RN by Richard Nixon

Author:Richard Nixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ITT

The day after we returned from China, Jack Anderson began a series of newspaper columns in which he claimed to have unearthed a major administration scandal. His charges were based on a memorandum allegedly from Dita Beard, a lobbyist for International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, to one of her ITT superiors. Anderson said that the memo implied that a government anti-trust settlement with ITT had been influenced by an ITT contribution toward the upcoming Republican convention and that John Mitchell and I had pushed for favorable treatment for ITT because of this contribution. Mrs. Beard supposedly managed this whole deal almost single-handedly.

In fact, the anti-trust settlement in question had been a favorable one for the government and not for ITT, which was required to divest itself of holdings representing $1 billion in sales. On the first trading day after this settlement ITT’s stock fell 11 percent. Furthermore, the money that allegedly influenced the settlement was not a contribution to the Committee to Re-elect the President or to the Republican Party, but to the city of San Diego so that the city could bid to be the site of the 1972 Republican National Convention. It is standard practice for local businesses to help underwrite a city’s convention bid, and the Sheraton division of ITT, which was in the process of opening a new hotel in San Diego, saw the contribution as a promotional investment: the nationwide publicity and prestige that would come with being the presidential staff headquarters during convention week would be worth the payment to San Diego.

My own role in the ITT anti-trust matter consisted of one angry phone call to Dick Kleindienst almost a year earlier at the time of three Justice Department anti-trust suits against ITT. Kleindienst, Mitchell’s deputy, was in charge of the case due to the fact that Mitchell had excused himself because an ITT subsidiary had been a client of our former law firm.

As I saw it, the Justice Department suits were a clear violation of my anti-trust policy. I was convinced that American companies would be able to compete in the international market only if they were as big and strong as the government-sheltered monopolies in so many foreign countries, and therefore I had instructed that big businesses were to be broken up only when they violated the laws of fair competition and not simply because they were big. I had made this position clear at staff and Cabinet meetings—and now some subordinate officials in the Justice Department were pursuing a course that deliberately contradicted it. ITT officials felt they were being unfairly sued and descended upon Washington in an effort to get the suits dropped. They had seen members of Congress from both parties and also everyone they could reach in the administration who would give them a hearing. When one case came to trial at the end of 1970, the court agreed that the suit was groundless and ruled against the Justice Department.

Several weeks later I learned that the Justice Department was going to appeal this decision to a higher court.

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