The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  If Nixon’s own public stance on the religious issue was impeccable, the same cannot be said of two prominent Protestant leaders who were his close associates. The conservative minister Norman Vincent Peale, with whom Nixon had been friendly since World War II, attached his name to a statement expressing serious reservations about electing a Catholic president. Responding to this on the television program Meet the Press, Nixon said that he did not believe religion should be a “substantial” issue, criticizing Peale’s action. “I decided,” he wrote later, “it would be unfair for me to attack him personally.”

  Peale had endorsed Nixon and urged the evangelist Billy Graham, a Nixon golfing buddy and long-standing supporter, to do the same. In his memoirs Graham was equivocal about the way he dealt with this “complication,” admitting only to having made “veiled allusions” to his preference and having participated in a Nixon rally. In fact, when publicly rejecting a Kennedy request that Graham sign a pledge not to make religion an issue, his spokesman drew attention to a bizarre claim that Catholics in Spain had prayed that Graham’s plane would crash. Two days later, speaking from Europe, the evangelist declared that religion would indeed be a “major issue,” adding that no one should vote on the basis of which candidate “is more handsome or charming,” a less than subtle reference.

  Months earlier Graham had called Nixon “probably the best-trained man for President in American history, and he is certainly every inch a Christian gentleman.” Billy Graham would reassess Nixon after Watergate. “I wonder,” he was to write then, “whether I might have exaggerated his spirituality in my own mind.”

  On another front, each side dug for information on the opposing candidate’s sex life. It was in 1960 that rumors first reached the press that Pat Nixon had been married before.* The Democrats looked for bedroom dirt on Nixon, with little success but one hilarious result.

  Lloyd Cutler, the future White House counsel under President Clinton, recalled having done “a little volunteer investigative work” with Bill Baggs, the editor of the Miami News and a Kennedy associate. Baggs, said Cutler, “was especially interested in the weekend parties that Richard Nixon used to attend at Bebe Rebozo’s house in Key Biscayne. . . . Bill found some call girls in Miami who claimed to have been at these parties. It was all going to make a very good story about Richard Nixon until we learned that among the people who were frequently in the house was Senator Kennedy, so we dropped the story. We never did find out whether Mr. Nixon had gone upstairs. . . .”

  The most damaging revelations, as the world is now aware, would have been about Kennedy. “I knew some of it at the time . . .” Nixon said in 1992. “Bebe told me more later. . . . But of course we couldn’t use it.” It was no accident that Nixon knew “some of it.” An FBI document reveals that an aide to his friend William Rogers, the attorney general, had specifically asked FBI Director Hoover for sex information on Kennedy.

  Hoover, who had long treated Nixon as his protégé, complied by adding sexual allegations to the political research material he was already supplying. One item was the durable allegation that Kennedy had been briefly and secretly married to a wealthy young Florida divorcée before his marriage to Jacqueline. Nixon aide Robert Finch thought the story “documentable,” and many years later, in 1997, the author Seymour Hersh produced a witness, one of Kennedy’s closest friends, who stated flatly that the wedding did occur. Had Nixon’s people been able to confirm the rumor in 1960, the revelation would have ended the Kennedy bid for the White House in minutes.13 The Hoover file contained much other information on Kennedy’s busy sex life, from a World War II dalliance with a woman who had supposed Nazi connections to more recent adventures, including an affair with a Senate secretary and his use of prostitutes.

  When Kennedy learned that details of his private life might be exposed, he sought out former Eisenhower cabinet secretary Maxwell Raab. “Nixon and the Republican National Committee are doing a job on me,” Raab recalled an angry Kennedy saying. “They’re trying to destroy me, and Jackie’s all upset. . . . It’s got to be stopped.” He asked Raab to tell the Republican side to “stop spreading the word that I’m philandering.” When Raab went to see him, Nixon denied any involvement, claiming the culprit was campaign chairman Len Hall. Nixon later said his team decided not to release the sex charges because they would have been “counterproductive.” Another account holds that he was in fact eager to leak the stories but relented after Hoover and Barry Goldwater convinced him it would be a mistake. (Ironically, women were to vote in greater numbers for Nixon in 1960 than for his handsome opponent.)

  Two other areas of dirty trickery foreshadowed Watergate. Intruders broke into the offices of both of Kennedy’s New York doctors, presumably searching for proof that he suffered from Addison’s disease. The incidents occurred at a time that New York Republican William Casey, later to be CIA director under President Reagan, was looking into Kennedy’s health status on behalf of the Nixon people. According to a former Republican aide, James Humes, the Nixon campaign office was also raided shortly before the election. Files were stolen but, Humes said, the press dismissed the story as just “part of the game.”

  Electronic eavesdropping was the other alleged abuse of the 1960 campaign, according to Nixon supporters. It is, however, an allegation with a serious weakness, for the Republican side made the claim only after Watergate, at a time when Nixon’s men had themselves been caught bugging Democratic phones. In July 1973, when Watergate had already broken wide open, Republican National Committee Chairman George Bush was to make a long statement suggesting that key figures in his party had been “under surveillance and spied upon” in 1960. The spying, the future president asserted, had been directed by a “Kennedy man . . . Carmine Bellino.” Bellino was now nothing less than chief investigator of the Senate Watergate Committee.

  Bush based this allegation on the statements of five private detectives who claimed knowledge of Bellino’s activities back in 1960, when he had worked for Robert Kennedy. One of them, John Leon, said Bellino had had him surveil a senior official of the Republican National Committee, Albert Hermann, “utilizing an electronic device known as ‘the big ear,’ aimed at Mr. Hermann’s window from a nearby vantage point.” Leon quoted an associate, Ed Jones, as stating he had tapped the phones of three Protestant ministers suspected of distributing anti-Catholic literature.

  In the most dramatic claim of all, Leon recalled a conversation with colleagues the day after the first Nixon-Kennedy debate. They had agreed, he said, that Kennedy “had the debate all wrapped up,” that he was “extremely well prepared.” He concluded from the conversation that Jones and another member of the group, former FBI agent Oliver Angelone, “successfully bugged the Nixon space or tapped his phones prior to the television debate.”

  Jones, an electronics specialist, admitted having worked for Bellino on two surveillance operations during the 1960 campaign but denied any bugging. Angelone quoted Bellino as saying the Protestant ministers had been bugged but denied having taken part in the operation. He denied it again in 1999, when interviewed for this book.14 Bellino, for his part, admitted having ordered physical surveillance but not bugging or wiretapping.

  The truth can probably no longer be determined. A Senate subcommittee that probed the allegations found no proof of electronic eavesdropping. As president, however, Nixon repeatedly declared himself “convinced that wiretapping had been a key weapon in the Kennedy arsenal during the campaign of 1960.” In old age he still talked of how he had been “victimized by all kinds of dirty tricks.” Robert Kennedy, he said, “was the worst. He illegally bugged more people—and started it—than anyone. He was a bastard.”

  _____

  Both Kennedy and Nixon had been touched by the tentacles of the Mafia. Kennedy’s father had made much of his fortune by conniving with gangsters during Prohibition, and compelling information indicates that he and his politician son used the mob connection as a stepping-stone to power in 1960. Chicago Mafia boss Sam G
iancana would be overheard on an FBI wiretap discussing the “donations” the gangsters had made during the vital primary campaign. John Kennedy’s lover Judith Campbell alleged years later that Kennedy took outrageous risks to enlist Giancana’s help, covertly meeting with him in person at least twice.

  Kennedy’s game was especially dangerous because his brother Robert was committed to the pursuit of organized crime and in particular to the downfall of Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked Teamsters leader. When he continued that pursuit as attorney general, the mob chieftains were so furious that some—including the House Assassinations Committee—would come to suspect the Mafia was behind the 1963 assassination.

  Nixon was also vulnerable. Before the 1960 campaign started, the author was told, an informant passed documentation to Robert Kennedy indicating that Meyer Lansky’s people had footed Nixon’s bill on a visit to Cuba.* The candidate’s brother made no use of the information, probably because his brother had himself been compromised in Cuba when Lansky fixed him up with women there. Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, who was aware of that episode, despised Kennedy and favored Nixon. “Santo,” recalled his attorney Frank Ragano, “viewed Nixon as a realistic, conservative politician who was ‘not a zealot’ and would not be hard on him and his mob friends. The Mafia had little to fear from Nixon.”

  “We’ll contribute to Nixon, too. . . . We’ll hedge our bets. Just like we did out in California when Nixon was running for senator. . . . You don’t know what the hell Jack’ll do once he’s elected. With Nixon, you know where you stand.” So said Giancana before the 1960 election, according to his brother Chuck.15 “Marcello and I,” Giancana allegedly added, “are giving the Nixon campaign a million bucks.”

  Carlos Marcello, Mafia boss of New Orleans and much of the southern United States, did reportedly make a massive donation to Nixon that year. According to a man who said he was present when the money exchanged hands, Marcello did so in September, at a meeting in Lafayette, Louisiana. “I was right there, listening to the conversation,” said the witness. “Marcello had a suitcase filled with five hundred thousand dollars cash, which was going to Nixon. . . . The other half was coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.” Five hundred thousand dollars, at today’s values, would be around three million dollars.

  The suitcase containing the money was handed to Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, and the witness who said he saw the transaction was Edward Partin, a close Hoffa associate who later turned informant and became the Justice Department’s principal prosecution witness against Hoffa. He told of the Marcello donation first to department investigator Walter Sheridan and later—on tape—to Michael Ewing, a congressional staffer and specialist on organized crime.16 The mob leader hoped, according to Partin, to exact a pledge that a Nixon administration would not deport him, something that Robert Kennedy would indeed attempt the following year.

  Hoffa’s alleged involvement meshes with other information, only too well for Nixon’s reputation. It brings into troubling focus exchanges that had taken place in previous months between Nixon, a former congressman friend from California, and Hoffa. The onetime congressman, Oakley Hunter, had met with Hoffa at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach just before Christmas 1959. In the privacy of Hunter’s room—both men having removed their coats to show that neither of them was wired—they had discussed the Teamsters’ “program for political action.”

  The two men spoke circumspectly, as Hunter afterward explained to Nixon in a “Dear Dick” letter. He told Hoffa that Nixon “did not have the knife out for him, and bore no preconceived prejudices against him.” He agreed that no person “could be elected President of the United States without substantial support from the rank and file of labor.” Then he asked Hoffa what he “expected of the government” and what he “might do for political candidates whom he favored.”

  In reply, Hoffa complained that the Department of Justice, then under close Nixon associate Attorney General William Rogers, was harassing him with “nothing more than nuisance suits.” He asked that the judge in a corruption case against him be removed. Then he said he could best help Nixon in 1960 by generating endorsements from local Teamsters officials and by harshly criticizing leading Democrats.

  Hoffa did precisely that, attacking Kennedy as soon as he announced his candidacy. After a further meeting with Hunter, at the Republican National Convention, he hammered away at him for the duration of the campaign, especially in the weeks after he had passed on to Nixon’s people the five-hundred-thousand-dollar Mafia donation. “You may be assured,” a senior Nixon aide told a correspondent at exactly that time, “that neither the Vice President nor the Republican Party will ever ally themselves with men like Mr. Hoffa.” Behind the scenes, almost coincident with the Marcello donation, the Eisenhower-Nixon Justice Department abruptly stopped the indictment process in the corruption case Hoffa had raised with Hunter. It was to be reactivated after the Kennedy election. Attorney General Rogers, thought investigator Sheridan, “obviously did not want to leave behind him what might appear to be a fixed case for Jimmy Hoffa. Thus Richard Nixon’s political debt to Jimmy Hoffa remained unpaid.”

  It would be paid, however, during the Nixon presidency, when Hoffa was in prison, sentenced to thirteen years for his crimes. Then, following more alleged payoffs, Nixon would order Hoffa’s release after he had served only five years.

  In 1960 no reports ever surfaced about help from organized crime for either candidate. Instead, thanks to yet more bad luck and bad judgment, another skeleton came rattling out of the Nixon closet. Six weeks before the election, while campaigning for his brother in California, Edward Kennedy received a call from an attorney who said he had “something hot” to impart. Days later, at a meeting at the Los Angeles airport, the man handed young Kennedy a single sheet of paper, a draft agreement under which the Kennedys were asked to pay half a million dollars for access to “research” about a “feebly disguised loan.” The information, said the attorney, “might affect the election.” Kennedy replied, “I don’t know whether we would use this or not,” pocketed the draft agreement, and left. The Hughes Loan, the $205,000 gift the millionaire Howard Hughes had made four years earlier—ostensibly to Don Nixon but with his brother Richard’s connivance*—was about to surface.

  Word of the airport rendezvous reached a second attorney, James McInerney, a close Kennedy friend, who was also, as fate would have it, lawyer for the accountant who had acted as proxy to hide Hughes’s involvement in the loan. Perhaps by chance, perhaps not, the accountant had recently come into possession of the entire bulky folder on the matter.17 He now made it available to McInerney, who passed it to the Kennedys, who in turn passed it to a newspaper friendly to them, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

  A comedy of errors followed. A Post-Dispatch reporter, in California checking the story, left a briefcase containing documents on the loan in a photographer’s studio, and photocopies were soon being circulated all over town. The material eventually reached Time magazine, which put five men on the story. The Kennedy people made certain it also found its way into the hands of Nixon’s perennial nemesis, Drew Pearson.

  Howard Hughes meanwhile ordered his crack troubleshooter Robert Maheu to help rescue Nixon from “tremendous embarrassment.” Sequestered in the Bel-Air Hotel with the Hughes’ copy of the records, Maheu thought he saw a solution. He went for “the sympathy angle,” showing Post-Dispatch reporters portions of the file that indicated Nixon’s mother had pledged all her worldly possessions as security for the loan. If the story was printed, Maheu said, Hughes would be forced to take all this “poor lady’s assets.”

  Influenced not only by this argument but also by concern about printing such incendiary information late in the campaign, editors hesitated. They did not run the story, might never have run it, had Nixon himself not subsequently panicked. “Nixon naively believed he could control the ‘spin’ on the story if he was the one to release it,” Maheu recalled. Nixon decided—and it was a unilateral decisi
on, press aide Klein confirmed—to give a doctored account of the loan to Peter Edson, the same friendly reporter used years earlier to preempt revelations of secret funding by wealthy supporters.

  “They made a sucker out of me,” Edson acknowledged later. The story fed to him was a total distortion, one that made no mention of either Hughes’s involvement in the loan or of Richard Nixon’s. Provoked, Drew Pearson promptly went to press after all, naming both men. Then, while Nixon was still denying the charges, his brother Donald admitted Hughes was the source of the money. The accountant in the case, meanwhile, said the major decisions on the arrangement for the loan had been made by Richard Nixon. All this emerged on November 1, with only six days to go before the election.

  Nixon was to tell Haldeman and Bebe Rebozo that he believed the Hughes furor had been a major factor in his defeat at the hands of John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy thought so too. As for John F. Kennedy, by the closing weeks of the campaign he shed all pretense at feelings of friendship for his old congressional colleague. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin heard him say of Nixon, “He’s a filthy, lying son of a bitch, and a very dangerous man.”

  As quickly as the Hughes scandal flared, it died away. The Kennedy people had sensed only a brief surge in their fortunes and George Gallup of Gallup poll fame declared the election too close to call or, as Time magazine put it, “as close as a boy with an ice-cream cone.” After a last lap of grueling travel, the quixotic trip to Alaska, Nixon finally came home to Whittier for election day.