Nixon Administration Torpedoed Reform Bill, Kennedy Charges

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) accused the Nixon administration Saturday of taking a "false public stand" on the issue of campaign financing reform and said the White House has "frustrated every effort to end the kind of abuses which occurred in 1972."

Kennedy said the administration "deceived the American public by taking an officially neutral stand" on a comprehensive campaign reform bill, privately lobbying for its defeat. The bill was defeated in the Senate last Thursday, after a filibuster by its opponents.

"When a vote on the bill became imminent," Kennedy said, "the White House sent Air Force jets all over the country to collect senators opposed to the bill and get them back to Washington in time for the vote."

Kennedy's remarks came in his keynote address to a strategy session of Massachusetts Democratic leaders at the Sheraton Boston Hotel.

Kennedy said campaign reform should be the major issue for Democratic candidates in the 1974 campaigns. "The question now is whether political influence should be apportioned on the basis of wealth," he said, "and this is the issue on which we can elect an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress next year."

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who also addressed the conference, sharply disagreed with Kennedy. "The Democratic party can't win the coming elections on pointing the finger at Republicans for Watergate," he said. "Watergate has made the average slob suspicious of all politicians--Democrats, too--and we all have to prove our honesty if our institutions are to survive."

Biden said Democrats must campaign on bread-and-butter issues. "The administration's economic mismanagement should be at the top," he said. "We are campaigning against a president who thinks that the public good is the sum of all private deals."