WITH each passing hour the Government crisis in Washington grew more tense. A federal grand jury was meeting secretly to consider indictments of high Nixon officials in the Watergate wiretapping and its coverup. The President was spending long days considering what to do about the scandal. The dismissal or suspension of some of his closest aides was not only anticipated, but overdue. Around the capital, the suspense was complicated by a pervasive air of unreality, a sense of something gone disastrously wrong very near the center of the nation's power. Yet there was no word from Nixon. All of Washington, not to mention the country, wondered: What was the President waiting for? Why didn't he act?
Only a few weeks ago, Nixon had seemed at the very peak of his power. Now he was suddenly besieged. The economy seemed mismanaged, prices still out of control. The peace in Southeast Asia was precarious. Above all, Watergate—which once could be dismissed as a pointless political caper —not only impugned the character of the top men around Nixon, but raised deeply troubling doubts about the President himself, clearly affecting his ability to govern and to lead the nation.
No hint of why Nixon had not taken any dramatic action to clean up the mess could be discerned in what was known of the President's secretive activity. He consulted one of the few advisers in whom he still has trust, Secretary of State William P. Rogers. State Department sources confirmed that Nixon wanted Rogers to lead a housecleaning; Rogers declined, suggesting that to gain full public confidence someone outside of the Administration must be called in. Nixon sounded out another trusted associate, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, who also said no, thanks. But why didn't Nixon assume the onerous duty himself?
Ominous. Within the distraught White House staff, speculation about an ominous answer grew beyond the whisper stage. The President was seen at least twice in consultation with John J. Wilson, a Washington attorney who had been retained by two of Nixon's most intimate aides: H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, the President's adviser on domestic affairs. Since their names were increasingly being mentioned by other suspects in the Watergate conspiracy as either trying to cover up White House knowledge of the affair or helping to pay the wiretappers to keep quiet, they had ample reason to hire a lawyer. But why was Nixon seeing Wilson? Said one White House source: "Wilson was retained by Haldeman and Ehrlichman to warn the President that they will not go easily or readily." The implication: pushed to the wall, these aides might reveal that Nixon himself was part of the cover-up conspiracy.