(Originally published by the Daily News on January 5, 1974. This story was written by Paul Healy.)
SAN CLEMENTE, Calif., Jan. 4 – President Nixon declined flatly today to produce any of the more than 500 documents subpenaed by the Senate Watergate committee, branding the request “an overt attempt to intrude into the executive office to a degree that constitutes an unconstitutional usurpation of power.”
Nixon’s refusal to supply recordings of his conversations and other materials came in a letter addressed to the committee chairman, Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.). The letter was delivered to the committee on Capitol Hill by White House congressional liaison staff members this afternoon, three hours after the deadline set by the committee to hand over the documents.
Speaking to reporters at the Western White House, Deputy Presidential Press Secretary Gerald L. Warren declined to say what the next move would be in the impasse between the President and the committee, or to comment on the possibility of contempt-of-court action against Nixon by Federal Judge John J. Sirica.
At the committee’s request, a special bid had been passed by Congress to permit the Watergate committee to subpena the documents from the White House directly.
Replying to the three subpenas for the documents received by the White House on Dec. 19, Nixon wrote to Ervin, “Only six months ago, your committee concluded that recordings of five conversations were necessary for your legislative determination.”
“Now, in one subpena alone,” the President continued, “you list, with widely varying precision some 492 personal and telephone conversations of the president ranging in time from mid-1971 to late 1973 for which recordings and related documents are sought; and, in addition, in the same subpena, recordings and related documents are sought for categories of presidential conversations, identified only by participants and time spans measured in months and years.
His Daily Diary
Nixon noted that a second subpena asks for 37 categories of documents or materials, one of which is “President Richard Nixon’s daily diary for Jan. 1, 1970, to Dec. 19, 1973.” He recalled that in a letter he wrote Ervin last July 6, he stressed that “formulation of sound public policy requires that the president and his personal staff be able to communicate among themselves in complete candor, and their tentative judgements, their exploration of alternatives, and their frank comments on issues and personalities at home and abroad, remain confidential.”
The President added in the same letter that he anticipated that even limited selected disclosures of presidential confidences would inevitably result in the attrition, and the eventual destruction of the indispensable principle of confidentiality of presidential papers.”
To comply with the three subpenas Nixon told Ervin, would unquestionably destroy any vestige of confidentiality of Presidential communications, thereby irreparably impairing the constitutional function of the office of the Presidency. Neither the judiciary nor the Congress could survive a similar power asserted by the executive branch to rummage through their files and confidential processes.”
Nixon also argued that some of the materials subpenaed might be relevant to some of the grand jury inquiries into various Watergate matters. He said this “could seriously impair the ability of the office of the special prosecutor to complete its investigations and successfully prosecute the criminal cases which may arise from the grand juries.”
The President ended his letter with the comment that he recognized “that in the current environment, there may be some attempt to distort my position as only an effort to withhold information.” But he emphasized that he took his position today to protect the presidency “against incursions by another branch, which, I believe, as have my predecessors in office, is of utmost constitutional importance.”
Matter of Principle
In answer to questions, Warren explained that Nixon today was sticking to his long-standing principle of adhering to the tradition of the separation of power; and that when he handed over some of the Watergate tapes to Sirica last year, it was “an extraordinary step, and he was making exception.”
Also today, Nixon announced a three-step shuffle of his legal staff. His acting White House counsel, Leonard Garment, will move up to become an assistant to the President. J. Fed Buzhardt Jr. will move from special Watergate counsel to the post of counsel to the President, the position held by John W. Dean 3d., who was fired by Nixon last spring and later testified against him in the Watergate hearings.
Buzhardt is being replaced as Watergate counsel by James D. St. Clair, a senior partner in the Boston law firm of Hale and Door and a lecturer at the Harvard Law School since 1955. St. Clair, 53, is a native of Akron, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Illinois.
