THE GATHERING IMPACT

The moment when all hopes for a period of healing dissolved can be precisely charted. It was on a weekend in the middle of April 1973. On Friday the 13th, the predominantly Democratic Federal City Club of Washington, in a gesture of good will, bestowed its public service award on me, a senior representative of the Nixon Administration, and on John Sherman Cooper, a senior Republican Senator. I brought to the occasion an appeal for unity. With Viet Nam behind us, I said, the nation's foreign policy could combine the exuberant idealism of the Kennedy Administration with the unsentimental emphasis on national interest of the Nixon Administration. Recalling the early 1960s, I said: "The Administration then in office, and its opponents, thought of themselves engaged in a common enterprise, not in a permanent, irreconcilable contest." I added: "It is time to end our own civil war. We have had enough of the liturgies of debate, and what we need most is unity."

I was still buoyed by the evening's mood of reconciliation when Leonard Garment called at my White House office the next day, Saturday, April 14. What he told me shattered everything. Garment's title, Special Consultant to the President, was grand enough, but without a specific area of responsibility. His emergence into prominence was usually a signal that Nixon was in some distress and required a steadying hand; and in recent days Garment had spent an increasing amount of time with Nixon.

In his deceptively casual manner Garment slumped onto a blue-covered couch that faced the White House front lawn. Never one to beat around the bush, he opened the conversation by asking: "Have you lost your mind?"

Without waiting for a reply, Garment unfolded an astonishing and shattering tale: within a matter of days my evocation of national reconciliation would look like a plea for mercy and be submerged in a crisis that would make the turmoil over Viet Nam seem trivial. Nixon's enemies were about to be handed the weapon they had been seeking. In the tornado of suspicion about to overwhelm us, my appeal to idealism would sound vacuous if not cynical. The outcome of the recent election might well be reversed; there was likely to be a battle to the death.

"Watergate," according to Garment, was about to blow up; its ramifications went far beyond the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex. There had been other break-ins sanctioned from the White House. A plan had existed to kidnap presumptive leaders of potential demonstrations against the Republican National Convention. Prostitutes were to be used to compromise and to blackmail delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Garment said the "sordid mess" had many dimensions. It could not have developed without the cooperation of the highest levels of the Administration. Garment thought that Special Counsel to the President Charles W. Colson had probably been the "evil genius" behind it. Yet the scale of the wrongdoing really made it impossible to imagine that Assistants to the President H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, whom the press had nicknamed "the Germans," had been unaware. And if Haldeman and Ehrlichman were involved, it was nearly inconceivable that the President had been completely ignorant.

Whoever was the culprit, in Garment's view, only radical surgery and the fullest admission of error could avert catastrophe. But if the President was involved even indirectly, full disclosure would not be the course selected; hence the Administration might bleed to death amid a cascade of revelations. Garment was convinced that the Administration would have to be ripped apart and reconstituted. Nixon would have to put himself at the head of this movement of reform, brutally eradicate the rot, and rally the American people for a fresh start.

I was stunned. Through acts that made no sense, discord would descend once again on a society already weakened by ten years of upheaval over Viet Nam. As I considered what this portended for foreign policy, my heart sank. A nation's capacity to act is based on an intangible amalgam of strength, reputation and commitment to principle. To be harnessed, these qualities require authority backed by public confidence. But if Garment was right, authority inexorably would start draining from the presidency. The dream of a new era of creativity would in all probability evaporate. Even preserving what we had achieved--the Indochina settlement, for example--would become precarious.

What had triggered this avalanche? When the Watergate CONTACT break-in occurred in June 1972, I had been en route to China. I accepted Press Secretary Ronald L. Ziegler's public position that it was a "third-rate burglary attempt" involving no White House personnel. At the morning staff meetings, the few references to Watergate were always by junior staff members, who complained of the media's unfairness. The avuncular approval this elicited from Haldeman, who presided, reinforced the sense that nothing serious had occurred.

Once, in the summer of 1972,1 asked Haldeman what Watergate was all about. "I wish I knew," he replied, and changed the subject. In late January 19731 ran into Joseph Califano, a former Johnson aide and old friend. To my smug remark that I did not see how the Democrats could recover from their electoral debacle, Califano said Watergate would bring a Democratic revival. I passed this view on to Ehrlichman, who snorted: "Wishful thinking! If that is what they are counting on, they will be out of office for 30 years."

There was, hindsight makes plain, something that should have alerted me early in 1973. It was the behavior of Nixon. I found it difficult to get him to focus on foreign policy. Memorandums came back without the plethora of marginal comments that indicated they had been carefully read. On at least one occasion Nixon checked every box of an options paper.

That Saturday evening, April 14,1 attended the White House correspondents' annual dinner. A point is usually reached in an Administration--it came rather early in Nixon's--where the President, normally the guest of honor, feels that his daily harassment by the media exhausts his tolerance for their company. On this occasion, however, Nixon decided to show up. The atmosphere was redolent with resentment. Afterward, while attending a party, I was called to a telephone. It was the President, and he was highly agitated. "Do you agree," he asked, "that we should draw the wagons around the White House?"

We know now that the day had been one of frenzied meetings between Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and former Attorney General and Campaign Manager John Mitchell. But I was not aware of them. I would like to be able to report that I said something helpful or constructive to the obviously distraught President. But few advisers possess the fortitude to tell their President that they do not know what he is talking about. I mumbled something noncommittal that Nixon construed as assent. "All right," he said, "we will draw the wagons around the White House." He gave that enigmatic metaphor no further content before hanging up suddenly.

I mentioned Garment's worries to Ehrlichman on Sunday, April 15. "Garment," replied Ehrlichman, "is a nuclear over-reactor. Pay no attention to him. Our major problem is to get John Mitchell to own up to his responsibility." Mitchell indeed! Did he have the major responsibility--or was he chosen as the fall guy? If Mitchell was involved, the scandal would be uncontainable. John Mitchell, that epitome of loyalty, would never have acted without at least believing that he was carrying out presidential wishes. Whatever hypothesis one considered--Garment's, which saw Colson as the chief villain with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in supporting roles, or Ehrlichman's, apparently placing the blame on Mitchell--Watergate was bound to rock the nation. It simply was not credible, least of all to those of us who knew how the White House operated, that Nixon's paladins had acted totally on their own. Clearly, the President was severely wounded.

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