TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/70s/70water.001

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 11KB | 202 lines

                                                                                October 30, 1972

INVESTIGATIONS

Denials and Still More Questions


     The issue of political espionage in the 1972 presidential
campaign has persisted -- a tangled, melodramatic business,
occurring like a backstage fistfight, somewhere still in the
margins of the voters' consciousness. The matter remained a
volatile presence, however, and last week the din of charges
and countercharges grew louder as Republicans and Democrats
exchanged bitter words over the implications of the Watergate
investigation. Without challenging a single point of reported
fact, the President's men denied any wrongdoing and attacked
the press for printing the stories. Even so, there were new
revelations of White House connections with a fat slush fund
used to finance political spying.

     TIME has learned that still another figure who held an
important White House position before moving to the Committee
for the Re-Election of the President played a key role in the
Watergate case. He is Jeb Stuart Magruder, now one of the Nixon
committee's deputy directors. Before he joined C.R.P. in April
of 1971, Magruder was first an assistant to H.R. Haldeman, the
President's chief of staff, and later to Herb Klein, Nixon's
Director of Communications -- giving Magruder about two years
on the White House staff. It was known earlier that the cash
used to finance the wiretapping at the Democratic National
Committee headquarters in the Watergate last June came from the
Nixon committee:  Justice Department files now show that
Magruder was the C.R.P. official who authorized the
expenditures.

     According to Justice Department attorneys, Magruder gave
his approval for the use of up to $250,000 to be spent on what
the attorneys called "political intelligence operations."  It is
not known whether that entire amount was spent, but at least
$50,000 was withdrawn for this purpose out of a secret fund of
possibly $700,000 in cash kept in the office of Maurice Stans,
former Secretary of Commerce and now finance chairman of the
Nixon committee. Justice Department officials told TIME that
Magruder hired another former White House aide, G. Gordon
Liddy, to head the political intelligence squad for the
committee. Liddy, who has been indicted in the Watergate case,
was authorized by Magruder to spend the $250,000. The actual
payments were made to Liddy by the committee's treasurer at the
time, Hugh Sloan, who took the cash from Stans' safe. Sloan, a
Republican fund raiser beginning in 1966, was a staff assistant
to the President before joining C.R.P.

     The only record of these disbursements form the secret
fund was kept by Sloan on a single sheet of lined yellow paper.
It was destroyed by a top C.R.P. official. Other relevant
papers, Justice Department officials said, were destroyed by
Liddy within hours after the predawn arrests at the Watergate.
He used a paper shredder in the C.R.P. offices for 30 minutes
that morning.

     Magruder, a Santa Monica, Calif., business executive who
coordinated Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign in the Los
Angeles area, told the Justice Department that he thought the
intelligence money was to be used to get information about
radicals and antiwar protesters who might try to disrupt the
Republican National Convention. He denied authorizing any funds
for illegal purposes. A certain conspiratorial mood among the
White House staff is illustrated by one of Magruder's former
assignments there. He moved from Haldeman's staff to Klein's.
TIME has learned, to watch Klein for Haldeman, who has a habit
of keeping a sharp eye on the activities of staff members.

     Scattered. Some of the men who were in various positions on
the committee when the Watergate case broke on June 17 have
since scattered (see chart). Liddy was fired from the committee
on June 28 when he refused to answer FBI questions. Sloan left
the committee shortly after the Watergate break-in. John
Mitchell, the former Attorney General, was head of the Nixon
committee at the time but quit on July 1, ostensibly because his
wife Martha wanted to get him out of politics. So far
unexplained is the mystery surrounding Martha Mitchell's claim
that only five days after Watergate arrests, Steve King, now
head of security for the Nixon committee, ripped a telephone off
the wall of a Newport Beach, Calif., motel room where she and
her husband were staying, threw her on a bed and held her while
a doctor gave her an injection. She was cut badly enough on the
hand in this fracas, the Washington Post reported last week, to
require hospital emergency room treatment. The man who took her
there, said the Post, was Nixon's personal attorney, Herbert
Kalmbach.

     Still very much in place in his windowless west-wing
office is Dwight Chapin, deputy assistant to the President, who
with White House Staff Assistant Gordon Strachan had hired
Donald H. Segretti to recruit agents to help "disrupt" the
primary campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates. TIME
reported earlier (Oct. 23) that Segretti had received from
Herbert Kalmbach more than $35,000 for his services. Kalmbach
in turn got the money from the secret fund in Stans' safe. This
information was based on statements made by both Segretti and
Kalmbach to FBI agents.

     Later, last week, the New York Times reported that a
telephone in Segretti's home was used to make 28 calls to
Chapin's home, the White House or the office of the indicted
Hunt. The Washington Post reported that only five people had
authority to approve payments from the Stans fund:  Stans,
Kalmbach, Magruder, Mitchell and an unidentified "high White
House official."  The Post also claimed that White House aides
had coached Segretti on what to say to the Watergate grand jury
and that when he appeared before the jury, the U.S. attorneys
who were prosecuting the case did not even ask whom he worked
for. A woman juror did, however, and Segretti named Chapin.

     Innuendo. It is still not clear what Segretti's specific
duties were, or just how unusual his campaign against Democratic
candidates was:  but the words "disruption" and "harass" were
used by Segretti in talking to the Justice Department. The Nixon
committee responded to the disclosures with a denial that anyone
"in authority" had "authorized or approved or had any prior
knowledge of the break-in at the Watergate or any other illegal
activities."  At the White House, Speechwriter Pat Buchanan
claimed that the news stories were politically motivated. "We're
not gonna play that game," he said. Presidential Press Secretary
Ronald Ziegler denied that anyone at the White House had
"directed acts of sabotage, spying or espionage" against the
Democrats and charged that the stories were based on "hearsay,
character assassination, innuendo and guilt by association."
Clark MacGregor, Nixon's campaign director, angrily denounced
the Post in particular for using "huge scare headlines" and
acting "maliciously" and with "hypocrisy" to link the White
House to such political espionage. Uncharacteristically, the
usually candid MacGregor did not allow newsmen to question him.
Senator Robert Dole, the Republican National Chairman, accused
McGovern and the Post of being "in a partnership in
mudslinging."

     Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray was also incensed at
the press, apparently because of reports that his agency had
moved slowly and narrowly on the political sabotage
investigations. "The press wants to hear that I'm a political
son of a bitch," he protested to TIME Correspondent Sandy Smith.
I'm getting pissed off at the rumors circulating in the
incestuous circle around here (Washington). They're trying to
get to the President through me. They're trying to attack the
FBI."

     In taking the offensive, MacGregor also charged that
publications had a "double standard" in not pursuing acts of
political sabotage against the Republicans. He claimed that
McGovern workers have planted spies within the Nixon campaign
and had even done so within Hubert Humprey's staffs during the
Democratic primary campaigns. He cited what he called examples
of "proven facts of opposition-incited disruptions of the
President's campaign."  They included the discovery of a Molotov
cocktail at one Nixon headquarters, fire damage at two others
and window breaking at Nixon storefront campaign offices in
three cities. The Post checked out each incident, found
widespread violence against Nixon campaign offices in the nation
but no evidence that McGovern's committees were involved in
them. On the other hand,when various Democratic candidates
reported acts of sabotage, there was often no evidence that
these deeds had any connection with Republicans.

     The charges against the Nixon committee -- the substance
of which has not yet been specifically denied -- are serious,
even though the activity looks inane and unnecessary. The
kindest explanation is that Nixon is surrounded by overzealous
aides who feel that they are expected to do everything possible
to assure his decisive re-election. With this mentality,
anything that seems to help or protect the President appears
proper to them, even though in this case it can only damage
Nixon.

     Up to Ears. As the controversy grew, George McGovern
pounded away at the issue on nearly every stop, employing often
shrill and exaggerated oratory. At a labor rally in Essington,
Pa., he charged that Nixon is "the kind of man who will not
hesitate to try to wiretap your union hall or your university or
your church or your home."  He told airport crowds in Toledo
that the Republicans had wiretappped the telephones of the
Democratic presidential candidates in the primaries "and they
had us followed and members of our families followed all the
time. Nixon is up to his ears in political sabotage. He has got
to take responsibility for it."

     That was, of course, making a long leap -- from acts of
still rather vague political dirty work by political underlings
to placing direct responsibility on Nixon. Yet McGovern did
have a point in contending in Detroit that the Watergate and
the secret G.O.P. spying fund were much more serious matters
than more celebrated scandals like the disclosures that Harry
Vaughan, an inside operator in the Truman Administration, had
accepted a Deepfreeze from a lobbyist and that President
Eisenhower's closest aide, Sherman Adams, had received a vicuna
coat and a rug. Asked why there was no uproar now over the
Republican activities, McGovern replied:  "Life is a struggle
between our better impulses and more selfish, baser instincts.
No one ever knows how that struggle will resolve itself. We can
only hope that the American people do care."  Trying to get them
to care, McGovern has scheduled a national television broadcast
this week on "Morality and Decency in Government."