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

by Matthews, Chris

  “Don’t say that. He’s a fine young man.” Then, after a pause to reflect, he added a thought. “He shouldn’t go into politics.”

  After suffering a stroke in April 1994, Nixon spent his last days in the same New York hospital where Jacqueline Kennedy lay, undergoing treatment for lymphoma. When he died on April 22, the country showed an appreciation that the deceased could not have expected. “Despite the intensity of the campaign and the narrow outcome,” said Ted Kennedy, paying the family’s first tribute to Nixon’s crucial magnanimity, “he accepted the results with grace and without rancor.” Alexander Haig, who had stayed close to Nixon until the end, saved for later the man’s own recollection of the legacy of 1960. “He believed until the day he died that Kennedy had stolen the election.”

  At his death, Nixon made the cover of Time for the fifty-sixth time, a record. “By sheer endurance,” its editors observed, “he was the most important figure of the post-War era.” President Clinton spoke at the grave site at Nixon’s boyhood home in Yorba Linda where he had heard that long-ago train whistle in the night. Yet within the month, the Nixon funeral dirge was overtaken by the classic, spritely tones of Mozart. When his rival’s widow succumbed to her illness just weeks later, there was a stirring in the national air, a momentary glimpse back to the magic of Camelot.

  Today, the Kennedy Center and the Watergate sit beside each other along the Potomac—like unmatched bookends.

  AFTERWORD

  The White House Tapes

  IN February 1971, Richard Nixon installed a secret recording system in the White House. The tapes, two hundred hours of which were released to the public in November 1996, offer spectacular glimpses into the Kennedy-Nixon rivalry.

  By May 1971, Senator Edward M. Kennedy had emerged from political purgatory. With voter memories of Chappaquiddick fading, he was a credible if troubling prospect for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. The spcctcr of a Kennedy “restoration” had risen from the dead, and clearly this disturbed Richard Nixon.

  On May 5, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman tried boosting Nixon’s morale. Nixon would enter the 1972 reelection campaign, Haldeman comforted him, armed with a daunting new weapon: billions in federal dollars that could be directed wherever they would do the most good politically. “All of us have talked about . . . if we only had the Kennedys’ money, how much fun a campaign would be. We do have the Kennedys’ money. We have two hundred billion dollars!”

  Nixon reminded Haldeman on May 13 how the Kennedys had used their official power against him following JFK’s 1960 victory. The president was particularly bitter about what he saw as the Kennedys’ use of the IRS to dig into his affairs. “Bob, do you remember when the Kennedys ordered them to go after me and that goddamned house I bought? Huh?” Nixon demanded, referring to a “restrictive covenant” he had signed when purchasing his Washington, D.C., home in 1951. The covenant, which barred resale of the property to blacks or Jews, had caused Nixon some nasty publicity in his 1962 gubernatorial campaign.

  The White House tape of May 27 finds Nixon still fixated on the Kennedys and what he viewed as their successful campaign espionage back in 1961. What ripped open the old wound was a report from domestic-policy aide John Ehrlichman that the IRS was demanding tax records from the local Republican party organization in South Carolina.

  NIXON: Did you ever find out? . . . Who ordered the audit of my income taxes in ‘61? Why don’t you find out, John? Find out who was there, who ordered it. It was not routine.

  Nixon also wanted evidence that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had ordered FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to bug his phones.

  NIXON: DO you think we could get from Hoover whether he ever was ordered to put a wiretap . . .?

  EHRLICHMAN: There’s no record of it ever being ordered. He said he would never countenance such a thing and didn’t. There is no record of it. I would expect there would not be.

  NIXON: Knowing Bobby Kennedy, I saw that great number of taps when he was in and that’s a time of much less national-security problems than now, so why the hell did he do it? You know goddamned well what he was doing. He was tapping his political enemies.

  The following morning, Nixon instructed Haldeman on the imperative to “go after” one’s political enemies. “That’s why I want more use of wiretapping. Are we dealing adequately with their candidates, tailing them and so forth?”

  HALDEMAN: We’re on and off.

  NIXON: Well, it shouldn’t be on and off. I mean, that’s something we can afford. That’s better than hiring eighteen more researchers, you know, little boys to go over there and try and figure out what the PR line should be. We can figure that one out. We can’t get any information. Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you put your money on that?

  Nixon turns to Ted Kennedy, who now leads the Gallup poll as the most popular Democratic candidate to challenge Nixon’s reelection:

  NIXON: I don’t know whether he’s a candidate or . . . maybe there’s better targets.

  HALDEMAN: We’ve got spot coverage on Teddy, just because we wanted to know what he’s doing. We have access on all of them through this guy who moves in and out.

  NIXON: Oh, yeah.

  HALDEMAN: And we have a pretty good fix on what they’re all doing.

  But Nixon was not impressed with Haldeman’s gumshoe operation. He alerted his chief of staff once again to the key role political espionage had played in his most humiliating defeat, the 1962 campaign for California governor. In that race, Nixon reminded Haldeman, his political enemies had raised political snooping to an art form, exposing details of both his brother Donald’s $205,000 loan from Howard Hughes and the embarrassing covenant he had signed on his new Washington, D.C., home.

  NIXON: Look! In ‘62! Best test we ever had. How’d I lose? They had access to every goddamned thing you could imagine. Don! My house! They had every goddamned thing you could imagine. Now that was a clever deal, see? Keep after ’em!

  Nixon now worried that an extensive snooping campaign could be traced back to him. He didn’t want his political aide Charles Colson to have anything to do with it, and agreed to Haldeman’s proposal that the operation he handled through a pair of former New York detectives, one of whom, Jack Caulfield, had been on the Nixon payroll for years.

  NIXON: Who have you got you could put in charge? Not Colson, you understand. Can’t do that out of the White House.

  HALDEMAN: We’ve got a guy we’ve got outside. I think that’s the way to do it.

  NIXON: You have a guy?

  HALDEMAN: Through Colson, I mean, through—

  NIXON: The cop.

  HALDEMAN: Caulfield.

  NIXON: I don’t know. Maybe it’s the wrong thing to do, but I have a feeling if you’re gonna start, you got to start now.

  HALDEMAN: Probably so, before they . . . I think mainly just to . . .

  NIXON: Keep them. They’re gonna beat up, you know.

  HALDEMAN: You figure just the three of them?

  NIXON: Oh, yes.

  HALDEMAN: Teddy, Muskie, and McG . . .?

  NIXON: I don’t mean to . . . Maybe we can get a scandal on any, any one of the leading Democrats.

  HALDEMAN: In the general range of Democrats.

  NIXON: Now you’re talking.

  HALDEMAN: Just looking for scandal or impropriety or anything.

  The following month, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers. Enraged at what he saw as an historic violation of national security, Nixon ordered Bob Haldeman on June 30 to burglarize the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank he believed was housing other sensitive Vietnam War records.

  NIXON: The way I want that handled, Bob, is . . . just to break in. Break in and take it out! You understand!

  HALDEMAN: But who do we have to do it?

  NIXON: Well, don’t discuss it here. You talk to . . . You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring me—

  HALDEMAN: I don’t have any problem breaking
in. This isn’t a domestic. This isn’t a foreign, approved security . . .

  NIXON: Just go in and take it. Go in around eight or nine o’clock and clean it up.

  Nixon shifted strategy on July 6. Instead of protecting government secrets, he wanted his staff to release as many old government documents as they could placing blame for the Vietnam War on his Democratic predecessors.

  NIXON: We’ve got to keep Vietnam as an issue. We’ve got to pin the whole Johnson-Kennedy . . . on these factors. We have to start getting out stuff. It ruins ’em.

  HALDEMAN: We’ve got to get the papers out before our second term is over.

  NIXON: You see why.

  HALDEMAN: It’ll all disappear.

  NIXON: What the hell do you think they’d be doing to us?

  On July 27, Nixon told Haldeman that he wanted to see the Kennedy and Johnson documents “personally.” He was interested most in those related to Kennedy’s role in the Bay of Pigs and the Johnson-ordered “bombing pause” on the eve of the 1968 presidential election. “I want to get those documents. I’m supposed to have access to them. I want to see it in my files.”

  Nevertheless, the White House was still facing resistance on September 8 from CIA director Richard Helms, especially in extracting agency files on what had become Nixon’s pet project, the Bay of Pigs.

  EHRLICHMAN: We’re running into a little problem. I’m talking to Helms about getting some documents the CIA has about the Bay of Pigs, things like that, which they would rather not see out. It’s a challenge. It’s going to be hard.

  NIXON: They are very sensitive about that.

  ERHLICHMAN: Helms especially. Allen Dulles was the head but Helms was the operating. So Helms knows everything about it.

  Nixon was now fighting a two-front war, against the legacy of Jack Kennedy and the prospect of a tough reelection fight, perhaps against another Kennedy, in 1972. On the same day he conspired with Ehrlichman to obtain the Bay of Pigs files, he also told Ehrlichman to target top Democratic contributors for tax audits.

  NIXON: John, we have the power. Are we using it now to investigate contributors to Hubert Humphrey, contributors to Muskie? Are we looking into Muskie’s returns? Does he have any? Hubert’s? Hubert’s been in a lot of deals. Teddy? Who knows about the Kennedys? Shouldn’t they be investigated?

  EHRLICHMAN: IRS-wise, I don’t know the answer. Teddy we are covering personally. When he moves on holidays. When he stopped in Hawaii on the way back from Pakistan.

  NIXON: Did he do anything?

  EHRLICHMAN: He was very clean. Very clean. He’s very careful now. He was staying at some guy’s villa and [we] had a guy on him. He was just as nice as he could be the whole time.

  NIXON: The thing to do is to watch him because what happens to fellows like that, who have that kind of problem, is that they go for quite a while and—

  EHRLICHMAN: That’s what I’m hoping. This time, between now and convention time, may be the time period.

  NIXON: You mean he’d be under great pressure?

  EHRLICHMAN: The added pressure. He would also be out of the limelight. Now he was in Hawaii very much incognito, and played tennis, fooled around, visited with people, and socialized and stuff. So you would expect at a time like that that you would catch him.

  Erhlichman mentioned his recent visit to Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. This raised the issue of Chappaquiddick.

  NIXON: He will never live that down. I don’t think he will. No, not that one.

  EHRLICHMAN: I think it’ll be around his neck forever.

  NIXON: It’s not like a divorce [where] most people will forget it.

  EHRLICHMAN: This has a geographic identity. They tell me that business on the ferry has tripled since the accident. It’s getting into the folklore.

  On October 14, Nixon’s men can be heard giggling over a plan to mass-produce posters showing Ted Kennedy’s face over the caption: “WOULD YOU RIDE IN A CAR WITH THIS MAN?” Colson pointed to the irony. “You know how they hurt you, tried to hurt you with, ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ Well, would you ride in a car . . .?”

  Two weeks later, Nixon was delighted when on October 30 a British newspaper published an embarrassing cartoon of Kennedy. He told Colson to mail it to “every member of the Senate.” A few days later, he escalated the plan. “I think that should have a circulation of about a quarter million,” he ordered Colson. He wanted the anti-Kennedy cartoon mailed from a New York address where it could not be traced to the White House “to every member of Congress, senator, governor . . . Democrat or Republican . . . editors . . . society pages.”

  When Nixon asked Colson on November 10 to tell him “what’s new on the political front,” the senator from Massachusetts was again Topic A. “I think the Kennedy thing has me fascinated the most, the way in which he’s trying in every way to step to the front.” Colson described a conversation with Teamster boss Frank Fitzsimmons in which the labor leader promised to share “all he knows about Kennedy” if the Nixon people would send an investigator out to Las Vegas to collect the material. “Put the investigator out there,” Nixon ordered Colson.

  On June 17, 1972, Colson’s “plumbers” executed their historic break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office-and-apartment complex. On July 1, Nixon suggested that Colson organize a parallel break-in of the Republican National Committee headquarters, thereby creating the public impression of a partisan tit for tat. This, he said, would put Senator Robert Dole, the Republican party chairman, in an ideal position to sue the Democrats just as Democratic chairman Lawrence O’Brien was suing the Republicans.

  NIXON: What would you think if that happened?

  COLSON: I think it would be very helpful if they came in one morning and found files strewn all over the place.

  NIXON: And some missing. I mean something could be very open, I mean demolished. Three or four thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

  COLSON: That would have a very good effect.

  NIXON: Right there in their convention.

  COLSON: During theirs? During ours.

  NIXON: Theirs. Next week.

  COLSON: And then Dole is in a perfect position to say . . .

  NIXON: Sue . . . sue the Committee. I’d sue ’em. But what I meant is . . . it should be . . . where it’s really torn up.

  Later that same day, Nixon told Colson his reasons for wanting to get the Watergate story behind them. “I don’t want the impression of this Big Brother in the White House, the president ordering, you know, bugging and snooping and the rest. Goddamned Kennedy did it all the time. Bobby Kennedy did a record number.”

  On September 7, Nixon approved an additional snooping campaign against Ted Kennedy, who was about to commence nationwide campaigning for the Democratic ticket. Worried that Kennedy would emerge from the 1972 election as his party’s savior, Nixon ordered that agents who would report back on any misconduct be assigned to Kennedy’s bodyguard. “Plant one, plant two guys on him. This could be very useful. We just might be lucky and catch this son of a bitch. Ruin him in ’76. He doesn’t know what he’s really getting into. We’re going to cover him, and we’re not going to take ‘no’ for an answer. He can’t say ‘no’ to the Secret Service.”

  The next day, Nixon talked with Ehrlichman about the political fallout from Watergate. “I’d a helluva lot rather have them talking about this than the fact we’re the party of the rich and that prices are high. This story is not helpful but, to the average guy, whether the Republicans bugged the Democrats doesn’t mean a goddamned thing. It means something to intellectuals. It means something to people who are concerned about repression and credibility and all that bullshit. But the average guy is chewing his pretzel. He’s interested in jobs. He’s interested in war and peace and defense and patriotism and that’s about it . . . a little bit on the social issues.”

  But Democratic efforts to exploit Watergate, including those by Senator Kennedy’s Judiciary subcommittee, h
ad Nixon’s men worried. “They’re going to try to haul the thing up publicly,” Haldeman reported on September 11. Nixon also worried that, thanks to the upcoming elections, the majority Democrats would retain the power to subpoena witnesses and demand government documents. “You see these committees. It shows you how important it is to win the Congress. You win Congress, you take control of the committees.”

  On January 3, 1973, swearing-in day on Capitol Hill, Haldeman wondered aloud how far the Democrats would go in probing Watergate: “There’s supposedly some question of what the Congress is going to do still. Indications are that the Kennedy staff have faded away in their activity. It may just all go away, you know.”

  But Haldeman’s boss was wondering how the whole calamity could have happened in the first place. “I can see Mitchell. I can’t see Colson getting to the Democratic . . . What the Christ was he looking for?”

  HALDEMAN: They were looking for stuff on two things: one on financial stuff and the other on what they thought they [the Democrats] were going to do in Miami [site of the Republican convention] to screw up, which apparently was a Democratic plot, and they thought they had it uncovered. Colson was salivating with glee at what they might be able to do with it.

  NIXON: You mean Colson was aware of the Watergate bugging? That’s hard for me to believe.

  HALDEMAN: Not only was he aware of it, he was pushing very hard for results from it and very specifically that.

  NIXON: Who was he pushing?

  HALDEMAN: Magruder and Liddy.

  NIXON: Colson was pushing Magruder? Was that what it was? And Liddy?

  HALDEMAN: It gets down to undeniable specifics—times of meeting, with times and places and that sort of thing. And the other one, of course, on Teddy.