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"The President is not engaged in the law-enforcement business," contends Chicago's Kurland. "It is a title that St. Clair has created for the situation." Adds Hofstra University Law Dean Monroe Freedman: "The contention is cute, but technically it's absurd." For a President merely to tell himself that a crime has been committed is not enough, many scholars point out. People in the White House are "no different from any other citizens" when they learn of a crime, says Attorney General William Saxbe, who has a greater right than the President to consider himself the top law-enforcement official. Far from initiating judicial action in the Watergate coverup, moreover, Nixon sought to block full disclosure. He withheld tapes and other evidence from investigators, fought vainly in the courts to keep this material away from the grand jury, and fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox when he persisted in seeking it.
St. Clair is not representing the President. He is representing the institution of the presidency.
"This is at best superficial and at worst misleading," declares Norman Dorsen, law professor at New York University. "It is not the presidency that is being investigated and that is denying Congress information. It is Mr. Nixon who is under investigation, who is not cooperating. It is not some abstraction that is advising St. Clair on the case. It is Richard Nixon." No one is counsel for the office of the presidency, asserts Kurland. "There is no such job. This is just rhetoric."
St. Clair seemed to concede as much last week when he told TIME Correspondent Dean Fischer: "My client happens to be the President of the United States. In this sense, he's a unique client. There are certain decisions that only he can make. These decisions relate to the confidentiality of presidential communications and Executive privilege. I can't make those decisions for him. They're his and his alone."
Such a decision by Nixon was made when the President ruled that he would not give Jaworski any more White House evidence, including 27 tapes that the special prosecutor is still seeking. St. Clair has not heard those recordings. That puts him in a weak position in having rejected Jaworski's request on grounds that the contents of the recordings did not justify violating the President's right to protect their confidentiality. St. Clair has apparently not heard the 42 tapes sought by the Rodino staff either.
For an experienced trial lawyer, St. Clair has made some specific comments on aspects of the Watergate cover-up case that appear odd. Particularly baffling was his claim that John Dean would no longer be a witness in Special Prosecutor Jaworski's conspiracy case against Nixon's former aides. Both Nixon and St. Clair were heavily depending on the claim that Dean had been discredited because he testified before the Senate Watergate committee that he had talked to Nixon about the hush-money payments on March 13, while a tape of the conversation shows that it occurred on March 21. Dean, who had testified without access to his White House files, later told