Haldeman reported that Ehrlichman felt that we should just get it over with quickly. Haldeman agreed that it was probably better to take whatever losses there were. I said it was just a damn shame about Magruder and repeated my feeling about the possibility of an eventual pardon. We talked about other things, but then I came back to Magruder and asked what we could do to help the “poor son of a gun.” Haldeman said he would be assisted in getting legal help. I told Haldeman that I hoped Magruder would leave the campaign before he was indicted. It would be better for him, and for us.
Haldeman and I agreed that the main thing now was that Mitchell come out clean. Whatever the actual case, I told Haldeman, Magruder simply had to draw the line on anything that might involve Mitchell.
I asked Haldeman if Colson had been called before the grand jury. He said no, but he might be called for a deposition in the civil suit. He then told me that the grand jury was apparently talking about calling Ehrlichman. I was surprised and asked why. Haldeman said it had to do with Hunt’s having worked for Bud Krogh. I again asked what could be the interest in Ehrlichman, and Haldeman said that Dean had tried to find out from the Justice Department but apparently they were not saying.
The next afternoon Haldeman told me that it looked as if Magruder was not going to be indicted for the Watergate break-in. Evidently there was a distinction that could be drawn about whether the decision was knowledgeable—and therefore indictable. Haldeman said that Magruder’s line would be that he had not known of this specific action—“which apparently is true,” Haldeman added. Magruder would say that he had authorized sums of money for Liddy without knowing the uses to which they would be put. He would admit to being guilty of stupidity but not of criminal conduct.
So Magruder was now at least technically safe. He had been part of the campaign’s intelligence-gathering operation, but he had not been specifically aware of the Watergate break-in. At least that was what he was apparently saying. I was skeptical, as I think we all were, but I nonetheless thought that it was now up to the Justice Department to make its case against him if they could.
Haldeman said that Mitchell did not think we should make Magruder leave the CRP. There would be advance warning if he was going to be indicted; if he was, he could leave then. Haldeman observed that Ehrlichman and Mitchell represented two different approaches to handling the entire matter: Mitchell was of the “stonewall-it-to-hell-with-every-body” school, while Ehrlichman was of the “complete-panic-cut-every-thing-off-and-sink-it-immediately” school. Haldeman felt both were wrong.
In the late afternoon of July 25 Haldeman brought me a wire service bulletin from McGovern’s post-convention vacation headquarters in South Dakota. McGovern and Eagleton had just held a press conference at which the vice presidential candidate disclosed that on three separate occasions between 1960 and 1966 he had admitted himself to hospitals for treatment of mental depression; on two of them his treatment had included electroshock therapy. He said that he still occasionally took tranquilizers.
After Eagleton’s statement McGovern had said, “Tom Eagleton is fully qualified in mind, body, and spirit to be the Vice President of the United States and, if necessary, to take over the presidency on a moment’s notice. I wouldn’t have hesitated one minute if I had known everything that Senator Eagleton said here today.” A reporter asked him if the decision to keep Eagleton on the ticket was irrevocable, and McGovern replied, “Absolutely.”
My diary records the prediction I made that day to John Connally on how McGovern would handle the situation: “I suggested that McGovern would give him four or five days and then have his major newspapers call for him to resign and then have him replaced by the national committee.”
I was therefore surprised the next day when McGovern made an even stronger statement, telling reporters that he was “1000 percent” behind Eagleton and that he had no intention of dropping him from the ticket. But when Haldeman came in with that afternoon’s New York Post calling for Eagleton’s resignation, I felt sure that despite McGovern’s public statements, this was the beginning of the process I had predicted to Connally.
Diary
It is my view that if Eagleton is not dropped from the ticket this weekend that they have a very serious problem in letting the thing ride along. It will appear that they have a finger in the air, waiting for public opinion and the polls to tell them what to do. As I pointed out, this tells us a hell of a lot about McGovern.
The main test of a man is whether he has the character to make tough decisions and then to lead his associates to follow him on those decisions.
On July 27 Jack Anderson reported a shockingly false story: he charged that Eagleton had been arrested several times on charges of drunken and reckless driving. In short order the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Post were calling for Eagleton to get off the ticket. McGovern repeated that he was 1000 percent behind his running mate, and Eagleton denied the charges and gamely defended himself. He insisted that he would stay on the ticket. His gutsy and unshakable belief in himself won sympathy, if not real political support.
On Sunday, July 30, Eagleton appeared on Face the Nation. Jack Anderson was one of the panel of questioners. He apologized for the drunk-driving charges but refused to retract them, claiming he was still checking them. I thought back to the fund crisis in 1952 and about how Anderson’s mentor, Drew Pearson, had done a similar thing to me. I could empathize with Eagleton’s frustration, and I admired his aplomb. He was as courageous as Anderson was contemptible.
At one point the program took a turn that bordered, I thought, on the incredible. One of the reporters remarked how much Eagleton was sweating. Eagleton pointed out that the lights were very hot. The reporter persisted and pointed out that others on the show were not sweating that much and then commented on Eagleton’s nervous fidgeting with his hands. I dictated that night, “I perspire even though I may not be under any tension whatever!” I thought it was a predatory performance.
In the meantime McGovern had started to seed the ground for a reversal of his support for Eagleton.
Diary
The way the McGovern-Eagleton thing adds up now, it seems to me, is that McGovern probably will be forced to put him off the ticket because of the opposition of the McGovern media and the professionals in the party. In the event he is able to replace him with Kennedy, this will make it a whole new ball game. If he is unable to get Kennedy, it’s difficult to see how he could improve the ticket.
The next night McGovern dropped Eagleton. I thought immediately of Eagleton’s family. I knew that their agony must have been like that we had suffered during the fund crisis—except that our suffering had been redeemed by a happy ending. I remembered that Eagleton had brought his young son to the Oval Office the year before, and I wrote a letter to the boy. A few weeks later I received his reply.
THE 1972 CAMPAIGN
The 1972 presidential election, with its landslide result, should have been the most gratifying and fulfilling of all my campaigns. Instead it was one of the most frustrating and, in many ways, the least satisfying of all.
During most of my first term I had assumed that my opponent in 1972 would be Kennedy, Muskie, or Humphrey. I thought that I could probably beat Muskie or Humphrey; a campaign against Teddy Kennedy would be much more difficult to predict because it would involve so many emotional elements. Any one of these men would have been a formidable opponent, and for three and a half years I fully expected to have to fight hard for re-election.
Even after McGovern emerged from the primaries as the frontrunner, I still could not believe that he would actually be nominated. I thought, as did many political observers, that at the last minute the convention would turn to Kennedy. Only after McGovern was nominated did I accept the fact that I was virtually assured of re-election without having to wage much of a campaign.
Against Kennedy or Muskie or Humphrey I would have had to fight a close-in, one-on-one battle. Against McGovern, however, it wa
s clear that the less I did, the better I would do. This was a totally unaccustomed situation for me, and it was not one in which I felt particularly comfortable or even knew instinctively what was best to do.
There were five basic components of my 1972 election strategy. First, I planned to spend the month and a half following the Republican convention in the White House doing my job. The choice between the candidates was so sharp and the issues spoke so clearly for themselves that there was no need for me to hammer them home.
Second, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the highly articulate Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and various members of the Cabinet and the administration would travel throughout the country as presidential “surrogates,” talking about our general record and achievements as well as about their own specialized issues. Ideally, one surrogate would precede McGovern’s appearance in each major city and another would follow him as soon as he left.
Third, I wanted to develop the most efficient and effective campaign committee organization humanly possible. We succeeded in this so well that Theodore H. White called the Committee to Re-elect the President “one of the most spectacularly efficient exercises in political technology of the entire postwar era.”
Fourth, I planned to use the last weeks of the campaign to broadcast thirteen radio speeches covering my philosophy of government as well as my positions on the major campaign issues.
Finally, at the very end, I planned to emerge from the White House and campaign personally during the last two weeks before the election in states where the presidential vote might be close, or where my presence might pull in a Republican candidate in a tight local race. This was a dramatic reversal of roles for one who had been the party wheelhorse in so many other national campaigns. I knew there would be resentment on the part of some of the party workers and particularly by some Republican candidates who were hoping that my landslide could pull them in. But I thought then—and I still believe—that what we did was the only way to run the campaign of 1972 and the best way to pull in enough new blood from the Democrats to give the Republican Party the New Majority momentum that could give it a whole new lease on political life.
In view of my plans for highly limited personal campaigning, I decided that we should try to help Republican candidates with money. Nearly a million dollars went from our campaign funds into various Senate and House races. I posed for pictures and sent tape-recorded endorsements to every Republican candidate except the two running for the Senate in Mississippi and Arkansas. The Republicans in those races had no chance against Democratic incumbents James Eastland and John McClellan, who had stood with me in every international crisis in the first term and whose support I would need in the next four years.
After McGovern had been nominated I knew that the most difficult thing for us about the 1972 campaign would be the tendency to relax. Even if complacency did not cost us the election, it might cost us the renewed energy that comes with the completion of a campaign.
“We have to develop a sense of mission,” I told Haldeman, “and not back into victory by default.”
The most exciting aspect of the 1972 election for me was that McGovern’s perverse treatment of the traditional Democratic power blocs that had been the basis of every Democratic presidential victory for the last forty years had made possible the creation of a New Republican Majority as an electoral force in American politics. I was confident that if we could only make a first inroad, we could follow through with these New Majority groups. I believed that I had a much greater affinity with most of them than had their erstwhile Democratic allies, and I made this point in two separate diary entries, one as a general observation and the other after a meeting with a group of labor union supporters in New York at the end of September.
Diary
The American leader class has really had it in terms of their ability to lead. It’s really sickening to have to receive them at the White House as I often do and to hear them whine and whimper and that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy very much more receiving labor leaders and people from middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism.
The meeting with the labor leaders was the best of all. They were friendly, all out, and I hope we can find a way to see that this alliance is not broken immediately after the election—and that they not revert to their usual partisan, Democratic position. Frankly, I have more in common with them from a personal standpoint than does McGovern or the intellectuals generally. They like labor as a mass. I like them individually. The same thing can be said of all other groups or classes, including young, black, Mexicans, etc.
I do not believe that any administration in history has gone into a reelection campaign with a more impressive record than ours in August 1972. There was no major area of American life in which we had not made progress or proposed dramatic new alternatives.
Inflation averaged 6.1 percent in 1969; after only one year our New Economic Policy had cut it to 2.7 percent. The GNP had increased at an annual rate of only 3.4 percent in the first quarter of 1969; by the third quarter of 1972 it was rising at 6.3 percent, the fastest gain since 1965. All during the campaign the stock market was moving toward the 1000-point record that it achieved in November 1972.
The real earnings of Americans had not increased at all from 1965 to 1970; now they were moving up at an annual rate of 4 percent. Each year of the Nixon administration had set a new record in gross farm income. Average income per farm was 40 percent higher than the average from 1961 to 1968.
We had reduced federal income taxes by 66 percent for a family of four making $5,000, and by 20 percent for a family of four making $15,000. Overall federal taxes on individuals had decreased by $22 billion.
We had proposed the first major welfare reform since the program’s inception. It was our proposal for a new national health insurance program—one that shared the cost between those who could afford to pay for health insurance, employers, and government—that survived the several socialized medicine schemes proposed by others. We had nearly doubled the funding for the fight against cancer and increased by ten times the funding for the attack against drug abuse. Seizures of narcotics and dangerous drugs had increased by 400 percent. The rise in crime had been 122 percent from 1960 to 1968; in 1971 it was only 6 percent; in the first half of 1972 it was only 1 percent.
We had proposed and won congressional approval for the nation’s first formal research institute for learning and education. We passed a landmark mass transit bill which meant that funding which had been no more than $175 million per year rose to $400 million in 1971 and to $1 billion in 1973. We presented a revolutionary proposal for federal revenue-sharing with the states and hard-pressed cities. We also proposed a complete reorganization of the federal government. We offered the first comprehensive program for the environment in history, aimed at striking a balance between the dreams of the environmentalists and the realities of job-producing industry. Our Legacy of Parks program launched what would eventually become 642 parks in fifty states, parks designed not for elitists but the average citizen.
Our administration had completely changed America’s spending priorities: in fiscal 1968, 45 percent of the budget was being spent for defense and 32 percent for “human resources,” such as education, social services, health. By fiscal 1973 those figures had been reversed. We increased spending for the arts by almost 500 percent. We increased Social Security benefits by 51 percent.
Draft calls were 299,000 in 1968; they were 50,000 in 1972, and we were on our way to the elimination of the draft and the creation of an all-volunteer Army.
We had a superb record, but we had to make it known to the voters—or at least to remind them of our achievements. At the beginning of the summer I wrote a memorandum to John Ehrlichman asking him to move from his role of overseeing the conception of domestic policies to the role of overseeing their execution:
You have handled the development of the programs with superb organizational ability and substantiv
ely have seen to it that they have come out along the lines of my own thinking. . . .
As I look back over the past three years, our great failing, particularly in the domestic area, has been that once the President shoots the big gun, the infantry doesn’t follow in adequately to clean up and to hold the territory. . . . As I see it now the gut issues are cost of living, busing, drug abuse, and possibly tax reform as it relates to the property tax. There are of course other subsidiary issues like the environment, revenue-sharing, etc. . . . And then of course there are always the issues where the opposition is on the attack. . . .
The way that I look at most of our domestic programs is that we have done an excellent job of conceiving them and a poor job of selling them. . . . Great ideas that are conceived and not sold are like babies that are stillborn. We need some deliveries within the next few months even if they have to be Caesarean. I will approve any programs you have to bring about those deliveries, provided of course you recognize my total opposition to any abortions.
My relationship with George Meany during the first three and a half years of my first term as President could be described as tempestuous. I had known him for twenty-five years, from the days I served on the House Labor Committee. He was tough, smart, and combative. Philosophically, he was liberal on economic issues and conservative on social issues; politically, he was a partisan Democrat. But when it came to foreign policy and national defense, he was a patriot first and partisan second.
We knew that in June Meany had told George Shultz that he would not support McGovern if he won the nomination. After the Democratic convention he called Shultz again. He was outraged that McGovern had dumped Pierre Salinger—not because of any particular affection for Salinger, but because Salinger was McGovern’s man, so McGovern should have stood by him. “He don’t stick to his people,” Meany said bitterly.
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