(2 of 4)
The cooperative's largesse was nonpartisan. In 1968 AMPI backed Democratic Nominee Hubert H. Humphrey with $91,691. When Nixon was elected, it made its first contribution to the new President. In what AMPI former General Manager Harold Nelson later candidly described as a "peace" offering, the cooperative in 1969 gave $100,000 to fund raisers for Nixon, ostensibly looking toward his 1972 re-election campaign. In its bid for more sympathy, AMPI pledged on Dec. 16, 1970, to contribute an additional $2 million for Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign. The cooperative delivered a first payment of $10,000 on March 22, 1971. Three days later, the Administration announced the increase in milk-price supports.
American Dream. Throughout the remainder of the year, the milk money flowed into the Nixon campaign chest, for the most part in legal amounts of less than $5,000. To receive the money, Nixon political associates set up a number of dummy committees, among them Citizens United in Pursuit of the American Dream and Americans United for Honesty in Government. A common device for getting around the $5,000 limit is to donate that amount to each of many different campaign committees.
By early 1972, however, AMPI executives were having second thoughts about their generosity to Nixon's campaign. Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader had brought suit in Federal District Court in Washington that January, contending that the hike in milk-price supports had been illegal. A week later, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit in Federal District Court in Kansas City, Mo., charging the cooperative with unfair trade practices, including price fixing. Upset by the course of their political activities and the resulting publicity of both suits, the AMPI asked Nelson to resign as general manager.
One of the first acts of his successor, George Mehren, 60, onetime Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, was to try to persuade Nixon associates to get the Justice Department to drop the antitrust suit. In an answer to a questionnaire from Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee, former AMPI Secretary Dwight I. Morris claimed to have evidence that Mehren offered Nixon Attorney Herbert W. Kalmbach another $300,000 in campaign funds if the suit were dropped. According to Morris, Kalmbach refused the offer because of the controversy raging over the Administration's antitrust settlement with ITT.
Whatever the truth of the charge —Mehren has never commented on it publicly—the AMPI directors set out to clean up the cooperative's image. In August 1973, they hired the Little Rock law firm headed by Edward L. Wright, a former president of the American Bar Association, to investigate the cooperative's past political wheeling and dealing. He found plenty, as his report showed last week when it became public. Among the report's revelations: