Countdown

Home > The Hanna Project > Election Year: 1971

1971

President Nixon becomes the poster child for campaign finance reform following extorting disclosures that hefty contributions have been extracted or extorted from companies and individuals under his administration’s regulatory purview. In March, for example, dairy industry representatives deliver the first $10,000 of a $730,000 contribution they have pledged to Nixon’s reelection campaign. That same morning, Nixon reverses a decision by his agriculture secretary, Clifford Hardin, and increases government price supports for milk. In June, International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (ITT) makes a $400,000 contribution to help finance the 1972 GOP convention. As a quid pro quo, the Nixon administration stops a federal antitrust lawsuit against the company. The transaction will be exposed the following year by investigative columnist Jack Anderson, who obtains an incriminating memo by an ITT lobbyist.

What Nixon does with the money is as criminal as how he got it. He sets up the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, a campaign organization that is completely separate from the Republican National Committee. The unusual arrangement allows CRP — which critics dub “CREEP” — to divert campaign donations to finance the White House’s illegal covert activities. Some $5,000 of the milk lobby’s money, for example, goes to finance a September burglary of the Beverly Hills office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychoanalyst whose patients include “Pentagon Papers” leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

Over initial Republican objections, the Democratic-controlled Congress passes the Federal Election Campaign Act, the first significant campaign finance reform law since the 1920s. It requires candidates to report all contributions of more than $100, and to list the donor’s name, occupation, and address. Additionally, the new law requires campaigns to report how they spend the money, restricts federal candidates to spending no more than 10 cents per voter on media advertising, and further restricts them from spending more than 60 percent of that amount on television and radio ads. (As a result, presidential candidates in 1972 will be allowed to spend $8.5 million apiece on electronic media, which will give them $5.7 million for other advertising.) Wealthy presidential candidates are barred from contributing more than $50,000 to their own campaigns. The law also allows labor unions and corporations to solicit voluntary contributions from members and employees for political action committees and permits funds from union and corporate treasuries to be used to cover the overhead expenses of their PACs.

While campaign finance reform advocates fear that Nixon will veto the law, in February 1972 he will not only sign it but feign enthusiasm for its provisions. “By giving the American public full access to the facts of political financing” he will offer, “this legislation will guard against campaign abuses and will work to build public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.” Meanwhile, his campaign operatives pressure contributors to make large cash contributions before the new law takes effect.

Congress also passes the Revenue Act of 1971, which gives citizens the opportunity to check a box on their tax returns that authorizes the federal government to contribute $1 from their taxes to public funding of presidential candidates.