The Watergate Story: Why Congress Didn't Investigate Until After the Election
Boyd, Marjorie
The Watergate story: why Congress didn't investigate until after the election by Marjorie Boyd One of the untold stories of last year's presidential race was the behindthe-scenes narrative...
...Any congressional attempt to probe the Watergate case was thus postponed until after the election...
...Eighty-one acres are owned by the Athens Development Corporation, headed by T. H. Milner, Jr., president of the First National Bank of Athens, the same bank in which Stephens is a major stockholder...
...Stephens' interest in the sewer problem is more than abstract...
...And the basic rights of the defendants to a speedy, fair, and impartial trial may be jeopardized...
...Athens applied to several federal agencies for financing to build a system of sewers and treatment plants for the city and some land in adjoining Clark County...
...That the Republicans were not depending on legal principle to bring them through is demonstrated by the amount of organization and muscle they applied to the task...
...Griffin, also a bankers' advocate, had announced that he was retiring at the end of 1972 to take his ailing wife home to Mississippi...
...Julian Bishop, mayor of Athens and a member of the bank's board of directors, is president of the Cedar Creek Development Corporation, which owns 52 acres of the parcel...
...After the committee vote, when Patman was asked what he thought about the congressmen's argument that the Watergate burglars' rights should be protected at all costs, he smiled sweetly and answered, “I am not going to criticize newly found converts to the cause of civil liberties...
...They have a club down here,” he said, referring to his home state of Georgia, “that has a bad connotation-a civil liberties club...
...From the Senate's circumscribed handling of both the ITT case and the confirmation of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to Eatrick Gray's recent mention of the “hot files” he has on members of Congress, we have seen the “Nixon Treatment” at work...
...And if anyone should have known that “Gentlemlan” John Masiello, president of ANR Leasing, was a member of the Vito Genovese family, it was Frank Brasco...
...For the first time, a committee of Congress allowed the convenience of prosecutors and the fancied rights of criminal defendants to take precedence over its own right to investigate and the public's right to know...
...Nevertheless, the Justice Department decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed against him and refused to let Beall turn the case over to a grand jury...
...Three days after the Committee vote, the director of the Athens Housing Authority announced that he had “worked out a solution'' with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to end an impasse in the construction of a $Zmillion, 1 l-story apartment building for the elderly in downtown Athens...
...Chappell offered no explanation of why he had not put Ms...
...Hi, Maury, This is Dick As chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee, Patman had the power to launch a preliminary staff investigation of the Watergate affair without consulting his committee...
...The Tampa paper turned its evidence, including a signed complaint by Ms...
...The Congressman claimed that Ms...
...When his 1970 opponent accused Hanna of pursuing his private business interests on four separate 1968 government-financed trips to Asia, Hanna admitted that he had helped promote a California trade center represented by his law firm and said that he “would promote any project that would improve trade relations with Asia...
...But Stephens remained unmoved...
...it's not a thing you ever speak about...
...Other Athens residents describe their congressman the same way, praising him for “all the federal money he has brought in...
...They grasped immediately the hearings' potential to create “negative image distortion”-the vision of a large bird-dropping falling through the air directly above the confident, statesmanlike countenance of their leader...
...S. Cow (D.-Ga...
...Patman fired back an angry reply to Brown and hounded tlhe staff to step up the investigation...
...Throughout September, though hobbled without subpoena power, the staff continued the effort to unravel the tangled financial dealings behind the Watergate affair...
...During the Committee meeting, Stephens received a phone call from House Speaker Carl Albert, who made a special plea to him to support the investigation...
...In 1971, Maryland U. S. Attorney George Beall sought to convene a grand jury to investigate charges made by a former post office official that Brasco had received a payment in return for using his influence as a member of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee to obtain a lease for trucks from the Post Office for the ANR Leasing Company, alleged to be a Mafia-controlled firm...
...the size of Nixon's impending landslide...
...Renfroe, over to the Justice Department...
...But a month earlier the Eagleton affair had shown the tremendous impact that one dramatic event can have on a presidential campaign in this media age, and few have shown greater sensitivity to the expanding role of the media in politics than the energetic Madison Avenue team in the White House...
...On December 22, approximately two-andahalf months after the Watergate vote, EPA announced an “increase in an existing grant” to Athens, which would raise the federal participation to 75 per cent...
...For example, the government announced on January 30 that it plans to construct a $6.8-million federal office building in downtown Athens to house, among other things, the district office of Congressman Robert Stephens...
...But Chappell had better reason for being grateful to Nixon than this...
...The House GOP high command joined the Justice Department in lobbying for votes to kill the investigation...
...They had uncovered, for example, the basic outline of what later emerged as the “Vesco story”-where a businessman under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission invested a large cash contribution in the President's campaign...
...He emphasized that he was not against an investigation of Watergate but was only interested in protecting the rights of the defendants awaiting trial...
...Henry Petersen, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, wrote a letter to all Committee members asking them to postpone the hearings...
...When it comes to congressional wheeling and dealing, Stephens is right bp there at the top of the class-a wily and resourceful Southern politician...
...New Members for the ACLU Congressional critics of the Justice Department's Watergate doctrine point out that if Congress declines to investigate cases where one or more of the figures involved is under indictment, then lengthy delays in investigations can be obtained by any group of wrongdoers by simply arranging an indictment for a lower echelon member of the group...
...It took someone as old-fashioned as Patman to take party politics seriously...
...Stephens seemed far more concerned with denying that he would ever be gauche enough to specifically mention his Watergate vote to the White House, than with refuting the impression that he has a tacit understanding with the Nixon Administration...
...Hope for a just share of the spoils, fear for their standing with the President's hard-nosed patronage distributors, party patriotism in the face of the spectre of McGovern-in short, all the normal political instinctsinfluenced them to act as congressmen have historically acted in such situations...
...So only one more Democratic vote was needed for the Republicans to block the probe, and there were three prospects likely to be amenable to influence...
...the people involved were residents of his district and local newspapers featured the story prominently...
...A Congressman's Congressman Congressman Richard Hanna's reasons for opposing the Watergate investigation remain a mystery...
...A local newspaper editor calls the Congressman a “sacred cow” since he has “gotten the government to do so much for us...
...Nonetheless, the Patman staff gave every consideration to the Justice Department's argument...
...Did they rise above partisan politics, as they claim, or did they decide their personal or political interests were best served by sparing the Nixon campaign the agony of a public airing of its dirty political laundry...
...These new projects are not the only instances where Athens has benefited from federal largesse during a period of national cutbacks...
...When Brasco and Chappell received their letters from the Criminal Division of the Justice Department asking them to vote against the Watergate investigation, may we not assume that the honorable gentlemen gave at least fleeting thought to the Department's past magnanimity, and to the possibility that its actions could still be reversed...
...H[e scheduled a hearing for September 14, inviting Stans to testify vo1unta:rily before the entire committee...
...McBiirney on his payroll if she had indeed written speeches for him...
...Gettys is known on the Hill as “the invisible man” because he is so rarely seen and almost never speaks...
...Charles Griffin of Mississippi...
...Even among politicians genuinely appalled by the implications, of the break-in-that it might mark the beginning of an era when elections would be won by the political party with the most efficient espionage and sabotage operationthere seemed to be a reluctance to endorse an investigation that would take place in the four or five weeks directly before the election...
...Despite all the recent rhetoric about a Congress in revolt and the Nixon Administration's inability to handle congressional relations, the story of the “Watergate probe that wasn't'' is an object lesson in effective use of presidential power...
...the other clandestine, formed of grosser considerations...
...There is nothing new in the argument itself...
...The Justice Department's own argument, set forth in Assistant Attorney General Pe tersen 's letter, dove tailed carefully : The public interest in a prompt and successful prosecution may be imperiled by widely publicized hearings at this time...
...But however unanimous, the Republicans were still a minority...
...McBurney had “written some speeches” for him, and while he admitted he made a “technical error,” he denied any intentional wrongdoing...
...But this may be a real problem for the Senate investigators...
...Being rich is one accusation I plead guilty to...
...He also is credited with securing a $5.5-million Model Cities Program and a $1 O-million housing project for Athens, along with over $65 million for the University of Georgia...
...One need not dwell extensively on why the 14 Republicans voted against the investigation...
...As expected, the 14 Republicans present voted unanimously to block the investigation, reaffirming the historic supremacy of party politics over public curiosity...
...What motivated the six Democrats to vote against what was clearly in their party's best interest...
...This is a serious matterdiverting the salary of a House employee is illegal...
...It's always understood...
...The ANR Leasing Company was located at 326 East 149th Street in the Bronx, well outside Brasco's Brooklyn district...
...During those hot and humid days of late summer, the beleaguered Stans was continuously accompanied by his lawyer, who objected to nearly all the questions posed by the press and various official investigators...
...After a five-month investigation, the Justice Department quietly announced that “the facts do not warrant criminal prosecution...
...An habitual absentee, an incorrigible junketeer, a chronic dabbler in outside business interests, a campaigner supported by a mare's nest of murkily disguised special-interest bankrollers, Hanna is the stuff of which those consistent congressional majorities against real ethics legislationaremade...
...None of this, of course, explains Democrat Hanna's vote to suppress the investigation...
...Part of the new, federally-funded sewer complex is to be placed under a large tract of underdeveloped land on the outskirts of Athens-land which is expected to soar in value...
...Hanna is a Southern California lawyer-businessman who started life as a poor boy and by 1968 could voluntarily read into the Congressional Record a statement setting his net worth at $392,821...
...The unfortunate Delaney, an Internal Revenue collector removed from office and indicted for embezzling, was investigated by a House committee while under indictment, and the Court of Appeals found that adverse publicity from the hearings had interfered with his right to a fair trial...
...Tom S. Gettys of South Carolina and Rep...
...In Bobby Baker's Footsteps On September 29 the Nixon Administration formally intervened...
...When I called Congressman Robert Stephens, a key Democratic “defector,” six months later and asked if he considered himself a civil libertarian, he expressed horror at the thought...
...Now, whenever most congressmen cite a devotion to civil liberties as a reason for anything-let alone quashing a controversial investigation-a host of anomalies and incongruities move into view...
...To stop the investigation they needed at least four Democratic votes-they came up with six...
...The battle was on...
...Jeane McBurney and to keep the payment “secret...
...In every attempt to block an investigation into corruption, there must always be two strategies-one legalistic, for public consumption...
...Perhaps they were remembering that Brasco, too, had reason to be grateful to the Nixon-MitchellKleindienst Justice Department, as well as reason to fear their wrath...
...But an umbrella was quickly opened and disaster averted...
...Stephens stoutly denies that he received any pressure on the Watergate vote from the Administration or Republicans in Congress...
...The unusual argument that generals must be spared so that footsoldiers can be prosecuted was embraced by our six Democratic defectors and all 14 Republicans...
...Minority Leader Gerald Ford held a series of pep meetings with the Republicans on the Banking Committee, but explains they were only “to urge each member to be present for the vote...
...Clark MacGregor, chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President, admitted that the Watergate case covered such a broad range of issues that “almost any committee of the Congress would have jurisdiction...
...When Patman, that obstreperous 79-year-old Texas populist, announced last August that his committee was about to hold public hearings on the controversial break-in, partisan Democrats imagined that the closing weeks of the presidential campaign would be filled with daily banner headlines and nightly television news specials conveying the horrors of the Watergate break-in...
...In part, this rare display of restraint reflects an unwritten bipartisan truce that has lasted nearly two generations...
...They point out that delayed investigations always work to the benefit of the wrongdoers, not just because election days pass, as in this case, but because of the increased risk that important evidence will be misplaced or destroyed, that memories will fade, that some witnesses will die while others move to Australia...
...Asked about his vote to kill the Watergate probe, he said, “When you give a fellow a vote, you don't hesitate to take any proposition you may have to him, and you have a right to expect a hearing...
...Congressman Patman said recently: Yes, I think the Senate investigation may encounter difficulties because of the delay...
...None concerned the rest of the wheel or its relation to the cogs...
...The report detailed the travels of Republican campaign funds back and forth across the Mexican border and the expeditious granting of a bank charter to a Republican fund-raiser, whose $2 5,000 con tribution had found its way into the Miami bank account of the Watergate burglars...
...In 1970, The Los Angeles Times assessed his net worth at $782,590, and when representatives of Ralph Nader's Congress Project asked Hanna how he had almost doubled his net worth in two years, while presumably occupied as a member of Congress, the Congressman explained: “It's just one of those fortunate things that happens to lawyer...
...Protecting the Cogs Nevertheless, the Justice Department argued in its letter that a 1952 case, Delaney v. United States, was “a remarkably similar situation” and should persuade the Banking Committee to delay its investigation until the conclusion of the criminal trials...
...He said that while he could not support the investigation Patman proposed, he would be willing to go along with closed hearings without subpoena power, thereby keeping the investigation “properly within the bosom of the Committee.'' Avoiding Swamp Fever A week before the vote, Chappell had been over to the White House for a private talk with Nixon and had his picture taken with the President for use in the campaign...
...it was used, for instance, by Frank Costello and other racketeers in the fifties, and more recently by Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby Baker, Senator Thomas J. Dodd, and top General Electric executives indicted for price fixing...
...Stephens' roots run deep...
...Congressman Thomas Ashley of Ohio says, “We need Stephens along to get anything viable legislatively...
...Stephens' efforts in the House have resulted in increased federal spending on Fort Gordon, a military base in Augusta, and the Navy Supply Officers' School in Athens...
...Stephens is a large shareholder in the First National Bank of Athens, known locally as “Stephens' bank.'' He also owns considerable holdings in real estate, but has built his political career around a strikingly effective record of attracting federal funds to his hometown of Athens and the rest of his congressional district...
...While Brasco denied receiving any money, he admitted that he had tried to help the company get the contract, but explained that it was simply a routine constituent request, and that he had no idea thad the firm had criminal ties “until t read it in the newspaper...
...The next day, August 3 1, Republican Congressman Garry Brown, a Michigan cohort of Minority Leader Gerald Ford, ‘came forward as the leader of aniti-investigation forces within the Banking Committee...
...And many were outspoken critics of the Supreme Court, charging that the Justices “protect the criminal at the expense of society...
...But another Democrat would provide insurance...
...On September 11, Stans' omnipresent attorney, Kenneth Parkinson, wrote Patman that he had advised his client not to appear at the hearing...
...The Congressman's interest in banking and currency seems to relate to his business holdings...
...But even a cursory investigation reveals these last two claims are somewhat suspect...
...Wright Patman's attempt to have his House Banking and Currency Committee probe the Watergate case in the closing weeks of the campaign...
...With Brasco and Chappell in the bag, the White House lobby had the Watergate vote wrapped up...
...Almost every day we read in the newspaper that some piece of potential evidence has been destroyed or is mysteriously missing...
...on behalf of the rights of the Watergate defendants, at its climax shouting, “Politics has no place in justice,'' Patman supporters at the committee table permitted themselves half smiles at Brasco's uncharacteristic theatrics...
...For the past three years Stephens has introduced amendments to appropriations bills to increase the percentage of federal help for sewer projects in small municipalities like Athens...
...The Committee to Reelect the President and the other campaign organizations have disbanded, and all the secretaries and lower-level office workers who may have important information have scattered...
...But Congress has always jealously guarded its right to investigate, and congressional parliamentarians can remember no case where a congressional investigation was abandoned in order to avoid jeopardizing a defendant's right to a fair trial...
...The whole affair was severely embarrassing to Chappell...
...It is understood that campaign irregularities are not to be publicly investigated, even though many are illegal under the provisions of the Corrupt Practices Act of 1925...
...Thus, Delaney actually gave no support to the Justice Department's conclusion that the Committee should delay its investigation...
...Stephens admits that he met with Gettys and Griffin in his office and they “voted” to go along with him...
...Months went by and the only tangible sign of the project that Stephens had so proudly announced was a red-white-and-blue HUD sign on a vacant lot opposite the Athens Public Library...
...George McGovern was as popular as swamp fever in Chappell's district, so the pictures of the Democratic Congressman and the Republican President were quite helpful...
...Why, then, was Patman the only one who attempted to hold hearings before the election...
...Practically, the Delaney case was different from the Watergate affair...
...Chappell was facing a tough reelection battle against Daytona oral surgeon “Bud” Fleauchauss, who charged Chappell with conflictofinterest and a do-nothing record...
...Moreover, there is time to get stories straight, work oulc rationales, pay off witnesses, alter some documents and feed others into the paper shredder...
...Since January, 1969, Democrat Stephens' success in procuring federal projects for his constituents has depended on the generous cooperation of the Nixon Administration, a situation Nixon's congressional liaisons fully appreciate...
...The Invisible Man In any event, at the showdown Committee meeting on October 3, Stephens not only was the first Democrat to announce his opposition to the investigation, but he ostentatiously delivered two other Democrats' votes, announcing that he was joined by noted civil libertarians Rep...
...The court's opinion stressed that congressional authority to investigate Delaney, even though he was under indictment, was unquestioned...
...What happened to all those ambitious members of Congress who normally vie for the limelight...
...out to be ineffective as blackmail, but if you doubt that many members of Congress are vulnerable to this kind of pressure, just ask Wright Patman...
...This would surely have been explored in the hearings, naturally falling within the purview of the Banking Committee...
...It granted Athens $4.8 million immediately, with the understanding that another $2 to $3 million would be forthcoming in 1973...
...Almost a year earlier Stephens had anmounced the project, only to discover that the lowest bid was $200,000 over HUD's construction limit...
...Patman lost the votes of six of the Committee's 21 Democrats, and his request for subpoena power to conduct the hearings was defeated by a vote of 20 to 15...
...Garry Brown proudly admits that he talked with Stephens about the vote, but Stephens vigorously denies ever discussing the matter with him...
...As both secretary and a director of the Bank of Belleview, Florida, Democratic Congressman Bill Chappell has a record of support for the banking lobby...
...Gray's testimony may have shocked many and may turn...
...And so it is not to the stated reasons, the ill-fitting legal camouflage, but to the unstated ones that we must turn for guidance...
...Protesting the Stans interview, Brown wrote a letter to Patman, saying he “was shocked and dismayed ” to learn of the incident and charging that the Committee stalff had no right to interview Stans...
...Thomas Nast, Where Are You Now...
...Dirty Politics Then there's the “sewer problem...
...His family settled in Georgia before the Revolutionary War and his great-granduncle was Vice President of the Confederacy...
...He told his hometown newspaper that he was angry at Patman over his failure to push a key housing bill through Congress-a less-than-compelling reason for being opposed to such an important hearing...
...Although it would be hard to prove any connection to the vote on the Watergate probe, the government has been exceedingly generous to Stephens' Georgia district in the last six months...
...When allowed to answer a question, Stans' professed ignorance of the finances of the Committee to Reelect the President was sharply at odds with his reputation as a highly efficient administrator...
...The Watergate story: why Congress didn't investigate until after the election by Marjorie Boyd One of the untold stories of last year's presidential race was the behindthe-scenes narrative of Rep...
...The argument for public consumption was first voiced by Maurice Stans' lawyer in explaining why he refused to allow his client to appear for public questioning: Because of the pendency of the charges against those individuals who were arrested at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, the appearance of Mr...
...But party politics broke down among the Democrats...
...The next day, Patman blasted Stans' refusal to appear and released a confidential report to committee members on the staff‘s preliminary findings...
...But on October 6, HUD agreed to transfer $200,000 from another project, and the graders and bulldozers moved in...
...The key convert was Congressman Robert Stephens of Georgia...
...perhaps nothing could have changed the outcome or even significantly reduced Marjorie Boyd is a Washington writer...
...Also, if we had held the investigation before the election, you can be sure that no high campaign officials would have taken the Fifth Amendment or pleaded executive privilege...
...Last June 20, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a grant to Athens for 35 per cent of the cost of their new sewers, but state or local funds for the remaining 65 per cent were not available...
...The hearings raised the possibility that the Banking Committee could successfully subpoena documents and bank records, constructing a paper trail to the President's door before election day...
...Another Democrat for Nixon Democratic Clpngressman Frank Brasco of Brooklyn, the only Democratic defector with a fairly consistent liberal record, made a particularly emotional speech...
...Stephens' local reputation as a powerful man in Washington was re-established...
...In 1969 one of the Congressman's secretaries, Patricia Renfroe, told the Tampa Tribune that Chappell had given her a $400-a-month raise and then two months later told her to give $594 of the pay to a Ms...
...Gettys owns bank stock and is remarkably consistent in supporting legislation favored by both bank and business interests...
...Throughout September, Ford's lieutenant on the committee, Garry Brown, was busily trying to keep the troops in line and win over the needed number of Democratic votes...
...the Watergate burglars were only small cogs in a wheel, and it should be possible to investigate the wheel's spokes and hub without heaping an excessive amount of unfavorable publicity upon these small cogs...
...Rep...
...It can only be said that he symbolized Congress' noted ambivalence toward matters of probity...
...Not just a footnote to an electoral debacle, the story contains a few handy lessons on “How to Scuttle a Congressional Investigation” and provides an historical backdrop to Sam Ervin's current Senate probe of the Watergate affair and its many peculiar ramifications...
...Since 1967 he has visited, at taxpayers' expense, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hawaii, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, England, Norway, Germany, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia, and France, some countries more than once...
...On the day of the vote, all the Republicans met in the office of senior Republican committee mem ber William Widnall, and then went on to the committee meeting en masse, a splendidly martial display of party discipline and a charming echo of the age of Penrose and Tammany...
...Whatever Brown hoped to accomplish by this attack, he succeeded only in hardening Patman's resolve to pursue the investigation, which had originally been suggested by Democratic Congressman Henry Reuss of Wisconsin...
...It smacked of “partisanship” and was too “political,” they said...
...After all, the criminal charges against the burglars were to be carefully limited, as the Justice Department well knew, to burglary, conspiracy, interception of communications, and unlawful possession of listening devices...
...Most of our 20 civil libertarians had, for example, voted for the District of Columbia Omnibus Crime Bill of 1970 with its famed “no-knock” provision...
...A Watergate probe would affect the success of everyone running on the Republican ticket...
...His 197 1 legislation passed the House and Senate, but was vetoed by the President...
...Stans before your committee, and the publicity attendant thereon, may impair the constitutional and civil rights of those individuals...
...When Patman called his committee together on October 3 to approve the subpoena power necessary for the hearings, a surprise awaited him...
...Stephens is acknowledged leader of the Southern Democrats on the Committee and is leading tactician of the pro-bank forces on most issues...
...Jake Lewis of the Banking Committee staff recalls: “We checked the question out with several distinguished constitutional lawyers, and they all dismissed the Justice Department's objection.'' When Congress comes upon a case where its right to investigate or the public's right to know does come into direct conflict with a defendant's right to a fair trial, Con,gess has power to grant the defendant immunity, thereby resolving the impasse...
...Delaney was an individual public official and all the malfeasances ascribed to him in the press necessarily reflected on him as a criminal defendant...
...Hanna has attracted quite a bit of attention recently because of his record-breaking number of junkets...
...Choice plots are owned by Stephens' friends and business associates...
...His interview on August 30 was equally unenlightening, brightened only when Stans was called away in the midst of the proceedings to answer a phone call from the President...
...A source close to the Committee reported that Stephens talked Gettys and Griffin into voting against the investigation: “Gettys and Griffin admire Stephens and are accustomed to following his lead...
...On August 30, 1972, three Banking Committee staff members interviewed Maurice Stans, finance chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President...
...Congressman Bill Chappell of Florida had gone so far as to introduce a constitutional amendment providing for an elected Supreme Court...
...The court decided that Delaney was entitled to either a change of venue or a delay in trial sufficient to allow a jury to forget his bad press...
...Chappell therefore had to tread cautiously...
...Before coming to Congress, Brasco was assistant chief of the Rackets Bureau in the district attorney's office in Brooklyn...
...But on some issues, such as housing, which has its own lobby, he is more “liberal” and acts as courthouse lawyer for the Committee's Northern Democrats...
...They announced for the record that their opposition to congressional hearings before the completion of the criminal trials was based on concern for the civil liberties of the Watergate burglars...
...The Congressman is frequently absent from important House votes...
...Perhaps the election was already decided by late August...
Vol. 5 • April 1973 • No. 2
