Struggling to recover his balance, Richard Nixon last week stumbled into yet another Watergate morass. Now it was the mystery of the missing tapes. Conceded one of his closest legal advisers: "We've created a credibility cul-de-sac of such monstrous dimensions that even the most innocent transaction appears suspect."
This particular transaction unreeled just as one of Watergate's long-awaited moments of truth finally seemed to be at hand. Nixon had vigorously protected nine recordings of his White House conversations through three painful months of litigation. His fight had precipitated a constitutional collision and had done much to undermine the claim that he was determined to "set forth the facts" about the scandal. But under overwhelming public pressure after the "Saturday Night Massacre" at his Justice Department, he had grudgingly agreed to yield to the demand of prosecutors and the courts. He would give up his nine tapes. Then, as he was about to do so last week, came the incredible admission: Nixon's lawyers told Federal Judge John J. Sirica that two of the most-wanted tapes did not even exist.
The disclosure moved Sirica to begin open hearings at once into the circumstances of the tapes' being or nonbeing and inspired a new surge of protest telegrams, which deluged official Washington with fresh demands that Nixon must leave office. Even some of Nixon's least likely critics turned against him. Columnist Joseph Alsop, ardent champion of the President's foreign policies, said that he must resign. Howard K Smith, ABC-TV'S highly independent commentator, declared that the tapes revelation "deepens suspicion inevitably that there has been a cover-up all along and it is still going on." Nixon, he said, must quit or be impeached.
Conservative Republicans too worried that the limits of public tolerance had been passed. Nixon's credibility, said Senator Barry Goldwater, "has reached an alltime low from which he may never recover." The President, insisted New York Senator James Buckley, now "has the clear burden of satisfying the American people that he has been speaking the truth."
No Certainty. Indeed, so universal was the dismay in Republican ranks that it produced a rare concert of behind-the-scenes congressional arm twisting of the White House: on terms virtually dictated to him by the Senate Republican leadership, Nixon approved the appointment of a new special prosecutor, replacing the dismissed Archibald Cox, and chose a new Attorney General to succeed the resigned Elliot Richardson (see stories beginning on page 40).
Those concessions were largely lost in the explosion over the disclosure that two of Nixon's tapes—recordings once viewed as crucial to the truth about Watergate—were not to be found. In making that admission, Presidential Special Counsel Fred Buzhardt predicted: "By the end of this hearing, we will have established with mathematical certainty beyond any doubt that those two tape recordings were never made." After three days of testimony before Judge Sirica, with more to come this week, no such certainty seemed yet in sight.