A Stout If Rambling Defense

Eager to talk about his presidency, Richard Nixon last week took the unusual step of inviting Columnist James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Star-News Syndicate to drop by the Oval Office. A Virginia conservative with a waspish wit, Kilpatrick has supported Nixon for years, although he did admit to feeling "shame, embarrassment, disgust, chagrin" after reading the full text of the White House tapes. The interview turned into a rambling, often self-serving monologue that lasted 80 minutes. The President's main points:

WHY NOT RESIGN? Nixon gave two reasons to justify his refusal to resign. First, he felt he should stay in office to continue to deal with the great issues of foreign policy that confront the nation: China, detente and the Middle East.

Second, and more basic, Nixon said that he would weaken the institution of the presidency by resigning. A strong United States, he declared, requires a strong President. "I will never leave this office in a way... that would make it more difficult for future Presidents to make the tough decisions." Without resolute, independent Presidents, Nixon said, "the chance for peace and freedom to survive in the world is down the tube." Summed up Nixon: "I have to be here, and I intend to be here."

HOW DID WATERGATE HAPPEN? Nixon put the blame on himself for not supervising his 1972 campaign with the care he usually devoted to elections. But when Kilpatrick suggested that Nixon may have been "betrayed" by his aides, the President raised his voice in anger: "I'm not going to indulge in a conversation with you or anybody else condemning men who have given very great service to this country." Nixon recalled how painful it had been for him to ask for the resignations of H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, the President's top domestic adviser. "I cut off one arm," said Nixon, "then the other arm, and [that] was about as rugged a period as anybody could be through."

VIEWS ON BUGGING. The President remarked that former Attorney General John Mitchell had been right in testifying that Nixon would have blown his top if he had known about the bugging of Democratic headquarters. Said Nixon: "I believe in hard, tough campaigning, but I believe it has to be fair."

Nixon recalled his own resentment when he learned that his office had been bugged during his losing campaign to be elected Governor of California in 1962. During his campaign for the presidency in 1968, said Nixon, "there was not only surveillance by the FBI but bugging by the FBI, and [J. Edgar] Hoover told me that my plane in the last two weeks was bugged." (The President offered no reasons for the buggings.)

THE TAPES. According to Nixon, the celebrated White House tapes were made as the result of an offhand decision. Nixon recalled that Haldeman had walked in one day and reported that the officials of the library being organized for his presidential papers had said it was essential that tapes be made. When he asked why, Haldeman replied, related Nixon: "'Well, Johnson had tapes --they're in his library at Austin--and these are invaluable records. Kennedy also had tapes,' and he [Haldeman] said, 'You ought to have some record that can be used years later for historical purposes.' I said all right. I must say that after the system was put in, as the transcribed conversations clearly indicated, I wasn't talking with knowledge or with the feeling that the tapes were there. Otherwise I might have talked differently.

"My own view is that taping of conversations for historical purposes was a bad decision on the part of all the Presidents."* Why had Nixon finally made public edited transcripts of some of the subpoenaed tapes? Admitting that he would have preferred not to, but an aroused electorate demanded it, the President said: "In this instance, we had no choice." He explained that he felt that the tapes would assure the public that he knew nothing of Watergate or the coverup, and that he had taken action when he had learned the facts.

PERSONAL FITNESS. Kilpatrick judged that the President had lost "some of the edge of sharp incisiveness that he exhibited a few years ago. Mr. Nixon's conversation tends to run off on tangents." But Kilpatrick also decided that Nixon remained firmly in command of his situation. Because he has successfully weathered other crises during his career, Nixon said, he was surviving Watergate without "tingling nerves and a churning stomach." At one point, he asserted: "I am a disciplined man."

If Nixon were to go on trial before the Senate, Kilpatrick asked, would he be able to defend himself while simultaneously managing the affairs of the country? "Yes," the President said grimly. "And I intend to."

*The Johnson library in Austin, Texas, contains some 500 transcripts of important phone conversations that President Lyndon Johnson made apparently without the knowledge of the participants. The archives for the Kennedy library, which is still to be built, hold 68 recordings of President John Kennedy's phone conversations, plus 125 tapes of his meetings. According to Dan H. Fenn Jr., the library's director, some of the tapes clearly show that the participants were aware that they were being recorded. But the full extent and nature of the taping done by Johnson and Kennedy are still not known.

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