Reports of the detective’s findings went to Chotiner, Bebe Rebozo, and the president himself. The sleuthing reportedly cost one hundred thousand dollars in the first six months, with no significant discoveries. Nixon never ceased fearing that Kennedy would rebound politically.
In 1970, with midterm elections coming up, the president and Charles Colson schemed to get the Lil Abner cartoonist, Al Capp, to run against Kennedy in Massachusetts. Although that notion failed, Capp seemed to do the White House a service by speaking out publicly against the anti-Nixon press bias. His usefulness ended abruptly, however, when he was charged with sexually assaulting a female college student. Panic at the White House was followed by a covert word with the prosecutors, a sordid end to hopes of using Capp to oppose Kennedy the womanizer.
Nixon’s aim in hurting Kennedy, Haldeman and Colson recalled, had a simple focus: His orders, Haldeman recalled, were “to catch him in the sack with one of his babes.”
They tried hard. In Paris for the funeral of President de Gaulle, Kennedy was surreptitiously photographed dancing into the dawn hours with an Italian princess. Nixon was delighted with the pictures, especially when Colson—on his orders—got one of them printed in the National Enquirer.
But the tactics were to no avail: The polls in the spring of 1971 suggested Kennedy could be the Democratic front-runner for the next year’s presidential election. “Nothing on Teddy?” Nixon asked when aides reported no compromising material had been found. Then “. . . goddammit, there ought to be a way to get him covered,” he insisted, as the Oval Office tapes ran on. “You watch. I, uh, predict something more is going to happen.” Told a man had been assigned to spy on Kennedy, Nixon worried that one snooper was insufficient.
One of Colson’s men tried yet again to find something new and incriminating on Chappaquiddick. He later retailed inaccurate information that Mary Jo Kopechne’s body had been without underwear when recovered, along with a theory that a second woman had been in Kennedy’s car at the time of the accident.4
Another White House operative decorated a Manhattan apartment in red plush, reportedly to entrap a woman who had been at the party that preceded the accident. Nixon’s men hoped she would succumb to a seducer, then reveal useful information while hidden microphones recorded her every word.
In spite of the president’s orders that he be watched around the clock, Kennedy failed to perform as hoped.5 A lead suggesting two Las Vegas showgirls could produce damaging testimony failed to pan out. A detective trailed the senator all the way to Hawaii only to report: “No evidence to indicate that his conduct was improper.” Nixon was disappointed.
When evidence failed to materialize, the White House tried fabricating it. The press was tipped that Kennedy had recently been arrested for drunken driving and released without charge. The truth, discovered in time, was that an incident along those lines had indeed taken place, but years earlier.
By the end of 1971 a Gallup poll would show Kennedy within three points of the president. “Do you think Kennedy’s going to run?” bemused National Archives researchers would one day hear Nixon ask Colson on a tape of a phone call. Then his voice trailed off, and Colson was left saying: “Mr. President? Mr. President?” into a void. Nixon had once again fallen asleep in mid-conversation.
After Kennedy had publicly announced that he would not run, and even after George McGovern had been nominated at the Democratic convention, Nixon would still continue to insist that his aides poll Kennedy’s popularity. Eight weeks before the 1972 election, when asked to provide Kennedy with Secret Service protection, the president saw a fresh opportunity to gather dirt.
“Plant one, plant two guys on him,” Nixon said at an Oval Office meeting. “A big detail,” he insisted hours later, “one that can cover him round the clock. . . . I want to make sure that he is followed.” Although the Secret Service has denied it, Alexander Butterfield has maintained that its agents were used to spy on the senator.
Nixon also urged aides to ensure that Kennedy’s latest rumored liaison was given widespread coverage.6 “Just might get lucky,” he said hopefully into the hidden microphones, “catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ’76.”
Nixon presumably forgot the existence of his taping system during that conversation. A year later, though, in a conversation with John Dean, he would appear to be trying to use it to cover himself. “You recall,” Dean would say, “that right after Chappaquiddick somebody was up there to start observing, within six hours.”
“Did we?” the president asked. “I didn’t know that.”
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If Edward Kennedy was pursued with lip-licking relish, other leading Democrats were also the subject of predatory attention. Before being diverted to Chappaquiddick, Ehrlichman’s field investigator tried to prove Hubert Humphrey was guilty of financial impropriety. His brief came from Nixon’s secretary, Rose Woods.
In the period before the election a private detective in the employ of the White House would work his way onto Humphrey’s campaign staff. Once in place, he caused as much disruption as possible without risking exposure.
A second operative, directed by Nixon’s appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, distributed thousands of bumper stickers reading: “Humphrey: He started the war. Don’t give him another chance!”7 Haldeman persuaded Nixon to “lay off,” but only after the Humphrey campaign had collapsed.
Another candidate who posed a more potent threat was savaged accordingly. As early as two years before the election, Nixon had marked Edmund Muskie, along with Kennedy and Humphrey, for “all-out attack.” When polls in early 1971 revealed that he was capable of defeating Nixon, intense efforts were initiated to stop him by underhand means.
Nixon repeatedly ordered false propaganda, “lib” mailings purportedly backing Muskie but designed to alienate conservative voters. Nixon investigators trawled Maine for “scandals or other skeletons” in Muskie’s closet. The result was disappointing—Nixon learned his opponent was “monkish” with a “big family. Six kids . . . ordinary type of life.” Documents from Muskie headquarters, “borrowed” by an infiltrator and photographed surreptitiously in the back of a car, were delivered to Haldeman aide Gordon Strachan.
Appointments secretary Chapin again orchestrated harassments designed to wear Muskie down, picketing and distribution of false and misleading literature, some of it on counterfeit Muskie stationery. Nixon told aides to “get a massive mailing in Florida . . . on the basis that it came from [Muskie], see?”
Thousands of Floridians received a scabrous letter under the Muskie letterhead, exhorting them to vote for Muskie while noting “several facts” about his Democratic rivals: that Humphrey had been arrested for drunken driving in the company of “a well-known call-girl” and that another contender, Scoop Jackson, had fathered an illegitimate child by a seventeen-year-old girl. For good measure, Jackson was also accused of having been arrested twice on homosexuality charges. No evidence was ever found to substantiate these “facts.”
The sex smear letter reportedly especially pleased Chapin, who had copies of the propaganda sent to his home address in Washington. The strategy, as one of those involved explained, was to set the Democrats at one another’s throats. In Muskie’s case, the specific aim was to goad the short-tempered senator to lose control. Handed a report that Muskie had “proved he can keep his cool,” Chapin scrawled a note in the margin: “We really missed the boat on this—obviously the press now wants to prove EM can keep his temper—let’s prove he can’t.”
According to one aide involved, Nixon personally approved an effort to take votes away from Muskie in the first and key primary, New Hampshire. White House operatives using false names plotted a write-in campaign for Kennedy, whose name was not on the ballot.
They were also likely behind the creation of another false letter published in the press less than two weeks before voting day, which implied disrespect by Muskie for French Canadians, an especially vicious slur in an area close to the border
with Canada.8 They certainly were behind a hurtful piece in the local paper about Senator Muskie’s wife, Jane, suggesting she smoked and drank to excess.
The White House undercover men hoped that this last blow would push Muskie over the emotional edge, and it did. Standing on a flatbed truck in the snow, trying to make a speech, he broke down in tears. The lapse threw public doubt on the senator’s emotional stability, and his campaign never recovered. He withdrew from the race weeks later.
Even afterward, on being told damaging information might be available on Muskie, Nixon urged Bebe Rebozo to check it out. If it could be used, the White House tapes recorded his saying, “We tear him to pieces.” Later still, when the falsity of the smears against Muskie and Jackson began to emerge, he was unfazed. That sort of activity, he said, was “chickenshit.”
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Nixon never ceased worrying about the man with real power to hurt him—in his words, “the one we had to take most seriously.” George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, had proved a serious threat in the close-run fight of 1968, when he had taken 13.6 percent of the vote. He was still a potent third force, a figure with an appeal not only to southern racists but to conservatives and blue-collar voters across the land. The votes he won were likely to be votes lost to Nixon, in numbers potentially large enough to cost the president reelection.
Nixon made his first move against Wallace early on, in a bid to destroy the governor in his home state. In March 1970 the president’s personal lawyer stepped into the lobby of New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel with an airline bag containing a hundred thousand dollars—a million at today’s values—to rendezvous with a man for whom he had no name, only a description. “Are you from Pennsylvania?” the lawyer asked. When the stranger responded as required, “No, pal, I’m from Miami,” the lawyer handed over the money and left.
Thus was Nixon channeling funds to Wallace’s opponent in the Alabama gubernatorial election, funds that ultimately amounted to some four hundred thousand dollars. A later White House tape and Haldeman’s diary establish that it was the president who authorized the payments. Simultaneously, the White House ordered an IRS probe of Wallace and his brother Gerald, then leaked a preliminary audit indicating widespread corruption. The source of the leak is today rather clear; the damaging tax information had been provided to Nixon himself.
Despite the sabotage, Wallace was to regain the governorship and remain a threat to Nixon’s reelection hopes for a full year to come. The White House maintained the pressure with the IRS probe and the odd dirty trick.9
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By the start of Nixon’s third year in office, it was becoming increasingly clear that his was a Jekyll and Hyde presidency. “Can you believe this?” Nixon asked the nation in the spring of 1971, as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was coming to an end. Pointing to the steady reduction in the number of U.S. troops and casualties, he said Americans could indeed believe it.
The president emphasized that he would end the war “nobly” without abandoning the South Vietnamese. In fact, no settlement would be reached for almost two years. In the meantime Nixon’s negotiators were secretly laying the groundwork for a settlement that would leave North Vietnamese troops in place on South Vietnamese territory—a presence that could spell doom for South Vietnam’s regime. In the same April speech Nixon spoke respectfully of the sincerity of those who questioned his policies. Just weeks later, as reported earlier, he would be discussing the use of “thugs” to beat up demonstrators.
As the domestic and foreign chicanery continued behind the scenes, Nixon offered the American people pomp, ceremony, and romance. White House servants were preparing frenetically for Tricia’s June wedding to Edward Cox, an opportunity for a public display of what the president had called a “First Family you can be proud of.”
The wedding cake was seven feet high. More than a hundred chefs, florists and seamstresses, painters and calligraphers prepared a dazzling wedding party for four hundred guests—and sixteen hundred journalists. Rarely at ease socially, Nixon sent out a memo asking staff to submit jokes he could make in the receiving line.
All went well on the day of the ceremony, June 12. “The President’s diminutive ethereal blond daughter,” bubbled one reporter, “finally walked down the curving staircase on her father’s arm.” Tricia married her groom, “tall, fine-boned and handsome,” in a dainty white pavilion specially erected in the Rose Garden. Nixon, in gray swallow-tailed suit with striped trousers, ascot, and stiff wing collar, danced with his wife—apparently for only the second time in twenty years. A radiant Pat on his arm, he confidently made the OK sign for the photographers.
But all was not OK, as Nixon discovered next morning on the front page of the New York Times. “In the top left-hand corner,” he recalled in his memoirs, “there was a picture of me standing with Tricia in the Rose Garden. . . . Next to the picture was another headline: VIETNAM ARCHIVE: PENTAGON STUDY TRACES 3 DECADES OF GROWING U.S. INVOLVEMENT.”
This was the first installment of a series of reports that Times managing editor Abe Rosenthal was to characterize as “the biggest damn story in the world.” For the past three months, at one point holed up in a Manhattan hotel suite, his reporters had pored over a seven-thousand-page, forty-seven-volume study dryly titled “United States–Vietnamese Relations, 1945–1967,” what the world rapidly came to know as the Pentagon Papers.
Prepared in the final months of President Johnson’s administration, the papers were an official history—complete with copies of original documents—of how the United States had become enmired in Vietnam and of the often less than noble or intelligent thinking that had kept it there.
Publishing the papers neither endangered the lives of U.S. fighting men nor caused any specific damage to national security. The history covered no events later than 1968, and according to Defense Secretary Laird, 98 percent of the material could have been declassified. The very fact that the material was classified, however, triggered a reaction in high places that had unimaginable consequences.
By the time of the collapse of the presidency three years later it would become clear that Nixon lied and that many of the men around him lied, sometimes to save their leader, sometimes themselves. Of those convicted of crimes after Watergate, five, including four of the President’s closest aides—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Chapin—would be sentenced for perjury.
To recreate accurately, then, the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers involves picking a way through a landscape strewn with falsehoods and half-truths. Sometimes the White House tapes and the documented record signpost the truth, yet even they can be misleading. The president’s tapes are but a partial record, and some of what Nixon said into the White House microphones may have been spoken deliberately to deceive. A false paper trail may have also been created, and many documents are known to have been destroyed.10
The available record suggests that Nixon’s initial reaction to the Pentagon Papers’ publication was fairly cool, for he perceived their potential for damaging the reputation of his predecessors Johnson and Kennedy. Nevertheless, although no one yet knew who was responsible for the leak, the president urged his staff to “get the story out” on Leslie Gelb, the man who had directed the study. Gelb was now working at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank closely associated with the Democrats.
Most of Nixon’s immediate ire, though, was directed at the New York Times for its “clear disloyalty” in publishing the material. No facilities, he ordered, were ever again to be granted to the nation’s newspaper of record. “No contact and no interviews,” the president ordered, “never in the office, never on the pool, never on the plane.” Any White House staffer who spoke with the Times was to be fired. “He wants to be sure,” Haldeman noted, “that we do everything that we can to destroy the Times.” Nothing in his presidency would give him more pleasure, Nixon stormed.
Nixon’s initial anger turned to unbridled rage, sparked a
nd fueled by Henry Kissinger. The security adviser had called the president from out of town on the day the first installment of the papers appeared, fulminating about the damage to the conduct of foreign policy. Those with whom he was involved in delicate diplomacy—the Chinese, the Soviets, the North Vietnamese—might, Kissinger said, conclude that the United States was “too unsteady, too harassed, and too insecure to be a useful partner.”
Expressed calmly later in Kissinger’s memoirs, the concern seems reasonable, but at the time the adviser was enraged. “These leaks,” Colson quoted him as shouting, “are slowly and systematically destroying us.” Kissinger pounded his hand palm down on the antique Chippendale table, rattling the coffee cups. To Colson he seemed to be “going through the ceiling . . . almost irrational.”
The culprit behind the leaks turned out to be forty-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation consultant who had used his privileged access to copy the papers. Once an ardent supporter of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Ellsberg was now convinced the conflict was futile. He dismissed Nixon’s Vietnamization policy as a “bloody, hopeless, uncompelled and surely immoral prolongation” of the war, “mass murder.” Ellsberg hoped that “by revealing over twenty years of secret plans for escalation, lies to the public, plans to violate treaties, and plans to basically enlarge the war . . . the public would draw from that that the current President might be doing the same . . . it would be just as serious if it became known that he was lying as it would have been for Johnson. So he had to try to shut me up.”
While Nixon did try but failed to stop further publication of the papers by taking the New York Times to court, his pursuit of Daniel Ellsberg became a vendetta. Kissinger, who knew Ellsberg, fed the president’s spleen with a torrent of allegations. Ellsberg may have been “the brightest student I ever had,” he told Nixon, but he was “a little unbalanced.” He supposedly “had weird sexual habits, used drugs” and, in Vietnam, had “enjoyed helicopter flights in which he would take potshots at the Vietnamese below.” Ellsberg had married a millionaire’s daughter and—Kissinger threw in for good measure—had sex with her in front of their children.