THE WHITE HOUSE: The Battle for Nixon's Tapes

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If President Nixon does not release tapes of Watergate conversations recorded in his offices, Senate Select Committee Chairman Sam J. Ervin Jr. told TIME last week, "I would inform the President that the committee was going to hold him guilty."

As the Watergate scandal grows more incredible almost weekly, it now seems probable that an ironic twist of fate could prove decisive in determining how the President's involvement is finally perceived. The controversy that arose from the secret bugging of Democratic Party headquarters might possibly be resolved through the secret bugging of the White House, ordered by the President himself.

As he has so often done in his convoluted conduct throughout the Watergate revelations, the President might change his mind. But, recovered from pneumonia and working over the weekend in the solitude of Camp David, Nixon was, according to close aides, drafting a letter rejecting Ervin's request that he turn over tapes of conversations in which he discussed Watergate with his key associates and any other relevant presidential papers or documents.

If so, Nixon might well be acting from the loftiest of motives—to protect the principle of Executive privilege for both his own presidency and future ones. But he probably cannot succeed, either in the courts of law or, more significantly, in the court of public opinion. Ervin is undoubtedly correct in arguing that a refusal by Nixon to produce the relevant recordings will be taken to mean that they probably do not support his protestations of innocence in all of the wrongdoing related to Watergate.

The revelation last week that Nixon had ordered the automatic and covert recording of all of his office talks and most of his telephone conversations since the spring of 1971 cast a startling new light on the astonishing affair. A case against the President that had seemed destined to rest ambiguously on the often credible but thus far wholly uncorroborated testimony of Nixon's fired counsel, John W. Dean III, now might have a clear-cut resolution.

To be sure, the taped conversations, if they do become public, could turn out to be just as ambiguous as all of the conflicting testimony. It seems unlikely that a President who knew his words were being recorded would engage in any self-incriminating conversations—unless he felt certain that his words would not be revealed until years later, if at all. Even with the tapes, the answer to Senator Howard Baker's celebrated question, "What did the President know and when did he know it?," could center on semantic shadings, conversational contexts and inconclusive interpretations of what the participants in the presidential dialogues really meant.

Ultimate Evidence. Another possibility: the tapes might clearly exonerate Nixon. John Ehrlichman, who is scheduled to testify this week before the Ervin committee's television cameras, thinks so and predicted last week that the tapes "will be the ultimate evidence." Ehrlichman, the President's former Chief Domestic Affairs Adviser, confirmed that he had been completely unaware that his conversations with his boss had been recorded. He said that the tapes ought to be produced by the President. Although Ehrlichman thought he himself "may have said some things about some people to the President

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