The Nation: More Evidence: Huge Case for Judgment

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showed their good faith by scrambling to collect money. A group of officials of the Associated Milk Producers, Inc. (AMPI) arrived in Louisville at 4 a.m. the next day, March 24, for an airport conference with Paul Alagia, an official of another cooperative, Dairymen, Inc. They asked him to get together $100,000. That afternoon D.I. contributed $25,000 to the G.O.P. dinner, which was held that night.

After the banquet, Kalmbach met at the Madison Hotel with AMPI General Manager Harold Nelson and Murray Chotiner, Nixon's longtime hard-line political strategist, who had recently left the White House to become a lawyer for the cooperative. Kalmbach has told the Senate Watergate Committee that Ehrlichman arranged the meeting to make sure that Chotiner guaranteed the $2 million pledge because the announcement of the rise in parity was to be made the next day, March 25. In his testimony, Kalmbach clearly linked the pledge of money with the rise in price supports. Kalmbach's statement is the strongest evidence of a milk deal revealed by the committee's documents.

On March 25, with the pledge reaffirmed, the Nixon Administration announced an increase in milk-price supports to $4.93 per cwt., or approximately 85% of parity. But the three dairy cooperatives never lived up to their promise. According to the evidence, they gave only between $537,000 and $737,000 to the President's campaign. The story of the deal —contributions in return for higher prices—broke in the press in September 1971, scaring off the cooperatives. When the President's fund raisers asked for more money in October 1972, the dairymen toyed with the idea, especially since the Justice Department had filed an antitrust suit against AMPI. (The case is still before the courts.) But the President's men also were beginning to get wary as the investigation mounted into the deal of milk and money.

Nixon Listens to His Tapes

One of the strangest pieces of evidence to be found in the entire Judiciary Committee report is a previously undisclosed transcript of a White House conversation on June 4, 1973.

John Dean had been talking to the Watergate prosecutors for more than eight weeks, and the President, painfully aware of the trouble he was in, spent more than twelve exhausting hours listening to tapes that might incriminate him in the Watergate coverup. (Some of these he withheld from the Special Prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee.) With a kind of desperation, he tried to put the best possible interpretation on his conversations with Dean. His aides—White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and Appointments Secretary Stephen Bull—were gathered around the President. He kept protesting his innocence to them, but at times almost sounded as if he were speaking for the record (or possibly for the tape recorder, which he knew was still running). He also kept seeking reassurance from the aides. "...

Really, the goddam record is not bad, is it?" the President asked. "Makes me feel very good," replied Ziegler.

At first, Nixon had trouble sorting out the commentary:

President: [Sighs] This is hard work.

Haig: It is.

President: But I've got to do it. Got to do it. And it's best for me to do it too.

Nixon and Ziegler examined the March 13 conversation