The IT&T San Diego Convention Scandal
President Nixon wanted the city of San Diego to be the site of the 1972 Republican National Convention, where he would accept the nomination of his party for a second term. The problem was San Diego was not inclined to go to the expense of hosting the convention. Despite the chaos which the convention would bring with it, including antiwar protests, civil rights protests, the need for increased security, the shortage of accommodations, and other problems faced by the city it was agreed that the convention would take place there, bolstered with corporate sponsorship in the form of $400,000 pledged from IT&T. The city also applied for a grant of nearly $1 million from the Nixon Justice Department to help fund the additional police needed to provide security.
Meanwhile, John Mitchell, the Attorney General, and other Justice Department officials negotiated pending antitrust litigation involving IT&T in a manner which benefited the communications giant and obscured the reasons for which the government had brought the suit in the first place. The Justice Department had filed the suit to determine if an existing law applied to the mergers of conglomerates, a decision which would have to be made by the courts. The Nixon administration essentially dropped the suit, after receiving promises that IT&T would, through a subsidiary, help fund the Republican convention in the city which the President preferred.
On February 29, 1972, a column by syndicated writer Jack Anderson revealed a memo written by a lobbyist for IT&T which directly linked the $400,000 pledge to the dropping of the lawsuit by the Nixon administration. Further investigations in San Diego revealed evidence the administration obstructed justice in several instances of investigations into prominent Republicans in San Diego who had used various illicit practices to ensure that the city would apply to host the convention. The Senate opened hearings into the Justice Department decision.
The Nixon White House launched a defamation campaign against the writer of the memo, Dita Beard, who had written that the $400,000 pledge had “gone a long way” towards achieving the settlement which IT&T wanted and that, “Certainly the President has told Mitchell to see that things are worked out fairly.” Mitchell told the Senate investigators that he had nothing to do with the negotiations over the litigation but later revelations and testimony as Watergate expanded revealed that he had been directly involved, and tapes of Nixon discussing the deal in the Oval Office also emerged.
In the end, to avoid the taint of scandal surrounding the convention, the Republicans moved the event to Miami Beach. Subsequent investigations took a back seat as the Watergate scandal began to unravel late in the year. The Nixon administration was furious at the way the story was leaked and in response to rumblings that the Justice Department might reinitiate the litigation involving IT&T the company placed the memo’s writer under surveillance. The Watergate break-in occurred as the scandal over the IT&T pledge, extracted by the Nixon administration as a quid quo pro, was still being investigated by several news organizations.