun-control legislation (against). All in all, Saxbe's tenure at the Justice Department did not loom as a quiet one. That prospect seemed to bother the frustrated legislator not at all. "You sit around the Senate for years and think of what you could do; you shoot your mouth off," says Saxbe. "Then they hand you the ball. You can't go home and sit on the porch."

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