To have the President’s visit at dinner was an unexpected pleasure and honor which they will always remember.
And so, dear Mrs. Nixon, you brought joy to many who are near and dear to me, and I want to thank you from my heart.
Very Sincerely,
Rose Kennedy
Several weeks later, Nixon wrote the two children back:
Dear Caroline—
I want you to know how much we appreciated your letter after our visit at The White House—We did not share the contents with anyone but our Swiss Chef was deeply touched when I told him that you had written so generously about his culinary creations.
I recall that you told us your favorite subject was history but that a poor teacher this year had somewhat dampened your interest. I know a teacher can make a great difference but I hope your enthusiasm for history continues.
History is the best foundation for almost any profession—but even more important you will find the really most fascinating reading as you grow older is in history and biography.
As far as the teacher is concerned I recall that some of the teachers I thought at the time were the worst (because they graded so hard) were actually the best in retrospect. I would guess you are an exceptionally good student and I hope the teacher doesn’t discourage you!
Mrs. Nixon, Tricia and Julie join me in sending our best. You will always be welcome in this House.
Richard Nixon
Dear John—
We all greatly enjoyed your letter and we were particularly happy that your visit to the House where you lived as a very young boy left pleasant memories.
I will let you in on a little secret with regard to our dogs. Usually Mrs. Nixon—for obvious reasons—will not allow them to come to the second floor. So you can see that your visit was a special treat for them (and for me!—I don’t worry so much about what happens to the furniture).
I was glad your wish which you made on the Lincoln bed came true—when you need another one like that—come back to see us. You will always be welcome in This House.
Sincerely
Richard Nixon
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Targeting Teddy
EVEN as he entertained his old rival’s family at dinner, Richard Nixon was immersed in the battle that drove and nourished his soul. On a sunny afternoon in Key Biscayne he remained closeted inside discussing and rediscussing with Haldeman a new Harris poll that showed his personal approval rating steadily on the decline. Two days later, back in Washington, Nixon spent the whole day in his Executive Office hideaway fixating on a poll of American youth that showed him fourth among the “most admired men,” behind John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy. The only consolation was that Edward Kennedy, the surviving brother, was not on the list.
Nixon now took the fateful step he hoped would secure his advantage in the long twilight struggle for “greatness.” He ordered his chief of staff to install a White House taping system that would assure him, not his enemies, control of his presidential record. Worried that liberal, pro-Kennedy historians and scholars would skew the accounts of his accomplishments in order to deny him proper credit, he decided that the remedy lay in being prepared. With recordings of every syllable uttered either in the Oval Office or in his Old Executive Office Building hideaway, Nixon would have the literal last word on the events of his administration.
The impetus, according to his chief of staff, was Lyndon Johnson. The former president made the compelling argument to Nixon that any chief executive needs a record of his meetings to defend his place in history. According to Haldeman, Nixon needed little prodding. “He was worried that in private, head-to-head meetings, he didn’t want the burden on himself of having to be the only recorder of that meeting because there’s a lot of work and he had to be thinking. He didn’t want the other guy to have the sole record of the meeting, because the other guy could have been the guy on the other side.”
Nixon had first tried other record-keeping techniques. At one point he had a staffer sit in the room and act as a “fly on the wall.” He experimented with having aides debrief both him and his guest immediately following a presidential meeting or just a quick debriefing of the visitor on his way out. He rejected both methods. “Nixon didn’t like someone sitting in, especially if they were taking notes, because that always bothers people because, you know, they keep looking over at the guy taking notes.” One solution was to have Gen. Vernon Walters, a former Nixon military aide known for his uncannily sharp memory, sit in on meetings. The crusty Walters made clear to Nixon’s chief of staff that generals commanded troops; they didn’t sit in the corner memorizing Oval Office conversations.
Thus, a permanent eavesdropper came to the White House. Despite the eagerness with which Nixon embraced his new taping system, it was just the sort of technology he found unfriendly. Originally, the recording system was controlled by two buttons: one, marked “Butterfield,” which turned the system on; the other, marked “Haldeman,” which served as the off button. Uncomfortable fumbling with the buttons with people sitting right there watching him, Nixon switched later to a voice-activated system. When someone talked in the Oval Office or Nixon’s Executive Office Building hideaway, the machine recorded it.
Having okayed the installation, Nixon never bothered to make use of it either to check or confirm with Haldeman an actual conversation—not until too late, when his words had become a matter of political life and death. “Do you want me to start getting someone to transcribe these things, because the tapes are piling up, and logistically it’s going to be a real mess,” Haldeman recalled asking. “Absolutely not” came Nixon’s snap answer. “No one is going to hear these tapes but you and me.”
But while the taping system was now in place to record Nixon’s presidential glory, the actual seizing of such glory remained a vexing challenge. Haldeman observed the struggle from close range. “Nixon took pains with his public image,” Haldeman recalled. “He dressed neatly and conservatively, handled himself calmly in public, made all of his ceremonial appearances in good style and humor—and yet, no matter what he did, he seemed to come across as flat, unattractive, unappealing. Jack Kennedy had only to stand up to project a charismatic image of ‘class.’ And, of course, to a lesser extent, this was also true of Kennedy’s brothers.”
Chuck Colson had emerged by early 1971 as Nixon’s chief political confidant. “The Kennedy-Nixon comparison. It was always there. It was always the source of resentment: the eastern-Harvard-liberal establishment everybody would look up to. Nixon knew he was a whole lot brighter but never got respect from the people who always thought they would restore the Kennedy charisma.”
His inability to create an aura around his presidency to captivate the hearts of Americans, as the memory of Camelot had done, continued to frustrate Nixon as he began the backstretch of his four-year term. It was more than a threat to his peace of mind. Ted Kennedy was reemerging as the chief obstacle between him and the validation of every American presidency—a second term. The surprise loss by Kennedy of his Senate leadership position to West Virginia’s Robert Byrd did nothing to lessen Nixon’s sense of foreboding and Kennedy’s new confidence. In March, Teddy mocked the president’s absence from the annual Gridiron Dinner, an evening of food, drink, and white-tie satire hosted by Washington’s senior journalists, claiming the president had been unable to attend because he was down in Key Biscayne “at the local Bijou watching Patton for the forty-third time!” Critics had blamed George C. Scott’s commanding screen portrait for Nixon’s defiant move into Cambodia the year before.
Such jabs were being duly recorded by those around Nixon. Correspondent Dan Rather was meeting with Haldeman and Ehrlichman when a secretary rushed in with a wire story about Senator Kennedy. Haldeman, he learned, had issued standing orders that any Ted Kennedy item on the news wires be brought directly to him. The CBS reporter was unique in spotting the Kennedy obsession behind the White House plotting during these m
onths.
In May, Kennedy pulled ahead of Democratic front-runner Sen. Edmund Muskie in the Gallup poll. Once more, the specter of a restoration loomed over the Nixon White House. Richard Nixon was increasingly seen by many as the illegitimate holder of the office that belonged, rightfully, to the dynasty that was waiting to reclaim it. Richard Nixon, viewed by many acolytes of “Camelot” as an illegitimate usurper, told Haldeman that the beloved Jack Kennedy was “colder, more ruthless” than him but came through as a “warm, human guy.” To give voters a less worshipful look at Kennedy’s younger brother, Nixon later told his chief of staff to put “permanent tails” on Teddy and other potential 1972 challengers.
That same month, Nixon ended his spring slump by defeating a move by Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield to cut the number of U.S. troops in Europe. He did so with the personal backing of Truman-era secretary of state Dean Acheson, a man he had once implied had been “taken in by the Communists.”
But the stalemate in Southeast Asia was daily becoming a heavier burden. Ted Kennedy, brother and political heir of the man who first sent U.S. troops into South Vietnam, condemned Nixon not just for the war but for his handling of antiwar protests. “We were in their faces a lot,” recalled James Flug, chief counsel of Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee. “We were directly on the case all the time and they knew it.” When Attorney General John Mitchell ordered mass “field arrests” during a May demonstration at the Capitol, Senator Kennedy was quick to ridicule the action, directing his Judiciary Subcommittee staff to dig into the Nixon administration’s tactics. “We must destroy the cancer that has been transforming the noble spirit of our nation in the eyes of our own citizens,” he warned. Haldeman noted in his diary that Nixon raised the “Ted Kennedy question” again. Nixon said the White House needed to do some long-range planning regarding Kennedy, since “it may very well go his way” the next year. “There will be great pressures to forget Chappaquiddick, which is, of course, his most vulnerable point; that we can’t let be forgotten.”
In June, Nixon aide Dwight Chapin recruited a former ally in University of Southern California student politics, Donald Segretti, just ending his service as an army lawyer, to run the 1972 “dirty tricks” campaign. Segretti was told he would be a “Republican Dick Tuck,” sowing seeds of discord and confusion in the enemy ranks, much as the mischievous pro-Kennedy partisan had done to Nixon over the years. Segretti was to create such fierce intramural hostility among the Democrats that they would be unable to coalesce as they had done to such frightening effect behind the campaign of Hubert Humphrey in the last weeks of the 1968 election. Segretti seized the work with gusto: “Love this Job,” he jotted in the margin of one dispatch. He was, after all, doing work the president of the United States himself wanted done.
Before the month was out, there came another escalation in the domestic war. The day after Tricia Nixon wed Edward Cox in the Rose Garden, the New York Times carried a picture of the wedding on the left side of page 1; on the right side, where editors traditionally place the chief story of the day, was the first installment of the Pentagon Papers. The “Papers,” leaked by former Kissinger associate Daniel Ellsberg, chronicled the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and offered to the Nixon camp hard documentary evidence that the Southeast Asian nightmare was the work of past presidents—Democratic presidents. “We should encourage, not discourage, the Hill from carrying on intensive hearings and well-publicized hearings over the Kennedy-Johnson papers and over how we got into Vietnam,” a gleeful Chuck Colson urged Haldeman. But the conspiratorial aide could not resist converting a lucky break into an anti-Kennedy weapon. “We could, of course, plant and try to prove the thesis that Bobby Kennedy was behind the preparation of the papers,” Colson enticed the Nixon team, “because he planned to use them to overthrow Lyndon Johnson.”
Release of the Pentagon Papers whetted Nixon’s appetite for more anti-Kennedy disclosures. He ordered Henry Kissinger to get hold of “the Lodge Files” on the murder of South Vietnamese president Diem. But Kissinger was still focused on the impact the embarrassing release of top-secret documents could mean to his back-channel dealings with China. Rather than disseminate the Pentagon Papers message, that it was Democrats who plunged the country into the Vietnam quagmire, Kissinger pushed Nixon to destroy the messenger. Daniel Ellsberg was to be crushed. “If we can change the issue from one of release of the documents to one of the theft of the documents, we will have something going for us,” Colson volunteered. Thus resulted the plan to sack the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of something to prove that the era’s most celebrated whistle-blower was “sick.”
Ellsberg was not the only target. “I don’t give a damn how it is done,” Nixon told Colson. “Do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks. I want results. I want it done, whatever the cost.” The cost would be a White House operation dedicated to plugging security leaks. It would take its name from the word someone had humorously posted on the band’s basement door in the Old Executive Office Building across from the White House.
The “Plumbers” were driven as much by political anger as the need to protect national secrets. Plied by Kissinger with tales of Ted Kennedy’s aggressive love life, Nixon ordered Haldeman to get the senator in a “compromising situation.” Colson now enlisted another fellow who didn’t mind a little creative trouble: E. Howard Hunt. “The more I think about Howard Hunt’s background, politics, disposition and experience, the more I think it would be worth your time to meet him,” Colson wrote Ehrlichman. “I had forgotten when I talked to you that he was the CIA mastermind on the Bay of Pigs. He told me a long time ago that if the truth were ever known, Kennedy would be destroyed.”
Like Colson, Hunt was a graduate of Brown University. Both men were active in the Washington alumni chapter. Colson was president of the local group; Hunt, vice president. Yet they shared something else besides an alma mater: a common enemy. Hunt was the embittered CIA agent “Eduardo” who had watched John Kennedy deny the Cuban exiles their promised “umbrella” of air cover over the Bay of Pigs. He was angry not just at the military defeat but at what he called the “lying and deception,” the promise to provide cover to the landing brigade, followed by its denial in the midst of battle. “How ironic it seemed that Kennedy’s successful campaign against Nixon had been largely waged—and won—on a promise to aid the Cuban exiles in their struggle against Communism,” he had written. Hunt believed that Richard Nixon, who, as vice president, was the invasion’s most aggressive booster, would not have failed in its execution. A less hesitant cold warrior, he would have stopped at nothing to ensure the success of the 1961 invasion.
Nixon hoped that his new recruit would help get out the true story of April 1961. Within a week of Hunt’s hiring, he suggested that his aides get the former CIA agent’s memoirs, nailing Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs, published in a prominent magazine. Getting Hunt’s story out to the American public became, Colson would later testify, a “pet Nixon project.”
But Hunt’s first assignment was to knock the surviving Kennedy brother out of the 1972 race for president once and for all. To prepare for the task, the ex-agent checked out such books as The Bridge at Chappaquiddick from the Library of Congress, then headed to Hyannis to quiz hotel owners and others about the goings-on of the area’s most famous summer residents.
It was amid this backroom plotting that Nixon announced to a stunned world his plan to hold a summit conference in Beijing with leaders of the People’s Republic of China. The partisan warrior who had spent years shouting, “Who lost China?” and had scolded Jack Kennedy in the 1960 debates for refusing to fight for Quemoy and Matsu was himself opening the door to “Red China.” It was a brilliant act of strategic surprise, leaving his enemies little recourse but to praise him. Ted Kennedy was particularly gracious. “Rarely, I think, has the action of any president so captured the imagination and support of the American people as President Nixon’s magnificent gesture.”
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bsp; Yet while they made history and garnered new respect, the Nixon people fretted as the weekly newsmagazines continued to ask “Will He or Won’t He?” teasing the Republicans with the possibility of a Kennedy candidacy. “Kennedy Non-Campaign,” the New York Times wondered. “Some Read a No as a Yes.” For the opposition, finding Kennedy “in the sack” became a White House cottage industry, especially after it was known that he was running two to one ahead of Muskie in California. His brother might have gotten away with it, but the younger man was to be given no such delicate treatment. To find evidence of girling, Nixon aide Jack Caulfield followed the Massachusetts senator to Hawaii, only to return home having found nothing “improper” to exploit. Caulfield would next rent a Manhattan apartment, furnishing it in a style one visitor called “Chicago whorehouse.” The scheme was to have handsome young men lure some of Robert Kennedy’s aides who had been at Chappaquiddick the night of the tragedy into the intended love nest in hopes of getting information on Ted Kennedy’s behavior.
The pressure for dirt was relentless. “Does Caulfield have anything new on Kennedy?” Haldeman kept pressuring White House counsel John Dean. At the same time, facsimiles of Sen. Edmund Muskie’s stationery were used to mail to members of Congress a Harris poll showing Chappaquiddick’s drag on Sen. Edward Kennedy’s presidential chances, thereby getting Kennedy angry at Muskie and Muskie angry at anyone who would think him guilty of such an obvious ploy. Donald Segretti suggested another Dick Tuck-like gimmick: creating a bogus “Massachusetts Safe Driving Committee” that could present its highest award to Kennedy.
Nixon’s resentment toward the Kennedy family was never far from the surface. When the new John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts prepared for a two-night opening extravaganza that September, Nixon derided the acclaim for the white marble building overlooking the Potomac River as “this orgasm over this utter architectural monstrosity.” As the grand debut neared, he received an added reason not to go. Word reached him that composer Leonard Bernstein was preparing an antiwar theme for the Kennedy Center’s opening. But a Haldeman-inspired plan to skip opening night and attend the second night, “letting the Kennedys take the glory,” became inoperative when Rose Kennedy wrote how “disappointing” it would be for Nixon to skip the center’s opening night. But when he read in his daily news summary that congressional Democrats were planning to request $1 million to spend on additional Kennedy Center furnishings, he scribbled his feelings in the margin. “No! Never!”
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 141