On July 19 a bulletin came over the wires announcing that, for the first time in its history, the AFL-CIO executive council had adjourned without voting any presidential endorsement. It was a moment to ponder and savor: for the first time in seventeen years the AFL-CIO was not going to endorse the Democratic candidate for President.
On July 28 I played golf with Meany, Bill Rogers, and George Shultz at Burning Tree, just outside Washington. As we went down the first fairway, Meany said brusquely, “Eagleton should have told McGovern, but now McGovern has handled it like a fool, vacillating from one side to the other.”
It was about 6:30 when we got back to the clubhouse and sat on the porch to have a drink. Rogers and Shultz joined me in ordering cigars so that we could keep Meany company. We sat for almost an hour in the twilight, all of us smoking our cigars and three of us listening to Meany talk. He said that McGovern was going to lose by a virtual landslide. In the circumstances, he said, though labor disagreed with some of my policies, it was in labor’s interest to remain neutral in the presidential race and concentrate on saving its favorite Senate and House members. Pouring money into McGovern’s campaign would be tantamount to throwing it away.
As we left the porch and walked toward our cars, Meany cleared his throat and said to me gruffly, “I want you to know now that I am not going to vote for you, and I am not going to vote for McGovern. But you’ll be doing all right with the Meany family.” He said Mrs. Meany and two of his three daughters would vote for me. The other daughter, he said, “will just follow her old man and not vote for anybody.”
Then, just as we were about to separate, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Just so you don’t get a swelled head about my wife voting for you, I want to tell you why—she don’t like McGovern.”
During the first days of August McGovern sought a new vice presidential running mate. He tried Teddy Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Abraham Ribicoff, Larry O’Brien, Hubert Humphrey, and Governor Reubin Askew of Florida—all without success.
I spent the weekend of August 4 at the vacation home of Tom McCabe, a good friend from the Eisenhower days, on Assateague Island off Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Mitchell, Rebozo, and Abplanalp came with me. The television set at the house did not work so we listened to the radio to hear McGovern announce that Teddy Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver would be his new running mate.
As early as June I had heard from visitors to the LBJ Ranch that Johnson was not going to support McGovern if he was nominated. After the Democratic convention I called Johnson and put the question to him directly.
“I don’t want to embarrass you,” I began, “but you know that John Connally is organizing Democrats who want to support me. A number of people have been contacted who are close to you, and they have indicated a desire to join the group, but only if it wouldn’t embarrass you. I appreciate your position in your party, but I would like to ask if you would remain neutral with respect to supporters who want to join John’s group.”
“Let me just read you a letter, Mr. President,” Johnson said, and I could hear a rustling of papers. “This is the standard reply I’m sending out to Democrats who write me about what they should do because they’re so disenchanted with McGovern. It says that because of the honor I have been given by my party over forty years, I am going to support the Democratic ticket at all levels. However, I go on to say—and no one will fail to catch this—that I have always taken the position that what an individual does in a presidential campaign is a matter of conscience, and I’m not going to interfere with that decision. Now what do you think of that?”
“I can only say that I’m very grateful, Mr. President,” I replied.
A few weeks later Johnson sent me some campaign advice through Billy Graham: “Ignore McGovern, and get out with the people. But stay above the campaign, like I did with Goldwater. Go to ball games and factories. And don’t worry. The McGovern people are going to defeat themselves.”
Billy said that when he had raised the question of the Watergate bugging business, Johnson had just laughed and said, “Hell, that’s not going to hurt him a bit.”
One of the first things I had to decide about the 1972 campaign was whether to change the ticket by choosing a new running mate. By the middle of 1971 Ted Agnew had become increasingly disenchanted with his role as Vice President. He felt, as does almost every Vice President to some degree, that the White House staff did not treat him with proper respect, and that I had not given him major substantive responsibilities. It was then that word came to us from Bryce Harlow that there was a very good chance that Agnew, on his own, would withdraw from the ticket early in 1972 to take advantage of attractive offers outside government.
During the first term Agnew had become an articulate and effective spokesman for conservative positions and issues. In this role he was wrongly underrated by the press as well as by his partisan critics. But as I began preparing for the 1972 election, I also had to look ahead to 1976. I believed that John Connally was the only man in either party who clearly had the potential to be a great President. He had the necessary political “fire in the belly,” the energy to win, and the vision to lead. I even talked with Haldeman about the possibility of Agnew’s resigning before the convention and my nominating Connally to replace him, although I knew that such a move was a remote possibility at best. The only serious option would be to replace Agnew with Connally as the nominee for Vice President at the convention.
Early in 1972 I discussed the vice presidency with Connally. His reactions ran from mixed to negative. I sensed that he did not think the second spot would be the best route to the White House for him. He said that none of us could calculate the depth of Republican opposition to him as a Johnny-come-lately.
I had a meeting with John Mitchell a few days later. I told him bluntly that I thought Connally should be President in 1976 and that I was weighing the possibility of giving him a head start, if he wanted it, by making him my running mate. Mitchell agreed that Connally was the man to run in 1976, but he argued strongly against making any changes in the ticket in 1972. Connally was still a Democrat, and Mitchell thought that putting him on the ticket might backfire with the conservative New Majority Republicans and Democrats, particularly in the South, among whom Agnew had become almost a folk hero. “Party workers have to believe that loyalty is rewarded, or there won’t be any party workers,” Mitchell warned.
He felt that Connally would be more helpful in the campaign as the Chairman of Democrats for Nixon than he would by becoming a Republican before the election. Moreover, Connally had told Mitchell that in no circumstances did he want to be Vice President.
In fact, Mitchell urged me to give Agnew a definite commitment. If we waited too long, he warned, Agnew might want to get a deal in exchange—possibly even a pledge to support him for the nomination in 1976. “Besides,” Mitchell said, “I feel sorry for him. He’s having some financial problems, and he needs to be able to plan his future.”
On June 12 I asked Mitchell to tell Agnew that I had made the decision definitely to have him on the ticket again as my running mate. I said that we would not announce it until after the Democratic convention. This would generate interest by creating suspense; it might also lead the Democrats to soft-pedal their attacks on him at their convention just in case I decided to choose someone else.
At the beginning of August I tried to block off time to work exclusively on my acceptance speech, but there were inevitably distractions that made concentration difficult. I mentioned a particularly nettling one in my diary on August 16: “McGovern is striking out more wildly now, trying to say that I was indirectly responsible for the bugging of the Democratic headquarters.” McGovern indeed was pulling out all the stops on Watergate. In one of his speeches at this time he had said that the break-in was “the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler.” Other Democratic leaders were equally vehement in their denunciations, having seized upon Watergate as the best way to distract public attentio
n from their own candidate.
The Democrats had mounted a particularly strident attack based on the fact that a large number of the contributors to my campaign preferred that their contributions remain anonymous. Many of them were Democrats of long standing and considerable prominence who thought it important to defeat McGovern but who would find it awkward to be named publicly. Anonymity for contributors was legal if the contribution was made before April 7, 1972, but the Democrats framed the issue and the media presented it as a case of secrecy versus openness in the political process and thus put us on the defensive in the battle for public opinion. By September the Washington Post would be printing leaks from anonymous sources on partisan congressional staffs. For example, there was one that charged Finance Chairman Maury Stans with being tied to $700,000 in illegal campaign funds that had been laundered through Mexico. Stans categorically denied the story. In the months ahead the CRP finance committee would be accused of monitoring the private bank accounts of potential contributors, of having laundered contributions in Luxembourg, and of having raised money from high-ranking Arabs and other illegal foreign sources. The charges were all false.
From the very beginning, I wanted to fight back. I saw no reason why McGovern and his supporters and contributors should be immune. If there was any campaign advantage to incumbency, it had to be access to government information on one’s opponents. I remembered the IRS leaks of my tax returns to Drew Pearson in the 1952 campaign and the politically motivated tax audits done on me in 1963. The Democrats, while in office, had made little effort to camouflage their political pressure on the key government agencies. It seemed that even when they were out of power their supporters—particularly among the bureaucrats in the IRS—continued to do the job for them. I heard numerous reports—clearly too frequent to be coincidental—of close personal and political friends who had been subjected to constant and, in my view, vindictive, investigation by the IRS since the time I lost to Kennedy in 1960.
So far our own efforts to use this power had been halfhearted and ineffective. I dictated a diary note about this in the spring of 1972: “This has really been a shameful failure on our part, and it is hard for me to understand it, in view of the fact that I had so often pointed out that after what they did to us when we were out of office we at least owed it to ourselves in self-defense to initiate some investigations of them.” Even now it frustrates me to think that our efforts to gain whatever political advantage we could from being in power were so tentative and feeble and amateurish in comparison to the Democrats’. I prodded my staff to change this; on August 3 I reflected on the situation we faced and the problem I saw behind it.
Diary
I emphasized to Haldeman and Ehrlichman the necessity of our getting information on some of our Democratic opponents that they constantly were getting out against us. It is ironic that when we were out of office they really used to crucify us—now that we are in office they still do, due to the fact that the bureaucrats at the lower level are all with them.
The problem we have here is that all of our people are gun-shy as a result of the Watergate incident and don’t want to look into files that involve Democrats. Haldeman said after the election we really could then take the steps to get loyalists in various positions that were sensitive. Of course, we should have long ago. Certainly we have been above reproach in this respect and have not used the enormous powers of the office—the Internal Revenue files, the Justice Department files—to go after some of the hanky-panky operations of our Democratic opponents.
I repeatedly urged Haldeman and Ehrlichman—though without apparent success—to have IRS checks made on McGovern’s key staff and contributors. In one memo on the subject I said that anything that came up that might indicate “shady dealings” should be got out early. “Of course, if nothing turns up, drop the whole matter,” I wrote. “But let’s be sure that we’ve gone the extra mile and developed material before we drop the matter.”
Larry O’Brien was one Democrat who was a grand master in the art of political gamesmanship. O’Brien had been tutored in the Kennedy political machine and further shaped by his years with Lyndon Johnson. He was a partisan in the most extreme and effective sense. After the Kent State tragedy, he virtually accused me of killing the four students. Whether the issue was Vietnam or Watergate, he could be counted on to hit hard, and not always above the belt.
An IRS investigation of Howard Hughes’s financial empire had revealed that Hughes was paying O’Brien’s Washington lobbying firm a large yearly retainer, reportedly almost $200,000. There were rumors about whether O’Brien had reported all the money and paid taxes on it. I was as doubtful as I was hopeful that we would nail him on this issue; as I noted in my diary, “I would be very surprised if he would have allowed himself to get in such a box.” The IRS had planned to interview O’Brien at some point regarding the Hughes retainer; I ordered Haldeman and Ehrlichman to have the audit expedited and completed before the election.
Whatever the findings of the audit, I thought, it would be a pleasant—and newsworthy—irony that after all the years in which Howard Hughes had been portrayed as my financial angel, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee was in fact the one profiting from a lucrative position on Hughes’s payroll.
In the end the IRS cleared O’Brien after a routine audit, and my desire to check up on him and on McGovern’s supporters was soon deflected by the heightening demands of the campaign schedule and the major new developments at the Vietnam peace talks.
On August 20, the day before the Republican National Convention opened, Pat and the girls went to Miami while I stayed at Camp David to put the finishing touches on my acceptance speech.
I watched television the next night to see the documentary about Pat that was shown on a huge screen in the convention hall. Jimmy Stewart had already given her an unforgettably eloquent introduction, and when the lights came up after the film, Pat suddenly appeared in person at the podium, standing with her arms out wide. It was a gesture uniquely hers, graceful and gracious. The program was running late, and, with infallible instinct, she spoke just a minute to say thank you. The cameras cut to Julie and Tricia, and I could see the loving pride in their smiles. I noted, “That was characteristic of the whole convention as far as the appearance of Pat, the girls, David and Ed are concerned. No First Family ever looked better than they did. No family looked more the all-American type than they did.”
I flew to Miami on Tuesday afternoon, August 22. That night I made an unscheduled appearance at the open-air youth rally, and the reception I received overwhelmed me. Pam Powell, the daughter of Dick Powell and June Allyson, escorted me onto the stage. Hands above their heads, four fingers outstretched, the thousands of young people took up a chant that I was hearing for the first time: “Four more years! Four more years!” It was deafening. It was music. This was a new kind of Republican youth: they weren’t square, but they weren’t ashamed of being positive and proud.
The picture that is probably most remembered from the 1972 convention is of Sammy Davis, Jr., impulsively hugging me on the stage at the youth rally. When the crowd finally quieted down, I described my first meeting with him at a White House reception a few weeks earlier. We had both talked about our backgrounds and about how we both came from rather poor families. “I know Sammy is a member of the other party,” I said. “I didn’t know when I talked to him what he would be doing in this election campaign. But I do know this. I want to make this pledge to Sammy. I want to make it to everybody here, whether you happen to be black or white, or young or old, and all of those who are listening. I believe in the American dream. Sammy Davis believes in it. We believe in it because we have seen it come true in our own lives.” For me—and, I think, for many others—the youth rally was the highlight of the convention. That night at the convention hall I was renominated for a second term by a vote of 1,347 to 1.
The next night outside the hall the frustrated demonstrators attempted to set fire to buses fil
led with delegates. They slashed tires, pelted delegates with rocks and eggs, and marched on the hall wearing their own gas masks and brandishing night sticks. My eyes burned from the lingering sting of tear gas as I entered the hall to accept my fifth and last nomination by a Republican convention.
Inside the hall neither the predictability of a well-organized program nor the absence of a hard-fought nomination battle could mute the enthusiasm of the crowd. The delegates had picked up the slogan I had heard at the youth rally. Over and over they shouted: “Four more years! Four moré years!”
The day after the convention I addressed the American Legion in Chicago and then spoke at the dedication of Dwight D. Eisenhower High School in Utica, Michigan. Then we flew across the country to San Diego, where another big crowd was waiting, and then took the short helicopter flight up the coast to San Clemente. The enthusiasm of all these crowds was exciting and contagious and deeply satisfying. There was an emotional quality to their receptions and reactions that neither the staff nor I had been able to sense in Washington, where many of the columns and news stories attributed my support more to the widespread disappointment with McGovern than to any intrinsic quality in my own candidacy.
Diary
Certainly, no one could say that we didn’t have the jumpers and the squealers in Michigan and San Diego and San Clemente, although it will, as usual, be difficult to get the press to write it. I am inclined to think that our people are going to be far more the jumpers and squealers than the McGovern people unless he begins to catch on and begins to inspire and lift up, rather than simply talk in the dour, Calvinistic way which characterizes his approach up to this time.
The crowd in San Diego was really fantastic. It must have been about 15,000. My talk was not really up to what it should have been. By this time I was having some fatigue and I just wasn’t able to put that much into it.
We then went on to San Clemente. It was a beautiful flight over the coast, and when we got here the staff, of course, had prepared me for a surprise. They had said that it was simply going to be the four mayors and a few friends from the area. It turned out to be one of the great crowds of the day. It was a very emotional crowd.
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