The Benefactors

All through the presidential race, one of George McGovern's refrains on his "secrecy-and-corruption" theme was the Administration's refusal to name the contributors who had poured at least $10 million anonymously into Republican campaign chests. The money, McGovern suggested, carried the possible taint of special favors. Eventually Common Cause, the reformist citizens' lobby founded by John Gardner, filed suit to force the G.O.P. to yield up its list of benefactors.

Last week, probably too late and too ambiguously to produce any effect on the election, Common Cause and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President reached an accommodation of sorts. In an out-of-court settlement, the Republicans agreed to release a partial list of names, including those of 283 donors who had given a total of $4.9 million. But all of those gifts were made before March 10, the last filing date under the expired Corrupt Campaign Practices Act. Still secret, awaiting further court action, were the names and amounts that were bestowed upon the Republicans between March 10 and April 7, the date when the new campaign disclosure act became law. Thus the possibility remained that the important Republican contributors were hiding in the lacuna of a legal technicality. The 283 whose names and gifts were revealed might raise an occasional eyebrow. Among them:

>$1,000,000: W. Clement Stone, a rich Chicago insurance man, who has been widely rumored to be in the running for the job of U.S. Ambassador in London in a second Nixon term.

> $800,000: Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburgh heir of the Mellon banking fortune.

>$300,000: Arthur K. Watson, former chairman of the board of IBM World Trade Corp. and recently resigned Ambassador to France.

> $100,000: New York Lawyer John Humes, Ambassador to Austria since October 1969; Leonard K. Firestone, president of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. of California; and DeWitt and Lila Wallace, co-chairmen of the Reader's Digest.

> $50,000: Oilman J. Paul Getty.

>$48,505: Anthony D. Marshall, former president of African Research & Development Co., Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago since February.

>$28,000: Vincent de Roulet, a corporate executive and Ambassador to Jamaica since October 1969.

> $27,117: Willard W. Keith, a director of the Lockheed Aircraft Corp., which was bailed out of its financial troubles last year by a federal loan guarantee of $250 million.

In signing the compromise agreement with Common Cause, C.R.P. retained the right to litigate whether contributors from March 10 to April 6 must eventually be revealed. It also avoided the potentially damaging spectacle of having two of the President's principal fund raisers brought onto the witness stand, under oath, in the closing days of the campaign. Maurice Stans, C.R.P. national finance chairman and Hugh Sloan, former C.R.P. treasurer, both had been scheduled to testify this week.

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