WATERGATE: Seven Charged, a Report and a Briefcase

(12 of 13)

presidential concurrence even to make such an offer, if it was made in, so to speak, good faith. Why the Kalmbach pledge was not fulfilled was not revealed—and Kalmbach cannot testify about his conversations with Nixon unless the President waives their attorney-client privilege.

Kalmbach pleaded to the relatively light charges in return for his full cooperation in the expected trials of other defendants. One of the Nixon campaign's chief fund raisers, he has publicly admitted soliciting some $190,000 that was passed covertly to the original Watergate defendants, the five burglars and their two team leaders, Liddy and Hunt, while they were in prison or awaiting trial. Kalmbach claimed that Ehrlichman personally assured him that the payments were proper and that he should carry out John Dean's instructions to make them, and he apparently will so testify if Ehrlichman goes on trial. Judge Sirica postponed sentencing Kalmbach—apparently until after he makes good on his promise to cooperate with Prosecutor Jaworski.

Not even the work of the original Watergate grand jury is complete. Sirica ordered the understandably weary jurors to be prepared to return within two weeks. One pending bit of unfinished business could be serious indeed for Nixon. The FBI and Jaworski's staff have been investigating the 18½-minute erasure on one presidential tape recording, as well as the claimed nonexistence of two other tapes and unexplained gaps in several more.

What Lies Ahead

Two other grand juries have yet to report on such Watergate-related situations as the clandestine operations of the White House plumbers, the President's dealings with ITT and milk producers, and possible campaign-funding violations by Nixon's political moneymen. Any of these juries could produce more indictments that would give new impetus to the impeachment sentiment in Congress. Indictments may be handed up this week in the plumbers' case. Said one Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, "Impeachment is most likely to come in the area of obstruction of justice — the tape erasures, the possibility that the President offered money to people to keep quiet or to commit perjury, the possibility that he authorized bribes in exchange for campaign contributions."

Once, the President's lawyers had claimed that John Dean, acting as the mastermind of a cunning scheme to conceal his own guilt, had duped all of those powerful aides above him. In its indictments the grand jury has exploded that story, which always had defied logic, and a good many other stories as well. The result inevitably is to narrow the circle of evidence around the President. To a large extent a presumption of Nixon innocence must rest on the vision of an exceptionally loyal and subservient White House staff successfully deceiving one of the most self-protective and politically sensitive Presidents.

How much narrower the circle has been drawn by the grand jury remained locked at week's end in Judge Sirica's courthouse safe: a letter in a manila envelope and a bulging briefcase. Together, those two ordinary artifacts of everyday life could contain enough critical mass to produce the largest bombshell yet in Watergate's long, concussive series. Richard Nixon may manage to survive whatever conclusions and evidence they lay out; perhaps their contents are