Watergate, page 17
Nixon chose a different path. Not only did he appoint his campaign leader to head the department, a man who had never worked there or even as a prosecutor at any level, but he filled seven of the top eight positions with campaign staff or defeated political candidates.I The choice for the department’s number two, Richard Kleindienst, was almost as incongruous, epitomizing the new type of conservative partisan Nixon had tried to populate his administration with as he arrived in 1969. A former Goldwater campaign aide fluent in Navajo from growing up in Winslow, Arizona, Kleindienst was aggressive but inexperienced. He had been learning on the job since he started—surprised at one point when he was told that there were ninety-three U.S. attorneys and an equal number of U.S. marshals spread across the country.
The appointments worried department veterans. “When the attorney general was the president’s campaign manager, the deputy attorney general was a campaign field director, and three assistant attorneys general recently ran for office, you are politicizing things, no matter what kind of face you try to put on it,” Lyndon Johnson’s deputy attorney general Warren Christopher had warned.
Some of the department’s early moves under Nixon had seemed to herald just that type of politically beneficial decision-making: It waved away charges against twenty-one GOP finance chairs who had violated campaign reporting rules outlined in the Corrupt Practices Act, and it dropped a potential bribery case involving a Maryland contractor and multiple U.S. congressmen. Then there was the antitrust case against El Paso Natural Gas Company, a client of Mitchell and Nixon’s law firm; in the administration’s first week, the Justice Department suddenly abandoned the suit.
Mitchell and Kleindienst additionally seemed to have little appreciation of department culture. Kleindienst turned out to be a tough-talking and sometimes boorish manager and insisted the department’s lawyers begin recording their days in quarter-hour increments and tracking their incoming and outgoing telephone calls for review. Day to day, he ran the organization as Mitchell found himself juggling three full-time jobs in 1970 and 1971—attorney general, reelection campaign manager, and senior Nixon advisor—in addition to the demanding challenge of his wife.
As winter progressed, Mitchell finally had to move to the campaign full-time, and he announced on February 15, 1972, that he’d resign as attorney general effective March 1. Martha had fought the move as hard and long as she could, fearing the loss of status and perks that came with being a cabinet spouse—she’d even enlisted Bebe Rebozo for help to undo her husband’s reassignment—but at every turn she was told that Mitchell was precisely what the president needed to win his reelection. “Mitchell knew that it was his manifest destiny to run Nixon’s last campaign,” campaign aide Robert Odle recalled. Martha didn’t see why he had to choose. She argued, not wrongly, “He’s been running it from there ever since CREEP started.”
The departure touched off a fateful series of musical chairs: Nixon nominated Kleindienst to succeed Mitchell, and another loyal Nixon aide, L. Patrick Gray III, to succeed Kleindienst. (As Mitchell stepped down, Kleindienst hailed him as “the greatest attorney general that the Department of Justice has had in its 100-year history.”) The Senate moved in late February to take up Kleindienst’s and Gray’s fairly straightforward nominations. While Gray didn’t have any law enforcement experience, the onetime navy submarine officer had worked on Nixon’s ’60 and ’68 presidential campaigns, worked in the Health, Education, and Welfare Department during the administration’s first year, and later landed at the Justice Department heading the civil division. The Senate initially appeared ready to approve both men, but as their joint confirmation hearings wrapped up on Wednesday, February 23, Senator Ted Kennedy asked for the odd proviso that the committee have a week to ready its confirmation of Kleindienst.
The confirmation hearings were only a minor story as Nixon’s historic trip to China dominated the world’s headlines—a week of grandiose diplomacy, pomp, circumstance, touring, and elaborately staged photo ops as the president opened up the closed world of the Chinese empire to Western cameras. On the evening of February 28, Nixon arrived back at the White House triumphant, greeted by his family, vice president, and other luminaries, and addressed the nation from Andrews Air Force Base about his momentous, first-of-its-kind journey.II
He went to bed that night at 11:52 and woke up the next morning to the biggest (but not the last) scandal of his administration.
* * *
As Richard Kleindienst read the newspapers that next day, he suddenly knew why Ted Kennedy had asked for a week’s delay in his nomination: Since the fall, Jack Anderson had been digging around on the Nixon administration’s suspicious handling of a controversial merger by the conglomerate ITT. Now he appeared to have the goods on the attorney general nominee, and the Democratic senator clearly had been tipped off.
The controversy dated back to the earliest months of the Nixon administration; following the also suspicious abandonment of the El Paso Gas case, the Nixon Justice Department had seemingly been set to crack down on other oversized companies, appointing the well-respected and hard-nosed Richard McLaren as its head of antitrust enforcement—the lone non–Nixon aide or losing politician among the department’s eight senior officials. He appeared beyond reproach and immediately took a firm line, warning publicly against any merger among the nation’s two hundred largest firms or within already concentrated industries.
That public warning, however, apparently meant little to the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, which had grown in prior years into one of the world’s largest companies and the nation’s archetypal conglomerate. CEO Harold “Hal” Geneen’s vision had made him the Napoleon of American industry, growing the company from $800 million in annual revenue to more than $7 billion, accumulating 390,000 employees in more than 300 subsidiaries throughout 67 countries around the world, and weaving together big brands like Sheraton Hotels, Avis Rent-a-Car, the maker of Wonder Bread, and the home-builder Levitt & Sons, as well as all manner of smaller companies, ranging from cosmetics to auto parts to book publishing. Growth largely came through a steady stream of mergers and acquisitions, as many as five a month, and repeatedly triggered the government’s antitrust fears—at one point, the government had blocked ITT from purchasing the ABC television network.III
In April 1969, ITT forged ahead with the largest merger in corporate history, attempting to purchase the Hartford Insurance Company. There was reason to believe it could push past government concerns: ITT had built out an almost unparalleled network of well-connected lobbyists and former officials, including a former CIA director and onetime secretaries-general of both NATO and the United Nations, and spent liberally on campaign contributions.IV
Within days of the proposed Hartford merger, McLaren wrote privately to Mitchell, “If [the] Antitrust [Division] is ever to take action to prevent such a restructuring of the market, this acquisition of a leading firm by the largest conglomerate is the one to challenge.” He asked for permission to seek a temporary restraining order to litigate the question before the merger was completed, but Mitchell turned him down. Only after the merger became official in November 1969 did the Justice Department finally file multiple antitrust lawsuits, challenging not just the Hartford purchase but also ITT’s simultaneous purchase of Automatic Canteen, a vending-machine giant, and Grinnell, the dominant manufacturer of fire sprinklers.
For the better part of two years, the government and ITT jockeyed over the lawsuits. McLaren saw them as key to protecting competition amid a wave of mergers that had seen 110 of the nation’s 500 biggest companies swallowed up since the mid-1960s, but in July 1971, the Justice Department made a surprise announcement that it was settling the case. ITT, the government agreed, would keep Hartford, but sell off other components, including Avis, Canteen, and its Levitt home-building work. Nearly simultaneously, McLaren resigned from his post and was nominated and confirmed quickly to a federal judgeship in Chicago—a process that normally takes months but was magically accomplished by the administration in just hours. “I immediately smelled a rat, but could find no evidence that the judgeship was tainted,” Ted Kennedy later recalled.
Columnist Jack Anderson had also taken notice and was further convinced of backroom dealings as news trickled out that fall that ITT had made a $400,000 donation in June to the Republican National Convention. Anderson suspected there was even more to the story—after all, the head of both the Justice Department and the president’s reelection campaign were one and the same. He also learned Connecticut regulators had only approved the deal after the company promised an expensive new build-out of offices and a new ITT-Sheraton Hotel in downtown Hartford.
Through the fall, Anderson’s reporters dug deeper and his column hinted at nefarious doings; one published in December said an “aura of scandal” hung over the merger and included details about how Connecticut’s insurance commissioner had met secretly with company officials, as well as a scoop that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating suspicious stock sales that benefited ITT executives.
On Tuesday, February 29, the morning’s papers carried Anderson’s latest report. For the last week, his colleague, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old named Brit Hume, had been confirming the authenticity of a June 1971 memo leaked to them on the first day of Kleindienst’s hearing. The memo from an ITT lobbyist named Dita Beard appeared to explicitly outline a quid pro quo between the Justice Department lawsuit and the RNC donation. “Our noble commitment has gone a long way toward our negotiations on the mergers eventually coming out as [CEO] Hal [Geneen] wants them,” she’d written. “Certainly the President has told Mitchell to see that things are worked out fairly. It is still only McLaren’s mickey-mouse we are suffering.… If it gets too much publicity, you can believe our negotiations with Justice will wind up shot down. Mitchell is definitely helping us, but cannot let it be known.” Her memo ended with a simple request: “Please destroy this, huh?”
Anderson followed up his Tuesday scoop with additional reports on Wednesday and Friday, revealing a previously unknown series of meetings between Kleindienst and an ITT director in April 1971. Realizing his nomination was in jeopardy, Kleindienst pleaded with the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, James O. Eastland, to restart the hearing. “[Kleindienst] insisted that he had never talked to Mitchell or anyone else at the White House about the ITT case,” Kennedy later recalled. “He was lying.”
On March 2—one day after Mitchell officially stepped down to begin his work on CREEP—the judiciary committee relaunched what would become the Senate’s longest confirmation battle in history, a process that would stretch through the end of April and involve more than 20 days of hearings, 32 witnesses, 193 exhibits and pieces of evidence, and a transcript that would reach 1,791 pages. The hearings and the ITT controversy would all but paralyze Mitchell during his first month on the campaign.
By the time the Senate reconvened on March 2, Dita Beard had disappeared. Robert Mardian called Mark Felt to locate her and serve her with a congressional subpoena to appear before the Senate—soon, a team of twenty-four FBI agents, spread across five states, were on the hunt. At the bureau, Felt worried again about the FBI getting pulled into the administration’s shenanigans: “I did not like the assignment, which smelled of politics.”
* * *
Until that fateful February, Dita Beard had been an under-the-radar power player—the sole registered lobbyist for ITT in the capital and a fifty-three-year-old, twice-divorced native Washingtonian with a strong joie de vivre, kept all too busy raising five children as a single parent. Succeeding wildly in D.C. despite its dominant male influence, she earned a reputation of being able to out-drink, out-shoot, out-play, and out-curse just about any male colleague. “Falstaffian,” one newspaper described her in a headline a few days into the scandal.
She’d first confirmed the memo as authentic in an initial meeting with Hume at her office on February 24, then later that night summoned him to her home, where during a two-hour, tear-filled follow-up interview she explained the ITT PR team wanted her to disavow the whole thing. “But that would be a lie and she wouldn’t lie like that,” Hume wrote in his interview notes to Anderson. “I finally began to press her to tell if there been an agreement of this kind. She was weeping now. She nodded yes. I asked her if it was negotiated by her. Again, a yes nod. With Mitchell? Again, yes, nodding.”
ITT, in an strategy session at its Park Avenue headquarters in New York, quickly settled on a three-pronged attack: Undermine the memo, Beard, and Anderson.V The Senate seemed willing to cooperate: Its initial list of new witnesses were all administration voices, like Mitchell, Kleindienst, and McLaren, who all testified that there had been nothing untoward about the process. Kleindienst demurred, saying yes, he’d had contact with an ITT executive, but had simply referred the man to McLaren’s office. McLaren, for his part, said he’d reversed himself after being convinced by ITT’s pleas that divesting itself of Hartford Insurance might cause large, negative ripple effects in the economy. The testimony was so one-sided and surface-level that Anderson and Hume ultimately insisted they be allowed to testify too.
When Beard finally resurfaced, it was in a Denver hospital, where she was reportedly being treated for heart problems. Back in D.C., her longtime doctor seemed to break every medical ethic by testifying at length about his patient’s drinking and bouts of “distorted and irrational behavior.” “Her thoughts do not flow in a logical order. She would become so disoriented that she would be incapable of a legal act, such as signing a will or a letter,” he told lawmakers. The message that her memo wasn’t to be trusted was clear, but cross-examination by senators in the hearing revealed that the doctor had visited the Justice Department twice just prior to testifying and had never reported any concerns to ITT during his regular, corporately mandated reports on her health.
The pressure on Beard herself was also high; on March 6, the company withheld her expected $15,000 annual bonus—a third of her annual compensation. Through it all, the White House worked closely with ITT to defuse the scandal and smooth Kleindienst’s confirmation. Colson dispatched Hunt to interview Beard in the hospital, wearing his CIA-provided red wig and traveling under his cover name “Edward T. Hamilton.” He took an envelope of cash from Liddy, met with Beard’s daughter in D.C., and flew to Denver, where he told Beard he was a “friend of Hal’s,” the ITT CEO. In an extended interview watched over by her physician, Hunt pressed her on whether her memo was real or a forgery and reassured her that the missing bonus was “doubtless a misunderstanding.” Far from being fired, Hunt promised, her job at ITT was secure and waiting when she felt better. Hearing that she’d be financially taken care of had an instant, profound effect on her memory. “Her recollection seemed to have improved, for she now told me she could not have typed the memorandum,” Hunt reported. He phoned Colson with updates throughout the three conversations and, after getting what he needed, told Beard that ITT planned to take care of her hospital bills too.
Back in D.C., Colson and the White House worked with Hunt’s employer, the Robert Mullen Company, to draft a public statement on ITT’s behalf. On March 17, a new lawyer for Beard, paid for by ITT and sharing an office with a Republican Party committeeman, announced that the memo was a “forgery, a fraud, and a hoax.”
The next day at the White House, aides talked Nixon through planting their own forgery with Anderson, with the aim of discrediting his reporting. “Don’t we have some spurious stuff that we can give to Jack Anderson?” Haldeman asked.
“I got just the scheme for that,” Colson said.
They then discussed how to soil the reporters with allegations of homosexuality. “Do we have anything on Hume?” Haldeman asked. “I thought there was some taint on him.”
“We’re doing a check on him. We don’t have it yet,” Colson replied.
“It would be great if we could get him on a homosexual thing,” Haldeman said.
Nixon recalled an old rumor he’d heard: “Anderson, I remember from years ago: he’s got a strange, strange habit out of—I think [Anderson’s colleague Drew] Pearson was [homosexual], too,” the president said. “I think he and Anderson [were].”
Soon, the inner circle’s conversations turned even more sinister. One day, Colson pulled Hunt into his office and Colson explained, Hunt would later recount, that Nixon was “incensed” over the “son of a bitch” Anderson’s ongoing publication of leaks. The columnist “had become a great thorn in the side of the President.” It was time, Colson said, to “stop Anderson at all costs.” Hunt was “authorized to do whatever was necessary” to assassinate Jack Anderson. “I assumed, as I usually do with Colson, that he was either reflecting the desires of the Chief Executive, or else that as a prescient staff officer, was attempting to find a solution to a problem that was troubling his chief,” Hunt later said.
Hunt immediately teamed up with Liddy, confiding that he’d received word from “my principal,” the code he always used to refer to Colson, that they had to do something about the reporter. He explained that Anderson had crossed the line in airing the nation’s secrets. “As a direct result of an Anderson story, a top U.S. intelligence source abroad had been so compromised that, if not already dead, he would be in a matter of days,” Liddy recalled being told. “Something had to be done.”
Over lunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel on March 24, across Lafayette Park from the White House, Hunt and Liddy met with Dr. Edward “Manny” Gunn, a recently retired CIA physician, and spoke in broad hypotheticals about how an accident might befall their victim. Anderson’s name was never used in the conversation; instead Liddy presented a hypothetical case where they were seeking to remove someone who was compromising the identity of intelligence sources, but by midway through the conversation Liddy assumed Gunn had seen through the thin cover story and guessed the would-be target’s identity. Hunt wondered whether a massive dose of LSD, spread across a steering wheel, might lead to a car crash. Gunn thought it unlikely to work, and instead suggested staging a fiery crash; Liddy and Hunt said they weren’t sure they had access to a driver necessary to initiate such an event. They discussed and rejected options like trading out the victim’s aspirin for poisoned pills, fearing the risk that a family member or visitor would end up taking the medicine instead. Finally, they settled on a run-of-the-mill mugging, turned wrong. Washington was experiencing an epidemic of street crime, and it seemed easy to imagine that even a famed columnist might coincidentally be cut down for his wallet and watch. At the end of lunch, Hunt handed Gunn a $100 bill from CREEP’s coffers for his time.VI
