As of January 12, the House Judiciary Committee had received nearly a quarter of a million telegrams and letters, 92 per cent of them calling for Richard Nixon’s impeachment, according to Helen Starr, Congressman Peter Rodino’s press secretary. . . . Rodino, chairman of the Committee, now says he thinks the Committee will report on an impeachment resolution by midApril. . . . Washington pretty much stunned by experts’ testimony of five separate erasures on the Rose Mary Woods tape. New House Minority Leader John Rhodes (elected to succeed Ford) has refused to say whether he will or will not vote for the impeachment resolution: “I’m going to listen to the evidence. I don’t believe in making decisions before the evidence is in.” . . . Sen. Daniel Inouye, Democrat, of the Ervin Committee, told newsmen the erasure revelations “saddened [him] because I was hoping that the report would have shown this was the result of some legitimate action.” Sen. Lowell Weicker wished the President would stop “giving the leastest information at the latest date.” . . . While Chesterfield Smith, president of the ABA, was saying he had become “reluctantly convinced” that President Nixon should be impeached, the NAACP was taking a more moderate course. The NAACP Council, meeting in New York last week, criticized Nixon but said the Association would continue “to presume that he is innocent until a contrary finding had been made.” . . . The IRS employee who leaked info on the President’s tax return to the Providence Journal-Bulletin last October has quit— before being fired. . . . And the latest odds (before the erasure news) quoted by Ladbroke’s, England’s major betting agency, were 3 to 2 that Nixon would serve out his full term.
Gerald Ford’s star rising: political analyst Richard Scammon says Ford is now the Republican front runner and predicts he will run a “closer and perhaps winning race against any Democrat in 1976.” Scammon says, as of now, “Rocky and Reagan don’t have a chance.” . . . Joseph Alsop believes Sen. Henry Jackson is the front runner among the Democrats, and points to recent Gallup and Harris polls which show Jackson running better against Vice President Ford than any other Democrat, even Ted Kennedy . . . Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, whose name keeps cropping up in the early line, won’t decide on a presidential bid until the end of 1974 because “I don’t have the national recognition of some of these other fellas.” . . . Republican Sen. Richard Schweiker, up for reelection in November, has received the endorsement of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO because of his ‘TOO per cent pro-labor voting record.” (Schweiker got a 75 in the latest ADA listing.) … In Illinois, Tennessee Williams’ brother Dakin Williams has announced against Sen. Adlai Stevenson III in the March Democratic primary. Williams will campaign against liberal abortion laws, against gun control legislation, against the busing of schoolchildren, all of which Stevenson favors. . . . State Senator C. R. Lewis of Anchorage, a national officer of the John Birch Society, will seek the Republican senatorial candidacy in Alaska; hopes to run against Sen. Mike Gravel. . . . Charles Stenvig, the former Minneapolis policeman who lost his third mayoral reelection bid in November, has rejoined the force and been assigned to the theft and forgery division.
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