Miss DREW. Well.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. And the interesting thing about it, Liz, is—and I suppose a lot of people in this country think there are thousands of these, you know, authorized wiretaps. And there are a handful, maybe 45, 50, you know. It's a very, very small number. It isn't just hundreds. It isn't thousands. It isn't even dozens. It's a very, very small number.

Miss DREW. When we get to the general question of surveillance, now that the Army has finished its surveillance, or we're told it has, and it'sMr. KLEINDIENST. Now, let's talk about the Army, too, for a minute. Miss DREW. No, I want to talk about the Justice Department.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. The reason why the Army got in it is because President Johnson, as I understood it, couldn't get the kind of information he needed from the Department of Justice, you know, in cases like this. But be that as it may.

Miss DREW. Okay.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. All right.

Miss DREW. You made your point. Now it's

Mr. KLEINDIENST. (Laughing) That's why I'm here, is to try to make some points.

Miss DREW. It's back-the Justice Department is taking this responsibility now. Who decides who will be surveilled?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, you have two-well, in that kind of situationyour'e talking about this internal security type of surveillance?

Miss DREW. Uh-huh.

Mr. KLEINDIENST.. It comes about or can come about as a result of a recommendation of several persons in the Department of Justice, either Assistant Attorneys General, or staff persons, by way of then formal recommendation documents to the Attorney General. And they, by recommendation only, but he and he only decides it. He does not delegate it to anyone; he has never delegated it to me, or to anyone else. So the Attorney General decides the question himself.

Miss DREW. Now, we-the Washington Post had a story over the weekend that there are 10,000 people in what's called a "security index," who would be subject to arrest in case of war or national emergency. Who decides that? Mr. KLEINDIENST. I read that in the newspaper, and I was rather astounded by it as I

Miss DREW. You didn't know about it?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. NO.

Miss DREW. Really?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. I know that there is some kind of list that has been maintained by the Internal Security Division for decades-the same list that was maintained by Ramsey Clark and Mr. Katzenbach and

Miss DREW. Yeah. I'm not picking on you for it

Mr. KLEINDIENST. I've never seen it. I've never been curious about it. I don't know the numbers there.

Miss DREW. And what are you going to do about it now, if you were so amazed by its existence?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, I might get a little curious to find out more about it, but I believe it probably has been a traditional function of the Department of Justice-again, agreed upon by President Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. I can likewise feel that, since this is the first time, to my knowledge, a story has come out about it, that it's very securely kept under much restraint, for the protection of innocent people. You know, there's rumor information in it.

Miss DREW. Well. But the question would be, who would decide that there was this national security emergency

Mr. KLEINDIENST. You mean, for the use of a thing like that?

Miss DREW [continuing]. And really, on what grounds these people would be arrested.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Oh, I can't imagine. You and I have debated this before, but I don't believe people should be arrested and detained without full due process of law. That if you have reasonable cause to believe somebody has committed a crime, arrest him; but if you do, immediately thereafter they should be arraigned, be able to set bail, and then have a trial, you know, very quickly thereafter. I can't imagine-well, it's incomprehensible to me that any

administration, this one, the next one, the next one after that, or past ones, would arrest people and detain them without due process of law. We did it once with the Japanese, which I abhored-did then, have since, and do now. And would never want to see that done again.

Miss DREW. On Mayday, were the

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Mayday.

Miss DREW. Mayday. Were the arrests there to get the people off the streets or to prosecute them for breaking a law?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. The arrests were there because those policemen under those circumstances, at that time, had reasonable cause to believe that the persons who were at or about the place of activity were either going to commit a misdemeanor or a felony or were in the process of doing so. And I think that's all the law requires, is that reasonable cause at the time.

Now, what happens to them afterward, I think, is a great tribute to our system of due process, because once arrested a person again has to be arraigned within a reasonable period of time. As I recall in the Pentagon disorders of 1967, it took three, four, and five days to have them arraigned, and these people were arraigned and left within 12, 14, 16, 18, 22 hours.

Miss DREW. But I gather it became clear early that evening, or even that afternoon, that there really wasn't enough evidence to prosecute a lot of these people. Why were they held

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, it wasn't

Miss DREW [continuing] In the camps?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. It wasn't clear, Liz. It wasn't clear until you could create a situation where once a person was arrested, he was properly arraigned, whether a policeman was available under the circumstances, to come into court and identify that person and say, "Yes, I saw him at 6:45 a.m. this morning throw a can out in the street or resist arrest or not move along." In each case, when there wasn't such an identifying police officer, the case was dismissed, as it should have been.

Miss DREW. But that was known that night

Mr. KLEINDIENST. But you couldn't

Miss DREW [continuing]. Wasn't it, that there wasn't

Mr. KLEINDIENST. You couldn't predetermine each case, however, until you've gone through them all. You don't let-you-I think that you have the obligation to go ahead and finish due process

Miss DREW. For the whole group.

Mr. KLEINDIENST [continuing]. Which you do in every case. For the whole group. Yes, indeed.

Miss DREW. Even though it was clear that you didn't have the evidence on them all?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, sure, but how do you know which ones until the process has worked itself out? The great thing about this whole situation isand that is, to my knowledge, no innocent person has been convicted, you know, of wrongful

Miss DREW. Hardly anyone's been convicted

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, fine. But that also means there have been no innocent people convicted. If the law had to be sure that a person was guilty before he was arrested, you would never have anybody arrested under our system of jurisprudence. What we are interested in is to see that no innocent person is convicted of a crime that he did not commit.

Miss DREW. But does this mean that when you have large groups in town again, I mean, that they might expect that this same procedure againMr. KLEINDIENST. Well, there's-large groups have been in this town before, six times since I've been the Deputy Attorney General

Miss DREW. Well, some of which are interfering with

Mr. KLEINDIENST. This is the first time a large group apparently conspired to stop the government by illegal conduct and activity. And it was illegal conduct and activity. I don't think, and I certainly hope, that that kind of group will come back and try to do that again. If they did it again under these circumstances as existed before, I would fully expect, I would urge, that the same steps be taken as was taken by Chief Wilson on that day.

Miss DREW. I have a lot of subjects I want to cover, and you're out-talking me. We're not going to get through

Mr. KLEINDIENST. [Laughter.]

Miss DREW. [Laughing] We're not going to get to them all, but one I wanted to ask you about is gun control. Do you think that people should be permitted to have handguns?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, some people should and some people shouldn't. I essentially

Miss DREW. What about a law against handguns? That's around.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, I essentially believe that, with the exception of a few areas of this, that that is a matter for state and local authorities. Miss DREW. Why?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. The handgun situation is one thing in New York City than it is in Idaho or Nevada or another area. I think that there is some legitimate part to play for the federal government, but I don't think it's the kind of situation where you want to run in and have a federal response to it. Secondly, I think it would be almost impossible to go out and confiscate every gun in the United States. If people of a criminal bent wanted to keep guns, they would. There's also a legitimate interest on behalf of the law-abiding person to use guns for hunting.

Miss DREW. Now, I'm talking about handguns, not rifles.

Mr. KLEINDIENST [continuing]. Or for recreational support. I'm talking about handguns. I'm talking about

Miss DREW. Handguns for hunting?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Sure, for recreation. Not hunting on handguns, but for recreation

Miss DREW. Well

Mr. KLEINDIENST. And then, I think there's also an interest in-on behalf of an individual citizen to be able to have a handgun in his house for his own self-protection. So that when you start weighing all of the interests, I think it's pretty difficult to urge a comprehensive, standard, federal solution to this problem; and I think the Congress has rejected that. I think that they turned that approach down.

Miss DREW. Senator Kennedy was here last week, and I-he was talking about this, and he said that the reason this Administration doesn't come out for this kind of control is it's overly influenced by the National Rifle Association. Do you have any response to that?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, I'd hate to comment about the groups that overly influence Senator Kennedy.

Miss DREW. Well, go ahead. He talked about you.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, I think-I don't think that the National Rifle Association overly influences this administration.

Miss DREW. Excuse me. He really didn't say "overly." I did that wrong. He said, "influenced."

Mr. KLEINDIENST. I think the position taken by the President on this subject matter is consistent with the position that he took in the campaign, and I wish Senator Kennedy would be as forthright in campaigns as President Nixon has been. And then thereafter be consistent in his—in his role as a senator, you know, about the things he said in campaigns. There's nothing inconsistent about this Administration's campaign posture on gun control, than it has backed up since it's been here, and I personally think it's the correct position.

Miss DREW. Well, I don't know that you answered me, but that's all right. We just have a couple of minutes left, but I wanted to get in a little bit about your own background. You grew up in-what was it? Winslow, Arizona? Mr. KLEINDIENST. Winslow, Arizona, uh-uh. A little town, a little railroad town in the northeastern part of Arizona. My grandfather homesteaded there in 1909. He had been born in Washington, D. C., as a matter of fact. Miss DREW. And then you-you went to Harvard, didn't you?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, I did a lot of things before I got to Harvard. I did a lot of dishwashing and automobile mechanic work. I was a cook and a waiter. I was at the University of Arizona for a year before World War II, I was in the service, and then transferred to Harvard College after World War II, in 1946. Then I went to the law school, and when I graduated from law school, I went back to Phoenix, where I practiced law for twenty years.

Miss DREW. You know, the-we were talking about wiretapping before, and as you know, a lot of people-as you said, people think more is going on than is. And a lot of people think their phones are being tapped, and

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Uh-huh. I know it, and that's a bad thing in a free society, you know.

Miss DREW. Well, that's what I wondered-wanted-if that bothers you, that that's going on now.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. It bothers me, but

Miss DREW. Why do you think they're so-they feel that way?

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, I think some politicians are trying to exaggerate the problem for strictly political purposes, and politicians who should know better. Because the general policies of the Attorney General under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, has been almost the same. And yet I think it's for political reasons that the matter has become one of hysteria right now. When it could just as easily have been that when you had Democratic Presidents.

And I think it's been for political reasons that some politicians, the Democratic Party, who seek to defeat President Nixon, are trying to make-or manufacture an issue out of it. If they were as sincere two or three years ago as they are now, they could have done it then. So I therefore attribute it to political motives.

Miss DREW. You know, there is a sort of fear, really, I guess would be the right word

Mr. KLEINDIENST. By some.

Miss DREW. Well, I was about to say something else—of this Justice Department. How does that make you feel, to be part of something like thatMr. KLEINDIENST. Well

Miss DREW [continuing]. Whether it's valid, or not. It's there.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Well, so long as I know that it's not valid, it doesn't bother me. I'm disturbed that-that anybody would create false impressions about me or the Attorney General in this area. We feel that we're very careful, we're very moderate men. We-all of the men in this Department are trained lawyers, that was our career before we got there, it's going to be our career when we leave. And if you are a good lawyer in a free society, you take very seriously the guarantees of the Constitution, the rights of individual citizens; you re very jealous in guarding civil liberties

Miss DREW. We're out of time, I'm sorry. Get-two more words.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Are we out of time?

Miss DREW. We are out of time. Thank you very much.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. I was just getting warmed up, Liz [laughing].
Miss DREW. Come back. Let's go on. Thank you very much.

Mr. KLEINDIENST. Thank you.

*

EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW WITH ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN MITCHELL,
ON "THE DAVID FROST SHOW", April 7, 1971

FROST. Welcome back. Talking with Attorney General John Mitchell. Everybody gets very worried by the phrase, "electronic surveillance," and sees 1984 just around the corner. Electronic surveillance really means two things, doesn't it? Wiretapping and bugs. How.much, really, is there going on at the moment? MITCHELL. Well, if I can put this into context, because there are different facets to it. There are really three facets to it. Number one is the courtauthorized electronic surveillance that we have been using against organized crime and kidnapping and counterfeiters, and so forth. I believe that, since we have come into office in January of 1969, there have probably been up to date about 300 of those, most of which of course are wiretapping. And of course we have to file a complete report in the federal establishment, with everything, including how much it costs us to do it. We have never had a single complaint from anybody about that.

The second aspect of it, of course, is what we refer to as the national security area, in which we exercise, or at least I do, under the direction of the President, the same powers that have been exercised by very Attorney General and President since they invented the system. And I can say right here and now that we have used it less than some of our predecessors in office. And I would also say that this nonsense of some of these paranoid people that think that the Congressmen or Senators are being bugged or they hear a click on their phone and they think they're being bugged is just absolutely nonsense. FROST. That's just the phone company, is it?

MITCHELL. That's the bad wiring, or what ever it may be.

Now, the other aspect of it I'd like to point out, that in this legislation of 1968 that we are using we now in the federal government have a handle of getting at individuals in the private sector and unauthorized local police forces, and so forth, which were using electronic surveillance, wiretapping and the rest of it. And we have quite a number of prosecutions. So that I would say that, far and away, since this legislation and since the activities are carried on as I have described them, there is much less likelihood of an individual being wiretapped than there ever was befored, because of our prosecutions of the private detectives and the rest of them that had been using it over the years. FROST. In the two areas where you do operate, and the area one, in chasing criminals of one sort or another, how many of those-309, is it, since you've come into office?

MITCHELL. Well, they go on-it's slightly over 300, I believe, at the last reporting or counting. But they go on from day to day; the number will change. And of course they are put on for a limited period of time. Most of them are 15 days. The maximum is 30 days. And if you want to use it longer in some big racket operation, you'd have to go back to court and get an extension on it.

FROST. And are there more or less in section two, in the area of national security?

MITCHELL. More or less than what?

FROST. More or less than in the first area, more or less than 300?

MITCHELL. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Much, much less. There are less than 50 of them.

FROST. Less than 50?

MITCHELL. Oh, yes, yes. And there again, of course, they relate to particular subject matters at a particular time.

FROST. I see. And how long do they run for? They can run indefinitely? MITCHELL. Well, they could run indefinitely, but of course in most cases that would be entirely nonproductive because-I hasten to point out that what we are looking for is intelligence that we need for the security of this country. And so that it isn't appropriate in most cases to just put on a wiretap and leave it there.

FROST. What is the exact number? It is much under 50 at the moment? MITCHELL. It's never been disclosed.

FROST. It's never been disclosed. But when you said it's less-well, it's less than 50, and that is less than some previous administrations.

MITCHELL. Yes, considerably so.

FROST. It went much higher, then. But I mean I presume a lot of the material-as you say, you want intelligence. A lot of material you must get from a wiretap is, "Could you send around two pounds of butter" and lots of-I mean how many people does it need to operate one wiretap?

MITCHELL. It doesn't need anybody. It's all done automatically, if you want it done that way.

FROST. But I mean how many people are needed to listen to everything? I mean do you need six people per wiretap or . . .

MITCHELL. No, it depends on, of course, where the tap is and where the phone is used and how it's used and so forth.

WASHINGTON.-Attorney General John N. Mitchell said today that "never in our history has this country been confronted with so many revolutionary elements determined to destroy by force the Government and the society it stands for."

In a speech in support of the Nixon Administration's contention that it can wiretap "dangerous" radicals without court approval, Mr. Mitchell declared that "the threat to our society from so-called 'domestic' subversion is as serious as any threat from abroad."