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There is no proof of that. Yet neither is there any certainty that Nixon was unaware of the kind of intelligence activity his aides were contemplating. While most editorialists and columnists seem to doubt that Nixon knew about Watergate in advance, a prominent adviser to the Administration expressed a frequent line of speculation. "I can imagine an Oval Office conversation like this between Nixon and his aides: 'Don't worry, boss. We have ways of finding out what those s.o.b.s are doing' —and Nixon letting it pass." The likelihood that the President promptly learned of White House involvement once the Nixon committee had been linked with the arrested wiretappers —but failed to admit it—is far greater.
More and more, Administration officials find it simply unbelievable that former Attorney General John Mitchell, a longtime Nixon confidant who has belatedly admitted attending three meetings at which the Watergate wiretapping was discussed, did not immediately tell the President everything he knew after the wiretappers had carried out their plans. If, as Mitchell maintains, he repeatedly refused to approve the Watergate plot, there seemed no reason for him to refrain from telling Nixon which officials had ignored him and gone ahead. The Washington Post reported last week that Nixon had, in fact, been warned at least three times, beginning in January, that his White House aides were trying to conceal their advance knowledge of the affair.
As Nixon hesitated, much of the normally smooth-functioning White House machinery came to a standstill. Conceded one White House official: "The ship of state lies dead in the water." The daily White House staff meetings chaired by Haldeman stopped. An air of mutual suspicion and self-protection paralyzed much of the staff. Even the most innocent aides assumed that their office telephones were being tapped. Recently, a ranking member of Nixon's staff suspected that his whole office was bugged. When a superior entered and asked some questions, the real replies were scribbled on a pad and given to the boss, while the two continued an innocuous conversation.
In both the White House and the Justice Department, officials resorted to black humor, forming betting pools on just who would be indicted by the grand jury. A commonly heard quip was: "Well, let's hope they go to jail with honor." The situation seemed to be spinning out of anyone's control:
> The FBI's acting director, L. Patrick Gray III, was said to have destroyed papers that came from the Executive Office Building safe of one of the convicted wiretappers—and he claimed that he had done so at the prompting of Ehrlichman and Nixon's chief counsel, John W. Dean III. Gray abruptly resigned.
> Two of the convicted Watergate conspirators were reported by the Justice Department to have burglarized the office of a psychiatrist to seek damaging evidence against Daniel Ellsberg (see following stories).
Those two developments added a new, sinister, almost police-state dimension to the affair. Meanwhile, the President, who is reported to be "furious" about the whole miserable matter, remained silent.