It was a week unlike any other in American

The troubles of Richard Nixon, as they attracted increasing attention, instantly divided the Republican and conservative communities (they overlap but are not coextensive). At the beginning, all of us assumed Watergate was something on the order of what Ronald Ziegler told us it was: nothing more than a third-rate burglary. At the next stage, some detected a dimension in the burglary that suggested a more subtle objective than mere political voyeurism, and some of us meditated on the possibility that an intelligence operation was afoot of delicate character. Still later, after Mr. Nixon fired his principal aides, and John Dean gave his testimony, the facts clearly required that one or another set of people should have committed perjury, and some conservative spokesmen began to express their dissatisfaction with Richard Nixon’s incomplete explanations and evasive activities. Most prominent of these was Senator Barry Goldwater, who in the summer of 1973 announced that he was increasingly “disgusted” by the tactics of the White House.

The flat assertions of innocence by Mr. Nixon brought the situation to a painful dilemma. Either his words had directly to be doubted, or it was necessary to construct a scaffolding that supported both those words and the developing data—the pleas of guilt by Mr. Nixon’s associates, the revelations of incriminating tapes, and the missing portions of individual tapes.

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Clare Booth Luce

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William F. Buckley Jr.

The troubles of Richard Nixon, as they attracted increasing attention, instantly divided the Republican and conservative communities (they overlap but are not coextensive). At the beginning, all of us assumed Watergate was something on the order of what Ronald Ziegler told us it was: nothing more than a third-rate burglary. At the next stage, some detected a dimension in the burglary that suggested a more subtle objective than mere political voyeurism, and some of us meditated on the possibility that an intelligence operation was afoot of delicate character. Still later, after Mr. Nixon fired his principal aides, and John Dean gave his testimony, the facts clearly required that one or another set of people should have committed perjury, and some conservative spokesmen began to express their dissatisfaction with Richard Nixon’s incomplete explanations and evasive activities. Most prominent of these was Senator Barry Goldwater, who in the summer of 1973 announced that he was increasingly “disgusted” by the tactics of the White House.

The flat assertions of innocence by Mr. Nixon brought the situation to a painful dilemma. Either his words had directly to be doubted, or it was necessary to construct a scaffolding that supported both those words and the developing data—the pleas of guilt by Mr. Nixon’s associates, the revelations of incriminating tapes, and the missing portions of individual tapes.