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Along with an emerging picture of moral bankruptcy comes a frightening vision of basic contempt for the fundamentals of representative government and its sensitive institutions. It is one thing to suspect that an Administration could regard the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Internal Revenue Service as instruments of revenge. It is another thing to read a President's own words on getting back at political enemies through heavy retaliation. It is chilling.
The next move is Mr. Nixon's. If he cannot move, it is up to Congress to proceed swiftly and with resolution toward the constitutional remedy.
THE HEARST PAPERS
From a column by Editor in Chief William Randolph Hearst Jr. that appeared in all the Hearst papers:
. . . President Richard M. Nixon has made it impossible for me to continue believing what he claims about himself in the Watergate mess.
That's about the most reluctant statement made here in the last 20 years. It probably will disappoint, surprise, and maybe even shock a lot of people. If so, they will have nothing on the disappointment, surprise, and shock I have felt in reading those transcripts of the White House tape recordings during the past few days.
The real reason for [the President's] uncooperative stalling tactics is now abundantly clear. It is all in the tape transcripts he finally was forced to make public. Even in their heavily edited and possibly inaccurate form, the transcripts add up to as damning a document as it is possible to imagine short of an actual indictment.
Maybe, technically, the President still is justified in claiming he knew nothing in advance about the Watergate breakin, or of the initial cover-up efforts. The point is that those shameful tapes reveal a man totally absorbed in the cheapest and sleaziest kind of conniving to preserve appearance, and almost totally unconcerned with ethics.
The man seems to have a moral blind spot. To me it is simply astonishing that he would make the transcripts public with the avowed belief that they would exonerate him. They may not actually amount to a conviction of criminal behavior. Perhaps the kindest way of putting it is that they amount to an unwitting confession, in which he stands convicted by his own words as a man who deliberately and repeatedly tried to keep the truth from the people.
He released them only because he had to, finally, and because he somehow thought the censored versions would do him some good with the public. God knows what the unexpurgated tapes would show.
Incredible? It sure is.
Sickening? Just read the transcripts.
Today, sitting here in a kind of stunned sorrow, it is hard for me to imagine why any informed person would not see the inevitability of impeachment.