The President's Strategy for Survival

Richard Nixon is rapidly running out of options in his struggle to survive Watergate. Last week he exercised a fresh one. Pushing his Special Counsel James St. Clair out front in a political as well as a legal role, Nixon embarked on a drive to save himself by appealing directly to the public and assailing the tactics of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating his conduct in office. It was much too early to assess public reaction, but the impact on the House of Representatives was immediate. The tactic backfired, and impeachment sentiment rose.

As both the President and St. Clair, a shrewd and highly successful Boston trial lawyer, moved boldly into the public arena, the outlines of the three-pronged White House offensive were sharply etched. The strategy seeks to:

1) Goad the House Judiciary Committee into hastily subpoenaing presidential tapes and documents and basing its entire impeachment case on a contempt of Congress citation against Nixon for obstructing the impeachment inquiry if, as he has so far, he refuses to yield the evidence. Nixon apparently believes that such a charge would be too thin to enlist broad public support and that even if impeached by the House on that charge, he could muster the 34 votes necessary in a Senate trial to retain his office.

2) Delay any broader impeachment move by stalling in the delivery of requested evidence, continuing to raise legal technicalities, and resorting to time-consuming court action. Delay could erode public interest in the whole sordid scandal. Stalling could also push the crucial impeachment vote closer to the November elections--thus making it more risky for any incumbent Congressman--and perhaps even cause the problem to be carried over into the next session of Congress.

3) Solidify the President's hard-core support and play on the more general public fear of forcibly removing any President from office. This is being done through a public relations campaign designed to highlight the President's achievements in office and the sanctity of the presidency itself. At the same time the effort seeks to obfuscate and obscure Nixon's own Watergate role and portray impeachment as a partisan movement spearheaded by political enemies. At a minimum, the aim is to build enough pressure on normally friendly Senators to prevent conviction on any House-approved impeachment charge.

Most of this strategy was probably devised by Nixon himself, but it has both come together and reached its peak since St. Clair became his chief legal strategist early in January. Not only is Nixon being scrutinized by the Judiciary Committee but, more important, he is on trial in the court of public opinion. At long last he has a lawyer who--unlike his previous counsel--is a seasoned courtroom attorney. Moreover, St. Clair's Washington experience (see box page 12) goes back to the classic Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, when he was an assistant to Joseph N. Welch, the Army's counsel. A poised and suave performer, he has brought an aura of aggressive confidence to Nixon's defense campaign. "Jim has been a bonanza for us," observes Alexander Haig, Nixon's overworked chief of staff. Haig describes St. Clair as a man who has "considerable acumen" in the highly charged and shifting political atmosphere of Watergate. "He intuitively understands the needs of the President."

Last week the President carried his public relations drive both North and South. In Nashville, he helped open the $15 million home of the Grand Ole Opry. As 4,400 country music fans applauded, Nixon said that their kind of music "radiates the love of this nation--patriotism." He flubbed an attempt at spinning a Yo-Yo given him by Country Music Star Roy Acuff and played God Bless America and Happy Birthday on the piano to honor his wife Pat, just back from South America, on her 62nd birthday. In a relaxed evening, there was no talk of his Watergate agony.

The President was garrulous and high-spirited the day before on a visit to Chicago, where he made his first public appearance outside Washington or the South since July, 1973. He easily handled soft questions from a largely friendly gathering of some 2,000 members and guests of the Executives' Club of Chicago. He implied that he will not comply with the Judiciary Committee's request for White House tapes and documents beyond those already turned over to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. With much exaggeration, Nixon complained that the committee wanted "all of the tapes of every presidential conversation--a fishing license or a complete right to go through all of the presidential files." He said that "it isn't the question that the President has something to hide." But to let anyone "just come in and paw through the documents," he contended, would destroy "the principle of confidentiality" between a President and his advisers.

Nixon was even more forceful in vowing once again that he would not resign. "Resignation is an easy cop-out," he declared, adopting his frequent rhetorical device of posing an artificially easy-or-tough choice. "But resignation of this President on charges of which he is not guilty simply because he happened to be low in the polls would forever change our form of government. It would lead to weak and unstable presidencies in the future, and I will not be a party to the destruction of the presidency of the United States."

Third Version. Only when he discussed a detail of his own Watergate role did Nixon's confidence seem to ebb. His voice grew tremulous as he described his increasingly crucial conversation with John Dean, his former counsel, on March 21,1973. In a statement last Aug. 15, Nixon said Dean had told him that secret payments had been made to the original Watergate defendants only to meet their legal costs. On March 6 of this year, however, Nixon said flatly in a press conference that Dean had told him on March 21 that the cash was meant to buy the silence of the lowly burglars--which Nixon admitted was a criminal act. After a week of silence on the topic, Nixon made an attempt to bridge that direct conflict and it was a lame one. Dean, he said, had just "alleged" that the money was used to keep the men quiet. This third Nixon version of the conversation was meant to clear him of any charge that he had known of a crime and done nothing about it.

The main question of the impeachment inquiry, of course, is whether Nixon not only knew of such acts but participated in them as part of a conspiracy to conceal the origins of the June 17, 1972 wiretapping and burglary of Democratic national headquarters. An event that could illuminate that fateful matter--and possibly blunt the entire Nixon counterattack--was scheduled to take place this week in the Washington courtroom of Federal Judge John J. Sirica. He was to rule that a Watergate grand jury report and a briefcase full of evidence relating to Nixon's own role in that conspiracy will be given to the House Judiciary Committee, headed by New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino.

Factual Findings. The grand jury package, given to Judge Sirica on March 1, when the jurors also indicted seven of Nixon's former official and political associates in the cover-up conspiracy, does not draw conclusions as to whether Nixon acted illegally. But a summary of the evidence in the briefcase lists a series of factual findings by the grand jury that do implicate Nixon in the wrongdoing of his aides. Any such transmission of the evidence to the House by Sirica is likely to be appealed. John J. Wilson, the attorney representing two of the indicted conspirators, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, has vowed to appeal.

The delicate way in which the White House has been handling the grand jury report shows the deft touch of St. Clair. He surprised many Washington lawyers by raising no objection at all to the idea of Sirica's sending the report to the Rodino committee when the judge held an extraordinary hearing on the question on March 6. To oppose this move would make it appear that the President feared a revealing of the contents of the briefcase. But St. Clair well knew that Wilson, whose clients' interests in many respects dovetail with those of Nixon, would fight to squelch the grand jury's findings. Wilson promptly raised objections on the grounds that 1) the grand jury had no power to make such a report, and 2) the documents were likely to mention Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and any public disclosure could prejudice their chances for a fair trial.

While Wilson carries on the legal battle over the grand jury report, the President and his staff are expected to continue their public psychological warfare against Watergate. That attack last week was well orchestrated. First, Ken Clawson, the White House director of communications, leaked to reporters a Feb. 25 letter from John Doar, chief counsel for the Rodino committee, to St. Clair. It showed that Doar was seeking not only six additional Nixon tapes, as generally believed--even by members of the committee--but also tapes covering six periods of time, from February to April 1973. Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler said that this involved 42 tapes. The White House disclosure made the Doar request look excessive, though it by no means supported St. Clair's claim that the committee seemed to want "hundreds of thousands of documents and thousands of hours of recorded conversations."

The main aim of those White House revelations, however, seemed to be to try to drive a wedge between the Rodino committee's members and its staff, including Doar and the Republican counsel Albert Jenner. In an effort to prevent news leaks--as urgently demanded by the White House--Doar and Jenner had been keeping only the committee leaders, Rodino and ranking Republican Edward Hutchinson, posted on all details of their dealings with St. Clair. Clawson charged that Doar had tried to "hoodwink" the committee by keeping from the other members the extent of his request.

Press Secretary Ziegler also assailed the Doar request. "The mere fact of an impeachment inquiry does not give Congress the right to back up a truck and haul off White House files," he told newsmen. Moreover, Ziegler said that for Nixon to comply with another Doar request--that the committee staff be given access to the White House files of such former Nixon aides as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and Charles Colson--would be "constitutionally irresponsible." Presidential Counsellor Bryce Harlow later protested to reporters that the Rodino committee members were acting like "children who are asking for another helping before they have eaten what's on their plate."

The surprise in the White House campaign was St. Clair's sudden emergence in public and his accessibility to reporters. Until recently, he had been operating mainly in private. He had bargained skillfully and sternly with Special Prosecutor Jaworski over which White House tapes and documents the grand jury could be given. St. Clair had spoken out publicly on only a few occasions. On Feb. 4 he attacked the credibility of John Dean and criticized Jaworski for publicly defending Dean's veracity. As a result, Jaworski privately scolded St. Clair for "unprofessional conduct," and their cordial but correct relationship cooled.

Legal Views. In his major courtroom appearance in Nixon's behalf, St. Clair on Jan. 16 tried to shake the testimony of a panel of court-appointed acoustics and recording experts in a hearing before Sirica. The panel claimed that an 18 1/2-minute erasure in one key Nixon tape in all likelihood had been deliberate rather than accidental. Though St. Clair, with his assured courtroom manner, was far more effective than such predecessors as the docile Fred Buzhardt and the ill-at-ease Leonard Garment, he made little headway against the experts. Sirica found St. Clair's questions repetitive and tedious and finally cut him off.

In last week's flurry of activity, St. Clair expressed highly controversial legal views in two television interviews and several talks with reporters. He said that because Nixon was the nation's "chief law enforcement officer," he had not committed any crime in failing to report the hush-money payments. This was an effort to account for the fact that Nixon, by his own explanation early this month, had not reported Dean's hush-money confession (made at the March 21, 1973 meeting) to any law-enforcement agency or court.

St. Clair also said that the charge in the indictment that a payment of hush money had been made on March 21 was doubtful. His reason: "sworn testimony" at the Senate Watergate hearings included no similar charge. He further contended that Dean could no longer be used as a credible prosecution witness because a tape showed that a conversation with Nixon that Dean thought took place on March 13, 1973, actually occurred on March 21.

More broadly, St. Clair argued that the Rodino committee must determine just what kinds of presidential acts it considers impeachable before it seeks more evidence. He also claimed that he was not actually engaged in defending Richard Nixon, but in representing "the office of the presidency."

None of those statements could withstand sharp legal scrutiny. Their shrewd purpose, however, seemed to be multiple-edged. They served to challenge and fuzz up the indictment's strong implication that, at the least, Nixon had learned from Dean on March 21 of the illegal payoffs to defendants and had failed to cut them off. St. Clair's remarks sought to set the Rodino committee members off on a potentially divisive squabble over defining impeachable acts--a point on which St. Clair knows the Congressmen hold sharp differences. St. Clair was trying to strengthen Nixon's oft-repeated claim that the institution of his office, rather than his personal fate, was the overriding issue in the impeachment controversy.

The new White House offensive was backfiring in its attempt to trigger precipitate and self-defeating action by the Judiciary Committee to impeach the President solely on grounds of contempt of Congress. Committee members were angry--not at each other or at their staff--but at what they considered the obviousness of the Nixon-St. Clair tactics. While they respect St. Clair's legal savvy, they think that he has ventured into essentially political maneuverings. At that game, they assume, they are far more adept and experienced than he.

Cooling Hotheads. A few of the more volatile members of the committee almost jumped at St. Clair's bait. Such liberal Democrats as Father Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, California's Jerome Waldie and Michigan's John Conyers Jr. wanted immediately to issue subpoenas for every bit of evidence that Doar was seeking. But Chairman Rodino called a caucus of the committee's Democrats and urged the hotheads to cool off. There would be plenty of time to issue subpoenas, he argued, once the White House intention to cut off all further evidence was totally clear. Meanwhile, the committee staff was awaiting a chance to examine all of the material that St. Clair and Nixon had promised, including the 19 tapes and more than 700 documents given to the special prosecutor's office.

The White House attack seemed to unify the committee--against the President. "It is not the White House's job to tell the committee how to discharge its constitutional function," declared Maryland Republican Lawrence J. Hogan, until now one of Nixon's strong defenders on the committee. "The President's lawyer was off base when he stated the committee should first define an impeachable offense--there is no set definition. Each member will have to subjectively determine this in his own mind." Hogan contended that Nixon was getting "bum advice" and was in danger of losing those on the committee "who are trying to keep an open mind on impeachment." The release of the Doar letter to St. Clair, protested Texas Democrat Jack Brooks, was "an affront to the comity between the White House and the Congress." But he urged his colleagues on the committee not to let "the White House hucksterism detract from the decency and forbearance of the committee. It is clear that the White House is not going to cooperate."

Rebutting St. Clair's demand that the committee state its charges against Nixon before it seeks more evidence, Republican Edward Hutchinson argued: "There are no charges. We hope we will find none. We are simply making an inquiry." Added Hutchinson: "What we have asked for is very reasonable and very relevant." The committee request, he explained, was aimed primarily at clarifying the "suspicion about the President's action in the so-called Watergate cover-up."

Contempt Citation. The committee strategy is to continue to move warily, maneuvering to avoid any court battles. Not only are such battles time consuming, but the committee is convinced that no court has any jurisdiction over any part of the impeachment inquiry and process. Impeachment is sanctioned by the Constitution as solely a congressional activity. The committee leaders expect to give St. Clair perhaps two more weeks in which to respond conclusively to its request for evidence. If he fails to do so, the request will be renewed. If Nixon and St. Clair still refuse to comply, only then will the committee issue a subpoena for the material.

Meanwhile, the committee's investigation will continue. First, all of the evidence given to Jaworski by the White House will be examined. Then the committee intends to study the package of evidence from the Watergate grand jury. If St. Clair and Nixon decide to resist the subpoena, the committee will probably seek a contempt citation against the President. The citation would become one of several--or perhaps many--points in an impeachment charge. "I would make it the last article of impeachment, not the first," declares a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee.

Reports TIME'S veteran congressional correspondent, Neil MacNeil: "St. Clair's strategy is offending the House's sense of itself--an extremely dangerous business for Nixon. He is losing Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans by the dozens right now." And this is even before any of the potential impeachment evidence has been analyzed by the Rodino committee.

Always Smile. Despite St. Clair's problems, many legal scholars give him high marks so far for making the best of what they see as a very difficult case. Under St. Clair, observes Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, "the quality of legal representation has gone way up." St. Clair is following a predictable pattern of impeachment defense, says Law Professor Arval Morris of the University of Washington. "The first thing is to narrow the concept of the impeachable offense--that rules out a whole lot of evidence." The University of Chicago's Philip Kurland views St. Clair's defense strategy as "to give only what he is forced to give and to delay as long as he can."

Richard Donahue, a leading trial lawyer in Massachusetts, offers a more invidious assessment. He considers St. Clair's tactics much the same kind of defense that one would put up for "a drunken driver. If you have a guilty client, you make 'em prove everything every inch of the way, attack everyone in the room--the judge, the court officers, the witnesses--but you always smile." Harvard's Dershowitz says that it is difficult to rate St. Clair's overall effectiveness without knowing the culpability of his client. "If Nixon is innocent, has nothing to hide, then St. Clair is doing a terrible job because he is making it appear as though Nixon has something to hide. If he is guilty, then St. Clair is doing a great job."

A strategy of delay, however, is a disservice to the nation, argues Law Professor John Flynn of the University of Utah. He objects to St. Clair's "defending this case on a petty criminal basis--raising every technical objection possible. This is a form of legal brinkmanship. He may be winning the legal battle but losing the more important battle of public confidence in the President." The University of Chicago's Harry Kalven Jr. agrees: "Delay has consequences for the whole country. It seems seriously inappropriate." It is also, of course, the opposite of what Nixon is arguing for: "I want a prompt and just resolution of this matter."

Many of St. Clair's recent statements on more specific Watergate issues are severely criticized by legal experts and other persons who have detailed knowledge of the various investigations of the scandal. Generally stated, these assertions by St. Clair include:

A President can be impeached only for crimes of a very serious nature committed in his governmental capacity.

As a practical--but not legal--matter, a serious criminal act by a President may have to be shown to enlist the two-thirds Senate vote for conviction and removal from office. Despite the views of Nixon and St. Clair, however, almost no reputable scholar contends that the "high crimes and misdemeanors" cited in the Constitution as bases for impeachment were meant to be taken in the modern sense of those words. Chicago's Kurland says that any "breach of trust of high office" falls within the meaning intended by the constitutional framers. This was shown by one of the framers of the impeachment provision, James Wilson, who said that what he had in mind was misbehavior, or what he called "malversation." James Madison added that impeachment was a protection against the "negligence or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate."

The President can claim Executive privilege in withholding requested evidence from the House Committee.

Disputing that, the University of Washington's Morris echoes the prevailing view among constitutional scholars: "In constitutional law, there really isn't any sort of Executive privilege that the President can raise against the House." The impeachment procedure was set up to cover a unique situation in which the separation of powers among the branches of Government can be broached by the Congress to determine whether an impeachable offense has occurred. Four U.S. Presidents--Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan and Ulysses S. Grant--have declared that they would have no right to withhold anything from an impeachment proceeding.

The House Judiciary Committee must determine what an impeachable offense is before it seeks the evidence.

There is no legal requirement to do so. It is precisely because the Constitution is vague on what is impeachable that the committee wants to determine whether there has been wrongdoing before deciding whether what it finds is impeachable. Certainly, the multiple indictments and guilty pleas on criminal charges by 26 Nixon agents so far are reason enough to prompt a broad and deep inquiry into the President's conduct in office. To carry out that inquiry properly the committee needs all the evidence it can get about the President's conduct in the Watergate and related political-espionage and payoff scandals.

Because the President is the chief law-enforcement official in the nation, he did not have a legal obligation to report his knowledge of the hush-money payments--a crime--to anyone else. He must only see to it that the judicial process was initiated.

"The President is not engaged in the law-enforcement business," contends Chicago's Kurland. "It is a title that St. Clair has created for the situation." Adds Hofstra University Law Dean Monroe Freedman: "The contention is cute, but technically it's absurd." For a President merely to tell himself that a crime has been committed is not enough, many scholars point out. People in the White House are "no different from any other citizens" when they learn of a crime, says Attorney General William Saxbe, who has a greater right than the President to consider himself the top law-enforcement official. Far from initiating judicial action in the Watergate coverup, moreover, Nixon sought to block full disclosure. He withheld tapes and other evidence from investigators, fought vainly in the courts to keep this material away from the grand jury, and fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox when he persisted in seeking it.

St. Clair is not representing the President. He is representing the institution of the presidency.

"This is at best superficial and at worst misleading," declares Norman Dorsen, law professor at New York University. "It is not the presidency that is being investigated and that is denying Congress information. It is Mr. Nixon who is under investigation, who is not cooperating. It is not some abstraction that is advising St. Clair on the case. It is Richard Nixon." No one is counsel for the office of the presidency, asserts Kurland. "There is no such job. This is just rhetoric."

St. Clair seemed to concede as much last week when he told TIME Correspondent Dean Fischer: "My client happens to be the President of the United States. In this sense, he's a unique client. There are certain decisions that only he can make. These decisions relate to the confidentiality of presidential communications and Executive privilege. I can't make those decisions for him. They're his and his alone."

Such a decision by Nixon was made when the President ruled that he would not give Jaworski any more White House evidence, including 27 tapes that the special prosecutor is still seeking. St. Clair has not heard those recordings. That puts him in a weak position in having rejected Jaworski's request on grounds that the contents of the recordings did not justify violating the President's right to protect their confidentiality. St. Clair has apparently not heard the 42 tapes sought by the Rodino staff either.

For an experienced trial lawyer, St. Clair has made some specific comments on aspects of the Watergate cover-up case that appear odd. Particularly baffling was his claim that John Dean would no longer be a witness in Special Prosecutor Jaworski's conspiracy case against Nixon's former aides. Both Nixon and St. Clair were heavily depending on the claim that Dean had been discredited because he testified before the Senate Watergate committee that he had talked to Nixon about the hush-money payments on March 13, while a tape of the conversation shows that it occurred on March 21. Dean, who had testified without access to his White House files, later told investigators that he had been wrong by one week. Nixon in Chicago seemed to be grasping at a straw in citing that one-week error as significant. Dean will be a major trial witness.

St. Clair also tried to undermine a key claim in the grand jury's conspiracy indictment: that $75,000 in hush money had been paid on March 21, 1973, to William Bittman, the attorney for E. Howard Hunt, a Watergate wiretapper. Hunt had been demanding money from the White House, threatening to disclose some of his seamy work as a member of Nixon's squad of secret plumber investigators. The payment was alleged by the grand jury to have been made just a few hours after Dean and Haldeman had met with Nixon on that day. St. Clair pointed out, however, that a large chart used in the Senate Watergate hearings had listed no such payment on March 21. That was hardly a conclusive refutation.

Hush Money. Testimony at the Senate hearings was imprecise as to the time of this payment. But St. Clair had to be aware that the grand jury had strong evidence of the date before citing it as a culminating act in the chain of criminal conspiracy. Last week the Washington Post reported that Frederick LaRue, a former official of Nixon's re-election committee who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, had recalled handling the payment after dinner on March 21. The date was verified by the travel records of one of La-Rue's out-of-town friends, who attended the dinner. Investigators have the credit-card records of his hotel and travel expenses. That is minimal documentation; the prosecutor has other evidence too.

The payment date challenges Nixon's repeated claim that, during the celebrated March 21 meeting with Dean and Haldeman in his office, he flatly rejected the idea of paying any hush money. The grand jury, which heard the tape of the meeting, cited Haldeman for perjury because of his testimony at the Senate hearings that Nixon had said such payments were wrong. This grand jury action suggested that Nixon must have been lying in his public claims that he told his aides the payments were wrong. If a payment was made after the talk, the President either did not discourage the payment of hush money, or he was misunderstood by his aides, or he was disobeyed.

Nixon conceded in a press conference two weeks ago that other persons who heard the tape might "reach different interpretations. But I know what I meant, and I know also what I did. I meant that the whole transaction was wrong, the transaction for the purpose of keeping this whole matter covered up." Nixon said that he told Dean, "It is wrong, that's for sure"--and that the remark was meant to apply to both the promise of Executive clemency and the payment of hush money to any defendant.

The President has refused to release the tape or a transcript of the conversation, but TIME has learned its gist.

Four important words spoken by the President come through clearly: "It would be wrong." But these words are spoken only within the context of a discussion about promising clemency. The subject of paying money to keep the burglars quiet comes once before the clemency discussion and two times after it. On none of those three occasions does Nixon say or suggest that such payments would be wrong.

Among the tapes most eagerly sought by both Prosecutor Jaworski and the Rodino committee staff are those of conversations between Nixon and his top aides from about ten days before to ten days after this March 21 conversation. The investigators wonder whether there was any more talk of the illegal hush payments in this period. Nixon has refused to yield any of these tapes to either of the investigating bodies.

Two Supporters. An additional problem for the President is that any White House attempt to stonewall the Rodino committee by denying access to any further evidence runs the risk of alienating two of Nixon's most helpful supporters: Vice President Gerald Ford and Republican Senate Leader Hugh Scott. Ford seems to be opening a greater distance between himself and the President. He still backs the White House view that Rodino is off on a "fishing expedition" for evidence and ought to specify "a bill of particulars" against Nixon before seeking the supporting documents. But Ford irked Nixon's staff by declaring publicly that Rodino is fully entitled to see the grand jury's special report and evidence. He also said that he was "concerned" about Nixon's failure to report the illegal payment of silence money to Watergate defendants as soon as Dean told him about it. "I think I would have," Ford said.

Scott is getting nervous because he went out on a limb to assail Dean's credibility on the basis of tape transcripts and summaries shown to him by Nixon. The failure of the White House to make the same information public disturbs Scott. His associates worry that he may have been misled by the one-week discrepancy in Dean's testimony about hush money, perhaps having seen a transcript in which no such discussion appeared. As for giving the Rodino committee what it wants, Scott, too, is opposed to "fishing expeditions," but he does not believe that the committee is on one. Noting White House objections to anyone backing a truck up to the White House for files, Scott suggests: "How about a station wagon?"

As the President's difficulties continue to accumulate, his public appearances look increasingly like an effort to go over the heads of the aroused impeachers in the House and directly to the public. His vows to "fight like hell" and "not walk away from this job" may win some wavering doubters to his side. But his position is steadily growing weaker.

If the President is innocent in the cover-up acts of his aides, he could easily gain adherents by turning over the 27 tapes that Jaworski wants and the 42 that the House Judiciary Committee is seeking. That would dispel many suspicions, and it would certainly not "destroy" the presidency. Since he has given up 19 tapes and 700 documents already, why would turning over more tapes break the back of this most visible of U.S. institutions? If he is not innocent the current collision course with the Congress may be the only viable one for him.

Gentler Approach. Perhaps perceiving new dangers in a showdown with the impeachment committee, St. Clair seemed to soften his earlier stand. "We are not seeking a confrontation," he told TIME. "It would not be good for the President or the country. I think John Doar and I both believe that adjustments can be made to avoid it. I don't think the committee intends to have a fishing expedition." If this view seemed more conciliatory than those expressed by his unique client last week, perhaps the gentler approach is merely a shrewd tactic. Or maybe Lawyer James St. Clair deserves a more attentive audience within the confines of the Oval Office.

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