ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 17, 1997 TAG: 9702170101
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
As President Nixon lay in Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from viral pneumonia, his closest aides debated without him how to destroy his notorious White House tapes - and who might do the deed, according to a new book of Watergate memoirs.
Former presidential lawyer Leonard Garment writes that the debate raged for days after the tape's existence had come to light.
The aides finally went to the hospital and talked over the problem with Nixon, Garment writes. There was general agreement that ``the tapes could not lawfully be destroyed,'' as the Senate Watergate Committee had made clear its intention to subpoena them.
In retrospect, he writes, that was probably good legal advice, but fatal political advice.
When the tapes' contents ultimately came out, Nixon's presidency was doomed. Had the tapes been destroyed, Garment writes, Nixon ``would have had more than a fighting chance.''
``He would have been spared the constant repetition of grotesque White House conversations, the endless public embarrassment of missing or allegedly erased tapes, the March 21 [1973] tape that prosecutors considered criminal and eventually the June 23 [1973] `smoking gun' tape.''
``It is hard to argue with defeat, so I confess error,'' Garment says. ``If I had foreseen the future, I would probably have stood with Fred Buzhardt [another White House Watergate lawyer] and said something like: `The tapes will kill you. Now you alone must decide what to do with them. If you destroy them, dissociate your staff from the decision and its implementation. Just do it: You'll have plenty of volunteer helpers.'''
Garment recalls those frantic days in ``Crazy Rhythm,'' just published. The former New York law partner of Nixon was a Democrat who advised the administration on domestic policy and got drawn into Nixon's fight to save his presidency.
The existence of the White House taping system became known in July 1973. Aide Alexander Butterfield testified before the Senate Watergate committee that for almost 21/2 years every word spoken, whether Nixon was in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room or his hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building, was recorded on giant reels in the basement.
Before subpoenas could be issued, Nixon had a few days to decide what to do with the tapes.
Garment writes that for two days ``there were virtually nonstop discussions'' among himself, Buzhardt, chief of staff Alexander Haig and lawyer Douglas Parker. ``I made everyone slightly edgy by noting that even if Nixon could not be indicted [for destroying potential evidence], conspirators who facilitated a nonindictable felony, including lawyers and ex-generals, could.''
In the end, Garment wrote, Nixon consulted with H.R. Haldeman, the former assistant he had fired months earlier in hopes of silencing the Watergate uproar. Haldeman advised that the tapes' exculpatory sections were ``Nixon's best defense.''
Garment concludes that Haldeman's ``festering resentment'' of Nixon - the attitude of a valet toward his master - must have been at play.
Nixon, in his 1978 memoirs, wrote that his failure to destroy the tapes proved his innocence: ``If I had been the knowing Watergate conspirator that I was charged with being, I would have recognized in 1973 that the tapes contained conversations that would be fatally damaging. I would have seen that if I were to survive, they would have to be destroyed.''
Moreover, Garment wrote, the tapes were ``financially priceless,'' and ``a kind of personal immortality, an actual piece of Nixon himself. ...Destruction of the tapes would have been something like an act of self-mutilation.''
LENGTH: Medium: 71 linesby CNB