In the immediate aftermath none of them were prosecuted for the killings. Although Attorney General Mitchell declared that American education was experiencing the “saddest semester” in its history—“There can be no greater evidence of disorder in society than the sound of gunfire on a college campus,” he said—and though an investigation by three hundred FBI agents concluded that the Guardsmen had been in no physical danger, and that they conspired afterward to blame the incident on a threatening mob which never existed, the Justice Department declined even to convene a federal grand jury. Long afterward this was done, but not until March of 1974 were eight indictments handed down.
At the time, an Ohio grand jury exonerated the troopers—and indicted instead twenty-five others, including the president of the student body. Although none of them were convicted, there was a widespread feeling that the victims had got what was coming to them. It was strengthened when President Nixon implied that violent protest had brought violence in return; the incident, he said, “should remind us once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.” The Scranton Commission said that “61 shots by Guardsmen certainly cannot be justified.” Vice President Agnew called their report “pablum for permissiveness,” and added that responsibility for what had happened lay with the students, “on the steps of the university administration, and at the door of the faculty lounge.” Any other interpretation, he said, would be “scapegoating of the most irresponsible sort.”
***
The campus disorders which greeted Nixon’s announcement of the Cambodian adventure formed a key link in the chain of events which led, ultimately, to the burglarizing of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex in Washington two years later. The first link had been a story in the New York Times of May 19, 1969, under the byline of William Beecher, who covered the Defense Department for the paper. It began: “American B-52 bombers in recent weeks have raided several Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps in Cambodia for the first time, according to Nixon administration sources, but Cambodia has not made any protest.”
Nixon was dismayed. He felt that his worst fears about the irresponsibility of the eastern establishment press had been confirmed, and believed them reconfirmed when the Times published technical details of American preparation for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) talks with Russia. Under the Constitution there was little he could do about Beecher and his paper, but he could at least hunt the unknown informants in his administration who were leaking classified information to newspapermen. He consulted Henry Kissinger, who drew up a list of thirteen officials, including five of his own National Security Council aides, who knew about the secret Cambodian bombing. On orders from the President, their telephones were tapped by the FBI; so were the phones of four journalists who had published leaked material: Beecher; Hedrick Smith, the Times man at the State Department; Marvin Kalb of CBS; and Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times. It was the White House’s first incursion into the twilight zone of questionable activity, and it was fruitless; Beecher’s source was never found.
The President began to entertain misgivings about the efficiency of both Hoover’s FBI and Richard Helms’s CIA. His doubts deepened after the events of May 1970. Nixon was convinced that the campus outbreaks were the work of foreign instigators, probably Cubans, Egyptians, and eastern Europeans. He asked the CIA to identify them. After an extensive investigation the agency reported that all the agitators were native Americans. The President gave the FBI the same assignment; the bureau brought back the same explanation. Still dissatisfied, the oval office ordered more wiretaps and—something new—house break-ins to search suspected offices and homes. The programs were to be directed by a new domestic security panel consisting of the country’s top intelligence men: Hoover, Helms, and the directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Their marching orders were to be drawn up by a twenty-nine-year-old Hoosier lawyer and presidential speech writer named Tom Charles Huston.
On June 5, 1970, the four intelligence chiefs met in the President’s office, were photographed with him, and were told that he wanted them to form a committee supervising national security, with Hoover as chairman. They were to go into action on August 1. Meantime Huston would draft operational plans with the FBI director. During one of their early meetings Hoover tried to dampen the young lawyer’s enthusiasm for illegal schemes by explaining the historical development of objective intelligence. Huston replied impatiently, “We’re not talking about the dead past; we’re talking about the living present.” In addition to electronic surveillance and surreptitious entry, his plan envisaged opening mail, recruiting more FBI informers on campuses, and CIA spying on students and other Americans living abroad.
As an attorney, the Indianan was aware that second-story jobs and what he called “mail coverage” were felonies, but he wanted to go ahead anyway. He wrote: “Use of this technique is clearly illegal; it amounts to burglary. It is also highly risky and could result in great embarrassment if exposed. However, it is also the most fruitful tool and can produce the type of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion.” He argued that the advantages “outweigh the risks.” Hoover disagreed. In a footnote to the Huston report the director said he didn’t want to be chairman of the panel and didn’t even want to be a member of it. Huston felt wounded. He sent Haldeman a memorandum in early July commenting on the FBI director’s comment: “His objections are generally inconsistent and frivolous—most express concern about possible embarrassment to the intelligence community (i.e., Hoover) from public exposure.” On July 23 Nixon signed a “decision memo,” drafted by the young lawyer, approving the plan, but when Hoover saw it he protested to Mitchell, who discussed it with the President, who dropped the whole thing. Embittered, Huston resigned that fall and went home to practice law in Indianapolis. His intelligence duties were assigned to a White House newcomer, presidential counsel John Wesley Dean III.
The following spring the Times began publishing fresh Pentagon leaks, and Nixon concluded that his administration had become a sieve, that something must be done, that he would have to bypass Hoover. Accordingly, the President established a Special Investigations Unit whose job, as he himself later explained, was to “stop security leaks and to investigate other sensitive security matters.”
Unknown to one another then, the men who would make presidential burglary the prelude to the American scandal of the century had been emerging from governmental careers, thus becoming available for new employment. E. Howard Hunt, whose CIA career had been going downhill since the American ambassador in Madrid refused to approve his assignment as deputy station chief there, on the ground that he was an intriguer, had retired at the time of the Kent State tragedy. Four months later James W. McCord Jr. resigned from the CIA, and eight months after that G. Gordon Liddy was fired by the Treasury Department because of an unauthorized speech praising gun ownership at a National Rifle Association rally.
David Young, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer from Kissinger’s staff, opened the Special Investigations Unit’s headquarters in room 16 in the basement of the Executive Office Building. The New York Times carried a brief item reporting that Young and a colleague, Egil Krogh Jr., were doing something about leaks. One of Young’s relatives read it and said to him, “Your grandfather would be proud of you, working on leaks at the White House. He was a plumber.” David put a sign on the door of his new office: “Mr. Young—Plumber.”
***
The off-year elections of 1970 were waged by the GOP leadership on the basis of a principle laid down by Murray Chotiner, Richard Nixon’s first campaign mentor. It was, quite simply, that Americans vote against candidates, not for them. An aspirant for office following Chotiner’s precept gave only nominal attention to his own program. Instead he blazed away at the least attractive aspects of his opponent’s record, ideas, mannerisms, and private life. If the aspirant couldn’t find anything, he invented something. The
se tactics were what the President’s critics had in mind when they spoke of the Old Nixon. The GOP strategy that autumn was to convert all the party’s nominees into Old Nixons. It was to be the first hundred-million-dollar congressional election, and the chief Republican firehorse would be the Vice President, or, as presidential adviser Bryce Harlow called him, “Power-pack Agnew.”
Certainly the party needed a boost of some sort. The previous November Nixon’s approval rating in the Gallup poll had touched 68 percent; but since then it had been eroded by worsening inflation, Cambodia, the Calley case, and rising unemployment. Early in the year Nixon told GOP leaders that they would lose in November if the jobless rate touched 5.5 percent. It went to 5.8 and hit 6 percent before the end of the year. The SALT talks were going well, and in March the nuclear nonproliferation pact was signed, yet neither these nor the administration’s plan for revenue sharing generated much interest in the electorate. Its welfare reform plans also lacked appeal. Nixon’s vow to preserve “neighborhood schools” without busing was well received in the South, but it angered Negroes in the North, and with the emergence of the black middle class the Negro vote was becoming formidable. By November the country would have thirteen black congressmen, 81 black mayors, 198 black state legislators, and 1,567 local black officeholders.
In the White House the Vice President was regarded as admirably suited to campaign under Chotiner’s colors. During his first year in Washington he had been remarkably active at the lectern, delivering seventy-seven major speeches, and his audiences had been large and appreciative. A Gallup poll in 1970 placed him third among America’s most respected men, just behind the President and Billy Graham. To be sure, eleven faculty members at the University of Minnesota had appealed to him to stop “driving moderates into the hands of the extremists.” Senator George McGovern had called him “a divisive, damaging influence,” and Republican Governor Francis Sargent had announced that he was unwelcome in Massachusetts. But college professors and McGovern were already recognized as the administration’s natural enemies, while Sargent’s state, with 300,000 students among its inhabitants, had become identified as the most liberal in the union. In any event, Agnew had been among the first members of the administration to spurn the President’s inaugural plea to Americans to “stop shouting at one another” (“I intend to be heard over the din,” the Vice President had said, “even if it means raising my voice”), and Middle Americans delighted in the choicer passages of Agnewian bombast:
Some newspapers dispose of their garbage by printing it.
Asking Senator Fulbright’s advice on foreign policy is like asking the Boston Strangler to massage your neck.
If, in challenging, we polarize the American people, I say it is time for a positive polarization.
Violence rewarded breeds further violence and perpetual violence ultimately produces a brutal counterreaction.
The disease of our times is an artificial and masochistic sophistication—the vague uneasiness that our values are false, that there is something wrong with being patriotic, honest, moral, and hardworking.
Agnew covered 32,000 miles while stumping thirty-two states in the fall of 1970. He set the tone for his campaign in a Palm Springs, California, press conference on September 13, when he called on the electorate to reject the Democrats as “radical liberals.” Subsequently he capsulized this as “radic-libs,” explaining that the politicians he had in mind could be “depended upon to vote against the interests of law and order and against the interests of a representative society and against the foreign policy of the United States virtually every time.” While not endorsing all aspirants in his own party—“I would have to put one Republican senator who seeks election in that group. That’s Senator Goodell of New York”—he condemned all opposition nominees: “The Democratic candidates are a team of permissive candidates who have a penchant for indulging the disorderly and fawning upon lawbreakers.” His sesquipedalian prose was enlivened by two presidential speech writers, William Safire and Pat Buchanan. With them as phrasemakers, he denounced senatorial doves as “solons of sellout” and “pampered prodigies.” All Democratic nominees were lumped together as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” “pusillanimous pussyfooters,” “vicars of vacillation,” “troglodytic leftists,” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history” catering to “foolish fads of phony intellectualism.” Of his fustian rhetoric he said he liked metaphors and alliteration, “but I don’t need gimmicks to get my message across. I am simply stating what America is all about.”
Agreeing with him, the President sounded much the same theme while campaigning 17,240 miles in twenty-two states over twenty-three days. In all of them he was on the attack. Like Agnew, he defended no record, described no goals, acclaimed no ideals; that would have violated Chotiner’s rule. Instead he stumped against students, narcotics, the SDS, rioters, draft dodgers, flag burners, homosexuals, criminals, promiscuity, and pornography, identifying all of them with the Democrats. The climax came the night before the election, when the Republicans rebroadcast on television one of the President’s most strident speeches. The previous Thursday evening in San Jose, California, demonstrators had pelted his limousine with eggs and rocks, tried to smash the windows, and hammered on the doors. “You had to see their faces,” an aide who was with him said later; “the hate in those faces—it got to him.” Time noted that the episode had been “condemned in all responsible and even quasi-responsible quarters.” Nevertheless, speaking after it in Phoenix, the President had seemed to blame all his critics for what had happened. He pledged that “No band of violent thugs is going to keep me from going out and speaking with the American people”—the implication was that Democrats were out to stop him—and said of the dissenters, “They’re not romantic revolutionaries. They’re the same thugs and hoodlums that have always plagued the good people.” He concluded: “Our approach, the new approach, demands new and strong laws that will give the peace forces new muscle to deal with the criminal forces in the United States.”
The quality of the election eve rebroadcast, like the message it bore, was scratchy, and at times all but incoherent. It lasted fifteen minutes. The next quarter-hour was given over to a paid reply from Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, speaking for the other party. Muskie was calm, measured—and devastating. Noting that Nixon and Agnew had maligned Democrats and accused them of disloyalty, he said: “That is a lie, and the American people know it is a lie…. There are only two kinds of politics… the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says: you are encircled by monstrous dangers…. The other says: the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men…. Thus in voting for the Democratic Party tomorrow you cast your vote for trust… for trusting your fellow citizens… and most of all for trust in yourself.”
Everyone, Muskie pointed out, believes in law and order; the Democrats had voted for the administration’s bills to control crime. But what about racial tension, the environment, the economy? And what about national unity? He said: “There are those who seek to turn our common distress to partisan advantages, not by offering better solutions but with empty threat and malicious slander.” He called on the voters to repudiate them.
They did. The Democrats gained twelve House seats, widening their margin to 255–180. The Republicans lost eleven governorships. They had led, with 32 statehouses to 18; now they trailed 29–21. The average Democratic candidate ran three percentage points ahead of 1968. Early in the campaign the GOP had entertained hopes of winning eight Senate seats and regaining control there. It had seemed possible, for the Democrats had twice as many Senate seats at stake. After the smoke had cleared, the Republicans had picked up just two of them, and one was of doubtful value; in Connecticut a conservative Democrat, Thomas J. Dodd, had been replaced by a liberal Republican, Lowell P. Weicker Jr.
Trying to put the best possible face on the results, Nixon claimed an “ideological victory,” pointing to the defeat of Albert Gore in
Tennessee, Joseph Tydings in Maryland, and Charles Goodell in New York, where Conservative party candidate James Buckley had won a three-way race with only 39 percent of the vote. But these gains were offset by the successes of Adlai Stevenson III in Illinois and John V. Tunney in California, and the Texas defeat of George Bush, whom the administration had strongly backed. Most discouraging for the White House were omens for the 1972 election. Apart from Tennessee, the celebrated GOP southern strategy had achieved nothing. Elsewhere Republicans had lost several key legislatures. Special Nixon-Agnew efforts had failed in New Jersey, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico, and they had done badly in big states—California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan—where the next presidential race would probably be decided.
The president of the liberal Republican Ripon Society summed up the outcome as the GOP’s “worst showing since 1964,” and said of Nixon’s interpretation that “to the degree he claims he has a working ideological majority now, he cannot use Congress as a scapegoat in 1972.” The standing joke among Republican governors assembling after the election in Sun Valley, Idaho, was that they should have met in Death Valley. The governor of Indiana, which had given the President his biggest plurality two years earlier, said he was in trouble even there; the governor of New Mexico warned his fellow Republicans that the GOP had “lost the election because the strategy was completely negative.” “In November 1970,” wrote columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “the Presidency of Richard Nixon… hit bottom.” In fact it sank lower. That winter Gallup showed the percentage of Americans who approved of the President dropping from 56 percent to 51 to 50 to 49. In the Harris poll Muskie surged ahead of Nixon by three points, and in subsequent months his margin widened to five points and then to eight points—47 to 39. Newsweek raised the possibility that Nixon might be a one-term President.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 183
