Lawrence O’Brien, the target of the Watergate caper, played the break-in story as a true partisan, saying that an attempt at interparty espionage “raised the ugliest questions about the integrity of the political process that I have encountered in a quarter century of political activity.”
But it was Richard Nixon who converted what his press secretary Ron Ziegler called a “third-rate burglary” into a personal and partisan catastrophe. Fearful that a disclosure of campaign tricks would cost him a second term, he moved to conceal his people’s involvement in the Watergate matter. A few minutes after 10:00 A.M. that Friday morning, Bob Haldeman suggested they get the FBI off the Watergate trail by telling them the break-in was a CIA-related operation. Nixon now gave orders that would fatally mar his career. He scripted for his chief of staff a rationale to use in explaining CIA involvement in the Watergate break-in based on the role of the Cubans and former agent E. Howard Hunt. “Hunt . . . That will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”
Later in the long morning meeting, Nixon elaborated on how Haldeman should try and convince the FBI to pull back from Watergate. A firm believer that the CIA was hiding facts about the Bay of Pigs, Nixon decided to hide Watergate behind the same protective shell that had been guarding the legacy of President Kennedy from taint. Haldeman’s presidential assignment was to meet with CIA director Richard Helms and deputy chief Vernon Walters, whom Haldeman had tried dragooning two years earlier as Nixon’s human recording system, and have them tell the FBI to drop its investigation of the Watergate break-in on the grounds that the CIA was involved. “When you get in, say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing and the president just feels that’ . . . without going into the details—don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement—but just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it. ‘The president believes this is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’ ”
By employing what he saw as Kennedy hardball, Richard Nixon had sealed his fate. In trying to hide his reelection team’s debacle behind the same elite shield that had guarded Jack Kennedy’s, he had recorded an obstruction of justice. The man warned to avoid the assassin image in his 1960 encounter with Jack Kennedy was now the man who, in the soon-to-emerge lexicon of scandal, had fired the smoking gun.
He still saw the whole Watergate matter as par for the course. Later, as John Ehrlichman attempted to brief him on antibusing legislation, Nixon suddenly changed the subject. What was all the fuss about the Watergate bugging, he began wondering aloud. “We’ve reduced the number of wiretaps by fifty percent. Robert Kennedy tapped the most when he was attorney general.”
* * *
WITHIN a week of the break-in, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post traced the lineage of Watergate from the burglars to E. Howard Hunt, Chuck Colson, and the Nixon White House. The two detected the political motive behind the plumbers’ operation from the list of books Hunt had borrowed from the Library of Congress. “The White House is absolutely paranoid about Kennedy,” a clerical aide told Bernstein. A public relations director of a Hyannis hotel told Woodward of Hunt’s snooping the summer before. “Hunt wanted to know if I’d heard of any women-chasing by the Kennedy boys, if I’d heard any scandal-type material.”
As the Post followed the myriad of trails from Watergate, the prime target of Hunt and his cohorts continued to tweak his predator. Ted Kennedy put out the misinformation that Nixon had been just as far ahead of his brother at this point in the 1960 campaign as he was now leading George McGovern.
In July, the Democrats met in Miami Beach to nominate George McGovern. Not until the last convention balloon was popped did Nixon finally stop anticipating the Kennedy coup he had so long imagined. When Hubert Humphrey sought to challenge the “unit rule,” which gave the winner of the California primary, McGovern, the state’s entire bloc of delegates, Nixon saw the fight as a backroom campaign to force a hung convention that would then turn to Ted Kennedy as the compromise candidate. “During most of my first term,” Nixon would confirm years later, “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.”
Even after McGovern’s nomination, Nixon’s obsession fueled speculation. When the newly crowned Democratic presidential candidate prepared to name Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton his vice-presidential running mate, the White House saw it as a Kennedy-influenced choice. Watching Teddy arrive to present the victorious McGovern to the convention, Nixon kept his eye glued to the younger man. “Kennedy looked very good, though some thought he looked fat. He had a magnetic smile, a lot of style, and a brilliantly written speech.”
Three weeks later, when press reports of past mental health problems forced Eagleton from the ticket, Nixon interpreted the sad turn of events as yet another ambush. “In the event he is able to replace him with Kennedy,” he wrote in his diary, “this will make it a whole new ball game.” Then, when Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver unexpectedly became McGovern’s new running mate, Nixon unleashed his staff. “Destroy him,” the president commanded Haldeman. “Kill him.”
The president was now thinking about the Kennedy struggle to come. Recalling his own calculation in 1964, Nixon simply assumed that Ted Kennedy was now content to watch McGovern lose a landslide, just as Nixon had watched Goldwater, paving the way for his own electoral triumph in 1976. At a Texas barbecue, he told John Connally, the man he had named to head “Democrats for Nixon” and had privately dubbed as his successor, how important it was that after the Democrats got killed in 1972 the last brother not be the one to “pick up the pieces.”
Nixon had the same intimations about the ongoing probe of Watergate, which the Democrats were trying without much success to make a campaign issue. “I guess the Kennedy crowd is just laying in the bushes waiting to make their move,” he told Haldeman. On this point, his political antennae could not have been more accurate. Up at Ted Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practices, maneuvers were under way to destroy him. When the White House had Republican leader Gerald Ford kill an investigation of Watergate by the House Banking Committee chairman, seventy-one-year-old Wright Patman, triggering what John Dean called a “sigh of relief” in the White House, the Kennedy staff knew it must fill the void. James Flug, chief counsel for the Kennedy subcommittee, with the help of the Library of Congress, had been keeping an extensive clipping file on Watergate since just after the break-in. Now Kennedy began urging Sen. Sam Ervin, chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over such matters, to open an investigation. But Ervin suggested that Kennedy go ahead on his own, which he did after getting subpoena power from the full Judiciary Committee. “Teddy Kennedy decided that this was the sort of thing he should investigate personally,” Richard Nixon would later observe in bitter hindsight.
In early October, the Washington Post fingered Nixon’s appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, as the White House “contact” for the dirty-tricks campaign being waged by Segretti and others. This revelation only added fuel to Nixon’s already-long-burning resentment of what he considered a media double standard. He complained that when Dick Tuck worked his dirty tricks on the Republicans, journalists accepted such behavior as standard campaign high jinks. Kansas senator Robert Dole, Nixon’s pick to chair the Republican National Committee, took the accusation public. Attacking the Post fifty times in a speech drafted by Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, he labeled editor Ben Bradlee “an old Kennedy coat holder,” his newspaper a “partner” of the Democratic opposition.
Kennedy told his subcommittee to start digging. “I know the peo
ple around Nixon,” he told the Post’s Bernstein. “They’re thugs.” He also realized that to prove effective, the Congress’s subpoena power needed to be exploited immediately; otherwise, documents might be destroyed and the chance of a serious investigation lost. Flug and committee investigator Carmine Bellino began scrutinizing the conduct of Nixon’s reelection committee, with specific attention to Segretti’s White House connections. Using telephone credit-card records, Kennedy’s subcommittee sketched the stark outlines of Watergate from the burglars’ numbers to the telltale “456” exchange of the White House. Its report would lay the foundation for Congress’s investigation and prosecution of the case against Richard Nixon. Donald Segretti could sense the menace. “Kennedy is out for blood,” he complained to reporter Bernstein. “Kennedy will tear me to shreds.”
But Watergate could not compete with Vietnam as an election-eve story. On October 26, national security adviser Henry Kissinger called a press conference on Vietnam. “We believe that peace is at hand,” he declared. The stumbling block was President Thieu, who could see no real difference between Kissinger’s 1972 agreement and that which the North Vietnamese had demanded in May 1969. The U.S. Army would pull out of South Vietnam; the North Vietnamese Army would stay.
Yet the American people cheered the news. At long last, the United States was removing itself from the Vietnamese quagmire. On November 7, Richard Nixon received over 47 million votes, nearly 20 million more than the Democratic candidate. Sixty percent of the electorate had backed the Republican incumbent. No Republican had ever won the White House by so large a margin. No president had ever won more popular votes or carried so many states: forty-nine. Nixon could claim the additional satisfaction of beating an important member of the rival family, Sargent Shriver, who had referred to Nixon as a “psychiatric case” and other unkind expletives as the race reached its inevitable conclusion. Nixon had won every state except Massachusetts—Kennedy country.
That night, Nixon listened again to Victory at Sea in the White House residence, attended a victory rally at a Washington hotel, then sequestered himself from family, friends, old political allies, the world, retreating across the street from the White House to his hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building, the better to digest the last tidbits of electoral conquest. Old campaign hand Herb Klein was not alone in registering the strange hibernation as evidence his boss’s resentments had returned. It was as if victory were not an occasion for reconciliation but an opportunity to revisit old wounds. Instead of celebrating in the bright light of fellowship, Nixon sat through the dark morning hours savoring with operatives Haldeman and Colson the state-by-state salute of his country that carried with it a decisive rebuke of his enemies.
The Saturday after the election, Nixon told Haldeman that he did not think “Teddy” would go after Watergate. You don’t strike at the king, he postured, unless you can kill him. “He can’t kill us; therefore, he won’t strike.”
Nixon was already making plans to consolidate his victory. To facilitate the purge of any lurking Kennedy holdovers still in the executive bureaucracy, he had Bob Haldeman demand the resignation of every member of the Nixon cabinet. Having seized all-out control of the government, the victorious Republican president’s next objective was to construct a new political coalition of the conservatively inclined working class and all southerners enraged by the Democrats’ tilt toward the left and their increasing control by cultural elites. And, finally, his political son, John Connally, would be anointed his champion to take on the battered forces of the Democratic party led by Ted Kennedy. Not only had he survived and come back from the humiliating defeat of 1960; Nixon now would create a new political order that would secure his victory for posterity.
However, as he ruminated on such satisfying dynastic visions, his enemies were gathering unnoticed at the moat. Obsessed with the presidential prize, the victor had allowed his partisan adversaries to secure even more tightly their power over Congress and with it what he knew from the Hiss case to be its all-potent power of subpoena. That and the eagerness to use it. Nixon’s success in exploiting the generational and class rifts of the Vietnam debate had engendered, in the zealots among the Democratic forces, an even greater anti-Nixon rage. One of those partisans was Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., the man who had succeeded Jack Kennedy in Congress. When a plane carrying Louisiana’s Hale Boggs was lost over a remote stretch of Alaska, O’Neill succeeded him as majority leader. The House was now led by the member from the most pro-Kennedy, anti-Nixon area in the country. O’Neill was an Irish-American Democrat who took tribal offense, moreover, at the strong-arm tactics of the Republican president’s reelection team.
Chuck Colson’s post-election attack on the Washington Post and its executive editor, Benjamin Bradlee, before a gathering of New England newspaper editors escalated another ancient war. “If Bradlee ever left the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where he and his pals dine on third-hand information and gossip and rumor, he might discover out here the real America.” Bradlee got the message. “That’s some pretty personal shit!” the editor told star Watergate sleuth Carl Bernstein. Already beating every other news organization on the Watergate story, the Post could hardly stop now. “I know it’s there,” Bradlee told his reporters. “I know it’s there.”
Nixon, brooding over his victory in the fastness of Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, could not see the enemy still advancing. Ted Kennedy’s subcommittee was already sharpening its weapon for use by the Democratic-controlled Senate: a damning report that would trace the Watergate chain of command from the Committee to Re-Elect the President at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue across the street and down the block to the president’s own doorstep.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Kennedy Versus Nixon—Again
TED Kennedy played a major, unseen role in the downfall of Richard Nixon. Part of this role was simply being who he was. From the moment he entered the White House, Nixon had faced the specter of a Kennedy restoration. After the two-year reprieve granted by Chappaquiddick, he watched the brother of Jack and Robert reemerge as the man posing the greatest danger to his reelection. Yet he knew that the Kennedy threat in 1972 arose not so much from the younger brother himself as from the glory he reflected from the past. “The Kennedy ghost haunting the Nixon White House was partly that of a person, a political contemporary, sometime Nixon friend, sometime rival, whose own path and Nixon’s kept crossing and recrossing as each made his way to the top,” wrote Nixon speechwriter and intimate Ray Price, who would be there at the end. More than that, it was a grand, lost spirit. “The ghost that dogged Nixon’s footsteps, that disturbed his nights and plagued his days,” Price recalled, “was less that of Kennedy himself than it was of Camelot.” Thus, to besmirch the Camelot standard, the political grave of Diem had been exhumed. To thwart the dynastic succession, the sad scandal of Chappaquiddick had been revisited. To distract attention from the assortment of dirty tricks poised to bring him down, the Bay of Pigs had been invoked.
But Ted Kennedy’s role in Richard Nixon’s demise was not entirely passive, not by any means. Thanks to his position of respect on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kennedy had the opportunity to be Nixon’s most relentless prosecutor. It was a role that Jack Kennedy’s brother seized with relish. Before election day in 1972 he was setting the charges that would explode the Nixon presidency. With allies Birch Bayh of Indiana and John Tunney of California, he pushed for full-dress Senate hearings on Watergate. In January 1973, the Democratic majority voted to create a select committee to probe the DNC break-in and other campaign activities against the Democrats during the 1972 presidential election. Kennedy’s senior colleague on the Judiciary Committee, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, was named to chair the panel. The Massachusetts senator promoted Ervin’s appointment believing that the genteel southern Democrat, schooled in the Constitution, would make the perfect prosecutor of the Republican president. It would allay the s
uspicion that the Watergate matter was being pushed hardest by Kennedy, which, in fact, it was.
Thanks to Senator Kennedy, the bipartisan panel had a head start. His Judiciary Subcommittee report, based on a seven-month investigation begun just after the June 1972 break-in and detailing the role of the White House and the Committee to Re-Elect the President in the “dirty tricks” campaign, as well as the Watergate break-in, became the Ervin committee’s start-up manual.
While his enemies began their siege, the man behind the White House gates took his second oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and ensure that its laws were faithfully executed. Having done so, he appropriated the cadence, if not the eloquence, of Jack Kennedy’s most famous appeal. “Let each of us ask not just how can government help but how can I help?” But his huge electoral mandate, which he hoped would settle the rivalry, had set off a fierce new struggle. Nixon’s announcement four days later of an accord with North Vietnam dictating the withdrawal of all American troops and the return of U.S. prisoners of war, which he christened “peace with honor,” served to enrage his enemies further. When Judge John Sirica, a Republican, slapped the Watergate burglars with harsh sentences designed to make them talk, the forces poised against the president were eager to listen.
To Nixon, the mounting hostility spoke for a historic double standard. Unable to let pass an article in the New York Times criticizing his “Imperial Presidency,” he ordered John Ehrlichman to take the piece apart, item by item, in order to demonstrate that JFK had impounded more congressional appropriations, Kennedy had done more wiretaps, Kennedy had conducted more illegal surveillance. When the Senate Judiciary Committee called White House counsel John Dean to testify, it confirmed Nixon’s view of the Watergate probe as more a rearguard action than an all-out attack. “This is the last gasp of our hardest opponents,” Nixon assured his nervous aide.
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 143