Drop by drop, evidence has accumulated since last fall that milk producers are among the most munificent backers of political campaigns in the U.S. Investigators for the Senate Watergate committee and Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski believe that the milkmen contributed as much as $737,000 to President Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, much of it illegally. Moreover, officers of the nation's largest dairy cooperative, Associated Milk Producers, Inc. (AMPI), admitted last week that the gift to the President's campaign was only part of a five-year scheme to help friendly politicians, both Democrats and Republicans.
The extent of the dairymen's political finagling is not yet fully known by federal probers, but it clearly included huge campaign contributions to many candidates for national and state offices. What the milk producers were after, of course, was higher prices for their products. At a meeting in Washington on Aug. 4, 1970, former AMPI Attorney Jake Jacobsen advised officers of the cooperative that "one way a small group makes itself heard is to help the politicians get into office. It works the same way from the President on down."
Wise Advice. Many milk producers thought they detected the wisdom of Jacobsen's advice when the Nixon Administration in 1971 raised federal milk-price supports by 270, to $4.93 per 100 Ibs. The increase came about three months after the President was offered $2 million by the dairymen for his 1972 campaign. The rise added more than $300 million to the annual income of U.S. dairy farmers and at least as much to the prices paid by consumers. Nixon has denied that the decision to raise supports was in any way influenced by the milk producers' contributions to his campaign; indeed, many Democratic Congressmen from dairy states favored the increase. But the relationship between the price hike and the promised contribution is one of the subjects being probed by the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry.
The bulk of the milk industry's contributions to Nixon came from AMPI which is based in San Antonio. Besides acting as a wholesaler, the cooperative operates a political arm called the Committee for Thorough Agricultural Political Education. It contributes to politicians' campaigns and lobbies in Washington and state capitals for measures helpful to AMPI members. The cooperative has assets of $170 million and represents 40,000 big and small milk producers in 22 states, mostly in the Midwest.
AMPI officially acknowledges making political contributions of $906,245 in 1972, second only to the $1,200,550 reported by the 13.5 million-member AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education. The AMPI contributions came to far more than the official figure, perhaps as much as a total of $1.5 million. Many of the gifts were legal. But others, which came straight out of the AMPI budget, violated federal laws prohibiting the donation of corporate funds for political purposes. Still other gifts may have broken the federal law limiting individual campaign gifts to $5,000 in a single year.