What will Nixon do now? That is the question that has every Wizard in Washington hanging by his or her fingernails -- from the bar of the National Press Club to the redwood sauna in the Senate Gymnasium to the hundreds of high-powered cocktail parties in suburbs like Bethesda, MacLean, Arlington, Cabin John and especially in the leafy white ghetto of the District's Northwest quadrant. You can wander into Nathan's tavern at the corner of M Street & Wisconsin in Georgetown and get an argument about “Nixon's strategy” without even mentioning the subject. All you have to do is stand at the bar, order a Bass Ale, and look interested: The hassle will take care of itself; the very air in Washington is electric with the vast implications of “Watergate.”

Thousands of big-money jobs depend on what Nixon does next; on what Archibald Cox has in mind; on whether “Uncle Sam's” TV hearings will resume full-bore after Labor Day, or be either telescoped or terminated like Nixon says they should be.

The smart money says the “Watergate Hearings,” as such, are effectively over -- not only because Nixon is preparing to mount a popular crusade against them, but because every elected politician in Washington is afraid of what the Ervin committee has already scheduled for the “third phase” of the hearings.

Phase Two, as originally planned, would focus on “dirty tricks” -- a colorful, shocking and essentially minor area of inquiry, but one with plenty of action and a guaranteed audience appeal. A long and serious look at the “dirty tricks” aspect of national campaigning would be a death-blow to the daily soap-opera syndrome that apparently grips most of the nation's housewives. The cast of characters, and the twisted tales they could tell, would shame every soap-opera scriptwriter in America.

Phase Three/Campaign Financing is the one both the White House and the Senate would prefer to avoid -- and, given this mutual distaste for exposing the public to the realities of Campaign Financing, this is the phase of the Watergate Hearings most likely to be cut from the schedule. “Jesus Christ,” said one Ervin committee investigator, “we'll have Fortune's 500 in that chair, and every one of those bastards will take at least one Congressman or Senator down with him.”

At the end of Phase One -- the facts & realities of the Watergate affair itself -- the seven Senators on the Ervin committee took an informal vote among themselves, before adjourning to a birthday party for Senator Herman Talmadge, and the tally was 4-3 against resuming the hearings in their current format. Talmadge cast the deciding vote, joining the three Republicans -- Gurney, Baker and Weicker -- in voting to wrap the hearings up as soon as possible. Their reasons were the same ones Nixon gave in his long-awaited TV speech on August 15th, when he said the time had come to end this Daily Bummer and get back to “The business of the people.”