New York, August 15—The hearings are postponed for a few blessed weeks during which the public mood is likely to crystallize. On the one hand the Committee has failed clearly to establish that President Nixon knew either about the burglary at Watergate or about the attempt to conceal the extent of the involvement in that and related operations by members of his staff. On the other hand, the spectacle has been so ugly, the quality of mind of some of Nixon’s subordinates so unedifying, many have come to the conclusion that a strong purgative is needed, nothing less than the replacement of the incumbent President of the United States.
It is, I think, the supreme paradox of the situation that what keeps this from becoming a national compulsion is the excesses of Richard Nixon’s critics over the years. If they had not acted with such overweening zeal, systematically magnifying the lint on Nixon’s record so as to look like the virus that almost overtook Europe with the Black Plague, they would have an easier time of it now. Every time I see a reference (they are quite frequent nowadays) to poor old Alger Hiss, and how he was framed, I say to myself: Nixon is safe. There are enough Americans around who know intuitively that jettisoning Nixon means, when all is said and done, rehabilitating Hiss. And into this kind of moral and epistemological anarchy, they decline to be seduced.
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