HOW WOULD IT PLAY?

Consider the following scenario. It's the Nixon White House, 1973. A suicide has rocked the place, the suicide of attorney John Doe, a deputy to White House counsel to the President John Dean. John Doe was a healthy, 47-year-old attorney known for handling complex legal matters, under pressure, with great skill and dispatch. He is happily married with two young children, no diseases and no known history of the slightest mental disturbance. No one in his family has ever committed suicide. At about 6:30 on a weekday evening, Doe leaves the White House, crosses the Potomac over Memorial Bridge, heading north to one of the parks lining the Virginia banks. He drives to a secluded spot and, sitting alone in his car, places a pistol in his mouth and fires.

Deceased deputy counsel Doe had acted in some matters as personal attorney to the first couple, handling complex partnership investments directly related to a Savings and Loan that went bankrupt, sticking the taxpayers with a $60 million tab. Further, the dead attorney was a former law partner of the First Lady's in pre-White House days. Doe had worked together with her in representing the failed S&L before government regulators.

Two state troopers have sworn out affidavits stating their first-hand knowledge that deputy counsel Doe and the First Lady had long carried on a torrid love affair. Their sworn affidavits corroborate widely circulated rumors that have long been current in the small state capital where the presidential couple lived prior to entering the White House.

Further, these affidavits corroborate the claims of a beautiful, 42-year-old nightclub chanteuse who the previous year had sold her story to a tabloid, claiming to have had a 12-year-old affair with President Nixon. Because of having accepted a six-figure sum for her story and owing to her own rather questionable past, she had been laughed off the national stage the previous year. This despite her possession of audio tapes whose authenticity the President had confirmed, wherein the President can be heard telling her to just lie and say none of it ever happened.

Stay with me on this scenario. Following the suicide, principal White House Counselor to the President John Dean, of Watergate fame, moves swiftly into action. Less than three hours later, in direct contravention of orders from White House Chief of Staff Robert Haldemann, who had ordered the office sealed and its records protected, Dean enters the office of John Doe for an investigative "sweep" prior to the arrival of FBI and other law enforcement personnel. Accompanying Dean are two long-time Nixon political operatives, legendary tough guy Chuck "I'd Walk Over My Grandmother" Colson, and Jeb Stuart Magruder.

FBI agents arrive while the Dean-Colson-Magruder cleanup operation is sweeping through the Nixon legal files and other papers in John Doe's office. The FBI agents are ordered to sit on boxes out in the hall, and when one rises to his feet to peer into the room to see what's going on, Dean sternly reprimands him, forcing him to sit back down until Dean is finished. The office is not sealed until 10 a.m. the next morning, when a Secret Service agent is posted outside the door.

For Richard and Pat Nixon, substitute the Clintons, this year. For John Dean, substitute the name of Clinton White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, boss to the dead assistant White House counsel Vincent Foster. Doe, of course, is Foster in this imaginary scenario. For Chuck Colson and Jeb Magruder, fill in Clinton political aides Patsy Thomasson, a veteran of Arkansas politics who is now special assistant to the President, and Margaret "Maggie" Williams, who serves as chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton, and who has been associated with the First Lady since 1984.

This is what transpired from and immediately after Foster's July 20 suicide.

"For five months," declares an angry Michael Barone, a Democrat who edits the highly respected Almanac of American Politics, "this White House misled us about the files in Vince Foster's office, and about how and when and under what circumstances they were removed, and by whom." Need more confirmation?

On Thursday, December 23, 1993, a news story in the Wall Street Journal had this to say:

"Some of the U.S. Park Police detectives who were charged with investigating Mr. Foster's death ... are now complaining that the White House impeded their probe. `We didn't have access to anything that the chief counsel deemed wasn't pertinent,' says one Park Police officer, referring to White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum. `He (Nussbaum) reviewed everything. ... Not one representative of government, including the FBI, was allowed to see those things.'"

Richard Nixon saw his aides hounded, ruined and imprisoned, and was himself disgraced and driven from office, forced out after the House Judiciary Committee voted Articles of Impeachment. Among the young legal staffers for the committee, back during that Watergate summer 20 years ago, were a recent Yale Law grad named Hillary Rodham, and one Bernard Nussbaum, then a young attorney.

Watergate began with a third-rate burglary, petty stuff indeed. Nobody died. It was the coverup that brought down the high and mighty. How will this one end?