Niggers. The avenging black horde. . . and suddenly it occurs to me that Graham's act is extremely subtle; he is actually threatening this weeping crowd of white-supremist burghers. . . Indeed. . . Redemption Thru Fear! It knocked 'em dead in Houston, so why not here?

10:05

The news, and John Dean again -- that fiendish little drone. (Did the president seem surprised when you gave him this information?) “No sir, he did not.”

The junkies are rolling up the tents at Camp David tonight. Mister Nixon has cashed his check. Press reports from “the Western White House” in San Clemente say the President has “no comment” on Dean's almost unbelievably destructive testimony.

No comment. The boss is under sedation. Who is with him out there on that lonely western edge of America tonight. Bebe Rebozo? Robert Abplanalp, W. Clement Stone?

Probably not. They must have seen what Nixon saw today -- that the Ervin committee was going to give Dean a free ride. His victims will get their shots at him tomorrow -- or next week -- but it won't make much difference, because the only ones left to question him are the ones he publicly ridiculed yesterday as tools of the White House. Baker's credibility is so crippled -- in the wake of Dean's references in his opening statement to Baker's alleged “willingness to cooperate” with the Nixon brain-trust in the days before these hearings -- that anything Baker hits Dean with tomorrow will seem like the angry retaliation of a much-insulted man.

And what can poor Gurney say? Dean contemptuously dismissed him -- in front of a nationwide TV audience of 70 million cynics -- as such a hopeless yo-yo that he wouldn't even have to be leaned on. Gurney was the only one of the seven senators on the Ervin committee that Nixon's strategists figured was safely in their pocket, before the hearings started. Weicker, the maverick Republican, was considered a lost cause from the start.

“We knew we were in trouble when we looked at that line-up,” Dean testified. There was something almost like a smile on his face when he uttered those words. . . the rueful smile of a good loser, perhaps? Or maybe something else. The crazy, half-controlled flicker of a laugh on the face of a man who is just beginning to think he might survive this incredible trip. By 4:45 on Tuesday, Dean had the dazed, still hyper-tense look of a man who knows he went all the way out to the edge, with no grip at all for a while, and suddenly feels his balance coming back.