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Nixon Knew. Few members of the House have any illusions that they will be permitted to escape that momentous roll call in late spring or early summer. It is accepted as a virtual certainty that the Judiciary Committee will vote an impeachment. Indeed, House Minority Leader John Rhodes felt that he had no choice last week but to go to Nixon and flatly warn him of the worst. Says Rhodes: "I told him why it [the articles of impeachment] would be voted out. All you have to do is look at the numbers of Democrats on that committee who put in resolutions of impeachment or said they favor impeachment." Nixon, who can count votes too, did not really need to be told. The President, reports Rhodes, "didn't seem overwhelmed or surprised."
In fact, Nixon's new game plan of an all-out fight against impeachment, coupled with White House efforts to depict the House process as a political vendetta rather than a judicial inquiry, is doubtless aimed at the vote of the House on the committee's finding. The President knows that the members of the House are caught on the horns of a cruel dilemma, indeed several dilemmas. They have been sent back to Washington with contradictory messages from the folks at home. Most Americans think that the President is guilty of one charge or another in the Watergate scandals; they would like to see him out of office. But they do not yet want him to be impeached. Most Americans, sick to death of Watergate, want Congress to act quickly on the impeachment question. This feeling is summed up by what amounts to a new political cliche: "Impeach him or get off his back." Yet the people also want the impeachment handled fairly and judiciously.
Saving Skins. Trying to make sense of these conflicting impulses, a good many Congressmen have come to a terrifying conclusion: that the people want Congress to do what it thinks best. That is not, by and large, what the House of Representatives does best in the best of times, and in this election year most Congressmen shrink from such a mandate like the plague. It heaps too much responsibility on their shoulders, forces them to step out ahead of the people and commit themselves to a position that could later prove disastrously unpopular. What they would like to do is wait until public opinion crystallizes and they have unequivocal marching orders. The production of fresh evidence in the months ahead before the vote could provide those orders. In the meantime, no one wants to act precipitately on impeachment. Polls of House members show only a few dozen willing to declare firmly for or against impeachment now. The vast majority of Republicans and Democrats are staying carefully uncommitted. Their re-election may well depend on it.
'What many members of the House would really like, of course, is for Nixon to resign, taking the House off the hook. That, too, is true on both sides of the aisle, though no House Republican has thus far dared publicly voice the feeling. (On the Senate side, the only Republican to call for resignation so far has been Massachusetts' Edward Brooke.) Democrat Frank Thompson Jr. of New Jersey puts it bluntly: "Most guys hope and pray for a resignation. I can think of 25 Republicans I know who will have to vote for impeachment to save their skins."