Nixon’s campaign manager later conceded that he had worked “very closely” with Richfield Oil’s local man during the early stages of the contest. While historians have differed on if or how much Signal Oil contributed, surviving correspondence shows that Nixon was in touch early in 1946 with J. Paull Marshall, a contact from wartime days at the OPA who was on the staff of the Republican National Committee. Marshall suggested that Nixon meet with Harry March, a Signal Oil president reputed in California political circles to be “the man with the black bag.”
A firsthand glimpse of how Nixon was financed, and of Nixon’s political ethics, comes from William Ackerman, the former financial officer of Gladding McBean, a senior management company. Its chairman, Atholl McBean, was a director of Standard Oil and the husband of the heiress to the Newhall Oil fortune. The company’s board included William Crocker of the Crocker Bank and other top-rank business leaders.
“I know how it started in 1946,” Ackerman said of Nixon’s political beginnings in a 1979 letter, “because, in retrospect, I was then a bagman for Nixon.” Citing a journal he had kept in 1946, Ackerman said a meeting of seventy-five executives took place in the spring of that year at The Inn in Ojai, north of Los Angeles. At the final session, he said, McBean president Fred Ortman talked about Richard Nixon.
“The fellows down at the California Club,” Ackerman quoted Ortman as saying, “have lined up a young man fresh out of the Navy. Smart as all get out. Just what we need to get rid of Jerry Voorhis. If he makes it, they think he has what it takes to go all the way. He says he can’t live on a congressman’s salary. Needs a lot more than that to match what he knows he could make in private law practice. The boys need cash to make up the difference. We’re going to help.”
Ortman had long made it clear, Ackerman said, that the legality of the group’s contributions was of no concern to him. The important thing was not to get caught. The money for Nixon from Gladding McBean, Ortman decreed, was to be raised by every executive’s stumping up a hundred dollars—that would be about nine hundred dollars today. “Send it to my office in cash. You tell the key people. Tell them to pass it on to their own group. This . . . deal will give everybody a big enough expense account to hide it. Taxis, Entertainment. This and that. We’re all experts at it. Gotta get at least five thousand. . . . We just gotta get rid of that pinko Voorhis.”
Decades later Ackerman was still astonished by the notion that one company alone had raised five thousand dollars, the equivalent of forty-four thousand dollars today, for Nixon in 1946. He recalled thinking of the wider pool from which Nixon’s backers could draw, “a pot big enough to engulf the world.” Over the years Ackerman was neither especially for nor against Nixon himself. “Instead,” he said, “I reserved my contempt for those who, while parading themselves as pillars of society, fertilized the soil in which to grow Nixons for their own gain.”
One of the McBean directors, insurance magnate Asa Call, was a link to a crucial fertilizing element, the power of the press. Call, and other men in the group that picked Nixon, gave him a vital connection to the most influential paper in Southern California. By the spring of 1946 Nixon had been looked over and approved by Kyle Palmer, the grizzled former racing tout who had long been political editor of the Los Angeles Times.
Palmer, aptly known as the Little Governor, functioned as much more than a political editor. “Anyone who wanted to run for political office,” said Robert Hartmann, a sometime Times bureau chief and future counsel to President Ford, “had to clear it with Kyle.” Before television ended the print press monopoly on political influence, Palmer was a kingmaker. When he looked upon Nixon, he recalled, he saw a dream candidate: clean-cut but a gutter fighter, “an old head on young shoulders.” He brought him to the Times’s publisher, Norman Chandler, who said: “He looks like a comer. He has a lot of fight and fire. Let’s support him.”
The Times accordingly gave Nixon blanket benediction. Fair play had never been a factor in the paper’s political coverage. Twelve years earlier Palmer and the Times had created phony news photos of tramps, supposedly streaming into the state to live off the handouts that would be available should Upton Sinclair, a Democratic candidate, become governor. The “tramps” in the Times’s pictures had been actors. In 1946, using a shortage of newsprint as its excuse, the Times limited the Voorhis campaign to small advertisements. The Nixon side was allotted more space. Palmer meanwhile wrote some of Nixon’s speeches.
In later years, when he began to complain about his treatment by the press, Nixon also railed at his old mouthpiece. For after 1962, after Palmer died and Norman Chandler’s son Otis had taken over the paper, the Times became more evenhanded. “Things would be a lot different if Kyle were alive,” Nixon would say during his losing 1962 campaign for governor of California, and he went on saying it well into the seventies. So enraged was he by the change that as president, the White House tapes show, he ordered the IRS and the immigration authorities to investigate the entire Chandler family.
“We’re going after the Chandlers,” he told Attorney General John Mitchell, “every one, individually, collectively, their income tax . . . starting this week. Every one of those sons of bitches.” He ordered the immigration people to find out whether the Times was hiring illegal immigrants. “I don’t want any argument about it,” he said. “I want you to direct the most trusted person you have in the Immigration Service that they are to look over all of the activities of the Los Angeles Times—all. . . . Otis Chandler—I want him checked with regard to his gardener. I understand he’s a wetback. Is that clear?”
Early in his career, Nixon fully appreciated how indebted he was. “I would never have gone to Washington in the first place,” he told Chandler in a 1960 letter, “had it not been for the Times.” In the breakthrough campaign against Voorhis, Nixon also had a patron in Jim Copley, who owned the Union and Tribune in San Diego, along with a string of smaller dailies. A mass of correspondence shows that for decades to come Copley put what he called his organization—as well as cash contributions—at Nixon’s disposal.
Nixon also benefited repeatedly from the expertise of Herbert Klein, a senior Copley editor who took long periods of “leave” to serve as Nixon’s press secretary. During the presidency, Klein was named director of communications. Klein has claimed he did not know Nixon well during the 1946 campaign, when he was news editor of the Alhambra Post-Advocate, but one of Nixon’s campaign managers had a different memory. “Herb helped us,” said Frank Jorgensen, “let’s put it that way—on publicity and writing.”
Perhaps the most flagrant misuse of the press in the 1946 campaign against Voorhis was the phony news trick. “Nixon’s campaign managers,” said W. E. Smith, then a reporter on the San Gabriel Valley Press-Times, “reached an agreement with our publishers. . . . Nixon bought front-page space in the Press-Times papers. He had an agreement for so much space per week—not for ads, but for planted news stories and pictures.”
If the Nixon campaign did invent news stories, there cannot be little doubt who was behind them. The prime suspect was a man who, one way or the other, was to remain close to Nixon throughout his political life.
6
* * *
Organized crime will put a man in the White House someday, and he won’t even know it until they hand him the bill.
—Ralph Salerno, congressional consultant on organized crime
He was something of a prodigy, the paid press adviser to that first Nixon campaign. The son of a cigar maker, born in Pittsburgh, reared in Los Angeles, Murray Chotiner left school at fifteen yet at nineteen obtained a law degree, the youngest graduate Southwestern Law College ever produced. At twenty-three he was working on Herbert Hoover’s campaign for the presidency and at thirty-three masterminding Earl Warren’s campaign for the governorship of California. In spite of his campaign expertise Warren soon threw Chotiner out of his office, apparently because his zeal was untempered by principle. Richard Nixon was to trust and rely on him f
or his entire political career.
Chotiner was a plump, diminutive figure who favored white suits, loud silk ties, and shirts with clock-face cuff links. He called himself Murray M. Chotiner, presumably because he believed it sounded more impressive; in fact he had no middle name.
In Chotiner, as Nixon’s later adviser Len Garment put it, he “met his Machiavelli, a hardheaded exponent of the campaign philosophy that politics is war.” According to the fourth of his wives, Nancy, “Murray was not beyond doing anything he could possibly do in a campaign, within the law, to rattle the cages.”
He rattled the cages for Nixon from the moment he set eyes on him at the selection meeting for the Voorhis campaign. In the years that followed he managed the 1950 campaign that defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas and took Nixon to the Senate. It was he who picked the color for the notorious “pink sheet” flyer that falsely implied Douglas was a Communist sympathizer. It was he who ran the 1952 campaign that took Nixon to the vice presidency, he who was the driving force behind Nixon’s defense when he was accused of corruption that year. He was manager again in the 1954 midterm elections, during which—resorting to a tried and true tactic—Nixon referred time and again to supposed documentation of his charge that the Democrats were under Communist influence.
In 1956, with another presidential election due in the fall, controversy suddenly arose around Chotiner. When parts of a lecture he had given at a “campaign school” for leading Republicans were leaked, Democrats expressed shock. It was, they said, “a textbook to hook suckers.” So it was, but that worried Chotiner not at all. As Len Garment has said, this was a man who “didn’t mind accepting the fact that politics is shabby most of the time, filled with lies and deceptions.”
Chotiner did grow concerned, and was nearly torpedoed, by discoveries made about him that spring by a Senate subcommittee investigating bribery and influence peddling. The Democrats had of course been looking for a way to get at Chotiner and, through him, at Nixon. The opportunity came by chance when Carmine Bellino, a legendary accountant and congressional investigator, was poring over canceled checks paid out on behalf of a New Jersey uniform manufacturer convicted of stealing from the federal government. One five-thousand-dollar check had been made out to “M. Chotiner” and deposited in a Los Angeles bank. When first contacted by Robert Kennedy, the youthful chief counsel of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, Chotiner had no immediate explanation. At a later meeting he came up with a story that sounded convincing—until Bellino slipped out to call a contact who had inside information. “The informant,” he recalled, “stated that Chotiner had been engaged because of his friendship with Nixon and Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, and he was expected to help in connection with the tax case then being considered for possible prosecution by the Department of Justice. . . .”
Chotiner tried every possible tactic to avoid testifying to the committee. First he promised to appear voluntarily, insisting there was no need to issue a subpoena, but then failed to turn up. When he was eventually obliged to do so, he gave little away. To divulge what services he had rendered, Chotiner argued, would violate the lawyer-client relationship. He denied he had ever used Nixon’s name to seek favors for a client.
Senator Joe McCarthy declared the probers were wasting time, that they had produced no evidence of misconduct by Chotiner, a favor for which Nixon later thanked him at a private lunch. The committee’s chairman finally suspended the hearings in light of the impending election, but by then Chotiner’s reputation had been gravely damaged.
Most seriously, his name was now linked publicly with organized criminals. The uniform scam had involved a number of notorious mobsters. One of the men Chotiner had represented, formally described as a “uniform contractor,” was actually a Mafia chieftain from Chotiner’s home state of Pennsylvania, Marco (“The Little Guy”) Reginelli.
An attorney can of course legitimately represent anyone he chooses. Chotiner and his partner, his brother Jack, however, had handled no fewer than 221 California bookmaking cases in one four-year period prior to the investigation. Bookmaking had subsequently been identified by the California State Crime Commission as “the most menacing racket in the entire field of organized crime.” As this chapter will show, the bookmaking connection impinged directly on the early career of Richard Nixon.
Nixon and Chotiner both scrambled to limit the damage of the 1956 probe, with Nixon claiming through an aide that he had had “nothing to do with Chotiner for a long period of time.” For his part, Chotiner insisted: “I have had no contact with the Vice President whatsoever since the day he was elected, as far as any contact with his office is concerned.”
Neither statement was true. Chotiner had paid the Washington hotel bill for Nixon’s guests when he was inaugurated as vice president, and as late as March 1956 he had been signing letters “on behalf of the Vice President.” According to reporter Howard Seelye, a Chotiner friend and Republican campaign adviser, Chotiner regularly left phone messages asking to be called back through the White House. On a visit to Chotiner’s office just weeks before the scandal broke, a reporter noticed letters addressed to Nixon in a pile of Chotiner’s outgoing mail.
Despite his claims of innocence, the Republicans were forced in 1956 to act as if they were dropping Chotiner. Officials informed the press that he would not travel with Nixon during the campaign and would not attend the convention. Both men spoke thereafter as though their relationship had ended. “It was a tragedy,” Nixon said piously, that Chotiner “had to get involved in the kind of law business that does not mix with politics.” In 1960, when he himself ran unsuccessfully for Congress, Chotiner once pointed to an empty spot on the wall where, he said, Nixon’s picture had formerly had a place of honor.
The supposed estrangement, however, was largely a pretense. Investigator Bellino remembered what Nixon staffers told him privately: “They stated [Nixon] was a man without guts. One of them mentioned how he had urged that Nixon break his association with Chotiner. But Nixon felt he couldn’t do it.”
Chotiner was a presence behind the scenes that year, advising Nixon during his losing campaign for the presidency against John F. Kennedy. He was available with advice during Nixon’s bid for the governorship of California in 1962. “I was asked to deliver something,” Dwight Chapin, later a close White House aide, recalled of a campaign chore in Los Angeles. “The door opens and the room is filled with cigar smoke, and there are Vic Lasky* and Murray Chotiner—like a classic picture of the Tammany Hall back room.” Chotiner, almost alone that year, forecast that Nixon would one day recover from his shattering defeat.
In the 1968 campaign, when Nixon undertook his successful fight for the presidency, Chotiner was quietly entrusted with serving as liaison with the states where it was crucial to garner maximum votes—again discreetly and out of public view.
The day after Nixon’s victory Chotiner claimed his reward, demanding the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. When he was turned down—other Nixon advisers regarded him as too high risk for such a prominent post—Nixon created a job for him despite a routine FBI background check that suggested Chotiner had links with organized crime. The job description was curious—general counsel in the obscure Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations—but a special executive order ensured he would be well paid. Few took much notice, a year later, when he was named special counsel to the president.
In his voluminous memoirs Nixon made only a handful of references to Chotiner, characterizing him merely as “brilliant . . . ever resourceful.” He altogether omitted mentioning Chotiner’s activities during the presidency. Chotiner remained a constant factor in Nixonian intrigue. He was involved in White House crimes and misdeeds in numerous spheres: representing Nixon in contacts with an operative for billionaire Howard Hughes, whose secret gifts of cash may be the key to Watergate; overseeing the extortion of millions of dollars from the heads of the dairy industry, an old connection for Chotiner and Nixon
that dated back twenty years; secretly threatening a troublesome Greek exile with deportation and likely imprisonment or even death should he reveal what he knew about Nixon’s illegal acceptance of funds from the Greek military junta; directing the secret payouts to congressional candidates known as the Townhouse Operation; providing lists of political enemies for investigation by the IRS; spying on Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, at one point paying Lucianne Goldberg (the woman who in 1998 would play a key role in exposing President Clinton’s sexual activity) to pose as a journalist on Senator McGovern’s plane; taking charge of a delivery of cash from renegade financier Robert Vesco, reportedly laundered through a casino in the Bahamas; serving on a secret committee that arranged for construction union officials, including convicted criminals and one full-fledged mafioso, to visit Nixon in the White House; intervening in the federal investigation of Teamsters Union leaders in a twelve-million-dollar building scam (those involved were dealt with more leniently); and playing a leading role in arranging the release of jailed Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, reportedly in return for huge secret payments either for Nixon personally or for his 1972 campaign. In a file on those negotiations, which involved an associate of Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, Chotiner was referred to by the code name Mr. Pajamas.
By the time of the Watergate burglary, Chotiner would have departed from the White House and returned to private practice. Yet his law offices were one floor above those of CREEP, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and he still maintained a White House telephone. At least one woman working on White House dirty tricks operations was carried on the payroll of his firm.