THE ADMINISTRATION,ECCENTRICS: Kleindienst Steps Up

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THE ADMINISTRATION

It was a rare breach in his stony façade when Attorney General John Mitchell last spring lost his customary calm because an aide predicted for newsmen the number of antiwar demonstrators who would appear at the Capitol. The Justice Department, Mitchell snapped, should not be making crowd predictions. One reporter persisted: How many were expected to participate? "No more than four or five thousand," replied Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, who was also present. "Damn it, Kleindienst," said the exasperated Mitchell, "why don't you keep your mouth shut?"

Keeping his mouth shut is hardly characteristic of the man President Nixon last week named to succeed the laconic Mitchell, who will step down March 1 in order to run the Nixon reelection campaign. Since he first came to national attention as head of the "Arizona Mafia" that captured the G.O.P. presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964, Kleindienst, 48, has made a practice of speaking his mind.

To the chagrin of his boss, Kleindienst once compared his job at the Justice Department with that of a "golf caddy"; he said that Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana was either "sick or not in possession of his faculties" for charging that the FBI was tapping Congressmen's phones. Admitted one friend: "Dick has a habit of shooting from the hip." But on matters of law-and-order, he and Mitchell generally see eye-to-eye.

Kleindienst has been outspoken in favor of preventive detention, wiretapping and keeping marijuana outlawed. He approved the legally doubtful arrest of thousands of protesters during last year's Mayday demonstration. Only in civil rights is Kleindienst considered more liberal than Mitchell; friends attribute his attitude to his religious faith (he is an Episcopal lay reader) and to the special circumstances of his boyhood in Winslow, Ariz.

Broken Heart. The son of a Santa Fe railroad brakeman, Kleindienst grew up among Navajos, Mexicans and Chinese—friends quip that he is "profane in two languages, English and Navajo"—and was elected student body president of his high school even though whites were in the minority. At the urging of his mother, he entered Harvard, and while there married a Radcliffe student named Margaret Dunbar; they now have four children.

Returning to Arizona after graduation from Harvard Law School, he won a seat in the Arizona House of Representatives in 1952—the same year that Barry Goldwater was elected to the U.S. Senate. "Goldwater got a lot of young people interested in politics as an avocation," he says. "I was one of them."

There followed various posts with the G.O.P. and, in 1964, an unsuccessful run for Governor. After his own defeat and Goldwater's, says Kleindienst, "I thought I was through with politics forever." But three years later he agreed to serve as Nixon's Arizona chairman and then as Mitchell's campaign deputy, a post that led eventually to the Justice Department.