Word: ervin
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...offers to furnish summaries of the desired conversations. The committee demands the tapes. The President declines again. The committee issues a subpoena for specific conversations. Nixon declines to honor the subpoena. The Ervin committee, by majority vote, cites the Secret Service officer who is now custodian of the tapes for contempt of Congress. Also, needing only a majority vote to do so, the full Senate confirms this citation...
...brave words masked what must be an acute dilemma posed by the tapes for Nixon, whether innocent or guilty of Watergate crimes. His press spokesmen have put the tapes in the same category as "the presidential papers," which Nixon on July 7 described to Ervin as documents he must withhold from the Senate committee. His refusal to release them, he wrote, was "based on my constitutional obligation to pre serve intact the powers and prerogatives of the presidency and not upon any desire to withhold information relevant to your inquiry." Yet the White House has already given the committee...
Beyond those grounds for disclosure, Chairman Ervin argues that
...does obtain the tapes, the Ervin committee could be stymied in its desire to see them speedily, since Cox apparently, if he would use them publicly at all, would do so only in the trials of indicted former Nixon aides. Such trials could be months away. If the President will not voluntarily give the tapes to Ervin, the committee will undoubtedly try to subpoena them. If that is resisted by the White House, it could take months for the committee to fight the issue through all the courts...
...practical question of whether Nixon can withstand the political pressure to release the tapes seems far more crucial than the legal issue. Says Ervin: "I think the American people are not so much concerned with the constitutional arguments as they are in the willingness of the President to assist the committee in its search for truth...