Throughout his third week at the Western White House, Richard Nixon made a noticeable effort to conduct business as usual. He conferred with China's representative to the U.S., Huang Chen, in what was presumably an effort to solicit Peking's help in bringing about a negotiated truce in Cambodia (see THE WORLD). In a garden ceremony, he swore in James R. Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense. He chatted with Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, the pioneer Houston heart surgeon, about Soviet-American relations. The White House said that the President was interested in hearing DeBakey's impressions of a recent visit to Moscow. But most observers took the meeting to be a peace offering to the prickly DeBakey, a Nixon supporter whose name had unaccountably turned up on the list of White House "enemies" that John W. Dean III had given the Ervin committee the week before.
Despite the purposeful normality, a certain edginess hung in the Pacific air. It was most bizarrely evident in a partial repudiation by the White House of a statement by the President's own daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who celebrated her 25th birthday at San Clemente last week. In a birthday interview, Julie, who alone in the family has been traveling and speaking around the U.S. in her father's defense, repeated an anecdote she had told before (TIME, June 25): how her father had asked his family in May, as the Watergate scandal unfolded, if he should resign in the national interest. This time, in the holiday paucity of news, the story got frontpage play across the country.
The White House reacted quickly and a bit nervously. Deputy Press Secretary Gerald L. Warren called in reporters to deny that the President had ever contemplated leaving the White House. The family discussion, he added, did not constitute "a serious consideration of resigning." But this view clashed directly with Julie's assertion that "I think it was more than just a rhetorical question. I think he really thought 'Will this end everything?' "
Perhaps the only plausible rationale for the President's correcting his daughter's harmless and human narrative of a family discussion is the White House obsession with maintaining an image of Nixon far above the tawdry Watergate battle: presidentially innocent, confident, unconcerned. That effort might also explain why the White House assiduously kept secret the identity of one of Nixon's visitors from Washington last week. TIME has learned that the special counsel to the President, J. Fred Buzhardt, made a furtive one-day flying stop at San Clemente. The visit, which undoubtedly dealt with Nixon's letter on Executive privilege, underscored the emergence of Buzhardt as Nixon's chief strategist and defense counsel for the Watergate affair.
Among Buzhardt's decidedly mixed contributions to the presidential cause have been:
1) his preparation of Nixon's 4,000-word statement of May 22, in which the President explained that he had limited the FBI investigation of Watergate for national-security reasons;
2) his cooperation with Fred D. Thompson, the Ervin committee's chief minority counsel, in preparing the painfully defensive White House version of Nixon's meetings with Dean;