THE SENATE'S LANGUID LIBERALS

...Liberal members of the Judiciary Committee were keeping a close watch on the Warner-Lambert case...

...Furthermore, when the Committee reopened its hearings following the Anderson allegation, it was on an informal basis and it was at Kleindienst's request...

...Returning to the Judiciary Committee at his own request, Kleindienst acknowledged that he had held a series of secret conferences with an ITT official during closed door negotiations on the antitrust case, and that he helped smooth the way for the out-of-court settlement which was widely regarded as a most profitable outcome for ITT...

...One news columnist had raised a substantive question while the members of a powerful Senate committee, with all the investigative tools of government at their disposal, had failed to explore even those matters which were already on the record...

...The Justice Department was excited by this mother lode of Democratic scandal in a state important to President Nixon's re-election effort—but officials quickly discovered that Sharp's lawyer during the time of the alleged crimes was Will R. Wilson, a Nixon appointee then serving as the head of the Department's Criminal Division and the man who would therefore head up any investigation by the Department into the situation...

...He was fined $5,000 and placed on probation for three years...

...On November 11 there was heavy trading in the stock of both companies...

...The principal politicians involved were mostly Democrats, including Governor Preston Smith, who, the SEC claimed, made $62,500 out of Sharp's stock manipulations, arid Texas House Speaker Gus Mutscher, who was alleged to have made about $42,000...

...On April 20, 1971, the FTC announced it would file suit to undo the merger, charging that it had substantially lessened competition in the drug business...

...Despite the Senate tradition of allowing a President to choose his cabinet without political interference, the Senate was taking its role of advice and consent more seriously, and Butz was in some difficulty...

...The Federal Trade Commission, as well, was watching the trend closely, and going to court to stop it when possible...

...Until the Anderson charges in the ITT affair pushed at least some of them into a more forceful stance, the liberals had played a passive if not languid role in challenging Kleindienst's involvement in these three Justice Department decisions suspiciously tinged with political considerations and personal favors...

...The Carson affair raises some intriguing questions about the operations of the Justice Department at its highest levels...

...A third case involved Kleindienst's approval of a drug company merger at a time when top officials of both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission were arguing for a temporary restraining order...

...He had required Department lawyers to fill out work sheets listing all their telephone calls and describing their actions for each quarter hour of the work day...

...Kleindienst wrote to his subordinate McLaren: "You are aware of the circumstances which have afforded me so little time to study this matter...

...After two days of rough questioning, a majority of the committee, including its orthodox chairman, Herman Talmadge of Georgia, disapproved the nomination...

...The Kleindienst-ITT case was still on the front pages of the nation's press when this issue of The Progressive was going to press in mid-March, but a newspaper columnist's disclosures in that case were only the top of the iceberg...

...The vote on confirmation was 13 to 0 in favor...

...One of these was the case of Robert T. Carson, former administrative aide to Republican Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii...

...He had directed the handling of the 1971 Mayday demonstrations, which led to the illegal arrests and detention of 10,000 persons...

...Senator Edward Kennedy was involving himself as chairman of the administrative practices subcommittee...

...The case was never mentioned...

...Submerged from public view was Kleindienst's curious involvement in three other Justice Department decisions suspiciously tinged with political considerations—cases that the liberals on the Committee could have been expected to seize on for public airing when they had an opportunity to obtain Kleindienst's explanation on the public record under oath...

...And how did the fact of an FBI investigation change the character of Carson's offer...

...When the date of the merger was finally set for November 13, 1970, word circulated in Washington and on Wall Street that the Government might go to court to prevent it...

...James Doyle, a national correspondent for The Washington Star, covered the Kleindienst confirmation hearings in the US...

...on November 13, 1970...

...Kennedy read a broad indictment of law enforcement under Nixon, but never engaged Kleindienst on the details of the three cases mentioned above, although they seemed to beg for clarification...

...It was only after the Judiciary Committee had completed its hearings and given Kleindienst a unanimous vote of confirmation that columnist Jack Anderson broke his revelations about Kleindienst's associations with an official of the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation...

...It was the liberals on the Committee whose performance seemed so strange...

...After news of the proposed merger appeared in the press on July 31, 1970, the Justice Department informed the FTC that it would investigate the merger...

...The most dramatic indictment was to come later...

...Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Company acquired Parke, Davis, Inc...

...But, he said, he did not regard it as a bribe at the time, and only reported it a week after the conversation, when he learned that the FBI was investigating Carson...

...Richard W. McLaren, head of the Antitrust Division, was known to oppose the merger, which was delayed at least once at his behest...

...Yet when the Kleindienst hearings were held, no questions were asked about the strange case of the Warner-Lambert merger...

...He had publicly championed the use of wiretapping and bugging without a court order in "national security" cases which the Justice Department had expanded to mean not only foreign espionage but domestic surveillance of antiwar militants and other radicals...

...The second curious case was that of Frank W. Sharp, a Houston financier who was charged by the SEC, along with twenty-seven other persons, with illegally manipulating the price of unregistered stock, then making the profits available to high public officials in Texas in exchange for favorable action on two pieces of bank legislation which would have eliminated Federal supervision of a bank he headed...

...As it turned out, the Judiciary Committee never asked these crucial questions...

...Kleindienst had granted Sharp immunity from the more serious charges in exchange for his agreement to testify against others involved in the alleged swindle...

...Late on a Friday night in October, Attorney General Mitchell announced Wilson's resignation had been accepted...

...When the hearings were held, no new information was elicited and the many unanswered questions remained unasked by the liberals on the Judiciary Committee...

...In June he had pleaded guilty to charges of making false entries in the records of his now defunct bank and of selling unregistered stock...

...He swore, however, that the settlement was not part of a deal to help finance the convention...

...The nomination was delayed, and finally timed to coincide with the President's trip to Peking...

...The FTC case is pending, and McLaren is now a Federal judge in Chicago...

...For more than three years Kleindienst had been Mitchell's top deputy, associated with almost every controversial decision made at the Justice Department...

...The vote that followed in the Senate was uncomfortably close for the Administration...

...Warner-Lambert's law firm in New York was Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander, where Mitchell had been a senior partner...

...Through September Wilson remained at his Justice Department desk, but Texas Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, a Democrat from San Antonio, was making daily speeches on the floor of Congress charging that Wilson, former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice, was deeply involved in the Sharp case, and had urged immunity for Sharp in order to protect himself...

...Thus when Richard G. Kleindienst came before the Senate Judiciary Committee in mid-February as the Administration's candidate to replace John N. Mitchell as Attorney General, the stage seemed set for a fight over the management of one of the most powerful and important cabinet departments...

...John Tunney of California took the occasion to request better treatment for Indians and more cooperation with other committees...

...Mergers like this one were being monitored very closely by the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, which was concerned about the increasing concentration of the nation's manufacturing assets in a smaller and smaller number of competing firms...

...After all, it was Kleindienst who thought it would be useful and efficient for other Department lawyers to keep close track of their telephone calls and actions each fifteen minutes of the day...

...The story appeared in the late editions of some morning newspapers that Saturday, and was generally buried among a flood of later breaking news in the Sunday editions...

...Michigan Democrat Philip Hart, as chairman of the antitrust subcommittee, was interested...

...SEC depositions pointed to Sharp as the key figure in manipulations...

...Anderson charged that the Justice Department's Antitrust Division approved an ITT merger, largest in corporate history, as part of a deal under which the corporation would kick in with a $400,000 campaign contribution to the Republican National Convention...

...Nixon staged a birthday party for Bobst at the White House in 1969...

...Kleindienst testified that he rejected the offer...

...His public attitude toward the small farmer, his theories of agricultural economics, and his close associations with the agri-business giants made him fair game for a close grilling by the usually passive Agriculture Committee...

...Hart satisfied himself with broad, general inquiries...

...It wasn't that they never laid a glove on Kleindienst—the liberals never put the gloves on...

...One of his clients—the Jesuit Fathers of Houston—accused Sharp of bilking them out of about $8.5 million...

...He had engineered the campaign for the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court...

...But the legal situation was now drastically changed, and the merger was a fait accompli...

...He had directed the narrow enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act...

...The President's political advisers had been worried about the possible effects of confirmation hearings that would closely scrutinize the Justice Department, and for a while it appeared Kleindienst might not be nominated because of the predicted adverse publicity...

...Not a single question was asked about Kleindienst's decision to grant Sharp immunity...

...Among the interested were reporters from Texas newspapers, confident that the Sharp case would be making new headlines...

...Carson was convicted last November of bribery-conspiracy and perjury after attempting to obtain Justice Department leniency for a New York businessman under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission on stock fraud charges...

...Through Bobst's good offices, the firm had become Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander in 1964...

...Birch Bayh of Indiana attended only the first two hours of the hearings, then left town...

...Kleindienst, called to testify at the Carson trial, told the jury Carson had made an offer to him to secure a contribution of $50,000 to $100,000 toward President Nixon's re-election campaign if the New York businessman could be given some consideration...

...When the Kleindienst confirmation hearings opened, there was great demand for seats at the press tables...

...Kleindienst took jurisdiction of the Warner-Lambert merger case when Attorney General Mitchell disqualified himself to avoid conflict of interest...

...The next day, Kleindienst sent a curious memo to McLaren, informing him that his recommendation for a temporary restraining order had been rejected, with the understanding that the merger would be consummated the next day (as it was), but that the SEC would be asked to continue the investigation...

...Just what happened in the Warner-Lambert case is not clear...

...When fraud, conspiracy, and bribery indictments were handed down last September^ Sharp was not among those indicted...

...The largest single stockholder in Warner-Lambert is Elmer H. Bobst, still active at eighty-seven as honorary chairman of the board, and one of the few men who continue to call the President of the United States "Dick" in their frequent meetings...