Nixon Digs In to Fight

There is a time to be timid. There is a time to be conciliatory. There is a time to fly and there is a time to fight. And I'm going to fight like hell.

Shifting stance once again, the President dropped into a fighting crouch, dukes-up on Watergate and the threat of impeachment. Conciliation having failed in Operation Candor, he and his defenders took the offensive, carrying out that pugnacious vow made last week at a private White House meeting with a group of Republican Congressmen. The themes were clear: he was innocent; he would never resign; he would resist impeachment as a narrow partisan political attack on him. And he got some help when Egil Krogh Jr. contended that the President was not responsible for one burglary carried out by the White House plumbers team that Krogh headed.

The hard line was taken up by Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, who knocked down any possibility that Nixon might meet with Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee, as it requested last week--for the third time. Ziegler indicated that the President may be planning to defy the House Judiciary Committee in its impeachment inquiry by not voluntarily turning over White House documents. The press secretary also applied a new gag on White House officials who have been willing to talk candidly, but anonymously, to reporters. All contacts with the press, he ordered, must be reported to him.

Press Pounding. Nixon plunged into a flurry of activity designed to show that he was still leading the nation. He startled HEW officials by insisting on rushing an education message to Congress before his State of the Union message, which will be delivered this week. "It was just chaos, really," said one HEW source. "You wouldn't believe the wild-ass way this was developed." Perhaps as a result, the message contained nothing substantively new. Yet while the White House was preoccupied with showing Nixon in motion, it failed to lobby effectively on its foreign aid bill. The House voted 248 to 155 to kill the Administration's proposed contribution of $1.5 billion to the World Bank to help underdeveloped nations. Only 47 Republicans supported Nixon.

The President's combative mood was most evident in two meetings with members of Congress, held over coffee and tea in the Cabinet Room. He conducted a 40-minute monologue on foreign policy and the economy for 19 Republican legislators before turning to Watergate. Then he blamed "the daily pounding by the press" for his troubles.

He declared that "under no circumstances could I consider resignation. We cannot allow Government to be overtaken by a mass assault on the presidency ... we cannot have a convulsion in the greatest nation in the world." Meeting 19 Southern and Border State Democrats, Nixon repeated: "It's unthinkable that I will resign. I'll fight it right down to the wire."

No Time. A similar contention that Nixon's professions of innocence can be taken on faith was spread by other prominent Republicans. After meeting with Nixon for nearly two hours, Vice President Gerald Ford declared that the White House was in possession of evidence that "will exonerate the President" of complicity in the conspiracy to conceal the origins of the Watergate wiretap-burglary. Added Ford: "It will totally undercut the testimony of John Dean [Nixon's fired former counsel who had testified that Nixon was part of that conspiracy]." What was the evidence? Ford said that the President had offered to show it to him, but he had "not had time" to look at it, and Ford also had doubts that he should see it now. Coming on the heels of his pro-Nixon American Farm Bureau Federation speech in Atlantic City before the tape-erasure findings were made public, that statement seemed to suggest that he realized the danger of involving himself in details of the President's defense.

Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott said, however, that he had seen this evidence, and it indicated that "on specific items the President would be exculpated entirely" if the material were made public. The documents show, insisted Scott, that "there is enough evidence" to indict Dean on perjury charges. He said that he had urged Nixon to release the documents and "let it all hang out." What Scott has seen are transcripts prepared by the White House of some of the taped talks between Dean and Nixon. It is difficult to believe that if Nixon had hard evidence exonerating himself, he would not have released it long since, thereby "putting Watergate behind him," in the oft-used phrase of White House spokesmen.

There is, moreover, a strong indication that regardless of the White House transcripts, the actual Nixon-Dean tapes do not support Scott's claim that Dean lied. That turned up last week in Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's pending case against Dwight Chapin, Nixon's former appointments secretary. Chapin faces four charges of perjury for statements about his relationship with Donald Segretti, a convicted political saboteur in Nixon's 1972 campaign. Jaworski filed court papers indicating that Dean will be called as a witness in Chapin's trial. The special prosecutor would hardly rely on Dean's testimony if he plans to charge him with perjury, too.

Nixon's claims of partisanship were, perhaps inadvertently, buttressed by the Ervin committee. For the first time it split along party lines on a major decision. By a margin of 4 to 3, Democrats went along with Chairman Ervin's wishes that the committee hold more public hearings. In an acrimonious closed meeting, the majority decided to call witnesses on two controversial situations: 1) a $100,000 gift from the Howard Hughes financial interests to Nixon's friend Bebe Rebozo, and 2) Nixon's price-support and import actions in favor of milk producers after learning of their pledges of $2 million to support his 1972 re-election campaign.

In asking for more testimony, the Ervin staff contended that it might be able to link the Hughes contribution to the decisive intervention by former Attorney General John Mitchell against a Justice Department antitrust ruling in 1970 that would have prevented Hughes from acquiring another gambling casino in Las Vegas. The staff report also contended that Nixon had met with Richard Danner, a long-standing friend and a Hughes representative, at Camp David as late as last May 18, presumably to discuss the return of the contribution. The White House conceded that the meeting occurred, but claimed that it was simply a "courtesy visit."

Just when the hearings would be held is now uncertain. Federal prosecutors in New York complained that the publicity might affect the impending trial of Mitchell and former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans for conspiracy to obstruct justice and perjury in Government dealings with Financier Robert Vesco, who is also a defendant. Ervin and a majority of the committee agreed to postpone the hearings.

The good news for the President followed the sentencing of Krogh, to serve six months in prison for the plumbers' burglary of the office of Los Angeles Psychiatrist Lewis Fielding. Although Krogh thus became the first full-time White House official to face certain imprisonment, he did not accuse Nixon of responsibility for the breakin. Dean had testified that Krogh had told him that orders for the burglary, designed to get information on Pentagon Papers Defendant Daniel Ellsberg, had come "right out of the Oval Office." But in a statement released after his sentencing, Krogh declared: "I received no specific instruction or authority whatsoever regarding the break-in from the President, directly or indirectly." Dean, said Krogh, must have misunderstood him; it was the creation of the secret unit itself, not the specific burglary, that was directly authorized by Nixon.

Krogh did not, however, completely exonerate the plumbers' supervisor, John Ehrlichman, from complicity in the crime. He said that Ehrlichman had approved "covert activity" to get information on Ellsberg, although Ehrlichman later told him that the burglary was "in excess of his authorization." Krogh is expected to be a witness in Ehrlichman's own trial for burglary and perjury. Krogh's lawyer pointedly noted that his client had neither implicated nor exonerated Nixon on anything other than the California burglary.

Traced Typewriter. On the darker side for Nixon, there were hints from both the White House and the joint congressional committee members studying Nixon's taxes that he may have to pay large sums for past tax liabilities. Most suspect were his deductions of nearly $500,000 for the gift of papers to the Government archives. California investigators have confirmed that the deed granting the papers was improperly backdated in 1970 to make it appear that the transaction was completed before a law banning such deductions became effective on July 25,1969. Evidence turned up by the California secretary of state's office shows that Nixon's tax attorney, Frank De Marco Jr., did not acquire the typewriter on which the deed, dated March 27, 1969, was made out until July of that year.

De Marco, faced with this evidence, has admitted the false dating. He contended that a draft of the document had been prepared before the deadline, but conceded that no deed was executed until 1970. He has no copy of the original draft. De Marco has also admitted predating an affidavit accompanying the deed, which he notorized but failed to record as required by California law.

It may or may not be shown that Nixon knew about the illegal predating. But such legal maneuvering to shave the President's tax bills, coming at a time when millions of Americans are beginning to prepare their own returns, may well do the President's image in the ultimate court of public opinion more damage than any of the Watergate crimes.

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