Justice: The Memoirs of an Attorney General
Kleindienst, Richard
JUSTICE: THE MEMOIRS OF AN ATTORNEY GENERAL Richard Kleindienst/Jameson Books/$16.95 Tim W. Ferguson Richard Kleindienst has written the latest and perhaps last Watergate memoir, and his Justice:...
...So far as discussing with anybody on the staff of the White House what I was doing, what do you think I ought to do, what do you feel about it, what are your recommendations—no...
...Golly...
...The fatal flaw in the Nixon presidency, he finds, was that a complex and tortured man in the White House was poorly served by sycophantic lieutenants...
...The delegate polls in Dallas last year showed the Vice President the preponderant favorite four years hence, Kleindienst's axiom or no...
...No suggestions coming from the White House as to what action should be taken by Justice Department...
...The subject was the ITT antitrust case that became subsumed in the overall scandal, and the details are worth reviewing not only in assessing the author but for their applicability to present politics...
...But Democrats on the Judiciary Committee thought pressure had been exerted (recall the purported Dita Beard memo on ITT funds for the 1972 GOP convention) to compromise, and Sen...
...It did so, in my opinion, because of his great inherited wealth...
...It was largely he, in the trenches, who pieced together Barry Goldwater's nomination in 1964 and Richard Nixon's in 1968...
...Klein-dienst in April 1971 to order that the ITT action, a test case for some conglomerate busters in the Justice Department, be dropped...
...Lodge's favor, the author writes, but precluded Mr...
...Kleindienst's picture of his own innocence...
...Nixon that so many other former supporters came to, he shifts the focus...
...And that doesn't appear ascribable to an uncontested convention: No respected sampling has found much difference in outlook between the 1980 and 1984 GOP delegates...
...He has used this unlikely vehicle to salute virtuous souls pertinent to the story (each chapter is entitled after one or two...
...Nixon's nomination to confer with Nixon about a running mate...
...Rocky was always able to secure the best political talent for his campaign organizations...
...But he does seem to have brought some uncalculated emotion and compassion to his duties and his diary...
...Nixon have been touchingly depicted before...
...Ehrlichman, and then Mr...
...Here is what he has to say early on in this political autobiography about one man who couldn't win the hearts and minds of his party: The presidential nomination of the Republican party always eluded Nelson Rockefeller...
...After he left office, Mr...
...Kleindienst's confirmation hearing was one of the earliest of the now-familiar batterings of conservative appointees by congressional Democrats, and it fits the pattern...
...Kleindienst tells of being Barry Goldwater's surrogate among a handful of Republican elders gathered on the night of Mr...
...Nixon himself, had phoned Mr...
...His conduct was unassailable during the actual Watergate cover-up (though Mr...
...In an account somewhat at variance with the accepted history of the episode, Mr...
...A different sort of dissonance is evident in Mr...
...Kleindienst makes clear that his answer was a considered one and that he doesn't see it as a lie...
...Nixon when the candidate pretended to seek his counsel...
...But is integrity the product of arduous discussion...
...It stretches beyond the familiar Watergate deceits, all the way back to a telling anecdote about Walter Judd and the 1960 vice presidential nomination...
...Mr...
...This is not elegant writing, just as Mr...
...Judd before the discussion began by saying the fiery conservative congressman from Minnesota had ruled himself out for health reasons...
...Mr...
...Kleindienst is not remembered around Washington as a particularly elegant fellow...
...Such a condition of life is not so disadvantageous in the Democratic party if the person becomes a sensitive liberal...
...In his history, Mr...
...Still, we can gain from the impressions of a man who, in his rise from a modest upbringing in Winslow, Arizona, to Harvard (undergraduate and law), reflected the struggle and success of the Republican mainstream...
...Birch Bayh asked, "In the course of the whole business, did you ever talk to anybody at the White House staff, any advisers to the president, on the ITT matter...
...Who knows, the would-be "new majority party" may be transmogrifying into the sort of governing coalition, content with power and less fussy about principle, that kept the Democrats so well so long...
...Lack of forthrightness in the face of ideological opposition has brought more political trouble than it has skirted...
...Surely, there is evidence that good counsel, when offered and accepted, benefits a Commander-in-Chief and his nation...
...The purpose of the evasion clearly was to protect his President, whose call in any case hadn't made a difference...
...Kleindienst was anything in Washington, he was a GOP delegate-counter without peer...
...National candidates [sic] are won by an army of enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers who believe in a candidate personally and for what he stands...
...Kleindienst got into problems with testimony again, drawing a year's suspension from the Arizona Bar for a faulty account of conversations he had in 1976 with other lawyers in an insurance fraud involving a Teamsters (!) fund...
...Kleindienst replied, "For me to say that no one in the White House with whom I might have talked would not have raised the ITT question, I would not be prepared to say that...
...But the response was not the whole truth or anything near it...
...Kleindienst could date himself with this work more than first appears...
...they do not excuse the lies and betrayals...
...They help us appreciate the man...
...Klein-dienst, who was still deputy attorney general but was overseeing ITT matters because Attorney General Mitchell had a conflict of interest, dodged the order and his undisturbed subordinates eventually reached a settlement with the company...
...Thruston Morton, the Kentucky senator, and Henry Cabot Lodge...
...Nixon not only had stacked the deck in Mr...
...Politicians and pundits have until 1988 to chew on it...
...Kleindienst, in his generous way, has reached the verdict on Mr...
...If Mr...
...The many sides of Mr...
...And he has used it to say thanks—the Acknowledgments, for friendship and support, go to scores of his acquaintances, including three Supreme Court justices (and George Shultz, spelled correctly...
...He calls himself "liberal on civil rights," and in his discussion of such episodes as the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee the old conservative indeed appears mellowed...
...Nixon, this version has it, told the group he had narrowed the choice to three: Mr...
...JUSTICE: THE MEMOIRS OF AN ATTORNEY GENERAL Richard Kleindienst/Jameson Books/$16.95 Tim W. Ferguson Richard Kleindienst has written the latest and perhaps last Watergate memoir, and his Justice: The Memoirs of an Attorney General is worth some note in that regard...
...who never had a debt, who never had to save for his retirement, or who never had to sacrifice to educate his children...
...No sir...
...Judd, the convention keynoter...
...If, however, the best is paid for, it probably isn't the best for political effectiveness...
...But before gearing up for another trek through that muck, let's zero in on one timely element of the account: what this electoral war-horse has to suggest about Republican presidential prospects...
...The Day mob in Washington and other protests of the period...
...Recall that before Mr...
...Kleindienst has, in the process, offered truth and wisdom as well, his contnoution shall have been worth the wait...
...Kleindienst settles his share of scores, but is generally kind—not only to his onetime boss John Mitchell, to whom he remains fiercely loyal, but to most others who gained notoriety during Watergate...
...Nor, on the other side, is Archibald Cox, the supreme ethicist who as special prosecutor leaked Kleindienst's confidential disclosures to Senators Edward Kennedy and Philip Hart and their staffers (and thus to the press), thereby poisoning the well of justice in his case...
...Judd (who today is alive and well in Washington) told Mr...
...The nomination eluded Rockefeller for another reason...
...The middle class is a little leery about anybody who never had a mortgage on his house, Tim W. Ferguson is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...Nixon forced his resignation along with Haldeman's and Ehrlichman's, forever branding him), but he did draw a minor fine and sentence (both suspended) for faulty testimony during his 1972 confirmation hearing to be attorney general...
...Kleindienst maintains his book "is not a judgment of Richard Nixon," but in rather oblique fashion, it is...
...This type of Nixonian duplicity forms a pattern as the years pass...
...Likewise, though the recollections of his career leading up to and including four-plus years in the Nixon Justice Department are for the most part undocumented, they can add perspective to the countless other accounts of the period...
...If only he hadn't been so relaxed about misspellings of bit players in the drama (Schultz, Flannigan, Bret Hume, Seymour Hersch) or indulgent in needless detail (more than 100 words on how one is wired to a polygraph machine...
...Curiously, the nation's former top law-enforcement officer treats this incident not at all in his actual memoirs, but includes as an unreferenced appendix an exculpatory letter about it from his lawyer...
...He even has nice words for Bob Haldeman...
...John Ehrlichman, his go-between to the President, and John Dean, his onetime aide, aren't so fortunate, however...
...Is there a message here for pragmatist-patrician George Bush...
...Kleindienst years later that he had done no such thing, and in fact had recommended himself to Mr...
...It is, however, a handicap in the Republican party, the basic core of which is middle class...
...Yet, just as it appears that Mr...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
