The Plot Thickens

WHILE IN THE past claims that the butler did it have sufficed to resolve the crimes of stage melodrama, the attempt to translate that principle into the arena of state politics is laughable. Justifiably or not, most Americans insist on regarding their government with somewhat more concern than they accord comic-opera principalities, and the newest Watergate bombshell--that the president's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, erased 18 minutes of the Watergate tapes--is so ludicrous as to defy belief.

Perhaps Woods did accidentally erase the tapes. If so, Nixon, with good cause, may feel his subordinates failed him. This is just the last in a long string of "failures" which serve the president, the reductio ad absurdum of the conduct of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, Magruder, Stans, LaRue, Liddy, Colson, Mardian, Kalmbach....