Friends Like These

THE cleverest thing about this book is the title, suggesting, by reference to Higgin's first work, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, that Richard M. Nixon's mentality was comparable to that of a small-time Mafia hood. Disappointingly, this is as close as Higgins comes to explaining Nixon's peculiar behavior duing the Watergate affair.

At times, Higgin's chronicle of events virtually pleads for some kind of commentary. There is for instance the meeting in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972, where Haldeman informs the President that the break-in was engineered by a bunch of people over at CREEP. All Nixon has to do at this point is call Earl Silbert at the prosecutor's office, come completely clean, and his problems are over. Why doesn't he? Is it out of loyalty to John Mitchell? Higgins is content to observe that "if you work hard enough, you can transform any problem into a calamity", and leaves it at that. In another section, Higgins concludes that Nixon's major fault was not that he was "arrogant...ruthless...petty, ungenerous, somewhat bigoted, and monumentally cynical" but "simply that he did not keep his word," which explains less than nothing.

The heroes of the book are those men who act most in accordance with the precepts of the law, and who do their jobs efficiently. So Earl Silbert and Elliot L. Richardson are praised profusely for "doing it by the book," and those who used the case as an opportunity to mount their political soapboxes incur Higgins's wrath.

THERE ARE PLENTY of the latter, most of them on the Ervin committee. Howard Baker demands repeatedly of witnesses, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" at exactly those moments when the other questioners are attempting to establish the circumstantial framework that will provide the answer. Joseph Montoya extracts "moral advice for the young people of this nation...from every felon who testified," and Lowell Weicker, with mind-deadening consistency explodes in a fit of moral outrage every afternoon at four o'clock, in time to dominate the evening news. Silbert and his team worried less about the strength of their case than they did about the behavior of Judge "Maximum John" Sirica, whose obvious assumption of presidential involvement threatened to blow the case in appeal.

According to Higgins there were at least two tragedies in the affair precipitated by the over-zealousness of Sirica, the Ervin committee and journalists. The case against John Connally hinged on the testimony of one man, Jake Jacobsen, and would never have been brought to court in normal times. Even more regrettable was the conviction for perjury of Attorney General Kleindienst, who actually threatened to resign when asked by Nixon to interfere with the ITT case, but denied to Sen Edward Kennedy's committee that such a request had ever been made.

While conceding that criminal prosecutions are never politically disinterested, and that genuinely "evil" men such as Mafia chiefs should be pursued in all possible ways, Higgins sometimes vacillates into a sophomoric ethical relativism. He hints that there is no difference between John Ehrlichmann's decision to screw Daniel Ellsberg because he sees him as a threat to national security and John Sirica's pursuit of Nixon with only a passing consideration for the appearance of due process.

Higgins is satisfied that for all its shortcomings, the process has worked and that the system has been saved, made safe for democracy. He ends on a annoying self-congratulatory note, "We are a pretty tough people. Giving us the swerve is unproductive."

AT HIS BEST Higgins writes books reminiscent of Raymond Chandler's; he has an ear for terse, unequivocal dialogue, and an equally sharp cynicism that cuts through the moral flab of his characters. But when his material is as worn-out as it is here, Higgins sounds more like Dragnet's Joe Friday, insisting monotonously, "Just the facts, ma'am."