WATERGATE: Seven Charged, a Report and a Briefcase

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can await a request for it from that committee or hold a hearing of all interested parties, including Jaworski and the White House, on what to do with it. He could simply make it public—or have it locked up indefinitely. Whatever his course, it is likely to become known this week.

The long-awaited, judiciously worded indictment sketched, in devastating detail, the cover-up plot that was hatched in the White House and in the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. The cover-up began almost the moment that five lowly burglars were arrested in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. The indictment attacks nearly all of the previous Watergate defenses put up by the men closest to Nixon. According to the grand jury, these aides tried to use the FBI and CIA to conceal the Watergate crime, not to protect national security. They arranged for payments of large amounts of cash to the arrested burglars, not for legitimate legal expenses but to keep them quiet. They extended offers of leniency and Executive clemency to the arrested men—inducements only a President has the power to fulfill. They destroyed evidence.

Seven of the President's former associates were indicted, and four of them were accused of lying a total of eleven times to grand juries, the Senate Watergate committee or the FBI. These are the men on whose testimony the President's own profession of innocence has heavily relied. Significantly, no perjury charge was made against John Dean, Nixon's former counsel and the one self-confessed member of the conspiracy who has directly accused the President of being an active participant in the cover-up scheme. The grand jury has heard some of the tapes of conversations between Dean and Nixon — and apparently is convinced that Dean's version of those disputed talks is the correct one.

Last week's indictment of the seven men brought the number of former Nix on agents charged or convicted in the scandal to 25 (see box page 20). Individual guilt or innocence is yet to be established through trials in many of these cases. But no equivalent litany of official accusation has ever before been directed on such a scale against the associates of any U.S. President. The scandals of Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding were far less pervasive.

The Indicted Seven

Because the positions of most of the men charged last week had been so high on President Nixon's once powerful inner team, their indictment, though long expected, was still shocking. That staff, once widely viewed as aloof and arrogant but sure-footed and efficient, has, of course, been progressively tarnished ever since Watergate broke wide open nearly a year ago. Now an appalling number of its members are desperately fighting to stay out of prison. Last week's seven accused conspirators were:

JOHN MITCHELL, 60. Once the Administration's high priest of law-and-order, the former Attorney General and head of Nixon's re-election committee was undoubtedly Nixon's closest political confidant. The two men had known each other intimately ever since Mitchell, a seemingly imperturbable municipal-bond specialist, and Nixon were partners in a New York City law firm. In the Administration, Mitchell was an eager but unsuccessful prosecutor of antiwar extremists (the Chicago Seven, the Harrisburg Seven, Daniel Ellsberg). Mitchell's most celebrated