INTERVIEW: Ehrlichman and Situation Ethics

John Ehrlichman, who was President Nixon’s domestic policy chief, has finished a roman à clef describing a CIA plot to blackmail a Nixon-like chief of state upon discovering a secret White House plumbers’ unit engaged in spying and dirty tricks. After reading the 385-page manuscript of The Company, New York Times Columnist William Safire, also a former Nixon aide, reports that Ehrlichman portrays “President Richard Monckton” as a “self-deluding, hate-filled moralizer.”

Last week, in his first interview since he was convicted of Watergate-related crimes, Ehrlichman spoke in Santa Fe for 90 minutes with TIME’S Managing Editor Henry Grunwald and Los Angeles Bureau Chief Jess Cook. Ehrlichman, who lives in a rented 160-year-old adobe house, said he has been putting in two or three hours each morning with pen and paper. He started outlining his novel in March 1974 and completed the manuscript two months ago. He lived on a $50,000 advance from Simon & Schuster.

At 50, Ehrlichman is a portly 205-pounder with a thick salt-and-pepper beard. He lives apart from his wife Jeanne, now in a Seattle suburb with one of their five children, and is said to squire around several Santa Fe women. He says he spends half of every day on volunteer work for schools, churches and Indians. He often visits the trout streams near Taos to fish.

Ehrlichman is dogged by legal problems and debts. He is appealing sentences, which could run up to eight years, for perjury, for authorizing the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, for his role in the Watergate coverup; he faces half a dozen civil cases over the denial of civil rights of individuals. He has been disbarred. He owes his lawyers about $350,000. Still, he appeared tanned and relaxed last week and much like the John Ehrlichman of old. He refused to talk about the details of the Watergate case, said he has not seen any of his former White House colleagues lately, and of Watergate books had read only Theodore White’s, which he termed “incomplete.” Highlights from the interview:

ON HIS FEELINGS ABOUT NIXON: The most difficult thing in the White House is to get a fact. Everybody has his own version. I’m terribly sympathetic to a man making decisions under those circumstances … I don’t have any sense of animosity at all. But he is a potential witness in the case [that is, if Ehrlichman’s appeals result in a retrial]. I really can’t explore my expectations or wishes or desires where he is concerned.

ON THE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE OF NIXON BEFORE WATERGATE BROKE: There was little about Nixon that you all−and behind you the people−did not know. I don’t think there were very many latter-day revelations. There has been a lot of postwar Germany about this. It’s very hard now to find anybody who voted for Richard Nixon.

ON THE LIMITS OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER: There is no way of knowing if an action of the President can be said to be constitutional or not constitutional. We operate in this country, and in the media and the courts, on a situational ethics base.

ON SITUATION ETHICS ON THE PRESIDENCY: I reject situation ethics. The White House should lead in setting standards, morality and goals. But when you are facing reelection, you look at the polls. When one is not elected, one defers to the guy who is. I never felt I had the right to substitute my judgment for his … I suspect there is a latent confidence by the American people that the President will do what is necessary for the country. The President has an extraordinary and useful capacity to mobilize public opinion. You imply there is something devious about manipulating public opinion. It’s the metaphysics of the presidency that he is able to bring along the Congress and country on estimates of what is right or wrong, what the Constitution provides on any given day.

ON THE NIXON PARDON: It certainly relieved us of a lot of spasm in the body politic we didn’t need at that time. We were distracted from the important public business far too long as it was.

ON A PARDON FOR HIMSELF: It would have been a dilemma, since it implies guilt. But I was spared having to make that decision.

ON HIS WATERGATE INVOLVEMENT: I wasn’t part of it… Things were compartmentalized there. It was a highly individualized system of responsibility.

ON HIS PERSONAL MISTAKES: I can think of turning points where, if I had been aware of what was going on, I might have been able to say something. One necessarily regrets not having said the word that would have deflected the course of history. The situation was probably festooned with landmarks I didn’t see.

ON HIS CRIMINAL TRIALS: These were political trials. That introduces enormous eccentricity in the results, but there was a climate in the country at the time of the trial that pretty well foredoomed the [jury] verdict. I think it will be a ten-year process before this whole episode is behind me. And I feel it will be a vindication.

ON PRESIDENT FORD: He has done, on balance, about as well as an unelected President can do. I would have hoped there would have been more of an attack on problems by the White House, but I’m sympathetic to their difficulties. I don’t find myself second-guessing. I find myself empathizing.