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

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  NIXON’S animus toward anything “Kennedy” was consistent with the changing political situation. In the fall of 1969, Ted Kennedy lay in the wreckage of Chappaquiddick. Two years later, he had come back from political death with as much gusto as Nixon himself had shown in the mid-1960s. The Gallup poll now showed the Massachusetts senator as Nixon’s closest competitor in a head-to-head race. The antidote driving Ted Kennedy’s electoral recovery between 1969 and 1971 and Nixon’s in the years 1965-67 was precisely the same: Vietnam. Wanting to remove a president they identified with an unpopular conflict, people were perched to forgive the character flaws of a credible rival. What they could not forgive was the war.

  To deflate Ted Kennedy’s expanding popularity, Nixon decided that the moment was long overdue to tag his elder brother for the death of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, an episode Nixon would identify as the fateful step on the slippery slope to deeper U.S. involvement. When a reporter asked at a September press conference why the Nixon administration wasn’t pushing hard for elections in Vietnam, Nixon turned historian: “I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem and the complicity in the murder of Diem.” He had borrowed the word “complicity” from the Pentagon Papers.

  Two days later, Nixon ordered Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, and Attorney General John Mitchell to get the Diem files out to the public, just as the Pentagon Papers had been released. “We have to get someone to blast it out.” He took the occasion to add several other exposés to his wish list. “We could also move to open the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told them. “I wanted ammunition against the anti-war critics,” Nixon wrote later of his motive, “many of whom were the same men who, under Kennedy and Johnson, had led us into the Vietnam morass in the first place.” His staff went into action. “The P ordered E to have the full Diem story on his desk by the end of next week,” Haldeman noted in his diary, “also the Bay of Pigs.”

  Following up, John Ehrlichman had breakfast at CIA headquarters across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia. “I went to Helms and said I had a list of files the president wants to see. I got it from Nixon. It had several items, but the biggest was the Bay of Pigs.” The files Nixon asked Ehrlichman to retrieve included those on the assassinations of Diem and the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo. Helms told Ehrlichman that he could only give such files to the president himself.

  Nixon would not be deterred, inviting the CIA director to see him personally. With the reelection campaign looming, Nixon told Helms that he needed to be “fully advised in order to know what to duck” should the Diem killing or the Bay of Pigs arise as issues. “I want to protect the agency,” the president told Helms, denying any intention to either hurt the agency or attack his predecessors. Helms then handed an envelope containing the requested files to Nixon, who placed them in a desk drawer. He would later complain that Helms had failed to give him the full story on the doomed invasion and Kennedy’s role in it.

  While the file Helms provided on the Bay of Pigs lacked the information Nixon most wanted, confirmation that President Kennedy had bungled and betrayed the mission, he still hoped to incriminate Kennedy in the Diem killing. Here again, the Nixon team would be stymied. “The closer one approached the assassination period,” E. Howard Hunt would note, “the more frequently were cables missing from chronological order.” Their suspicions of a cover-up turned out to be well founded. Years later, author Richard Reeves reported that President Kennedy had ordered many of the Washington-Saigon cables destroyed.

  The lack of evidence did not stop Chuck Colson. Told by Hunt that none of the discovered cables tied Kennedy himself to the Diem killing, Colson had a suggestion: “Do you think you can improve on them?” Hunt, using a razor blade, a Xerox machine, and some creative surgery, then forged a cable from Kennedy denying asylum to President Diem and his influential brothers. The goal, Colson would later testify, was not merely to discredit JFK but to wound his brother as a presidential challenger, especially among the large bloc of Catholic voters Colson had targeted in 1972. “Complicity” in the grim Saigon affair of 1963 was not enough. He wanted to document that a Catholic president had conspired in the assassination of a Catholic leader of another country. He wanted voters thinking fondly of Ted Kennedy to see the blood of Diem and Nhu on his older brother’s hands. The scheme failed only when Life insisted on photographing the doctored cable.

  Even with Nixon’s chances of reelection bolstered by his masterful turning of the tables on China policy, the dirty deeds continued to grow like fingernails on a corpse.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Smoking Gun

  LIKE Jack Kennedy before him, Richard Nixon pined for the political legitimacy that comes from winning a decisive reelection mandate. Though his grand dealings with China and the Soviet Union marked the handicraft of a great statesman, he never lost sight of the one man who could take it all away from him. Ever fearful of Teddy’s gains, he was so reactive that if the Democrat stirred even for a second, the Republican president would twitch. When Kennedy declared he would have “crawled” to Hanoi to get prisoners of war released, the president showed up at a conference on POWs. When Kennedy’s subcommittee held hearings, on the plight of American Indians, the Nixon team proclaimed its own allegiance to the Native American cause. When the senator went to India and Pakistan to study the refugee problem, Secretary of State Rogers addressed the United Nations on the refugee problem. So predictable was the echo that Kennedy staffers figured there had to be a White House “Kennedy desk” where aides monitored the senator from Massachusetts the way the State Department keeps track of a tricky foreign country.

  Every new indication of Kennedy’s intentions served only to remind Nixon of past humiliations. Each criticism brought new evidence of a media double standard. When Hugh Sidey of Time went after the White House for monopolizing the news, Nixon angrily pointed out to Bob Haldeman that no similar complaints had been heard back in the early 1960s when President Kennedy held the spotlight and Nixon languished in the shadows. His indignation was recharged when the New York Times reported for the first time that Attorney General Robert Kennedy, that “ruthless little bastard” to Nixon, had a decade earlier ordered a backdoor Justice Department investigation of the $205,000 received by Nixon’s brother from Howard Hughes.

  But the same day’s newspapers served up an even fresher exposé: Columnist Jack Anderson revealed that Nixon had recently received a $100,000 political contribution from the aerospace tycoon. Determined once and for all to force similar public scrutiny of the Kennedy camp, Nixon was now furious to get out the fact that the generous Hughes had other irons in the fire. “Nixon knew that O’Brien was on Howard Hughes’s payroll, and Nixon had that Howard Hughes thing that had been pounded into him for years,” Haldeman recalled. “It was ‘How come they can nail me because Howard Hughes loans my brother money and they don’t pay any attention that Howard Hughes is financing Larry O’Brien, who is the only effective spokesman the Democrats got.’ He wanted to get him nailed.”

  O’Brien had come to assume a superhuman stature. “The presence of Lawrence O’Brien as chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) unquestionably suggests that the Democratic nominee will have a strong, covert intelligence effort mounted against us in 1972,” operative Jack Caulfield warned in an in-house memo. “Should this Kennedy mafia-dominated intelligence gun-for-hire be turned against us in ’72, we would, indeed, have a dangerous and formidable foe.” The president shared this estimate. “Larry O’Brien was one Democrat who was a grand master in the art of political gamesmanship. O’Brien had been tutored in the Kennedy political machine and further shaped by his years with Lyndon Johnson. He was a partisan in the most extreme and effective sense.”

  O’Brien would soon prove just how dangerous he was to Nixon. In February, a hot-on-the-trail Jack Anderson charged that the Republican president had stopped the Justice Depa
rtment from appealing an antitrust action against the conglomerate ITT in exchange for a backdoor $400,000 contribution to the upcoming Republican National Convention. O’Brien jumped on the revelation, blasting Nixon with every media cannon in his armory. Beneath the partisan bombardment over ITT, Nixon issued his command to counterattack. Why was he taking heat from Democratic chairman O’Brien and the press over ITT when O’Brien himself was getting paid his salary as DNC chairman while simultaneously pulling down a retainer from Hughes? “O’Brien’s not going to get away with it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman, more eager than ever to get the details of O’Brien’s Hughes connection into print. “We’re going to get proof of his relationship with Hughes—and just what he’s doing for the money.” Yet Nixon was frustrated at his campaign’s failure to find dirt on the Democrats, just as he was frustrated back before the 1960 election by the CIA’s delay in invading Cuba. “When are they going to DO something over there?” he complained to Haldeman.

  On the morning after Jack Anderson’s column appeared on the Hughes gift, White House plumber G. Gordon Liddy presented Attorney General John Mitchell with a political espionage plan, code-named Gemstone. It was an ambitious scheme to gather opposition research and disrupt the Democratic operation through sabotage, the use of prostitutes for political blackmail, break-ins to obtain and photograph documents, and various forms of electronic surveillance and wiretapping. Mitchell’s initial resistance was soon overwhelmed by the eagerness of campaign and White House lieutenants to meet Nixon’s demand for dirt. “Why don’t you guys get off the stick and get Liddy’s budget approved?” Colson yelled over the phone to campaign deputy Jeb Magruder. “We need the information, particularly on O’Brien.”

  Colson was active on another front. Expecting Maine’s Edmund Muskie to win the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, he pulled a dirty trick: a mass mailing to New Hampshire voters urging that they write in the name of Ted Kennedy. The purpose was to get Muskie angry at Kennedy for trying to steal some of his margin over the long-shot antiwar candidate, South Dakota senator George McGovern. Magruder was resistant to the plot at first: “We liked the idea of sowing disunity among the Democrats, but we weren’t convinced that one mailing would do very much. It seemed like a large outlay for a dubious result, so we stalled, hoping Colson would drop the plan.” He soon had no choice but to go along, however. Colson, emerging from the Oval Office, was able to pull rank. “We’ve got to get that mailing going. I’ve just come from talking to the president, and he thinks it’s crucial.” As Haldeman observed, “In battle, Nixon always wanted ‘to go for the jugular.’ ” That meant Teddy.

  Even Nixon’s historic visit to China that February could not assuage his anxieties. Chou En-lai hosted a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People. On their televisions, Americans saw their country’s foremost Cold Warrior, the onetime Red-baiter, toasting a glass of strong mao-tai and quoting Chairman Mao. “Seize the day!” the American politician who had built his career asking “Who lost China?” kept repeating as he raised his glass to yet another official around the great table. “Seize the hour.” Nixon was single-handedly taking China out of the global struggle between the United States and the USSR, making her more Cold War ally than enemy. He had done politically what no other president in the post-World War II era would have dared.

  Yet it was a triumph that brought no relief. Even when George McGovern embarrassed Muskie by “winning” the New Hampshire primary, taking 37 percent to the front-runner’s 46 percent, then went on to beat him in Wisconsin, the Nixon people kept on anticipating the Kennedy ambush. The single-minded Pat Buchanan noted that the antiwar McGovern’s surprising success would only heighten pressure on Kennedy to run. A Jeff MacNelly cartoon in the Richmond News-Leader compared the fight for the 1972 Democratic nomination to an NCAA-basketball-championship draw, with each contest leading to the final playoff with Ted Kennedy.

  Even the McGovern victory in the Wisconsin primary that April didn’t diminish Kennedy’s starring role in the worst-case Nixon scenario. “Somebody should be attacking Kennedy . . . personally,” came a Nixon memo to Colson. He listened with interest to a Haldeman suggestion that Secret Service protection be offered to Teddy as a way of signaling what had to be his inevitable rival. “The P wanted to be sure to get people to follow-up on the line that K is now the obvious Democratic candidate,” Haldeman penned in his diary. The strategy here was to make the expected late Kennedy entry into a fait accompli, thereby robbing it of excitement. Even when McGovern scored his biggest win so far in the 1972 primary season, sweeping Massachusetts, the incumbent still kept faith in Kennedy’s running. “Noncandidacy would have been the best strategy for Kennedy in any event,” Nixon said years later, defending his assessment, as if the fact of Kennedy not running were evidence that he would.

  In Nixon’s view the specter of Came lot loomed larger than ever. “Jackie Kennedy received bravos for years because she brought Pablo Casals to the White House to play his cello forty years after his prime,” he complained to Haldeman. “When we look over the list of people that we have had to the White House, they make the Johnson years appear almost barbaric and the Kennedy years very thin indeed.” He told Haldeman to get more “vicious” in pounding JFK’s conduct of Vietnam policy. “The president asked me to remind you that he feels very strongly about someone taking Teddy on,” Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods wrote the chief of staff. “The country needs to be reminded how Richard Nixon, as a candidate for California governor, backed JFK in the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

  If Nixon was wrong about 1972, he was right about Ted Kennedy. His lack of an active candidacy did not mean the absence of an active hostility. From his seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kennedy was coming at Nixon not as a nominee but as a prosecutor. Unwilling to let ITT drop, Kennedy’s staff camped out at the senator’s McLean, Virginia, home, staying till midnight, then returning early the next morning to brief the boss on any promising leads.

  On April Fools’ Day, the Nixon team began constructing a far more enticing scandal for the Kennedy team to investigate. On that day, G. Gordon Liddy received the go-ahead to bug the offices of Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O’Brien.

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  IN May, Richard Nixon became the first American president to visit Moscow. Yet even a historic meeting with Communist party chairman Leonid Brezhnev, capped by the joint signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation agreement, could not save Nixon from his disastrous campaign to gather dirt. As the U.S. president attended the Bolshoi’s production of Swan Lake, G. Gordon Liddy shot out the streetlight in back of George McGovern’s Washington headquarters, which was number two on the burglar team’s list of targets. Three days later, with their candidate still in the Soviet Union, five men, all but one Cuban exiles loyal to E. Howard Hunt because of his anti-Castro zealotry during the Bay of Pigs, entered target number one: the office of Democratic party chairman Lawrence O’Brien at the Watergate complex, overlooking the Potomac River, alongside the new Kennedy Center.

  The group took two full thirty-six-exposure rolls of film and numerous Polaroid shots. The attempt to bug the Democratic headquarters was not as successful. When the device placed on Larry O’Brien’s phone somehow failed to work, the decision was made for the burglars to go back and repeat the job.

  On June 17, ten days after George McGovern had locked up the Democratic presidential nomination with a victory over Hubert Humphrey in the California primary, E. Howard Hunt and Liddy launched the second illegal entry at the Watergate. Richard Nixon’s command that his people hold Kennedy man Lawrence O’Brien “accountable” for his retainer from Howard Hughes was at last executed. So, too, was the president’s feverish demand that his reelection intelligence operatives earn their pay in “opposition research,” especially on the Kennedy crowd. Once again, the burglary team of the committee to reelect the president entered the Watergate looking for some campaign “meat.” This time, James McCord and the four
Cuban Americans were caught and arrested at two o’clock Saturday morning.

  On Sunday morning, President Nixon, back at his Key Biscayne home after a weekend in the Bahamas, noticed an odd story on page 30 of the New York Times. “What’s that crazy item about the DNC, Bob?” he asked Haldeman over the phone. “Track down Magruder and see what he knows about it.” He would later claim to be unfazed by the report. “I had been in politics long enough and had seen everything from dirty tricks to vote fraud. I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging.”

  Nixon quickly moved to control the political damage by making the break-in look like the work of anti-Castro exiles worried about soft-line Democrats ready to cut a deal with the Communist leader. “This thing may be under control because of the Cubans who went in there,” Nixon told Haldeman over the phone. “You know, those Cubans down there hate McGovern. Those people who got caught are going to need money. I’ve been thinking about how to do it. I’m going to have [Cuban American pal] Bebe [Rebozo] start a fund for them in Miami, call it an anti-Castro fund and publicize the hell out of the Cuban angle.” The rationale would be that Hunt and the Cubans who broke into the Democratic headquarters suspected that the Democrats would get into power and betray them, as they had in denying them the promised “umbrella” of air protection in April 1961. “Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs.”