* * *
ONE member of the family showed more overt contempt toward the new White House occupant. In March, Ted Kennedy and wife, Joan, attended the First Lady’s yearly reception for members of Congress. Pat Nixon, like the other women attending, wore a floor-length gown. The president was in black tie. As Joan Kennedy passed through the receiving line, she caught every eye and camera. She had chosen a low-cut cocktail dress, shimmering with silver sequins and stopping a full half foot above her knees. “Wow!” a Nixon cabinet member exhaled.
In April, Ted Kennedy flashed a more lethal contempt for the new Nixon order. “This is the time to begin to get out of Southeast Asia, lock, stock, and barrel,” he demanded. Next, Kennedy jumped on reports that the White House was wiretapping journalists it suspected of getting “leaks” about secret U.S. bombing in Cambodia. Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee demanded that the Justice Department come clean. Attorney General John Mitchell’s people stonewalled the Kennedy request.
But events of the summer would bring the Kennedy family’s high hopes for a “restoration” crashing to earth, even as the first men traveled to the moon and back. The first lunar landing of American astronauts in July 1969 was an accomplishment so mythical as to mark by itself John F. Kennedy’s place in history. President Nixon invited Lyndon Johnson to join him at Cape Kennedy for the astronauts’ liftoff. But his highest tribute was to the president who had spoken so grandly of Americans having “thrown our hat over the wall” of space. “His people gave him some great word pictures,” the president told one of his speech-writers as he prepped for the occasion.
But no homage to JFK could protect Nixon from the charge of usurpation. The Washington Post objected with special sarcasm to his name on a marker to be planted by the astronauts on the moon’s surface. How dare the space program be treated as some run-of-the-mill public works project! How dare Richard Nixon presume to take credit for a program “defined by President Kennedy. He was not, insofar as we understand the procedures last November, elected President of all mankind.” The New York Times piled on. When NASA carried through on its idea of having the president speak to the astronauts by phone, it editorialized that the Republican president was “Nixoning the Moon.”
* * *
THAT weekend in July changed everything. On Martha’s Vineyard, in a car accident involving Ted Kennedy, a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, was killed. The news from the island off Cape Cod stirred instant reaction within the Nixon White House. “Wants to be sure he doesn’t get away with it,” Bob Haldeman jotted in his diary after briefing Nixon and his family on the crash at Chappaquiddick. “Real concern is realization of what they’d be doing if it were one of our people. Obviously he was drunk, escaped from car, let her drown. Shows fatal flaw in his character.”
The next day, Nixon was in the midst of preparations for his historic telephone hookup with the Apollo 11 astronauts. Speech-writer Bill Safire was present in case something went wrong and the president had to offer instead a grim farewell from earth. But despite the great occasion at hand, Nixon’s real concerns were up in Massachusetts. “This is quite a day on another front, too!” he told Safire. “It’ll be hard to hush this one up; too many reporters want to win a Pulitzer Prize.” His aide disagreed. The episode at Chappaquiddick could very well be pushed to the back pages, given the historic events miles away. “No,” Nixon said. “The fact that it happened this day would make it even more significant, especially the way they would be trying to make this a Kennedy day.”
After the long Air Force One flight to Guam, site of the astronauts’ splashdown, and meeting with the three men aboard the USS Hornet, Nixon remained obsessed with the Kennedys’ plight. “I would get six or eight phone calls a day about Chappaquiddick,” recalls John Ehrlichman, who had remained back at the White House. “Nixon saw it as a chance to drive a stake through their hearts.”
To meet his boss’s needs, Haldeman had an aide back at the White House sit at a telephone alongside the television, thereby allowing him to scribble notes of Kennedy’s dramatic account for his questionable conduct before and after the accident. Listening intently, the president noted the “gaps and contradictions” in an appeal many would compare to the Checkers speech of a generation earlier. Nixon noted a crucial difference. “I could not help thinking if anyone other than a Kennedy had been involved and had given such a patently unacceptable explanation, the media and the public would not have permitted him to survive in public life.” That list of “anyone else” began with the name Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon’s worst fear was that Ted Kennedy was going to get away with it, just as his brother had for so long escaped public knowledge of his relentless “girling.” Like most Americans, including legions of those supporters of the Kennedy family in the past, he supposed that the real story of what happened that night on Chappaquiddick Island had been sanitized. Believing the Kennedy people would do everything they could to keep the truth permanently buried, Nixon ordered John Ehrlichman to get someone digging into the case.
Operating on presidential orders, Ehrlichman sent White House aide Jack Caulfield to Chappaquiddick. For two weeks, the former New York detective dug through the available evidence, asked damaging questions at press conferences, anything to keep the dirt flying. The Nixon team also worked Washington for clues, placing a wiretap in the Georgetown house where Mary Jo Kopechne had roomed with three other women. Nixon himself took a hand in the quest. Two weeks after the tragedy, the president equipped Ehrlichman with a fresh lead. “Talk to Henry Kissinger on a very confidential basis with regard to a talk he had with J. K. Galbraith as to what really happened in the EMK matter. It is a fascinating story. I’m sure HAK will tell you the story, and then you, of course, will know how to check it out to get it properly exploited.”
Yet even as he worked to seal his feared rival’s doom, Nixon made a show of trying to prove himself above that sort of behavior. When Kennedy arrived at the White House for the regular congressional leadership meeting, Nixon set aside ten minutes for a private bucking up.
Initially, neither press nor public needed any artificial stimulation regarding Chappaquiddick. A Bill Mauldin cartoon in the Chicago Sun-Times showed Ted Kennedy seeing Nixon and his dog Checkers looking back at him from a mirror. A Harris poll taken in October showed 55 percent of Americans agreeing that Kennedy “panicked in a crisis and should not be given high public trust, such as being president.” Still, a third of those responding disagreed.
Nixon, dissatisfied with Kennedy’s incomplete demise, was determined there would be no letup in the campaign. Convinced that Kennedy’s loud criticism of his Vietnam policy was an attempt to deflect attention from Chappaquiddick, Nixon relished pointing out how the North Vietnamese were now quoting Kennedy’s words “with devastating effect.” He slyly suggested that Pat Buchanan send material to the nation’s newspaper editors documenting Hanoi’s boastful use of the Massachusetts senator’s remarks, suggesting that the mailing be postmarked Boston. He also ordered his staff to procure hard intelligence on what Kennedy and other antiwar senators, such as South Dakota’s George McGovern, were planning to say next. In September, Nixon put more pressure on Haldeman to produce results, adding to his team a White House newcomer who was an old hand at fighting the Kennedys. Charles Colson, the former top aide to Massachusetts Republican senator Leverett Saltonstall, was put in charge of what Nixon called the “Teddy Kennedy fight.”
That same autumn, longtime Kennedy pollster Lou Harris received a surprising call from the White House. “Are you out to get me?” came the voice over the telephone.
“No, Mr. President,” Harris responded. “You’re the only president of the United States.”
“You’re sure you’re not out to get me?” prodded Nixon, intently aware that the man he had on the line had worked not just for the Kennedys but also for Pat Brown in the 1962 gubernatorial campaign and whose last published poll during the 1968 campaign had called it for Humphrey by three points. Temporarily mollifi
ed, Nixon invited Harris in for a meeting.
When the pollster entered the Oval Office, he found Nixon with his chief of staff. “This is Bob Haldeman,” the president told his visitor. “As you see, he doesn’t have horns.”
“Well, Mr. President,” Harris shot back, “he doesn’t have a halo over his head, either.”
Nixon then showed his guest to one of two wing-backed chairs that were sitting side by side. “You sit there,” the president said, indicating the seat to the right. “The last person who sat there, I want you to know, was an African tribal chief. He’s dead now.” This bizarre detail was a standard Nixon icebreaker. What struck Harris was the peculiar side-by-side arrangement of his and Nixon’s chairs. They were the only two people left in the Oval Office and yet were positioned so as not to see each other. Here he was talking to the president of the United States sideways! Harris tried to remedy the odd arrangement by edging his chair, almost unconsciously, until it faced his host at a rough forty-five-degree angle. “See here,” Nixon said, interrupting the conversation. “This is my office. Let’s put these chairs back where they were.”
If the seating arrangement was unexpected, Nixon’s query of the long-term Kennedy pollster was even stranger still. “Do you think I can be a personality kid? My staff thinks I can.”
“What do you mean?” Harris played for time.
“My staff thinks I can,” Nixon plunged on. “I think I’ve got a lousy personality, and I’m not a personality kid.”
Harris, eager to please, had brought with him every poll he’d ever taken on Nixon. Citing them, he said, “Mr. President, people don’t like your personality.” Nixon smiled. Harris sensed his host seemed relieved, even justified, to hear the hard verdict.
“That’s good! That’s absolutely right. I knew my staff was wrong!” He promptly invited Harris to stay and accompany him to the next event on his daily schedule, an address to a group of businessmen. This, he would soon prove to his guest, was a task at which he excelled.
Seeking to compensate Harris on the spot for his professional counsel, Nixon began digging through his drawer, finding souvenirs of all varieties, each bearing the presidential seal. “Here, this is for your wife or girlfriend,” he said, handing his guest a woman’s pin, “or whatever you’ve got.” The awkward attempt at the locker-room machismo was another standard Nixonism. After rummaging through the cuff links, paperweights, and tie clasps, Nixon got down on his hands and knees to open his credenza, from which he pulled golf balls, Richard Nixon golf balls. “Here! You play golf?” asked Nixon. “I play tennis, Mr. President,” responded Harris. At this, Nixon pushed a button, and a white-coated attendant appeared. “Get a bag for Mr. Harris,” the president directed. When the sack arrived, Nixon loaded it with everything he had collected in his desperate quest. “Here,” he implored Kennedy’s pollster. “This is all I’ve got.”
* * *
RICHARD Nixon’s notion of becoming a “personality kid” would not die. “He was pushing it both ways,” Haldeman recalled of his team’s efforts to warm up his boss’s public image. “One day they would say, ‘You’ve got to be a lovable guy!’ so he would try and figure out what that is. Then it would backfire, so he would say, ‘See! It doesn’t work!’ ” Haldeman deputy Jeb Magruder lived through it. “To some extent, as both Haldeman and the president realized, the problem was simply Nixon himself. He was not a lovable man, and no public relations program was going to make him so.”
Nixon, however, still had an ace in the hole. Though popularity would have been a nice bonus, his strength lay with the brand of politics he had first employed that long-ago freshman year at Whittier. His first November in the White House, he went on television to defend not just his Vietnam policy but his kind of guy. Quoting John Kennedy’s argument that an American withdrawal “would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but Southeast Asia,” he issued a defiant call to arms. “I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days,” he said to a country held in the grip of weekly casualty reports and recent witness to a mammoth antiwar rally. Twenty years after his infamous appeal to “cloth coat” Republicans, twenty-four years after being drafted by the Committee of 100 to fight the elite liberal Jerry Voorhis, Nixon was once again championing the Orthogonians he now rechristened “the great Silent Majority.”
But still he craved something more: ammunition that would seal his 1968 victory and protect him, once and for all, from a restoration. What he needed, what he pestered his aides to get for him, was the goods on John F. Kennedy himself, on how he had botched and betrayed the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. For Nixon, this was the holy grail of opposition research. “He’s continually cranking on about the Bay of Pigs, how the Kennedys got away with it,” aide John Ehrlichman recalled. Defending the White House pursuit of Ted Kennedy’s behavior at Chappaquiddick, H. R. Haldeman compared it to the far larger prize. “This was at least a chance to get something while it was still hot with some guys that ought to be able to find it out. We never did find out the stuff, the background on the Bay of Pigs.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Escalation
A full year into his presidency, Richard Nixon continued to strive for legitimacy and for public affection. His backstage standard remained the man who had beaten him to the White House. Wondering aloud about White House relations with the media, he complained to Bob Haldeman that his people were emphasizing “what” the administration had done without spotlighting the leadership qualities of the president himself. Haldeman dutifully jotted down his boss’s example of a predecessor who had succeeded by doing the opposite. “JFK did nothing but appeared great.”
Nixon sensed now the revival of a live Kennedy menace. Lawrence O’Brien, the field director who had planted Jack Kennedy’s political flag across the country in 1959 and 1960, was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. It was a sign to Nixon that Ted Kennedy would be calling the shots behind the scenes. He ordered Murray Chotiner, his street fighter from the Voorhis and Douglas campaigns, to neutralize O’Brien. A month later, Chotiner reported to Haldeman that he was checking into Larry O’Brien’s affairs systematically. Nixon next ordered Haldeman to put John Caulfield and fellow gumshoe Tony Ula-sewicz to work digging up dirt on several liberal senators who were challenging his Supreme Court nominations. The list started with the well-known liberal from Massachusetts.
Nixon’s fear of Kennedy, even in the months after Chappaquiddick, was well founded. Wielding his clout on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jack’s younger brother kept up a rearguard action against the Republican president’s Supreme Court nominations. Clement Haynesworth of Virginia was the first to fall. Determined to name another southerner, Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell chose Harold Carswell. “Nixon-Mitchell have again nominated a mediocre candidate with no indications of particular intelligence, leadership, insight, or respect among his brethren,” Kennedy’s chief counsel James Flug briefed his boss. “In fact, his official record is quite consistent with the notion that he is a segregationist and white supremacist. I smell blood.” Flug told Kennedy that Carswell’s nomination could be beaten if the civil rights organizations could be brought into the fray. He listed a number of senators who would go along with a dump-Carswell effort, given the right amount of “brotherly pressure.”
Kennedy went to work. On the first day of confirmation hearings, he asked Carswell for a list of clients he had represented in private practice who later appeared before him in court. Accused by a Republican senator of conducting a “fishing expedition,” the Massachusetts senator plunged even deeper into the fight. Cars-well was defeated in the Senate, 51-40. Nixon, making the best of the defeat, said the opposition would never confirm a southern conservative to the Court.
* * *
IN April, the president announced a bold stroke by U.S. forces in Vietnam. On national television he revealed that American forces had invaded neighboring Cambodia, whose terr
itory served as both supply base and refuge for the attacking Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops. The aerial pounding delivered by the air force was matched by Nixon’s defiant on-air rhetoric. “I would rather be a one-term president and do what I believe was right than to be a two-term president at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power,” he declared self-righteously. America was no “pitiful, helpless giant,” he declared, and neither was Richard Nixon.
The effect of this broadcast was to split an already divided country even further. On campuses, the heart of the American antiwar movement, Nixon’s “incursion” into Cambodia had the impact of nitroglycerin. At Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a mass of demonstrators. Four students were killed. The news photo of a young woman kneeling over one of the fallen youths became a rallying cry against Nixon’s “escalation” of the war. The war John Kennedy had begun was now Richard Nixon’s, and those who served Kennedy the most ardently now unleashed the harshest criticism at their lost hero’s 1960 rival. Democratic chief Larry O’Brien was especially vicious. Nixon would later say that the veteran Kennedy man had accused him of “virtually killing the four students” himself.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 139