1965. As a House Republican leader from 1965 to 1968, he was responsible for developing positive Republican proposals.

In September, 1968, Mr. Goodell was appointed to succeed Robert Kennedy in the U.S. Senate from New York. As a Senator he championed many civil liberties causes. He was the first to propose legislation that would cut off all funds for the war in Vietnam by a fixed date in the future. His opposition to the war and other disagreements with the Nixon Administration led to the open opposition of Vice President Agnew in the 1970 campaign. Since his defeat, he has been practicing law in New York City.

He is married to the former Jean Rice and the father of five sons-Bill, Tim, Roger, Mike and Jeff.

Mr. Goodell is author of a recent book, "Political Prisoners in America," published by Random House, 1973.

In January, 1974, he became Chairman of the Board of DGA International and partner in the law firm of Hydeman, Mason & Goodell, both located in Washington, D.C.

Mr. GOODELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Those are fond memories for me, too, and I am gratified that you have been here to carry on these battles for the last 4 years.

Mr. Chairman, I have a statement which I would like to ask your consent to put in the record. I will abbreviate the statement. I don't think all of it needs to be read.

Senator ERVIN. Let the record show at this point the statement will be printed in full in the record immediately after your remarks.

Mr. GOODELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator ERVIN. Also the statement from the Congressional Record of March 22, 1974.

Mr. GOODELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Committee for Public Justice held three days of hearings here in Washington in this building in February on the basic subject of separating the Department of Justice from partisan politics, and we did hear from a great many witnesses and that transcript is available for the use of this committee at your pleasure.

I welcome this opportunity to appear before the Subcommittee on Separation of Powers of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to discuss S. 2803 and S. 2978.

The Committee for Public Justice is an independent organization. It studies and is concerned with individual rights and civil liberties of American citizens. As part of its efforts at public education concerning these problems, it has held a number of conferences relating to the administration of justice.

We believe that the problems which S. 2803 seeks to deal with are extremely important, and I commend the chairman for his bill, although I do not stand shoulder to shoulder with him urging its

enactment.

The Department of Justice has greater power over the day-to-day lives of American citizens than any other agency of Government. It is vital that the administration of justice should be evenhanded and insulated from improper political influence.

However, we in the Committee for Public Justice do not feel that it is necessary or desirable to separate entirely the Department of Justice from the executive branch of Government. We feel that other less drastic solutions are possible, including the appointment of an independent permanent prosecutor.

Accordingly, we are rather reluctantly supporting S. 2978, a bill to establish a Special Prosecutor's office.

I say "reluctantly," Mr. Chairman, because I think there is ample evidence available in the record to justify moving now directly to set up a Special Prosecutor in this area.

On the other hand, commissions serve a purpose in bringing people of stature and prominence together to consider a question and then place their prestige behind an idea, educate the public, and perhaps move forward to get some enactment of legislation. Therefore, I support the commission primarily as a means, a vehicle for public education, rather than a real exploration of the merits of the question.

I have no doubt in my mind what the solution should be, whether it is a limited independent prosecutor or all the way to a full independent Department of Justice. Either would be better than what we have now.

We believe that there are more effective ways for dealing with the problem of improper political influence in the Department of Justice than total separation. Among the steps which we believe should be taken are the following:

1. Persons involved in the political process as candidates or managers should not be appointed to high positions in the Department for 2 years after they served in their political positions. Department officials should not speak for political candidates or collect funds for political campaigns. It might be desirable to have persons of the opposite party appointed to a certain number of positions in the Department, including perhaps the criminal division.

I might say, Mr. Chairman, that I'm very hesitant to recommend that such a provision be written into law requiring a 2-year hiatus between involvement in politics and becoming Attorney General because I think it would be very difficult to define exactly the people you're going to exclude. You might say, "Well, we'd exclude the campaign manager," and then what do you do about a finance chairman or a regional manager, or somebody who was very actively working full time in the campaign but had no precise designation, or perhaps a major contributor?

I think it would be better to leave this question to the Senate in making it clear to future Presidents that any appointment to the position of Attorney General would be questioned very thoroughly in hearings on his approval, and we would expect that the President would appoint someone who was not involved in politics or partisan politics in the past. I think the Senate could, with vigilance, enforce this without having a very precise provision of law which would be very hard to define.

2. The Attorney General must have the final word on prosecutions. No one, not even the President, should interfere with individual cases. The President may set policy, but not dictate specific steps that should be taken. If the President does not like what his Attorney General is doing, he should fire him. In England it is clear that the Attorney General has the final word on all prosecutional decisions. 3. Above all, the Attorney General must appoint people of integrity in the Department who believe in the rule of law. The Justice

Department should not be considered a refuge for defeated political candidates who have had little experience in law enforcement and the administration of justice.

4. There must be thorough and continuous oversight by Congress with respect to both the Justice Department and the FBI. A special congressional panel with permanent staff must be established to continuously check into improper actions by the Department and the Bureau. A joint Senate/House committee along the lines of the CIA oversight committee would be desirable.

5. A citizens panel should also be established that can explore invasions of individuals' rights on a continuous basis. It would have the authority to check into claims of abuse of power, to make public cases of denial of rights, and to press for redress of griev

ances.

6. Most important, we believe a permanent special prosecutor's office is desirable. Mr. Lloyd Cutler, a former president of the American Bar Association, offered a plan at our Justice Department conference which we believe has many positive features. The main idea of the plan is as follows:

1. A Special Prosecutor would be appointed for a 6-year term with the advice and consent of the Senate.

2. A deputy might also be appointed who would be of the opposite political party of the Special Prosecutor.

3. Removal would be possible only for incapacity or misconduct. 4. The Special Prosecutor would have jurisdiction over all election law crimes, violations of Federal criminal law by present or former Government officials or national political party figures, and lobbying offenses. It would be limited to those three areas of jurisdiction: election law crimes, violations of Federal criminal law by present or former Government officials, or lobbying offenses.

5. The Special Prosecutor would be able to use all the investigative resources of the FBI and could prosecute all cases within his jurisdiction. The Special Prosecutor could check into the types of crimes associated with Watergate, and into other acts of corruption. He could do so in a way that would not present any potential conflict of interest which may take place when the Justice Department must investigate its own political allies or superiors.

The plan also has the virture of providing a check on overreachings by Government officers, particularly Justice Department figures and FBI agents when they interfere with the civil rights of citizens by illegal surveillance, wiretapping, and similar crimes in which you and I, Mr. Chairman, were involved and tried to get some inhibitory legislation.

In reaching these conclusions, we in no way dispute, Mr. Chairman, your reasons why changes are required in the Justice Department. We agree wholeheartedly with your remarks on the importance of the Department of Justice, on the need for the American people to have faith in the fairness of our system of justice, and on the doubts that have arisen in the public mind about the Department's activities in the Watergate scandal.

In Watergate, we have had a Justice Department which refused to recognize or consider that its superiors in the executive depart

ment may have been guilty of criminal behavior. It reported the result of its investigations of wrongdoing to those very people who may have planned and participated in the crimes, and in this way contributed to the obstruction of justice. It arranged for the special appearance of witnesses from the administration before a prosecutor instead of the grand jury and sought to restrict grand jury questioning of possible White House involvement in the Watergate scandal.

But there have been other questionable actions and nonactions by the Justice Department in recent years. They were also the result of improper political considerations in the development and carrying out of policy.

In the field of civil rights, the Justice Department has gone beyond merely implementing a new policy of the administration; it has effectively nullified congressional enactments in some areas through tactics of nonenforcement. While its recent actions on voting rights and employment may have been vigorous, although it opposed extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1970, its nonactivity in education and housing are in violation of congressional require

ments.

It has also shown its disregard of constitutional requirements by a conscious policy of restricting the rights of demonstrators in the Nation's capital.

A more fundamental problem arises in the misuse of the concept of national security. Of course, the problem has been present in the FBI for over 30 years. A substantial argument can be made that the FBI has usurped the power to engage in domestic intelligence since 1939. While its power to investigate crimes is clear, the Presidential directives on which the Bureau has relied to check into "subversive activities" do not appear to grant the power the FBI has claimed. Nor do any statutes grant it such authority.

Its extraordinary intelligence activities, its extensive files, its direct avenues to Congress, has rendered it impregnable over the years. And it has used this power for direct political purposes.

It has tried to convince the public that movements for change were inspired by subversives or were the product of agitators, or that the Nation should not move for reform of basic institutions because "the Soviets would rejoice." It created and expanded its jurisdiction to implement the political ideology which J. Edgar Hoover endorsed.

The problem of the recent Justice Department has been that it has been infected by the FBI abuses of the Hoover years. The Justice Department has found a new and more effective device to gather intelligence from those it considered its enemies; namely, the grand jury. It has taken over the FBI's concepts of national security and foreign intelligence and used them to justify wiretaps, infiltration, and surveillance of political dissidents. Its conspiracy indictments have embraced the cold war terminology and ideology of Hoover. Obviously, it has done nothing to check into the FBI's expansion of power. The experience of the FBI and the Justice Department in recent years has been that illegality breeds deception and deception breeds illegality.

The way to deal with the misuse of power in the national security area is to take steps to eliminate the practice directly, not through structural changes in the Department. Mail drops, pen registers, wiretaps must be eliminated or greatly curtailed except where necessary to uncover the commission of a crime through surveillance with the approval of the courts. Other abuses connected with the collection or dissemination of data must be dealt with by specific legislation, and I commend the chairman for his indefatigable efforts in this area of uncovering the situation and proposing legislation.

These problems transcend most of the recent concerns about partisan influence in the Justice Department. Obviously there are serious inroads into the rule of law when partisan political input is the crucial factor in prosecutorial decisions. Antitrust enforcement, for example, has been compromised for years because powerful interests have been able to exert pressure on both Democratic and Republican administrations to influence antitrust decisions.

One would hope that it would be possible to minimize this problem by requiring disclosures of all contacts between the decisionmaker in the Department and all outsiders who ask about particular cases including legislators, White House figures, or the parties themselves. But the line between economic policy and partisan politics may blur in this area and the best safeguard is to appoint people of integrity to positions of responsibility, and for Congress to remain vigilant in its oversight capacity.

Detailed papers on each of these subjects were prepared at our Justice Department conference and will be made available to this committee.

These criticisms do not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the Justice Department must be totally independent of the executive branch. It can well be argued that prosecution is and should be an executive function that flows directly from the executive's obligation to execute the laws. If a President is elected on a platform of vigorously enforcing antitrust or civil rights laws, for example, or of the criminal laws generally, he should have a Department of Justice which will carry out his pledge. It would not do for a carryover Attorney General from a prior administration to say that he does not believe in vigorous enforcement of these laws and he will not take steps to bring about prosecutions which the public has voted their desire to have take place.

It is true that in many States and cities the attorney general or district attorney is elected directly by the people and is independent of the chief executive, but a Governor or a mayor controls the police forces and, so, has a direct input in the way in which laws are enforced. Creating an independent Justice Department, with an Attorney General who appoints the U.S. attorneys in each district as well as the Director of the FBI, means that the President is almost totally removed from the process of law enforcement.

We do not believe that it is desirable to make the prosecution function so distant from the political process. The Attorney General must be made more responsible to the public and their needs, not