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The dominant question remained: How much did Nixon know about Watergate? The prevailing, serious answer: Much more than he has yet revealed (see Hugh Sidey's column on the subject page 19).
Even many Nixon critics are willing to believe that the President did not know in advance about the political-disruption campaign and the plans to bug the Democratic headquarters. But at the very least he created an atmosphere in the White House that led zealous aides to believe that they could go beyond the bounds of propriety and the law.
It is far harder to believe that after the Watergate arrests the President did not have at least a suspicion of the coverup. If he was not suspicious, he knew even less about some of his own aides than the press did. How could so many of his loyal men lie to him so long? Why did Nixon wait until March to start a tough investigation of his own? And if Dean is right, of course, Nixon knew all about the concealment.
Over the weekend preceding the TV speech, Nixon retreated to the solitude of Camp David in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains accompanied by his Irish setter, King Timahoe, and his equally faithful speechwriter, Ray Price.
The dismissal of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, those two dour Germanic guardians of the Oval Office, seemed mandatory. Neither wanted to quit. Haldeman, a former J. Walter Thompson ad agency vice president from Los Angeles, had participated in all of Nixon's campaigns since 1956, when he was an advanceman for Nixon's re-election as Vice President. He had become probably the second most powerful man in the Government because he determined just who could see the President or whose memos would reach Nixon's desk. Ehrlichman, a Seattle bond lawyer who had been a U.C.L.A. classmate of Haldeman's, had joined the Nixon team as an advanceman in the 1960 campaign against John Kennedy. He had become almost the equivalent in domestic affairs of Henry Kissinger in foreign policy.
The pair's involvement in the Watergate case and related skulduggery could no longer be ignored. Haldeman was said by some federal investigators to control a secret cash fund, which was used to pay off the seven men arrested in the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee last June to keep them from implicating higher officials. He also was reported to have authorized a covert "dirty-tricks" drive against Democratic presidential candidates. As for Ehrlichman, in addition to his actions in the Ellsberg case, he had condoned the destruction of some files taken from the office of one of the Watergate wiretappers.
On Friday night, April 27, as Nixon gazed gloomily at the distant lights of Washington from the rustic presidential cabin in Camp David, Md., he knew his two longtime servants had to be sacrificed. He summoned Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler on Saturday and asked him to help prepare their resignation statements. Probably his closest remaining confidant, William Rogers, arrived to help