INVESTIGATIONS: ITT (Contd.)

• Share

The Senate Judiciary Committee originally convened seven weeks ago for what seemed the short-order task of confirming Richard Kleindienst as Attorney General. Now, to the delight of Democrats and the dismay of Republicans, the investigation is still dragging on with no conclusive end in sight. Last week's fresh round of witnesses only added to the tangle of contradictions, leading California Senator, John Tunney to observe that some inquiries into perjury might be in order. Furthermore, a confrontation cropped up between the committee's Democratic members and the White House over the practice of executive privilege that threatened to pull the rug out from under Kleindienst's confirmation altogether.

The committee is still trying to determine whether Administration-approved settlements of three antitrust cases against International Telephone & Telegraph were linked with the ITT offer to pledge at least $200,000 toward underwriting the Republican National Convention in San Diego in August. The now famous Dita Beard memo quoted by Columnist, Jack Anderson, clearly implied a link. Mrs. Beard denied authorship, but admitted she had written another similar memo on convention financing and had delivered it personally to William R. Merriam, head of ITT's Washington office. Last week, however, Merriam told the committee that he knew of no such memo, had never commissioned it and never received it.

Error. Merriam's testimony hardly squared with the recollections of Republican Congressman, Bob Wilson, of San Diego, who said in a taped interview last month, that Merriam told him he had received the Beard memo. Wilson added in the interview that "Jack Anderson has the original memo."

But last week Wilson told the committee it was all a semantic misunderstanding, that by using the word "original" he was simply referring to the top copy of a memo, not necessarily the memo Mrs. Beard says she wrote. Merriam admitted telling Wilson he had received the memo from Mrs. Beard; lamely adding that he discovered later he had not received any memo and simply had not bothered calling Wilson back to correct himself.

Neither witness was very convincing to the committee. When Democratic Senator, Sam Ervin asked who had given the orders for the destruction of ITT's Washington files after the committee investigation had begun, Merriam replied: "I did, sir."

Ervin: Well, you could not destroy that [Dita Beard] memo because you did not have it.

Merriam: No, that is right, but there might have been a lot of others in there like that.

There was still more confusion about what role—if any—the White House played, and the amount ITT might contribute to the convention. Mrs. Beard testified that a White House telephone call to Merriam mentioned $600,000. Wilson said, ITT President Harold S. Geneen spoke of a "guarantee" for $400,000. Geneen earlier in the hearings had testified that there was never any commitment for more than $200,000.