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Even more than Mitchell, Maurice Stans represented the inner establishment of the Republican Party, having served as a major G.O.P. link with corporations and businessmen back through the Eisenhower Administration, in which he was Director of the Budget. Stans became Nixon's Commerce Secretary in 1969 and left in February 1972 to become the chief fund raiser for the Nixon campaign.
The indictments are, of course, yet to be tested under the crossfire of questioning in courts. Both men issued sharp denials of any wrongdoing and expressed confidence that the judicial process will clear them of all guilt. But the charges (which carry possible, although highly unlikely sentences of up to 50 years in prison) may be only the first criminal proceedings against the two former Cabinet members.
Both Mitchell and Stans have been deeply implicated in the Watergate scandal itself and are under investigation by the federal grand jury in Washington that is probing the affair. Stans was the Nixon moneyman whose bountiful safe financed the actual burglary and wiretapping of Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex last June. It may also have furnished the conspirators with hush money to cover up White House involvement in that illegal eavesdropping.
Mitchell, who has reversed earlier denials and admitted attending meetings at which the wiretapping was proposed, will almost certainly be indicted by the Washington jury.
Mitchell and Stans will also be called before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, headed by North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., which is scheduled to begin its televised public hearings this Thursday. They may well turn out to be not only one of the most absorbing and significant television series ever, but also one of the most fateful political dramas in U.S. history.
The week before the hearings brought an unrelenting succession of new reports and revelations which the committee will have to consider. Among the most sensational:
> L. Patrick Gray, Nixon's personally chosen acting FBI director, asserts that he warned the President just three weeks after the arrests at the Watergate that some of his aides were interfering with a full investigation into the wiretapping and thus, in effect, were already starting a cover-up operation. Gray made this claim last week to Senator Lowell Weicker Jr., a member of the Ervin committee, and repeated it in a milder version to the committee staff. If it is true, Nixon not only disregarded news of White House involvement for some ten months, as he has conceded, but he also ignored the warning of the nation's highest police official.
> John W. Dean III, the President's counsel who was abruptly fired by Nixon on April 30, contends that the President asked him to sign a resignation and a confession that he, Dean, alone had tried to conceal the White House involvement in Watergate. Dean refused. Moreover, he insists that he never gave Nixon a report that cleared all of his aides of involvement. That would make an outright lie of Nixon's press-conference statement of last Aug. 29 that Dean's investigation had produced such a conclusion—unless someone above Dean had misled the President.