Back in the days before Watergate became the national preoccupation, one of the most prominent skeletons in the White House closet was the allegation that the Administration had quietly settled a 1971 antitrust case against ITT, the giant conglomerate, in return for an ITT offer of up to $400,000 to help defray the cost of the Republicans' 1972 national convention in San Diego (later switched to Miami). Columnist Jack Anderson published an ITT memorandum last year that appeared to substantiate the charge. But before ITT Lobbyist Dita Beard, the author of the memo, could give testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was spirited off to Colorado—reportedly by the White House "plumbers"—and was said to be too ill to be interviewed at the time. Last week the Ervin committee gained possession of a White House memorandum that seemed to shed new light on the ITT case.
The memo was sent by Charles W. Colson, then a White House special counsel, to H.R. Haldeman, then the President's chief of staff, on March 30, 1972. It turned up last week when the Ervin committee subpoenaed a secretary of Colson's and asked her to bring along her files. The purpose of the Colson memo was to urge the Administration to withdraw its nomination of Richard Kleindienst as Attorney General—a nomination that was subsequently approved by the Senate. Colson's point at the time was that the Senate investigation of Kleindienst might conceivably turn up copies of several memorandums that had been written by both Administration and ITT officials. These documents, said Colson, could implicate a number of Administration officials in the ITT case, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, Secretary of the Treasury John Connally and Attorney General John Mitchell. More important, at least two of the documents could "directly involve the President."
The various documents to which Colson referred all dealt with efforts by ITT in early 1971 to enlist the Administration's support in quashing three separate antitrust suits under way against the corporation. U.S. district courts had previously ruled against the Government in two of the cases, which involved two lesser ITT subsidiaries, Grinnell Corp. and Canteen Corp. But Richard W. McLaren, head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, who had strenuously pressed the litigation, had already made known the Government's intention to appeal to the Supreme Court. The third and most important case, involving ITT's merger with the Hartford Fire Insurance Co., had not yet been decided. The memorandums detailed the company's successful efforts to influence Government policy.