Then President Johnson dropped a huge October surprise. On Halloween night 1968, he went on television to announce that Hanoi had agreed to begin peace negotiations in Paris in return for the cessation of bombing of North Vietnam. Suddenly, Humphrey shot ahead in the polls—with the Democrats actively involved in peace negotiations, who would want to break the line of succession?
Nixon bitterly (and cleverly) announced: “I am told that this spurt of activity is a last-minute attempt by President Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr. Humphrey. This I do not believe.” In the last week of the election, some polls showed the Democratic candidate ahead for the first time in the contest—that is, until South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu said that his country would not participate in the peace talks, and negotiations broke down.
THE WINNER: RICHARD NIXON
In a close election, Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey 31,785,480 to 31,275,166, a margin of about a half-million votes, although Nixon’s electoral vote lead was 301 to 191. The fifty-five-year-old Nixon had made one of the most extraordinary political comebacks in American history. In his victory speech, he said that the theme of his administration would be one he had seen printed on a teenage supporter’s sign during a campaign stop: “Bring Us Together.”
It was typical of the era that this comforting story of unity was not quite what it seemed. The teenager was a girl named Vicki Cole, the daughter of a Methodist minister in a small Ohio town. She had first held a much more partisan sign that read, “LBJ Taught Us, Vote Republican,” but after losing it, she found the “Bring Us Together Again” sign lying on the ground. It was a serendipitous occurrence that would win her a trip to the White House and a personal visit with Richard Nixon after the election.
In fact, when reporters interviewed Cole, she explained that her true pick for president was the slain Democrat Robert F. Kennedy.
OCTOBER SURPRISE? It is generally believed that if Lyndon Johnson had successfully announced peace talks with North Vietnam in the last week of the 1968 election, Hubert Humphrey might very well have won the election. But South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu refused, and negotiations broke down.
There were many, LBJ among them, who believed that Nixon had conspired with Thieu to break off the deal by convincing him that a President Nixon would give better terms to South Vietnam. Despite some circumstantial evidence—Nixon’s top advisor and later Attorney General John Mitchell had made contact with a Thieu intermediary—the charges were never proved. Contemporary observers, including Hubert Humphrey, felt that Nixon would not have taken the risk of being seen as obstructing the peace talks; others emphasized that Thieu did not need any help in understanding that Johnson’s announcement was indeed a political one, timed to meet the November elections and not necessarily in South Vietnam’s best interest.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME After losing his California gubernatorial bid against Governor Pat Brown in 1962, Nixon pulled off some truly dirty tricks with the help of H. R. Haldeman, who would later become his chief of staff.
They set up a phony organization called the Committee for the Preservation of the Democratic Party, which mailed a half million postcards to registered Democrats, expressing concern over the “capture” of the party by a “left-wing minority” that included Brown. The Democrats discovered the ruse during the campaign, got a court order forcing Nixon to cease sending out the postcards, and then sued the Republicans for damages, winning an out-of-court settlement.
Another ploy was stunning in its crudity. After finding a photograph of Brown kneeling to speak to a Laotian refugee girl, Nixon and Haldeman cropped out the refugee and put a picture of Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev in her place, so that it looked as if Brown was kneeling in supplication to America’s worst enemy.
SPIRO “MOUTH” AGNEW In Richard Nixon’s carefully scripted campaign, VP candidate Spiro Agnew was the only one who ad-libbed—to disastrous effect. Agnew, the first Greek American candidate for vice president, had been picked for his staunch law-and-order stance as governor of Maryland, but Nixon soon realized that the man was a bit of a loose cannon. While on a flight to Hawaii, he saw a Japanese American reporter sleeping on the plane and shouted to a friend, “What’s wrong with that fat Jap?”
Agnew, at least, was an equal-opportunity offender. He referred to Polish Americans as “Polacks” and commented, while visiting a ghetto, “when you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seen ’em all.”
Democratic ad men capitalized on this with a television commercial that simply showed the words “SPIRO AGNEW FOR VICE PRESIDENT,” followed by thirty seconds of raucous laughter.
Republicans were quick to accuse Hubert Humphrey of putting voters to sleep.
RICHARD NIXON
VS.
GEORGE MCGOVERN
“I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging.”
—Richard Nixon
In 1972, the Vietnam War was still raging despite Richard Nixon’s campaign vows to bring it to a halt. In America, four student war protesters had died at Kent State University, in Ohio, shot by National Guardsmen. Some 200,000 people marched on Washington in 1971, demanding an end to the hostilities. The 1972 election was pivotal. Americans, reeling from the unparalleled recent upheavals, sought a president with competence, integrity, and compassion. What they got was an election in which it seemed that all the smear tactics and nasty politics of the previous decade seemed to coalesce into a political campaign that would be forever synonymous with the words “dirty tricks.”
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: RICHARD NIXON Nixon’s triumphs during his presidency had largely been on the foreign affairs front, with historical summit trips to China and Russia. At home, faced with growing opposition to his policies and an economy shored up by wage and price controls, he had walled himself inside his presidency, sticking close to the White House and relying on the same group of advisors and rich friends for comfort and advice.
DEMOCRAT: GEORGE MCGOVERN McGovern was a history and political-science teacher turned senator from South Dakota. He was affable and low-key, and he could be tough-minded. Unlike Nixon, McGovern was a World War II hero who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for piloting his bomber over North Africa and Italy.
But like Humphrey before him, McGovern was not terribly exciting. His nomination and acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Miami took place at 2:48 A.M.—prime time, as one observer said, “in Guam.” The nod for VP went to Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri.
THE CAMPAIGN
The Republicans received a surprise early in the campaign when they learned that Thomas Eagleton had been hospitalized for clinical depression three times between 1960 and 1966—indeed, he had been given electroshock therapy. There were also rumors that he had been treated for alcoholism. At first, McGovern said he was behind Eagleton “one thousand percent,” but eventually he succumbed to party pressures and replaced him with R. Sargent Shriver, Kennedy intimate and former ambassador to France. It was easy for Republicans to paint McGovern as indecisive and a man who did not stand by his friends.
Nixon had decided to run as President Nixon, not as candidate Nixon; he made appearances only in the Rose Garden and at carefully controlled campaign events. Behind the scenes, however, his campaign swarmed with dirty tricks. When the New York Times opposed Nixon’s mining of Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam, a full-page ad appeared in the paper the next day, from fourteen concerned “citizens” supporting Nixon. The only problem was that the ad had been secretly placed by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (its true acronym is CRP, but it’s so much more fun to call it CREEP). The names signed to the ad were those of relatives of CREEP team members. CREEP also sent thousands of pro-Nixon postcards to a Washington, D.C.—based television station that was taking a public-opinon poll on the mining of Haiphong, resulting in an outcome of three to one in support of the president’s actions.
And these were only the more public actions. Nixon
had also ordered a special team of the Internal Revenue Service (the ominously named Special Services Staff, or SSS) to conduct field audits on his enemies, who included Larry O’Brien, head of the Democratic National Committee. How did Nixon know who his enemies were? Because, of course, he had an “Enemies List,” compiled by staffers John Dean and Chuck Colson. The list swelled to some 200 names—including Paul Newman (involved in “Radic-Lib causes”), black Congressman John Conyers (“known weakness for white females”), and Maxwell Dane, one of the partners in the advertising agency that had produced Johnson’s famous “Daisy” spot.
And we haven’t even mentioned the most famous group of dirty tricksters in American history, men whose actions far outsleazed LBJ’s Five O’Clock Club: the Special Investigations Unit, a group known more informally as the “Plumbers.” Nixon had told top advisor John Ehrlichman to “set up a little group right here in the White House” to fix leaks, and so Ehrlichman assembled a task force that included ex-CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy as well as numerous others.
A night watchman would discover five Plumbers right in the offices of the Democratic National Convention in the Watergate apartment and office complex in Washington, D.C., on the night of June 17, 1972. They wore surgical gloves and carried bugging equipment (tiny microphones hidden in phony ChapSticks), cameras, forty rolls of unexposed film, and $3,500 dollars in brand-new, consecutively numbered hundred-dollar bills.
When the press queried White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler about this little episode, he dismissed it as “a third-rate burglary.” If so, it was the only third-rate burglary to eventually cause the resignation of an American president. At the time, however, Americans paid surprisingly little attention to the news. The campaign went on, with Nixon taking a page from LBJ’s 1964 playbook, marginalizing his opponent by making him seem to be a dangerous radical. Effectively caricaturized as the candidate of the “three A’s: Acid, Amnesty [for draft dodgers], and Abortion,” McGovern was getting the pants beaten off him. One McGovern staffer whispered to a reporter late in the campaign, “I just hope we can avoid a debacle.”
THE WINNER: RICHARD NIXON
And what a debacle it was. Richard Nixon won by the largest plurality of the popular vote, beating McGovern 47,169,911 to 29,170,383 and taking the Electoral College 520 to 17. But the party would soon be over, as revelations about Watergate in the ensuing year drove Nixon out of office by August 1974.
Nixon later dismissed Watergate as merely another “political bugging” and, for a cold warrior who had been the victim of a lot of dirty tricks, this was no doubt true. He would admit in his memoirs that “I told my staff that we should come up with the kind of imaginative dirty tricks that our Democratic opponents used against us and others so effectively in previous campaigns.” (The campaigns of Kennedy and Johnson were cases in point.)
But, at the time of Watergate, the revelation of the existence of tapes made in the Oval Office let Americans listen in, for the first time, to the sound of their president doing business. And what they heard was not pleasant.
THE DESTRUCTION OF EDMUND MUSKIE AND OTHER TALES OF THE PRIMARIES Early in 1972, President Nixon, whose approval ratings hovered at only about 48 percent, felt that he was vulnerable to a challenge from a strong Democratic candidate.
So it became the goal of dirty tricks managers like Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin to “foster a split between Democratic hopefuls” in the primaries. Teddy Kennedy was not a problem—the last surviving Kennedy brother had pretty much blown his presidential chances by driving a car off a bridge in 1969 and drowning the young woman who was with him.
Going into the New Hampshire primary in February, many predicted the big winner would be Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine (Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 running mate)—in fact, most journalists had already anointed him the Democratic presidential nominee. And Richard Nixon viewed Muskie as a formidable candidate.
But then strange things began happening. Suddenly, New Hampshire voters began receiving phone calls from rude black people—phone calls that came late at night or very early in the morning—saying that they had been bused in from Harlem to work for Muskie. And then the conservative editor of the Manchester Union Leader, William Loeb, published a letter, purportedly written by an ordinary citizen, that accused Muskie of using the word “Canuck” to refer to French Canadians. In defending himself against this and other slurs, Muskie, standing outdoors before microphones and cameras, began to cry. Or, since it was snowing, perhaps a snowflake had landed in his eye—it’s impossible to tell from tapes of the incident.
But Muskie did lose his cool, and many voters wondered if he was unable to handle pressure. He won New Hampshire, but by a much smaller margin than predicted. Only later was it discovered that the “Canuck” letter was written by White House aide Kenneth Clawson.
Things just got worse when Muskie headed for the Florida primary. There, many voters received a letter, written on Muskie campaign stationery, stating (falsely) that Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving in 1967. Other letters on Muskie stationery claimed that prominent Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Henry “Scoop” Jackson had fathered a child with a seventeen-year-old girl.
No detail was too small. Posters appeared on Florida highways that read: “Help Muskie in Busing More Children Now.” Ads were placed in tiny free shopper’s newsletters saying: “Muskie: Would you accept a black running mate?” And, at a Muskie press conference in Miami, someone released a handful of white mice with tags attached to them reading: “Muskie is a rat fink.”
The person behind all of this Florida mayhem was Donald Segretti, the dark prince of dirty tricks. Segretti, whose name means “secret” in Italian, was a California lawyer who had been law school pals with several Nixon staffers—in particular, Dwight Chapin, the man who hired him and paid him $16,000, plus expenses, to wreak havoc in the primaries.
Muskie placed fourth in Florida and was finished as a candidate. Segretti’s role in the investigations was discovered after the Watergate break-in, and he served four-and-a-half months in prison for misdemeanors associated with illegal campaign activities.
GOT A LEAK? GET A PLUMBER! The Plumbers came into existence at least partially because of the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” by the New York Times and Washington Post. These top-secret Defense Department papers traced the development of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and showed how covert decisions had been made behind the backs of the American public. Although much of this could be laid at the feet of Democratic administrations, Nixon was concerned that such leaks could establish a precedent that might imperil his own secret decisions.
The leaker of the papers was former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg, and the Plumbers were organized specifically to discredit Ellsberg—to “link him to a conspiracy which suggests treasonable conduct,” as Nixon aide Chuck Colson put it. Their first operation was to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, which provided no information on Ellsberg and was done so clumsily that a trail of destruction was left behind.
The clumsiness of this operation was rivaled only by that of the Watergate burgle of the Democratic National Committee offices on June 17, 1972. The group had already broken in on Memorial Day—undetected—to install listening devices. Since the bugs weren’t working properly, the Plumbers went back. But this time, they carelessly taped the spring locks on the doors horizontally rather than vertically; the tape was seen by the night watchman, who called D.C. police. Two of the suspects had address books with White House telephone numbers in them and, of course, they carried $3,500 worth of brand-new, consecutively numbered hundred-dollar bills—not exactly your basic walking-around money.
The five burglars had been recruited by E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who were not present that night. But the trail now led directly to them, to CREEP, and to the White House. From there, the question for the nation in the televised congressional hearings the
following year became: Did Richard Nixon approve or know about the burglary? His answer was that he did not, but it was apparent from the Oval Office tapes that at least he knew that such dirty tricks were occurring.
In the Dirty Tricks Hall of Fame, this man deserves a seat of honor.
JIMMY CARTER
VS. GERALD FORD
Twenty members of the Nixon administration were convicted after the Watergate dust had settled; that’s not including Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resigned after pleading no contest to non-Watergate related tax-evasion charges. Nixon himself might have been indicted had it not been for his appointed successor, Gerald Ford, granting him a “full, free, and absolute” pardon for any crimes he might have committed.
This was not a popular move with the American public, and it came back to haunt Ford in the bicentennial election year of 1976. Under Ford’s watch, the country had suffered through significant inflation, rising unemployment, and the shocking end of the Vietnam War, in which American personnel fled the country in ignominy. They also had to deal with Ford’s pratfalls—when he stumbled down the steps of Air Force One during official business, no one in the country let him forget it. Nevertheless, he became the Republican Party’s nominee after narrowly beating out former California governor and neocon Ronald Reagan in the primaries. Ford’s running mate was Senator Robert Dole of Kansas.
Reform laws passed in the wake of Watergate cleared the way for a very untraditional presidential candidate: the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. With the passage of the Federal Elections Campaign Act (which went by the unlovely acronym FECA), individual campaign contributions were severely capped, but any candidate who could raise $100,000 in fifteen states could qualify for federal matching funds. In 1976, the Supreme Court declared one part of FECA unconstitutional, claiming that contributions were really a form of free speech and thus protected by the First Amendment. Candidates were free to spend as much money as they wanted on their own campaigns, as long as they refused federal matching funds. But the court did continue limits on individual contributions of federal candidates and upheld the part of FECA that called for public disclosure of campaign financing.
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