User:Taylordw/sandbox/ITT affair

The ITT affair was a Nixon Administration scandal in which ITT Corporation pledged $400,000 in sponsorship toward the 1972 Republican National Convention as part of a lobbying effort to convince the administration to relax a series of antitrust cases against ITT, brought owing to a number of acquisitions ITT made in the late 1960s, most notably Hartford Fire Insurance. The President himself ordered Acting Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to drop the case. When the affair came to pubic awareness in February 1972, the Republican Convention was hastily relocated from San Diego to Miami Beach in order to reduce the appearance of impropriety. Nixon claimed that his order was owing to his view of the proper limits of Federal antitrust power. The House Judiciary Committee could not definitively establish a link between Nixon's order and ITT's $400,000 pledge. Thus the ITT affair was only included in Article II, part 4 of the Articles of Impeachment as obstruction, not bribery. The level of involvement of the President remained unclear until 1997 when the National Archive released the recording of a 13 May 1971 Oval Office conversation in which Nixon said ITT's money is "part of this ballgame", and instructed aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman to use intermediaries and allowing sufficient time to pass as to obscure the connection.

The affair
On 19 April 1971 Erlichman telephoned Kleindienst and told him to stop the appeal of the ITT case. Kleindienst said he could not do that because the appeal had been recommended by Richard McLaren and already approved by Solicitor General Erwin Griswold. Erlichman hung up and a short time later President Nixon called and repeated the demand. Kleindienst demurred. "The brief has to be filed tomorrow. Your order is not to file?" Nixon shouted, "My order is to drop the Goddamned thing, you son of a bitch! Don't you understand the English language?"

Evidence of a quid pro quo first became public nearly a year later when journalist and long-time Nixon bête noire Jack Anderson obtained an internal ITT memo detailing the deal.