Our Crowd

Watergate

ONLY twice in the nation's history has the impeachment of the President become a serious consideration. In the first instance, threat grew into actuality, in large part through the doggedness of Thaddeus Stevens, Class of 1814, an implacable foe of President Andrew Johnson. In the second, the threat was averted by the unprecedented resignation of an incumbent President, but the ultimate results - not only of a vote in the House of Representatives to impeach, but of a vote in the Senate to convict - were as predictable as Hanover's winter snows.

The role of alumni of the College in the 1868 impeachment and trial of President Johnson - of Stevens, the House leader; of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, 1826, who presided at the Senate trial; of Senator James W. Grimes of lowa, 1836, whose dramatic "not guilty" vote helped bring acquittal; of Senator James W. Patterson of New Hampshire, 1848, who voted for conviction - was documented in the May issue of the MAGAZINE. The involvement of Dartmouth men in the long-playing trauma of Watergate, prevented from final resolution only by the resignation of President Nixon, was less concentrated but more various. Two alumni were high-ranking members of the House Judiciary Committee, which drew up the Articles of Impeachment; one was a member of the legal staff of that committee; another was on the legal staff of the Senate Select Committee charged with investigating the multifarious activities which came to be lumped under the rubric "Watergate"; two were members of, the national press corps whose revelations exposed what lay under the rock of a "thirdrate burglary"; two were part of the Special Prosecutor's team of attorneys whose mission it was - and is - to gather evidence and to bring to justice those who allegedly violated the laws and the guarantees of the Constitution; one was a victim of the "Saturday Night Massacre" which saw the original Special Prosecutor dismissed for doing his job too well; one was a former Congressman recruited to revive the integrity of the Committee to Re-elect the President after its employees were caught in Democratic headquarters.

The list is not - and probably never can be - inclusive. Some, such as Michael H. Cardozo '63, a lawyer working for the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex, which provided both trigger and title for the drama, were more Peripheral - and involuntary - participants. Others like Thomas C. Green '62 are among the scores of attorneys still occupied in the legal proceedings that are the aftermath. In a sense, all were involved; no one in America was really untouched by Watergate.

ROBERT MCCLORY '30, second ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, was reelected last month to serve his 7th term representing the 12th district of Illinois. A loyal party man who served in Illinois' General Assembly and Senate for 12 years before going to Congress, McClory asserted in the televised debate that the argument that a Republican could not vote to impeach a Republican "demeans my role here." After reviewing the allegations and the obligations of a President to "see that the laws are faithfully executed," he added, "After receiving evidence for weeks and weeks ... I ask myself, is this any way to run a White House, or a country?" McClory voted against the first article of impeachment, on obstruction of justice; switched to the "aye" column on the second, on abuse of power; and introduced - and was one of only two Republicans voting for - the third, on contempt of Congress.

HENRY P. SMITH '33, Republican Congressman from the 40th District in upstate New York, is third ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee and ranking minority member of the Judiciary sub-committee before which President Ford testified in October on his pardon of former President Nixon. A staunch Nixon defender, Smith voted against all three articles of impeachment, dealing with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and defiance of Congressional subpoenas. In the televised debate preceding the votes, he stated that "... Except for the area of the secret bombing ..., where I have not yet made up my mind, I should have to vote against impeachment of the President on the state of the evidence which we have seen ..." A graduate of Cornell Law School, Smith became mayor of North Tonawanda, N.Y., in 1961 and was appointed Niagara County Judge and Surrogate and Family Court Judge in 1963, two years before he went to Congress. At the end of his present term, he will retire, having announced last winter that he would not run for reelection to a sixth term.

CLARK MACGREGOR '44, a five-term Congressman from Minnesota, was appointed President Nixon's liaison man with Congress in 1971 after he lost a Senate bid to former Vice President Humphrey. On July 1, 1972, about two weeks after the Watergate break-in, he became director of the Committee to Reelect the President, succeeding John Mitchell, who resigned "for compelling family reasons." MacGregor, who admitted in a speech at Dartmouth last fall that he had been "duped about Watergate," pointed out at the same time that Senator Ervin's Watergate Committee had in its exhaustive investigation uncovered no "dirty tricks" committed after he took over at CREEP. He also referred to Jeb Stuart Magruder's testimony about "a campaign to deceive MacGregor." Following the 1972 election, MacGregor became a vice president of United Aircraft Corporation.

WILLIAM H. MERRILL '45, a Detroit attorney, spent 15 months on the Special Prosecutor's staff, heading the task force whose investigation of the "plumbers" led to the conviction of Nixon aide John Erlichman. A Yale Law School graduate, Merrill was in private practice till 1961, when he started a four-year stint as Chief Assistant U. S. Attorney for eastern Michigan. He ran - unsuccessfully - for Congress in 1966, was an aide, in Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential primary race, and returned to private practice in 1970. He is now, once again, back practicing law in Detroit, feeling "a great sense of satisfaction of having done something significant in an area that will probably be more important in the future than it seems now." Of the steadfastness of first Cox's, then Jaworki's staff and the concern of an aroused citizenry, he says "We can't be protected automatically by the Constitution. People must care enough to make it work."

RICHARD L. CATES '47 took leave from his Madison, Wisconsin, law partnership to become chief assistant to John Doar, special counsel for the House Judiciary Committee. A trial specialist, Cates has taught at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he earned his J.D., in addition to his private practice. His primary responsibility was piecing the case against President Nixon together for presentation to the Judiciary Committee and briefing the Democratic members in the days before the public hearings. A comment about Dartmouth and its "production of whole human beings" Cates wrote for his 25th reunion yearbook seems prophetically appropriate: "In a system which has for its central theme that all men have dignity and value, we need institutions dedicated to producing men worthy of such heritage and capable of making it survive."

JONATHAN MOORE '54, appointed Associate Attorney General of the United States in August 1973, resigned from that position a scant two months later in the wake of the "Saturday Night Massacre," when his boss Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned in turn rather than fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on presidential orders. A long-time protege of Richardson, Moore had worked for him first in the campaign for Attorney General of Massachusetts and been with him in Washington since 1969, moving, in in- creasingly responsible positions, from the Department of State to Defense to Health, Education, and Welfare and finally to the AG's office. The troubleshooter among a trio of trusted aides known as "Richardson's Mafia," Moore was closely involved in the proceedings during the week of moves and counter-moves, feints an parries, that preceded the "Massacre. A 1956 graduate of Harvard's Litauer School of Public Administration, he has been in government service almost ex clusively since: with the United States In formation Agency in India and West Africa; as an administrative aide to Massachusetts Senator Everett Saltonstall; and as a special assistant to William Bundy in the Departments of State and Defense under the Johnson Administration. He has also acted as a foreign policy adviser to Governors Romney and Rockefeller. Early this year Moore became director of the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard, successor to the Litauer School.

MORTON M. KONDRACKE '60 whose investigative reporting for 'the Chicago Sun-Times earned him a slot on the White House "Enemies List," had already won two Illinois Associated Press awards for stories on open housing and on riots before the paper transferred him to Washington in 1968. Through him, the Sun-Times became the fourth newspaper to gain access to the Pentagon Papers - from sources other than Daniel Ellsberg. He became a specialist on the ITT affair and covered the Watergate hearings of Senator Ervin's Select Committee, during the course of which he uncovered evidence of perjury on the part of high-ranking members of the Nixon team. A Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for the 1973-74 academic year interrupted his direct involvement, but the sojourn in the ivory tower failed to dampen his concern over skulduggery in high places. He's back in Washington this year, as convinced as ever 'bat more investigative reporters are needed to keep government responsive to an informed public.

H. WILLIAM SHURE '61, who earned his aw degree from the University of Virginia |n 1964, was assistant minority counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Presidential' Campaign Activities, chaired by Senator Ervin and commonly called the alergate Committee. He was called upon to assist Minority Counsel Fred Thompson at the behest of Senator Lowell Weicker, for whom Shure had been since 1971 an area representative in Connecticut. He has now returned to his New Haven law firm, which he joined for a few months in 1964 before three years' service as a captain in the Judge Advocate's Department of the Air Force and rejoined after his tour of duty. In an article in the December 1973 issue of the MAGAZINE, Shure paid tribute to the "invaluable role of the press," with its "self-imposed requirement of accuracy" in "helping blast loose the seemingly impenetrable layers of secrecy and cover-up that shrouded this tragedy."

DAVID E. ROSENBAUM '63 was on of the two reporters from the Washington bureau of The New York Times assigned to the hearings first of the Ervin Committee and later of the House Judiciary Committee. Covering "the story of a lifetime," as he calls it, Rosenbaum reported on the hearings themselves and wrote interpretive pieces as well. An alumnus of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and a Borden Graduate Award for "high academic standing with promise of professional accomplishment," he worked for papers in his native Florida and in England and for the Congressional Quarterly before joining the NYT. Of the press's "crucial role in the Watergate investigation," he contends that, despite occasional overzealousness in pursuit of exclusives, "the press was often way ahead of the official investigations, calling attention to scandals that subsequently became subjects of inquiries by the Senate committee or the special prosecutor's office," whose very existence, he adds, "resulted from the public's outrage over disclosures in the press." Rosenbaum is still at the Times as the denouement of Watergate is played out.

ROGER WITTEN '68 was an early member of the Special Prosecutor's staff, working in the area of campaign financing. The eighth lawyer recruited in the original cadre by Archibald Cox, under whom he had taken courses at Harvard Law School, Witten was at the time clerking for Federal Appeals Judge Harrison Winter in Baltimore. He stayed on as part of Leon Jaworski's staff after Cox was fired in the "Saturday Night Massacre." His job, he reports, was "a great opportunity, a challenge, and a worthy endeavor," despite the 12-hour days and 6-day weeks. Last month he resigned from the Special Prosecutor's staff to join a large Washington law firm, where he plans eventually to specialize in litigation of civil cases.