The tone of the letters, as well as the refusal of the Presdent and his assistants to indicate any move toward conciliation with the committee, had an air of finality—that the President, after months of wavering from one position to another on release of material had now set a hard‐line course and intended to follow it to the end.

Commitment Is Cited

Even though his flat refusal to yield more materials is considered certain to increase the chances of his impeachment by the House, his assistants said his action was backed up by a deep sense of commitment and determination.

Mr. Nixon's outright rejection of Congressional subpoenas in an impeachment proceeding had no precedent. On April 30, he complied in part with the committee's first subpoena by making public edited transcripts of recorded conversations, both those requested and additional ones that taken together, he said, constituted all of the Presidential conversations dealing with Watergate.

Many Presidents have refused requests from Congressional committees for a variety of information from the White House files, but their refusals were usually accompanied by an explanation that only in the event of an Impeachment inquiry would a ‘President have no ground for refusing Congressional access to Presidential records.

President James K. Polk wrote in 1846 that in event of a House impeachment proceeding “all the archives and papers of the executive departments, public or private, would be subject to the inspection and control of a committee [of the House] and every facility in the power of the executive be afforded to enable them to prosecute the investigation.”

The Judiciary Committee am May 15 issued two subpoenas demanding that the President turn over the tape recordings of 11 conversations said to concern the Watergate case, and diaries of Mr. Nixon's White House meetings during an eight‐month period in 1972 and 1973. This was part of a sustained bipartisan effort by the committee to obtain materials Mr. Nixon had refused to yield.

Mr. Nixon, in his letter to Mr. Rodino, said neither subpoena had been specific as to subject matter and “I can only presume that the material’ sought must be thought to relate in some unspecified way to what has generally been known as ‘Watergate.'”