Not Even Earplugs Could Help

"When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal. "

As Richard Nixon and a tenacious David Frost revived memories of the Viet Nam War and the domestic dissension that it sowed, that was the startling defense of the former President for some of the actions of his Administration against the antiwar movement.

The exchange, part of the third of the televised Nixon-Frost interviews, was fascinating. Nixon insisted that when "a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude" was involved, a President could readily use otherwise illegal acts, including burglaries (he preferred the euphemism "warrantless entries"), wiretaps, mail openings, and IRS and FBI harassment against any "violence-prone" dissenters. But if this was so vital to national security, why not ask Congress to make such acts legal? "In theory," said Nixon, "this would be perfect, but in practice, it won't work." It would alert the targeted dissenters, he said, and raise a public outcry.

Frost kept probing for Nixon's view of the limits on presidential power. If burglary is all right, why not murder? "Ah, there are degrees, ah, there are nuances, ah, ah, which are difficult to explain," replied Nixon. He said that it might have been better to kill Hitler before he could order the murder of millions of Jews. Frost reminded Nixon that domestic dissidents were hardly comparable to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Nixon finally agreed that only "the President's judgment" determined what was legal under this Nixonian doctrine of presidential supremacy.

Nixon explained that because a President is accountable to both Congress and the voters, he cannot "run amok in this country and get away with it." Nixon paraphrased a Civil War statement by Abraham Lincoln: "Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation." Said Nixon: "Now that's the kind of action I'm referring to." Again, Frost refused to equate preserving the Union in the 1860s with deterring dissent in the 1970s.

Tragic Way. Insisted Nixon: "This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Viet Nam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was President." And he added a personal aside: "Nobody can know what it means for a President to be sitting in that White House working late at night and to have hundreds of thousands of demonstrators charging through the streets." Not even earplugs, he said, could have blocked the noise.

How had he hoped to deal with the war when he became President? Said he: "The most popular position to take on Viet Nam ... was to bug out and blame it on Johnson and Kennedy." But he did not take this easy way because "Kennedy and Johnson were right in going into Viet Nam." Nixon's only regret about his own tactics, he said, was that "I didn't act stronger sooner." Had the U.S. employed saturation bombing of civilian centers in Southeast Asia, he went on, the war would have ended "in a tragic way, but much, much sooner."

As Frost probed Nixon's motives in striking out at his critics, the former President anticipated the questions. "Am I paranoiac about hating people and trying to do them in?" he asked. "The answer is: At times, yes. I get angry at people ... but an individual must never let hatred rule him." His bitterness showed when he described Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the secret Pentagon papers, as "the punk." It also showed toward the Kennedys as he related how Jack and Jackie had never once invited him and Pat to the White House for a meal, even though he had previously been Vice President. He compared the bugging of Martin Luther King's hotel rooms under Attorney General Robert Kennedy to his wiretapping of Government officials and newsmen. But he conceded: "Two wrongs do not make a right, they make two wrongs."

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