The Lost Tapes Caper

The Watergate controversy entered the realm of existentialism this week when J. Fred Buzhardt, a special counsel to President Nixon, told Judge John J. Sirica that two of the tapes subpeonaed by the court never existed.

Buzhardt's surprise announcement has the whole country asking, "What is reality?"

The Nixon version of reality with regard to the missing tapes has been undergoing constant revision ever since the news broke on Wednesday.

Buzhardt originally claimed that an April 15 conversation between Nixon and John W. Dean III was not recorded due to a "rare malfunction" in the White House recording system. They story was changed the day after the first announcement when Buzhardt said that the recording system, which goes unattended on weekends, ran out of tape just before Nixon had his Sunday evening talk with Dean.

The tape of the 55-minute Nixon-Dean conversation is considered vital by the Watergate special prosecution staff because Dean has testified that during the April 15 meeting Nixon said he was probably foolish to discuss an offer of executive clemency for convicted conspirator E. Howard Hunt.

Another aspect of reality that the White House is currently trying to revise is the date when Nixon first learned that two of the tapes were missing.

The first story out of the White House, announced on Wednesday, was that the non-existence of the tapes wasn't discovered until Saturday. Yesterday Stephen V. Bull, a special assistant to the president, changed the story and said that Nixon first discovered the tapes were missing on September 29--more than a month before anyone was informed of the situation.

If this second version is the one Nixon is going to stick with, the White House is going to have a hard time explaining how Nixon could offer to give Archibald Cox '34 and Sam Ervin summaries of the tapes without telling them that two of the tapes didn't exist.

Judge Sirica is currently holding hearings into the circumstances surrounding the non-existence of the tapes. Whatever the outcome of those hearings, the latest episode in the Watergate affair will leave Americans still asking, "What is reality?"

Presumably, new Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski will be asking the same questions and trying to come up with some answers. Jaworski, a conservative Texas Democrat who served under president Johnson and counseled the commission which investigaaed the assassination of John F. Kennedy '40, was appointed to the position from which Archibald Cox was fired.

On the same day, Nixon announced that he would nominate Sen. William B. Saxbe (R-Ohio) to replace Elliot Richardson '41 as the Justice Department's head.

The appointment of Jaworski probably will not satisfy the 53 senators who are sponsoring legislation to create an independent prosecutor. At hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is looking into the new legislation, Cox testified that he also thought the Congress should create an independent prosecutor. Cox told the Senators of the frustrations and delays he encountered in trying to obtain evidence from the White House.

Cox said that he had particular trouble in getting logs of conversations and meetings of the White House plumbers unit and records of dairy industry campaign contributions.

On Tuesday, the former special prosecutor admitted that he might be the source of leaks concerning Nixon's role in keeping an ITT anti-trust suit out of court. Cox said he regretted telling two senators and their aides about a conversation in which former Atty. Gen. Richard G. Kleindienst '46 admitted that Nixon had told him not to pursue an appeal of the ITT case before the Supreme Court.

The White House said Tuesday that Nixon did in fact have such a conversation with Kleindienst, and also said that Cox's leak was proof of his partisanship.

The day following Cox's apology, speculation came out of Washington that the ITT leaks came from the Justice Department and not from Cox. Sources said the leaks were an attempt to make Cox look bad.

Cox, Williston Professor of Law, has accepted a visiting professorship at Cambridge University to begin next October, it was announced this week. Cox, who was praised by President Bok earlier this week, does not have to stay in England for very long, but he may well use the excuse to keep away from America's reality crisis.