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Lawyers in or out of government enjoy a position of personal trust. The attorney-client privilege allows a client to confess to his lawyer without fearing that the lawyer can later be made to testify about their talks. Even this has been used to explain the actions of the Watergate lawyers. Whatever they did, the argument goes, was done for the President as client. That, too, is a poor justification. In a 1967 Virginia case, Attorney Richard Ryder took stolen money and a sawed-off shotgun from his client and stored them in his own safe-deposit box. A U.S. district court, citing Benjamin Cardozo's observation that "the privilege takes flight if the relation is abused," ruled that the special lawyer-client relationship could not be invoked in circumstances that so clearly involved the obstruction of justice. Ryder was temporarily suspended from practice.
There is, then, no special defense for the Watergate lawyers, and some legal leaders want to see them specially punished. The severest professional punishment that could be visited on any culpable Watergate lawyer is disbarment, which can be inflicted even for misconduct that is not serious enough for criminal prosecution. The A.B.A., says New York Attorney Martin Garbus wryly, "sets forth high standards for lawyers—a higher standard than is anywhere articulated for Presidents." In perfect seriousness, Garbus is gathering 500 signatures for a petition to the California and New York bar associations —both of which have the President as a member—to consider whether "Richard Nixon has failed to meet the standards of his profession [and] should be disciplined or disbarred." In general, however, legal associations have yet to take disciplinary steps against any members involved in Watergate. Only Liddy has been expelled from the bar (by New York).
The District of Columbia Bar Association has hired three law students to track and catalogue Watergate developments in preparation for any formal actions, but thus far no complaints have been filed against anyone. David Austern, counsel for the association's disciplinary board, observes, "It's like an assassination of the King of England. Nobody files a complaint; everybody assumes the authorities know about it."
Problems involving the procedures of disbarment are really just technicalities when compared with the massive breakdown of standards demonstrated in the Watergate case. "What then went wrong?" A.B.A. President Robert Meserve asked an audience of lawyers in Hollywood, Fla. "Surely, it does not require a close reading of the code [to discover] that breaking and entering is wrong, that perjury is wrong, and that encouraging it is wrong." Part of the problem lies in the fact that on the one hand a lawyer as a counselor is expected to bring a detached and professional point of view to a case, and that on the other the lawyer as advocate is expected to represent his client's interest and vigorously advance it. It is true that flamboyant trial lawyers often use every legal means at their command to win a case for even a guilty man. Yet the balance in the Watergate affair apparently tipped disastrously in favor of excessive advocacy.