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Last week the President carried his public relations drive both North and South. In Nashville, he helped open the $15 million home of the Grand Ole Opry. As 4,400 country music fans applauded, Nixon said that their kind of music "radiates the love of this nation—patriotism." He flubbed an attempt at spinning a Yo-Yo given him by Country Music Star Roy Acuff and played God Bless America and Happy Birthday on the piano to honor his wife Pat, just back from South America, on her 62nd birthday. In a relaxed evening, there was no talk of his Watergate agony.
The President was garrulous and high-spirited the day before on a visit to Chicago, where he made his first public appearance outside Washington or the South since July, 1973. He easily handled soft questions from a largely friendly gathering of some 2,000 members and guests of the Executives' Club of Chicago. He implied that he will not comply with the Judiciary Committee's request for White House tapes and documents beyond those already turned over to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. With much exaggeration, Nixon complained that the committee wanted "all of the tapes of every presidential conversation—a fishing license or a complete right to go through all of the presidential files." He said that "it isn't the question that the President has something to hide." But to let anyone "just come in and paw through the documents," he contended, would destroy "the principle of confidentiality" between a President and his advisers.
Nixon was even more forceful in vowing once again that he would not resign. "Resignation is an easy cop-out," he declared, adopting his frequent rhetorical device of posing an artificially easy-or-tough choice. "But resignation of this President on charges of which he is not guilty simply because he happened to be low in the polls would forever change our form of government. It would lead to weak and unstable presidencies in the future, and I will not be a party to the destruction of the presidency of the United States."
Third Version. Only when he discussed a detail of his own Watergate role did Nixon's confidence seem to ebb. His voice grew tremulous as he described his increasingly crucial conversation with John Dean, his former counsel, on March 21,1973. In a statement last Aug. 15, Nixon said Dean had told him that secret payments had been made to the original Watergate defendants only to meet their legal costs. On March 6 of this year, however, Nixon said flatly in a press conference that Dean had told him on March 21 that the cash was meant to buy the silence of the lowly burglars—which Nixon admitted was a criminal act. After a week of silence on the topic, Nixon made an attempt to bridge that direct conflict and it was a lame one. Dean, he said, had just "alleged" that the money was used to keep the men quiet. This third Nixon version of the conversation was meant to clear him of any charge that he had known of a crime and done nothing about it.
The main question of the impeachment inquiry, of course, is whether Nixon not only knew of such acts but participated in them as part of a conspiracy to conceal the origins of the June 17, 1972 wiretapping and burglary of Democratic national headquarters. An event