More Evidence: Huge Case for Judgment
Still more evidence--15 volumes in all--poured from the House Judiciary Committee last week, covering the far-flung aspects of the impeachment proceedings. The evidence documented the misuse of the IRS to intimidate political opponents, the widespread surveillance of Government officials and newsmen and the raising of milk prices after the promise of a $2 million campaign contribution from dairymen. But the President seemed to be cleared of charges that he had forced a settlement of an antitrust suit against ITT in return for a pledge of up to $400,000 contribution to the G.O.P. National Convention. He tried to order the Justice Department to drop the suit, however, because businessmen were unhappy about the Administration's temporarily aggressive antitrust policy. Buttressing a narrative of events was an impressive array of documents, including previously undisclosed transcripts of White House tapes, grand jury and congressional testimony, memos from the White House and federal agencies, letters, logs and phone conversations. It all added up to the most massive case made against any political figure in the history of the nation.
Using Taxes as Weapons
The Judiciary Committee's 440-page book of evidence on the Nixon Administration's repeated attempts to use the nation's tax-collecting machinery to harass political opponents and reward political friends shows an unprecedented abuse of the Internal Revenue Service. The White House targets for tax punishment ranged from such respected organizations as the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution to such radical groups as Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers. A variety of individuals selected for special scrutiny included Lieut. General James M. Gavin, Washington Lawyer Clark Clifford, Economist Walter W. Heller and Actress Shirley MacLaine (all were Democrats). The intended harassment, which began early in the Nixon Administration, was often blocked by the men Nixon himself had appointed commissioners of the Internal Revenue Service or by Treasury Department officials. Though bullied by top White House aides, these men often insisted that the integrity of nonpartisan application of tax laws must be protected and that political use of tax information on individuals not only violated privacy but also violated federal law governing the IRS. Non-political audits are of course commonplace. Many taxpayers are routinely audited in random checks of their returns, or because some part of their filing does not fit normal patterns and is detected and flagged by computers.
Nixon's first two IRS commissioners both felt so strongly about the White House pressure that they threatened to quit rather than carry out the orders of his aides. The first, Randolph W. Thrower, objected in 1970 to one White House scheme on the ground that it might create "a personal police force" within IRS. His successor, Johnnie M. Walters, protested late in 1972 that another White House proposal would have been "disastrous for IRS and for the Administration and would make the Watergate affair look like a Sunday-school picnic." Obviously out of favor with the President, both commissioners finally quit.
Thrower's warning about a personal police force was in response to the President's attempt to appoint a secret investigator for the White House, John Caulfield, as the top enforcement official of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and to take that post out of the normal chain of command in IRS. Caulfield, a former New York City police detective, was then performing such White House chores as supervising a sporadic surveillance of Senator Edward Kennedy and wiretapping the home of Columnist Joseph Kraft.
Thrower fended off the Caulfield appointment.
Commissioner Walters was similarly incensed when he was summoned to the office of then Presidential Counsel John Dean on Sept. 11, 1972, given a list of 579 members of Democratic Candidate George McGovern's campaign staff and contributors to his funds, and instructed by Dean to investigate their taxes in a way that would "not cause ripples." The list included Gavin, Heller, Clifford and MacLaine, as well as former IRS Commissioner Mortimer M. Caplin, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, Entertainers Polly Bergen, Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner and former Diplomat Angier Biddle Duke. Walters told Dean it would be "disastrous" for the IRS to act on this request. He also protested to then Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz and, according to an affidavit given to the Judiciary Committee, Walters said: "Mr. Shultz looked briefly at the list and said do nothing with respect to it." Despite intense further prodding from Dean, Shultz and Walters refused to order tax audits of the McGovern supporters.
Sometimes the President's aides were more successful. On Sept. 21, 1970, Nixon Aide Tom Huston wrote a memo reminding the President's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that Nixon had "indicated a desire for IRS to move against leftist organizations taking advantage of tax shelters." Huston advised that "what we cannot do in a courtroom via criminal prosecutions to curtail the activities of some of these groups, IRS could do by administrative action."
Huston attached a report by Commissioner Thrower indicating that a "special-service group" had been set up within IRS to check on extremist organizations "on the right or left," including the leftist S.D.S. as well as right-wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan. This special-service group had compiled financial information on some 1,025 organizations and 4,300 individuals and had recommended "enforcement action" against 26 groups and 43 persons. As a result, eight organizations were denied their previous tax-exempt status.
Thrower advised Huston that "knowledge of the existence and operations of this group should be carefully limited."
The White House failed in its desire to harass the Ford Foundation and the Brookings Institution. Dean complained in a July 20, 1971, memo that Commissioner Walters was reluctant "to make discreet politically oriented decisions" and that "purposeful delay appears to be the chosen bureaucratic tact [sic]." Arguing that both Ford and Brookings engaged in "either direct or indirect political activity [which] represents formidable opposition to the best interests of this Administration," Dean urged that the President order John Connally, then Treasury Secretary, to attack tax-exempt foundations generally in a major speech. If he would not do so, Dean advised, Vice President Spiro Agnew could use a "hardhitting" and specific speech already prepared by Nixon Aide Patrick Buchanan for that purpose. Dean further offered to "turn the spigot off" on Government contracts to Brookings.
In the end, however, no contracts were canceled.
Getting tax information on individuals was relatively easy for the White House aides. Haldeman was able to obtain a "status report" on Gerald Wallace, brother of Alabama Governor George Wallace, in early 1970. Haldeman told Clark Mollenhoff, then a Special Counsel to the President (since returned to his reporting job for the Des Moines Register and Tribune), to acquire the information, and Mollenhoff agreed after being assured by Haldeman that Nixon wanted it. Mollenhoff got it from Assistant IRS Commissioner Donald W. Bacon. The report, which claimed that Gerald Wallace might have failed to report kickbacks from state liquor sales and federal highway contracts, was then leaked to Columnist Jack Anderson by a source "at the highest White House level," said Mollenhoff in a Judiciary Committee affidavit. The aim apparently was to impair George Wallace's re-election prospects in hopes of removing him from the 1972 presidential race. Anderson claims that he received the tax report from Murray Chotiner, a Nixon adviser who died early this year. Disclosing such tax information is a criminal offense.
Repeatedly bypassing the reluctant IRS commissioners, Dean, Caulfield and other Nixon aides often got tax information from Assistant Commissioner Vernon Acree, whom Nixon later promoted to Commissioner of Customs. According to Caulfield's secret testimony to the Senate Watergate committee, Acree told him how tax audits could be initiated by writing anonymous letters to the IRS. Acree followed such a procedure himself, according to Caulfield, in 1971 when the White House wanted a tax investigation made of Newsday Editor Robert Greene, who had written a series of articles exposing some financial dealings of C.G. ("Bebe") Rebozo, Nixon's closest friend. Greene was audited by New York State tax authorities after New York and IRS officials had exchanged information.
In an attempt to find out through tax audits in 1971 whether Actor John Wayne, a supporter of the President, was being unfairly treated by IRS, Caulfield secured tax-status reports from Acree on such other cinema celebrities as Richard Boone, Sammy Davis Jr., Jerry Lewis, Peter Lawford, Fred MacMurray, Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra, as well as on California Governor Ronald Reagan. After comparing these reports with Wayne's treatment by IRS, Caulfield concluded that "the Wayne complaint ... does not appear to be strong enough to be pursued." The same Acree-to-Caulfield connection gave the White House information on a 1971 IRS investigation of the Rev. Billy Graham's taxes. Dean sent Caulfield's findings along to Haldeman with the notation, "Can we do anything to help? ..." In a response that has never been explained, Haldeman wrote: "No--it's already covered."
The most brazen attempted use of the tax power by the White House was its persistent effort to destroy the reputation of Democratic National Chairman Larry O'Brien just before the 1972 election. Not only was O'Brien's phone bugged (in the Watergate breakin, the device failed to work), but John Ehrlichman, Nixon's top domestic aide, conceded in secret testimony to the Senate Watergate committee: "I wanted them [IRS officials] to turn up something and send him to jail before the election."
Apparently on its own initiative, IRS began looking into O'Brien's tax status when it learned from its investigation of Billionaire Howard Hughes' income taxes in late 1971 or early 1972 that O'Brien had received "fairly substantial amounts of money" from Hughes. O'Brien concedes that he was paid roughly $180,000 for public relations work he did for Hughes. According to Walters, Ehrlichman asked Secretary Shultz to get the IRS to find out if this money had been properly reported. At Shultz's request, the IRS checked and found that O'Brien had reported it for the years 1970 and 1971, had paid "a small deficiency" and that "the examinations were closed."
Ehrlichman was angry at IRS response and insisted that tax agents interview O'Brien again before the election. They did so, reporting no damaging information. When Ehrlichman learned of this, he scolded Walters in a phone call on Aug. 29, 1972. With Shultz listening in on Walters' line, Ehrlichman told Walters: "I'm goddam tired of your foot-dragging tactics." Reported Walters to the Judiciary Committee: "I was offended and very upset .. . Following the telephone conversation, I told Secretary Shultz that he could have my job any time he wanted it." Though Shultz wanted him to stay, Walters quit on April 30, 1973.
The Judiciary Committee is greatly interested in whether Nixon knew of these tactics to manipulate the IRS.
There is evidence that he did. The released tape transcripts show that Nixon told Dean on Sept. 15, 1972, to keep notes "on all those who tried to do us in" because "they are asking for it and they are going to get it." On March 13, 1973, Nixon seemed to be offering the use of the IRS to investigate the financing of McGovern's campaign and raised no objection when Dean said that he already had access to such information from IRS.
Earlier, when Commissioner Thrower told then Treasury Secretary David Kennedy in January 1971 that he planned to resign, Thrower asked for a chance to protest to Nixon "about White House attitudes toward the IRS." Kennedy said he would arrange a meeting with the President, but according to Thrower, "Haldeman told him that the President did not like such conferences." Persisting, Thrower expressed his concern to Attorney General John Mitchell, warning that "any suggestion of the introduction of political influence into the IRS would be very damaging to him [Nixon] and his Administration, as well as to the revenue system and the general public interest." Thrower said he next got a call from Nixon's appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, who reported that Mitchell had passed along Thrower's complaint and therefore no conference with the President was necessary. "Thereupon," said Thrower, "I submitted my resignation."
Still resenting his experience with the White House, former Commissioner Walters last week explained what he felt had been at stake in his dispute with Nixon's aides. "The very base of the democratic way of life and the republican form of Government," he said, "is built on the self-assessment tax system. Now if you louse that up, and it was loused up by those people, we don't have a democracy."
Spying Gone Haywire "I don't care whether he's a hawk or a dove or a--. If the son of a bitch leaked, he's not for the Government... I've studied these cases long enough, and it's always a son of a bitch that leaks." Thus--according to the transcript, newly released by the Judiciary Committee, of a conversation between the President, his chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman and Special Assistant Egil Krogh--did Richard Nixon in July 1971 show his outrage over continuing leaks of classified material and his determination to stop them. Since just after taking office in 1969, the President had been disturbed by the appearance of classified information in the press, beginning with a New York Times disclosure that the U.S. was secretly bombing in Cambodia and including Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon papers and the publication of the Administration's position in arms limitations [SALT] talks with the Soviet Union. His concern, argues James St. Clair, was entirely justified, and the wiretaps that he ordered to find the source of the leaks entirely legal. But the evidence on domestic surveillance released last week by the committee shows that the President and his men grossly abused their authority to spy on Americans. Surveillance that began out of concern for national security was used by people whose purposes were purely political. It is illegal, of course, for the White House to use FBI wiretaps to assemble political intelligence.
The evidence recounts much that was already known about the wiretapping that was ordered by the White House and carried out by the FBI. Between May 1969 and February 1971, 13 Government employees and five newsmen were tapped for periods ranging from less than a month to 21 months. So secret was the surveillance that the FBI did not even keep the wiretap logs in its regular files; copies were held by the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover or his assistant William Sullivan, while other copies went directly to the President or one of his closest advisers.
The impeachment panel's volumes show that three people continued to be tapped after they had left the National Security Council and thus had no access to classified material. They were Anthony Lake, Morton Halperin and Daniel Davidson, all former aides to Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council. Furthermore, Lake and Halperin were tapped after they left the Government entirely. According to the impeachment evidence, the political intelligence gleaned in this manner included:
> The "activities of certain potential Democratic candidates for national office." That information was revealed by the tap on Lake, whose phone was monitored for nine months after he left the Government, at a time when he was advising several political Democratic candidates on foreign policy.
> Information about the man whom Nixon at one time considered his most dangerous political rival, Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. This information was gained from the tap on Halperin when he worked as an adviser for Muskie in 1970-72 after leaving the Government.
> Information about the plans of former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford to criticize Nixon. A letter from Hoover to Nixon dated Dec. 29, 1969, states that the tap on Halperin disclosed that Clifford was preparing an article for LIFE critical of the Administration's Viet Nam policy. This tip was fed to Jeb Stuart Magruder, then White House deputy director of communications. In a memo to H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Magruder urged a drive to counteract Clifford's article by, among other things, "relating some of Clifford's activities to the press that would indicate the hypocrisy of his position." Ehrlichman wrote to Haldeman:
"This is the kind of early warning we need more of--your game planners are now in an excellent position to map anticipatory action." In another handwritten memo Haldeman told Magruder: "I agree with John's point. Let's get going."
After the taps were on for only a few weeks, it had already become clear, to the FBI at least, that they were turning up no national security leaks. Indeed, the entire 21-month program did not uncover a single such leak--a fact the President seemed to recognize when he told John Dean on Feb. 28, 1973, that "they never helped us. Just gobs and gobs of material: gossip and bull shitting."
Yet the tapping continued for months after its uselessness to security became obvious. In May 1970, the FBI was ordered to stop giving wiretap logs to Henry Kissinger, then the President's national security adviser, and turn them over to Haldeman, the President's chief of staff and one of his main political advisers.
Who initiated the national security wiretaps? A Hoover memo dated May 9, 1969, points to Kissinger. "Dr. Henry A. Kissinger ... called from Key Biscayne ..." the memo states. "He advised that there is a story on the front page [of the New York Times] by [William Beecher] which is extraordinarily damaging and uses secret information. * Dr. Kissinger said they wondered whether I could make a major effort to find out where that came from. I said I would."
Two later memos from Hoover similarly name Kissinger as the initiator of taps on his aides, Winston Lord and Lake, and New York Times Reporter Hedrik Smith. But Kissinger has hotly disputed this, saying at his Senate confirmation hearings on his nomination as Secretary of State that his only role in the wiretap program was to supply the names of people who might have had access to classified material. When leaks from the Judiciary Committee raised doubts about his version, Kissinger angrily threatened to resign unless his name was cleared.
Kissinger's version of the events has considerable backing. His defenders have pointed out that Hoover was in the habit of name-dropping in his request for wiretap authorizations. Moreover, after some apparent indecision in the White House, President Nixon two weeks ago sent a letter to J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he took all responsibility for ordering the wiretaps. Former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 1973, offered an explanation that backed Kissinger while also accounting for Hoover's memos. Richardson testified that "although he is identified in the FBI record as having requested the taps directly ... my discussions with Dr. Kissinger have convinced me that he was not the originator, in the fundamental sense of the word, of any of these taps." Indeed, FBI memos in the new committee evidence show that Kissinger supplied only three names: Lord, Lake and Smith, who had written an article in June 1969 on the Administration's then unannounced plans to remove nuclear weapons from Okinawa.
Next week Kissinger will appear again before the Foreign Relations Committee to answer questions. The now prevailing interpretation: Kissinger approved of the wiretaps, and his forceful demand that the leaks be plugged may well have been a major factor in the President's decision to order them. But Kissinger only supplied names on request for a program that had already been ordered by the President.
The Judiciary Committee's evidence details for the first time the frantic efforts by the White House to keep the wiretap data secret. On July 12, 1971, the President ordered Robert Mardian, then Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Internal Security Division, to get the data from William Sullivan at the FBI. According to FBI interviews of Mardian, he showed the materials to Kissinger, Haldeman and Alexander Haig, Kissinger's assistant. Then, he says, he delivered the files to the Oval Office. Mardian was asked: "Did you give the bag [containing the wiretap files] to Mr. Nixon, the President of the United States?" His reply: "I cannot answer that question."
Mardian's answer, which implies that the President indeed saw the wiretap transcripts, could have an important bearing on the impeachment case. Reason: the evidence suggests, though it does not prove, a crucial connection between the wiretap records and the then ongoing trial of Daniel Ellsberg. The evidence shows that 15 conversations between Ellsberg and Halperin were included in the two boxes of wiretap data on Ellsberg. When William Matthew Byrne Jr., the judge in Ellsberg's trial, learned of the wiretaps and was advised of the break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg's psychiatrist, he dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and declared a mistrial because of Government misconduct. Possibly the President wanted to cover up all the wiretap data in order to keep secret the surveillance material on Ellsberg, so as not to damage the Government's case against him.
Another piece of evidence in the committee's volumes makes this interpretation plausible. On April 18, 1973, while the Ellsberg trial was still under way, Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen called to tell the President that E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had broken into Dr. Fielding's office. The President's curt reply: "I know about that. That's a national security matter. Your mandate is Watergate. Stay out of that." In mid-April, the Justice Department began to advise Judge Byrne of the Government's covert activities involving Ellsberg. On May 11, the case was dismissed.
The impeachment evidence contains much other new material on the President's role in the Ellsberg case.
> A transcript of a presidential tape, not previously disclosed, casts doubt on Nixon's claim that the Pentagon papers case was a matter of national security. The President and John Dean talked on July 24, 1971, about a New York Times article that contained secret material about the SALT talks then going on with the Soviet Union. That leak, said the President, "does affect the national security--this particular one. This isn't like the Pentagon papers."
> In a previously secret affidavit, John Ehrlichman swore before the U.S. district court that Nixon had given after-the-fact sanction of the Sept. 3, 1971, burglary of Dr. Fielding's office. After the break-in became known, the President publicly said that had he known about it beforehand, he "would have disapproved." Yet in a meeting with Ehrlichman on April 18, 1973, Nixon said that it had been "fully justified by the circumstances."
Nothing in the evidence indicates that Nixon knew in advance of the Fielding burglary, but he clearly created the mood of vengeance toward Ellsberg that led to it. He ordered Hoover to supply information on Ellsberg to Egil Krogh, the "plumber" who served 4 1/2 months in prison after pleading guilty to violating Dr. Fielding's civil rights. Charles Colson, who has been sentenced to one-to-three years in prison for smearing Ellsberg, reported in a newly revealed affidavit: "The President from time to time expressed his dissatisfaction with the aggressiveness of the [Ellsberg] investigations ..." Moreover, in what apparently set the stage for the Fielding burglary, the President told Plumbers Krogh and Young to do whatever was necessary to get information on Ellsberg.
The evidence indicates that Nixon knew too of the psychological profiles on Ellsberg that were prepared by the CIA.
In the summer of 1971, under pressure from the White House, a CIA psychiatrist had prepared a first profile that described Ellsberg as brilliant and patriotic. That August Plumbers Young and Hunt, apparently not satisfied with the report, provided the psychiatrist with some FBI reports and Department of State documents on Ellsberg and ordered a second profile.
"These men," the psychiatrist recalled in a previously secret affidavit, "were interested in obtaining information which could be used to defame or manipulate Ellsberg." The result was an unflattering portrait that emphasized "strong, although fluctuant, emotional attachments" and "sudden and extreme shifts in loyalty and enthusiasm." The new report referred to Ellsberg as "a very intelligent man" and denied that he was "emotionally disturbed in a psychotic or gross manner." It briefly mentioned his sex life and two years of psychoanalysis, but its focus was on traumatic childhood experiences--especially a car accident at 15 in which his mother and sister were killed--to explain his alleged psychological instability.
The evidence does not indicate how the second profile was put to use. The CIA turned it over to Young in November 1971, along with a letter from Director Richard Helms that stressed that the agency's "involvement in this matter should not be revealed in any context, formal or informal." Helms' concern was quite understandable. The only other American citizen to have been the subject of a CIA psychological profile was Lloyd Bucher, commander of the spy ship Pueblo, which was seized by North Korea in 1968. The CIA's interest in Bucher was legitimately tied to national security; the agency wanted to know how well he was likely to withstand the pressures of a rigorous interrogation about American spy operations. But it is a clear violation of the law for the CIA to get involved in domestic concerns, as it did with Ellsberg.
The President's intense feelings about the Ellsberg case refleeted his strong worries about leaks of many kinds. In one previously unpublished conversation with Ehrlichman and Krogh on July 24, 1971, the President was so outraged over the leaks concerning the SALT talks that he suggested that everybody in Washington with top-secret clearance--some 400 to 500 people--be given lie-detector tests. "Polygraph them all. I don't know anything about polygraphs and I don't know how accurate they are," the President said, "but I know they'll scare the hell out of people."
Similarly, Nixon's eagerness to collect intelligence on those whom he considered dangerous (mostly members of radical political groups) led him to briefly approve some clearly illegal operations in the so-called Huston Plan. The outlines of the plan have long been known; the Judiciary Committee evidence presents many of the reports and memos that circulated in the White House while it was under discussion.
Drafted in June 1970, by Presidential Staff Assistant Tom Charles Huston, the plan spelled out various ways for expanding domestic intelligence activities. Huston specifically pointed out that some of his recommendations--for secretly reading mail and surreptitious entries--were against the law.
Nevertheless, according to a Haldeman-to-Huston memo dated July 14, 1970, the President approved of these illegal operations. Five days later, after J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell balked, the President rescinded his approval.
Milking the Dairy Co-Ops
In the proposed articles of impeachment, President Nixon is charged with "acts of bribery" -- one of the few offenses specifically listed in the Constitution as reason for impeachment. Under one lesser provision of the bribery law, a public servant may be found guilty for merely receiving a gift and knowing that it was given to benefit the donor in his dealings with the Government. The recipient need not have actually performed the act for which the bribe was given, or even have intended to do so. The question before the Judiciary Committee: Under this broad definition, was Richard Nixon guilty of bribery for accepting campaign contributions from dairy corporations that benefited from increases in Government milk-price supports?
In 1969 three of the nation's major dairymen's cooperatives, eager to get on the good side of the new Republican President, contributed $100,000 to Herbert Kalmbach, then the President's personal lawyer and roving fund raiser. In the fall of 1970 the cooperatives pledged $2 million for Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972. The President was told of their pledge, but the cooperatives soon had reason to reconsider their generosity. On March 12, 1971, Agriculture Secretary Clifford Hardin, with the backing of the President, announced that federal milk-price supports would remain at $4.66 per cwt., or about 79% of parity, instead of the 90% that the dairymen wanted. The higher the supports go, the more money the dairymen are sure to get -- and, usually, the more consumers have to pay. After Hardin's announcement, the angry cooperatives decided to cancel plans to donate between $60,000 and $100,000 to a G.O.P. fund-raising dinner scheduled for March 24 in Washington.
Playing politics on their own, Democrats in Congress started drawing up bills to boost supports to at least 85% of parity. Lobbyists for the cooperatives urged Administration officials to raise the price supports, and the dairymen got an appointment to plead their case before Nixon on March 23.
Nixon took the precaution of taping the late-morning meeting. At one point he joked: "Matter of fact, the room is not tapped, [laughter] Forgot to do that [laughter]." The President said he was "very grateful" for the support the dairymen had given him--"and I don't have to spell it out." But nothing was said at this key meeting about the $2 million pledge or any deal. Nixon praised the virtues of the rural life, lauded the sleep-inducing properties of milk, gave each man presidential cufflinks and prudently refrained from even hinting at whether or not he would accede to the dairymen's request to raise parity.
Then Treasury Secretary John Connally swung into action, dominating a strategy session on the problem that was attended by the President and his top aides.
According to a transcript of the meeting, Connally urged Nixon to raise the parity to 85%. He noted that during the 1972 election, "you're going to have to be strong in rural America." He pointed out that the cooperatives were "amassing an enormous amount of money that they're going to put into political activities, very frankly." He argued persuasively that the Democratic Congress was going to take all the credit by giving the dairymen 85% of parity in a bill that the President could not possibly veto. "If you do," said Connally, "you've cost yourself the money--you've lost your political advantage. You, you're infinitely worse off." Later, Connally advised Nixon: "You're in this thing for everything, you, you can get out of it."
The President agreed that he could not veto a bill that raised parity. "Not because they're milkers, but because they're farmers," he said. "And it would be just turning down the whole damn Middle America. Uh, where, uh, we, uh, where we, uh, need support. And under the circumstances, I think the best thing to do is just, uh, relax and enjoy it." Minutes later Nixon said he would boost support prices--without saying just how high.
Then John Ehrlichman, the President's top domestic adviser, who knew all about the cooperatives' campaign offer, told Connally that he thought the new policy should not be revealed "till you get the green light." Connally quickly agreed, and the President interjected: "You, you're now thinking of the political offer?" The President was apparently referring to the campaign-contribution offer. The other participants in the conversation seem to have been thinking along the same lines. They agreed to hold up the announcement for two days until the White House had marked out final details and was convinced that the cooperatives would make good on their original pledges. Late in the 38-minute conversation, Nixon specified that the parity rise would be to 85%.
The dairymen immediately showed their good faith by scrambling to collect money. A group of officials of the Associated Milk Producers, Inc. (AMPI) arrived in Louisville at 4 a.m. the next day, March 24, for an airport conference with Paul Alagia, an official of another cooperative, Dairymen, Inc. They asked him to get together $100,000. That afternoon D.I. contributed $25,000 to the G.O.P. dinner, which was held that night.
After the banquet, Kalmbach met at the Madison Hotel with AMPI General Manager Harold Nelson and Murray Chotiner, Nixon's longtime hard-line political strategist, who had recently left the White House to become a lawyer for the cooperative. Kalmbach has told the Senate Watergate Committee that Ehrlichman arranged the meeting to make sure that Chotiner guaranteed the $2 million pledge because the announcement of the rise in parity was to be made the next day, March 25. In his testimony, Kalmbach clearly linked the pledge of money with the rise in price supports. Kalmbach's statement is the strongest evidence of a milk deal revealed by the committee's documents.
On March 25, with the pledge reaffirmed, the Nixon Administration announced an increase in milk-price supports to $4.93 per cwt., or approximately 85% of parity. But the three dairy cooperatives never lived up to their promise. According to the evidence, they gave only between $537,000 and $737,000 to the President's campaign. The story of the deal --contributions in return for higher prices--broke in the press in September 1971, scaring off the cooperatives. When the President's fund raisers asked for more money in October 1972, the dairymen toyed with the idea, especially since the Justice Department had filed an antitrust suit against AMPI. (The case is still before the courts.) But the President's men also were beginning to get wary as the investigation mounted into the deal of milk and money.
Nixon Listens to His Tapes
One of the strangest pieces of evidence to be found in the entire Judiciary Committee report is a previously undisclosed transcript of a White House conversation on June 4, 1973.
John Dean had been talking to the Watergate prosecutors for more than eight weeks, and the President, painfully aware of the trouble he was in, spent more than twelve exhausting hours listening to tapes that might incriminate him in the Watergate coverup. (Some of these he withheld from the Special Prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee.) With a kind of desperation, he tried to put the best possible interpretation on his conversations with Dean. His aides--White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and Appointments Secretary Stephen Bull--were gathered around the President. He kept protesting his innocence to them, but at times almost sounded as if he were speaking for the record (or possibly for the tape recorder, which he knew was still running). He also kept seeking reassurance from the aides. "...
Really, the goddam record is not bad, is it?" the President asked. "Makes me feel very good," replied Ziegler.
At first, Nixon had trouble sorting out the commentary:
President: [Sighs] This is hard work.
Haig: It is.
President: But I've got to do it. Got to do it. And it's best for me to do it too.
Nixon and Ziegler examined the March 13 conversation with Dean sentence by sentence. Though Nixon has consistently claimed that he did not know of the cover-up activities until March 21, his dialogue with Ziegler shows that he was aware of them on March 13:
Ziegler:... What you had in mind was--President: The hang-out route.
Ziegler: Relaying the hang-out in terms of Segretti...
President: Segretti, and, and the Watergate ... There's no cover-up in this--to this point, period--not one talk of coverup.
Ziegler: That's right.
President: You know, not one bit. There's a little, there's feeling of it through here ... they're hanging tough and so forth ... I suppose he [Dean] could say there that I was telling him to cover up, wouldn't you say for Haldeman?
Ziegler: I suppose he could say that in the context at the time... still, there's nothing.
President: I didn't know.
Ziegler: ... You were talking about political problems, not illegal problems... Damn it, I know that's the case...
President: That's why I said, 'Cut it off at the pass.' But what I was thinking there, was basically not to get all those guys pissing on each other. But Dean could go out, with probably some justification, and said [sic] that he ... told the President all about this...
The President kept returning to Dean's possible strategy.
"... Dean is likely to tell the lawyer the story, Ron, from his vantage point... Goddammit. Oh, the son of a bitch defects.
I didn't know." Later he reflected: "I should have reacted before the 21st of March, actually. Dean shouldn't have had to come in to me with the 'cancer in the heart of the presidency,' which, to his credit he did."
Again the President fell to his doubts: "I mean, God, maybe we were talking about a cover-up--Watergate. I really didn't, I didn't know what the hell--I honestly didn't know ... It's not comfortable for me because I was sitting there like a dumb turkey."
Then he referred to the March 21 tape: "... That's a tough conversation. Unless Haldeman explains it--which he will. [Sighs] But I think we can survive that too." Replied Ziegler: "Yeah, absolutely. We'll survive it all."
H.R. Haldeman, in fact, tried later to explain the conversation to a grand jury in such a way that the President would be cleared of participation in the coverup. For that explanation, Haldeman was indicted for perjury.
The Defense: No Proof
Replying to most, but not all of the charges against Richard Nixon, Presidential Counsel James St. Clair issued a 151-page brief last week that took the defense lawyer's classic position in a criminal case: his client is innocent until proved guilty, and the evidence presented in the Judiciary Committee hearings fails to constitute such proof. Beyond that, St. Clair claimed "a complete absence of any conclusive evidence demonstrating presidential wrongdoing sufficient to justify the grave action of impeachment."
The President's lawyer concentrated on Nixon's most vulnerable position: his denial of any participation in a scheme to conceal the origins of the wiretapping and burglary of Democratic National Headquarters. The St. Clair brief offered arguments to support three specific related claims:
There is no evidence that the President had knowledge prior to March 21, 1973, of an alleged plot to obstruct justice after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee.
Conceding that Nixon congratulated his former counsel, John Dean, in a taped conversation as early as Sept. 15, 1972, for "putting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there," St. Clair contended that Nixon was not referring to a "criminal plot to obstruct justice" but was speaking "in the context of the politics of the matter." The President, explained St. Clair, was concerned about Democratic exploitation of the affair and Democratic civil suits over the burglary. The brief claimed that Dean in his celebrated March 21, 1973, conversation with Nixon emphasized that the President was learning about the cover-up for the first time. Said Dean: "Well, I can just tell from our conversations that, you know, these are things that you have no knowledge of."
St. Clair also argued that it was FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III, rather than the President, who first suggested that the CIA may have been involved in the burglary. Thus, when Nixon told H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to meet with top CIA officials on June 23, 1972, it was not an attempt by Nixon to thwart the investigation but a natural follow-up to Gray's expressed concern about possible CIA involvement in Watergate.
According to St. Clair, the President was totally unaware of any destruction of evidence by his aides in attempting to cover up the Watergate burglary and of any perjury by them until Dean told him of it on March 21.
The evidence shows that the President did not authorize the payment of Howard Hunt's attorney fees.
On the key charge that Nixon had approved the payment of hush money to E. Howard Hunt in that March 21 conversation, St. Clair repeated his familiar rebuttal: the payment was set in motion by Nixon's aides before this meeting. When Nixon told Dean, "For Christ's sakes, get it...", Nixon meant only to give Hunt "a signal" of White House concern, not to make a payment of cash. The President was unaware that a cash payment was made on the evening of March 21. Moreover, if it was, any such payment was meant not as hush money but as a legal contribution to Hunt's defense fees and for the support of his family.
The evidence establishes that the President carried out his constitutional responsibility to see that the laws were enforced.
As soon as Nixon learned from Dean on March 21 about the extent of the coverup, St. Clair argued, the President launched his own investigation to get all the facts. When Dean was sent to Camp David and failed to produce a report, Nixon turned the investigation over to Ehrlichman. As part of this White House probe, Ehrlichman called Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and told him to report directly to the President if the Justice Department found evidence of any wrongdoing by anyone in the White House or by former Attorney General John Mitchell. Moreover, rather than trying to hide the facts, Nixon urged all his aides to testify before the Washington grand jury investigating the burglary, without granting them immunity. This, according to St. Clair, is what led Jeb Stuart Magruder, a key Nixon campaign aide, to go to the grand jury in one of the first moves to help crack the case. The President wanted Mitchell, too, to go before the grand jury, and Nixon instructed Ehrlichman to tell Mitchell that he should reveal all he knew about the burglary and to "let the chips fall where they may."
Beginning April 15, 1973, Nixon kept in almost daily touch with Henry Petersen, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, as the President cooperated fully in the Watergate investigation. St. Clair admitted that the President sometimes got confidential information from Petersen about the progress of the Justice Department's probe and passed it along to his suspect subordinates. This was not done to protect them, St. Clair argued, but to let them know that others were talking to the grand jury and so they must tell the truth. It was this kind of action by the President, sweepingly claimed St. Clair, "that resulted in Dean and Magruder cooperating with the prosecutors and the subsequent breaking of the case."
The defense brief handled other allegations against the President in far less detail. Dismissing charges that Nixon had violated the Fourth Amendment's protection of individual privacy by ordering wiretaps on Government officials and newsmen between May 1969 and February 1971, it argued that the taps were then perfectly legal and were justified by interests of national security. If Nixon had not called for such wiretaps to plug leaks from the National Security Council, St. Clair argued, "he would have failed in his constitutional responsibilities."
As for Nixon's creation of a secret White House squad of investigators, called the "plumbers," the brief argued that this too was a proper effort to protect national security and that "the President never explicitly or implicitly authorized anyone associated with this unit to commit illegal acts," including the Ellsberg burglary. Surprisingly, St. Clair claimed that Nixon deserves credit for informing the judge in the Ellsberg trial of this burglary since "there was no legal obligation to report the break-in." In fact, the judge had been seeking information about the Government's investigatory tactics against Ellsberg for weeks and dismissed the case when he learned of this White House-directed breakin.
As for charges that Nixon traded a rise in milk-price supports for a pledge of large campaign contributions from dairy producers, the brief repeated the President's public contention that he acted in response to general political and economic pressures rather than in return for campaign funds. Congress was pushing for such a raise in support, the brief noted, and Nixon might have been compelled by legislation to enact the raises anyway, because vetoing such a bill would have been politically unwise.
Finally, the brief tried to rebut charges that Nixon used the IRS machinery to harass political opponents. St. Clair contended that if Nixon's aides wrote memos to IRS officials seeking special tax treatment of political opponents, no such tax harassment was actually carried out. Ironically, the brief cited the "highly principled" character of the President's appointed IRS commissioners as substantiation that no White House pressure influenced them. That appears to be true because two commissioners threatened to resign rather than yield, although it is not at all certain that they felt that the President was unaware of the efforts of his aides.
In the introduction to his brief, St. Clair made a magnanimous-sounding offer to the Judiciary Committee: "Should the committee desire any additional submissions, the special counsel to the President would welcome the opportunity to respond to any particular request." That gesture seemed a bit odd, considering that Nixon has refused to comply with no fewer than eight subpoenas from the committee for the submission of 147 tape recordings of presidential conversations.
* On May 9, 1969, the New York Times published an article by William Beecher on the series of secret B-52 bombing raids on Cambodia.
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