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3) his preparation of a list of 41 questions that Hawaii's Senator Daniel K. Inouye obligingly asked Dean; and
4) his articulation in a memo for the Ervin committee of the scarcely credible thesis that the diffident Dean was the "mastermind" of the cover-up and Former Attorney General John N. Mitchell was Dean's "patron."
The White House subsequently dissociated Nixon from Buzhardt's memo, a maneuver that TIME Correspondent Dean E. Fischer interprets as "part of Nixon's strategy of using Buzhardt to launch trial balloons and then dissociating himself from his Special Counsel if he thinks the balloons have been punctured."
Buzhardt's partner in defending the President is Leonard Garment, Dean's successor as White House counsel, and both men are advised in their efforts by University of Texas Law Professor Charles Alan Wright, a leading constitutional expert.
The two principal lawyers for the President, Buzhardt and Garment, could hardly be less alike and still effectively serve Richard Nixon. Buzhardt (pronounced Buzz-ard), 49, is a shy, almost contemplative South Carolina conservative, monosyllabic, unflappable and extremely hardworking. Garment, also 49, is the suave, articulate, Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants who, in his earlier years on the White House staff, devoted himself primarily to sensitive civil rights problems and successfully pushed for increased Government assistance for the arts.
Aloof Client. Despite their dissimilarities, the two men seem to work easily together in what both describe as a particularly difficult job. Says Garment: "There are roughly 500 lawyers and investigators on the other side. We're like a small country law firm. We're in the peculiar position of being isolated from the Justice Department, and of not being able to develop information from the people involved in Watergate." Since they cannot interview witnesses directly−for reasons of "propriety," as Garment puts it−and since the client has reportedly remained aloof and generally uncommunicative, the White House lawyers have been obliged to rely heavily on sworn civil depositions and testimony and on whatever they can glean from news clippings.
During Dean's testimony before the Ervin committee, Buzhardt and Garment monitored the televised hearings, read the Washington and New York papers and the wire service tapes, and most evenings they managed to monitor all three network news broadcasts, often working as many as 15 hours a day in preparing the White House case. But last week they eased up a bit, in the belief that they had little to fear from the remaining witnesses.
When asked if he was worried about John Mitchell's appearance before the committee this week, one of the White House lawyers replied: "No. From everything I can tell, he's not going to get us into trouble. It looks as if the worst is over."