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Depicting the President as an innocent victim of his aides is another theme. "Judging by all the known evidence," Columnist Joseph Alsop said recently, "the President was persistently, flagrantly and arrogantly lied to about this matter, by a whole series of men to whom he had given total confidence." The El Dorado, Kans., Times agreed: "We believe that when the matter became public the President was lied to by the yard by men [whom] he trusted, and who went to disgusting lengths to try to make his campaign for re-election a winning one." In William F.
Buckley Jr.'s National Review, Columnist George F. Will concluded that the Nixon "tough guys poisoned the atmosphere in the White House" with consequences "disastrous for Mr. Nixon, the presidency and the nation."
The New York Times Op-Ed page, most of which has been devoted to knocking the President, has made room for some defenses as well. Ex-Nixon Speechwriter William Safire, whose debut as a regular Times columnist has suffered from the strain of Watergate, weighed in with a conversation between himself and his mother conducted over Mom's chicken soup. "Mom—if you can't be sure the President didn't know, do you think he should resign?" Her plucky reply: "Absolutely not. He has character, and if he didn't know, he should stay on and try to be the best President we ever had." Dwight Eisenhower's son John, a Nixon inlaw, composed a hearts-and-flowers allegory about "the Coach" whose team has committed errors "out of an excessive loyalty to him and the Institution." As it turns out, the man described was onetime Army Football Coach Earl H. ("Red") Blaik, and his dilemma was the 1951 cheating scandal at West Point that decimated his team. Eisenhower noted that Blaik rebuilt his team and retired with honor. The moral: "Is there any reason to believe that our nation's Coach, Richard Nixon, will do less?"