(4 of 10)
The most compelling early witness will be Convicted Conspirator McCord. His sensational charges that high officials had ordered the wiretapping, then paid the arrested men to plead guilty and keep quiet, helped break the case wide open. Some of his charges have since been at least partly corroborated by others who have testified to the grand jury or Senate investigators.
Probably the next most volatile early witness will be Hugh Sloan Jr., who was treasurer of the Nixon re-election committee at the time of the wiretapping. He has claimed that at least two higher officials urged him to lie to the grand jury about payments to the Watergate conspirators. The officials, said Sloan in a sworn deposition, were Jeb Stuart Magruder, Nixon's deputy campaign manager, and Frederick LaRue, an assistant at the re-election committee. This happened within a few weeks of the Watergate arrests, Sloan claims. When he tried to warn John Ehrlichman about this, the President's adviser told him that he did not want to hear about it. Sloan says he also tried to tell Dwight Chapin, then Nixon's appointments secretary, but Chapin brushed him off, saying: "The important thing is to protect the President."
Perhaps weeks later will come the potentially explosive testimony of fired Counsel John Dean—if arrangements can be made by the Ervin committee to grant him some kind of immunity against prosecution in return for his story. Dean insists that he can directly implicate Nixon in the massive cover-up that followed the Watergate breakin. That may put such later and climactic witnesses as ousted White House Aides Ehrlichman and Haldeman even more on the defensive. Also late in the order of witnesses are Stans and Mitchell.
The hearings, which will be held in Senate Caucus Room 318, the chamber in which the celebrated Army-McCarthy hearings unfolded in 1954, will be historic because they involve the very viability of the President as a national leader. More than all of the rather limited and ponderous movements of the courts, the wide-ranging freedom of the Senate hearings can make or break the President and his men. The Ervin committee is concerned not solely with criminal activity but also with the broader questions of protecting presidential elections against deceitful and unethical practices.
While the Army-McCarthy hearings all but destroyed the wild-swinging Wisconsin Senator—as much by the exposure of his whining, bullying manner ("Point of order, point of order") as by the revelation of his methods—the Ervin hearings can crucially affect the whole Nixon Administration. Ervin has suggested that he might even summon the President himself to testify, if need be, to get at the truth. With typical understatement, Ervin says: "I know of no law that says that the President is exempt from the duties which devolve on other-citizens."
What clearly is shaping up is an epic test of credibility in which the central issue will be whether Nixon can politically survive. The President's closest aides, Ehrlichman and Haldeman, will almost certainly proclaim Nixon's total ignorance of any Watergate coverup. In the process, they will be insisting upon their own innocence as well. Standing against them will be John Dean, who will argue that the other three are still conspiring to avoid disclosure of the full truth.