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Press Secretary Ziegler also assailed the Doar request. "The mere fact of an impeachment inquiry does not give Congress the right to back up a truck and haul off White House files," he told newsmen. Moreover, Ziegler said that for Nixon to comply with another Doar request—that the committee staff be given access to the White House files of such former Nixon aides as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and Charles Colson—would be "constitutionally irresponsible." Presidential Counsellor Bryce Harlow later protested to reporters that the Rodino committee members were acting like "children who are asking for another helping before they have eaten what's on their plate."
The surprise in the White House campaign was St. Clair's sudden emergence in public and his accessibility to reporters. Until recently, he had been operating mainly in private. He had bargained skillfully and sternly with Special Prosecutor Jaworski over which White House tapes and documents the grand jury could be given. St. Clair had spoken out publicly on only a few occasions. On Feb. 4 he attacked the credibility of John Dean and criticized Jaworski for publicly defending Dean's veracity. As a result, Jaworski privately scolded St. Clair for "unprofessional conduct," and their cordial but correct relationship cooled.
Legal Views. In his major courtroom appearance in Nixon's behalf, St. Clair on Jan. 16 tried to shake the testimony of a panel of court-appointed acoustics and recording experts in a hearing before Sirica. The panel claimed that an 18½-minute erasure in one key Nixon tape in all likelihood had been deliberate rather than accidental. Though St. Clair, with his assured courtroom manner, was far more effective than such predecessors as the docile Fred Buzhardt and the ill-at-ease Leonard Garment, he made little headway against the experts. Sirica found St. Clair's questions repetitive and tedious and finally cut him off.
In last week's flurry of activity, St. Clair expressed highly controversial legal views in two television interviews and several talks with reporters. He said that because Nixon was the nation's "chief law enforcement officer," he had not committed any crime in failing to report the hush-money payments. This was an effort to account for the fact that Nixon, by his own explanation early this month, had not reported Dean's hush-money confession (made at the March 21, 1973 meeting) to any law-enforcement agency or court.
St. Clair also said that the charge in the indictment that a payment of hush money had been made on March 21 was doubtful. His reason: "sworn testimony" at the Senate Watergate hearings included no similar charge. He further contended that Dean could no longer be used as a credible prosecution witness because a tape showed that a conversation with Nixon that Dean thought took place on March 13, 1973, actually occurred on March 21.
More broadly, St. Clair argued that the Rodino committee must determine just what kinds of presidential acts it considers impeachable before it seeks more evidence. He also claimed that he was not actually engaged in defending Richard Nixon, but in representing "the office of the presidency."
None of those statements could withstand sharp legal scrutiny. Their shrewd purpose,