By the time we got back to the residence we were really bushed. Pat had dinner with me in the study—she had a second helping of chicken but I was not really in a condition to eat much and was glad that King came in to finish off my steak. Pat has been a really tremendous trouper in this past week.
I finished the day sitting out at the pool and smoking a cigar from Iran.
On Wednesday, August 30, Haldeman came in with a morose look.
“Bad news,” he said glumly, “I really mean it—it’s really bad.” Then he handed me the latest Gallup poll:
Nixon
64%
McGovern
30%
Undecided
6%
When I looked up he was smiling. So was I. It was the largest post-convention point spread in favor of a Republican candidate in Gallup’s history.
My first press conference of the campaign was scheduled for August 29. Watergate was obviously going to be one of the subjects raised. Ehrlichman assured me that there was still one thing of which we were certain: John Dean, the Justice Department, and the FBI all confirmed that there had been no White House involvement.
In the press conference I was asked whether I thought that there should be a Special Prosecutor appointed for Watergate. I answered that a Special Prosecutor was hardly necessary, since the FBI, the Justice Department, the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, and the General Accounting Office were all conducting investigations. I said that I had ordered total cooperation by the White House. “In addition to that,” I continued, “within our own staff, under my direction, Counsel to the President Mr. Dean has conducted a complete investigation of all leads which might involve any present members of the White House staff or anybody in the government. I can say categorically that his investigation indicates that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident. . . . What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur, because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.”
At a Cabinet meeting on September 12, Attorney General Kleindienst reported that the indictments on the Watergate break-in and bugging would be handed down in three days and that no one at a high level in the CRP or anyone in the White House would be named. He had anticipated the predictable Democratic charges of a whitewash and had therefore totted up some impressive statistics. The FBI had made this the biggest investigation since the Kennedy assassination: 333 agents in fifty-one field offices had followed 1,897 leads through 1,551 interviews for a total of 14,098 man-hours.
The indictments handed down on September 15 named only Hunt, Liddy, and the five men arrested in the Democratic headquarters. My lengthy diary entry for that day indicates the relative unimportance I continued to attribute to Watergate at that time. In it I described a meeting with Nelson Rockefeller and a two-hour session on taxes with Connally, Burns, Shultz, Stein, and Ehrlichman; I reflected on several passages from Robert Blake’s Disraeli, which I was currently rereading; I noted a conversation with Julie in which she was concerned about the way she had handled a reporter’s question on Vietnam; I mentioned my concern because Pat was suffering from a prolonged earache but would not slow down her schedule; I commented on a recent radio speech by Connally; and I recounted a meeting in the Oval Office with singer Ray Charles. My only reference to Watergate was one short sentence near the end: “This was the day of the Watergate indictment, and we hope to be able to ride the issue through in a successful way from now on.”
At Haldeman’s suggestion, I saw John Dean later that day and thanked him for his work. I had known ever since the week after the break-in that Dean, as White House Counsel, was keeping track of all the different Watergate problems for us, including the FBI investigation, the grand jury, the Democratic civil suit, the libel suit Maury Stans had filed against Larry O’Brien and the CRP’s countersuit against the DNC, and Texas Representative Wright Patman’s attempt to hold pre-election hearings on the CRP’s finances. Summing up his status report on these matters, Dean said, “Three months ago I would have had trouble predicting where we’d be today. I think that I can say that fifty-four days from now [Election Day] that not a thing will come crashing down to our—our surprise.”
I said that the whole thing was a can of worms, and a lot of what had happened had been “awfully embarrassing.” But I told Dean that the way he had handled it had been “very skillful, because you—putting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there.”
Dean covered the whole range of the different cases he was handling. The GAO report charging that the CRP had violated campaign finance rules had been referred to the Justice Department, Dean said, where there were reports of hundreds of other alleged violations—including charges against McGovern, Humphrey, and Jackson as well. The GAO was also planning to audit the use of funds by the White House staff. “I think we can be proud of the White House staff,” Dean said, adding that the GAO would find nothing if they did investigate. Patman’s unabashed partisan attempt to hold hearings on CRP finances was the next pre-election assault we faced. I told Dean that the whole thing was simply “public relations,” and he agreed.
“We just take one at a time,” Dean said.
“And you really can’t just sit and worry yourself about it all the time, thinking ‘the worst may happen’ but it may not,” I replied. “So you just try to button it up as well as you can and hope for the best . . . and remember that basically the damn thing is just one of those unfortunate things and, we’re trying to cut our losses.”
Then we turned to my long-time determination to restructure the bureaucracy in Washington—so that even if it were not favorable to us, at least it would no longer be serving the Democrats.
Two days later I recalled my impressions of this meeting.
Diary
I had a good talk with John Dean and was enormously impressed with him. I later told Haldeman, who said that he brought him into the White House, that he had the kind of steel and really mean instinct that we needed to clean house after the election in various departments and to put the IRS and the Justice Department on the kind of basis that it should be on. There simply has to be a line drawn at times with those who are against us; and then we have to take the action to deal with them effectively. Otherwise, they will be around to deal with us when their opportunity comes to them.
As the polls continued to indicate a Nixon landslide, McGovern and Shriver became desperate. They launched a strident campaign of personal attacks. McGovern said that my policy on Vietnam sought a “new level of barbarism” in order to save my own face. Three times he compared me to Hitler and the Republican Party to the Ku Klux Klan. He said that any working man who supported me “should have his head examined.”
Shriver called me “Tricky Dicky,” a “psychiatric case,” “power-mad,” the “greatest con artist” who spent most of the time “figuring out ways to keep America number one in the power to kill and destroy people abroad,” and “the number-one bomber of all time.” I told George Christian, President Johnson’s former Press Secretary who was working with Connally in Democrats for Nixon, that Johnson should be pleased that Shriver had called me the number-one bomber. Christian laughed and said, “I don’t believe so, Mr. President. LBJ never likes to be number two in anything.”
While these increasingly shrill and acrimonious charges were being hurled against me I continued to stay on the job in the White House, aloof from the rising emotional tides of the campaign. Some diary notes I made after a weekend at Camp David in early September convey the striking contrast between the campaign as I experienced it and as McGovern and Shriver waged it.
Diary
Around noon, since it was such a beautiful day—clear blue—I went into the pool for a while. It was one of those days when I was able to lie on my back and look up at the leaves. I was reminded of the fact that in the sp
ring the leaves turned over in the wind and the leaves in the spring and the fall were really so very much alike. One portrays the beginning of summer, the other the beginning of winter—one the beginning of life, the other the beginning of death.
I expect the situation to get rougher in the next week and throughout. It is very clear that McGovern had finally learned that what he has to do is simply to attack and he is doing so in a very vicious and irresponsible way. Our people, of course, as I pointed out to Colson, are reacting in their usual honest and stupid way, by defending rather than attacking.
McGovern’s going to all the big cities at this time for street rallies is an indication of their desperation because eight weeks before the election is much too soon to hit the big cities.
My campaign was running like clockwork. Ted Agnew, Clark MacGregor, Bob Dole, and their teams were doing a magnificent job. They were not only effective spokesmen for the administration but kept McGovern on the defensive with sharp thrusts against his far-left views. In September I began adding some political appearances to my schedule, but it was still the most restrained campaign of my career; consequently, I remember it primarily as a series of episodes.
One of the most memorable was a campaign trip I made to Texas on September 22 that ended with an enthusiastic Democrats for Nixon barbecue at the Connally ranch.
Diary
I told Connally as we were sitting around about 11:30 or 12 it is vitally important that Teddy Kennedy not pick up the pieces after this election. It is important that people like John Connally pick them up because the country simply can’t afford to have the likes of Kennedy and McGovern as even possible Presidents in the years ahead.
Pat pointed out a New York Times article on Mrs. McGovern said that the Nixons were from the fifties and the McGoverns from the seventies. I just hope the press continues to think this way because in the end they’re going to take a hell of a beating.
I woke up twice in the night, once at 2, and once at 4—even though I was terribly tired when I went to bed. Finally at 7 o’clock I woke up again. When I got up, opened the blinds, looked out on beautiful green countryside, at the cows in the pasture, rang for breakfast, to my great pleasure instead of my wheat germ they insisted on sending in some of their country sausage, which was totally and perfectly delicious. I am going to have to mix up the breakfasts and lunches just a bit in order to get away from such a drab and uninteresting diet.
At the end of September George McGovern received the official editorial endorsement of the New York Times. The Washington Post withheld a formal endorsement but made clear its preference for McGovern. In my diary I noted my reaction when I heard about the Times’s endorsement: “I said that I learned the news with relief because I didn’t want anybody on the staff to urge me to meet with their editorial board and thank God we had not done so. Nobody had had the temerity to suggest that I do so. And as I pointed out to Haldeman there should be a letter to the Times or a statement that the Times basically should endorse McGovern because he stood for everything they stood for—permissiveness, a bug-out from Vietnam, new isolationism, etc.”
The Post’s decision came as no surprise either. On June 26 I had dictated this note on a report Kissinger gave me from columnist Stewart Alsop, who had been to dinner with the paper’s publisher: “Henry told me of an interesting conversation he had had with Stewart Alsop. Stewart, apparently, is still critically ill and had been out to dinner with Kay Graham. He had been arguing emphatically with regard to the necessity to support RN because of what he had accomplished in foreign policy, and also the danger of having McGovern in the presidency. He said that Kay Graham finally blew up and said, “ ‘I hate him and I’m going to do everything I can to beat him.’ ”
On September 26 we held a dinner in New York for campaign contributors. One encounter during that evening particularly stayed in my mind.
Diary
One thing that made a very great impression upon me was when a relatively young man—at least he seemed young to me; I would imagine he was forty, he could have been forty-five—said to me that he’d lost his son in Vietnam in 1970 and he was still for me and for my foreign policy.
When I think of such men as this and the mothers of the boys as well as their wives, I realize how very important it is to see not only that we end the war, but that we end it in a way that will make their sacrifices not be in vain, which is what I told him as we were being hauled away.
The crowd that turned out to greet Pat and me in Atlanta on October 12 was estimated at between 500,000 and 700,000. To the dismay of the Secret Service, a man in the crowd outside the hotel grabbed me and shouted above the noise, “Thanks for making the South a part of America again.” I later told Ehrlichman, “The South is teaching the Democratic Party a lesson about patriotism.”
During a long motorcade in Ohio I was warned that there were some unfriendly demonstrators waiting for us a short way ahead. Since there had also been a bomb threat, the Secret Service wanted to close the top of my car and increase the speed during this particular part of the route.
Diary
One thing I did do was when the Secret Service wanted to speed up, I told them to slow down. I said we must not run from these people, so we slowed down to a snail’s pace and I waved out the window, as did Pat on the other side, at all the nutheads in the nasty crowd.
When I saw some of the antiwar people and the rest, I’d simply hold up the “V” or the one thumb up; this really knocks them for a loop, because they think this is their sign. Some of them break out into a smile. Others, of course, just become more hateful. I think as the war recedes as an issue, some of these people are going to be lost souls. They basically are haters, they are frustrated, they are alienated—they don’t know what to do with their lives.
I think perhaps the saddest group will be those who are the professors and particularly the younger professors and the associate professors on the college campuses and even in the high schools. They wanted to blame somebody else for their own failures to inspire the students.
I can think of those Ivy League presidents who came to see me after Kent State, and who were saying, please don’t leave the problem to us—I mean, let the government do something. None of them would take any of the responsibility themselves.
Now the responsibility is theirs, although I imagine they will find another issue. The black power thing is gone—the environment has fizzled out—the war will be gone—the question is, what next? I suppose it will be big business or corruption or what have you, but it will be difficult to find one that emotionally will turn the kids on like the war issue.
It will be good that the college administrators and professors will have to look within themselves—look in the mirror—and realize that it is they who have the responsibility—that they are at fault if the young people are not inspired. They can’t blame it on government or anybody else.
Although my direct involvement in the campaign was limited, it was intense. By the end of the campaign I had made dozens of speeches and informal remarks.
Diary
I had a rather curious dream of speaking at some sort of a rally and going a bit too long and Rockefeller standing up in the middle and taking over the microphone on an applause line. Of course, this is always something that worries a person when he is making speeches, as to whether he is going too long. It is a subconscious reaction. It is interesting.
Since my strategy was to minimize my own campaigning, my family took over the burden of crisscrossing the country making appearances. All together, Pat, Julie, and Tricia covered seventy-seven cities in thirty-seven states in the nine weeks from the end of August to Election Day. David was in the Navy and had to stay on the sidelines, but Ed Cox plunged right in and went onto college campuses to face some of the toughest audiences of all. His easy manner and quick, organized mind enabled him to hold his own and make a strong impression everywhere he went.
In all their speeches and in all their press conferences, th
ere was never a misspoken word. They were heckled, shoved, hissed, and subjected to obscene shouts from demonstrators, but they pressed on like professionals, with poise and grace. Even when Pat was being cursed by angry young men and women in Boston, she was serene and natural—which infuriated them even more; I am sure they had no idea how much they hurt her. Tricia passed on to us her strategy when confronted by a crowd of burly demonstrators: “Please,” she would say quietly, “don’t push the children.”
Julie, who was steely enough to mean it when she said that she would give her life for South Vietnam’s freedom, was soft enough to leave the dinner table in tears when she thought about how David, who loved politics so much, would miss the election because his ship would be in the Mediterranean.
Diary
Julie called me after the Gromyko dinner, very thoughtfully waiting until then, to ask me about whether she could go to see David since he could not return for the election. I, of course, approved it all the way.
To hell with the election if it interferes with a few days that they may have together at this time when it means so much to them.
I recall that in 1960, after the defeat, Julie was the one who at least as far as her open feelings were concerned really never gave up. I remember going in to her bedroom at the Forest Lane house just to kiss her good night, and she would say, “Daddy, can’t we still win?” This was two weeks or so after the election.
In 1960 during the first debate she had been worried about whether Daddy had won or not. Tricia had very loyally stepped up and said, “Of course he did.”
I remember in 1962 the reaction was somewhat different. Julie had said congratulations on taking on the press after the election, whereas Tricia seemed more reserved and more worried about it.
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