Sen. Talmadge: “Now, if the President could authorize a covert break-in and you do not know exactly where that power would be limited, you do not think it could include murder, do you?” John Ehrlichman: “I do not know where the line is, Senator.”

With the first phase of the Watergate hearings more or less ended, one of the few things now unmistakably clear, as it were, is that nobody in Nixon's White House was willing to “draw the line” anywhere short of re-electing the President in 1972. Even John Mitchell -- whose reputation as a super-shrewd lawyer ran afoul of the Peter Principle just as soon as he became Nixon's first Attorney General -- lost his temper in an exchange with Sen. Talmadge at the Watergate hearings and said, with the whole world watching, that he considered the re-election of Richard Nixon in '72 “so important” that it out-weighed all other considerations.

It was a classic affirmation of the “attorney-client relationship” -- or at least a warped mixture of that and the relationship between an ad agency executive and a client with a product to sell -- but when Mitchell uttered those lines in the hearing room, losing control of himself just long enough to fatally confuse “executive loyalty” with “executive privilege,” it's fair to assume that he knew he was already doomed. . . He had already been indicted for perjury in the Vesco case, he was facing almost certain indictment by Archibald Cox, and previous testimony by John Dean had made it perfectly clear that Nixon was prepared to throw John Mitchell to the wolves, to save his own ass.

This ominous truth was quickly reinforced by the testimony of John Ehrlichman and Harry “Bob” Haldeman, whose back-to-back testimony told most of the other witnesses (and potential defendants) all they needed to know. By the time Haldeman had finished testifying -- under the direction of the same criminal lawyer who had earlier represented Ehrlichman -- it was clear that somebody in the White House had finally seen fit to “draw the line.”

It was not quite the same line Mitchell and Ehrlichman had refused to acknowledge on TV, but in the final analysis it will be far more critical to the fate of Richard Nixon's presidency. . . and, given Mitchell's long personal relationship with Nixon, it is hard to believe he didn't understand his role in the “new strategy” well before he drove down from New York to Washington, by chauffeured limousine, for his gig in the witness chair.