Nixon pardon was another preemptive strike against the Kennedys, part 2

By Margie Burns
Created Jan 1 2007 - 12:20pm

By informed accounts, Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) was politically
obsessed with the Kennedys, and with good reason. Even with the advantage of
being Eisenhower's vice president and the support of most of the nation's
newspaper publishers, Nixon lost the 1960 presidential race to Kennedy - a
Catholic with a short Washington resume, lurid concealed private amours and
health problems, and apparently no advantages except for a wealthy,
no-holds-barred father, a highly motivated extended family, a certain
entrenched dishonesty in the Chicago region, and a demeanor that stood up
well to television. Nixon lost narrowly, but he still lost.

After being in the White House, Kennedy could have whipped Nixon even
posthumously, and Nixon was astute enough to stand aside from the 1964 rout
of Barry Goldwater by Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

WashPost reporter Bob Woodward chose to title one of his later books
"Shadow," referring to "the Legacy of Watergate" in the subtitle. A deeper
shadow in the period was cast by the Kennedys than by Watergate (and a
deeper yet by Vietnam, and a still deeper by the Cold War that generated
Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs and probably Watergate), and what happened to and
because of the Kennedys largely defined Nixon from at least 1959 onward. It
never stopped defining him. He ran against the towering shadow of the
Kennedy mystique for the rest of his political life.

Nixon failed to win the California governorship in 1962 and subsequently
relocated to New York City, closer to the power centers of the eastern
seaboard GOP, Wall Street and national media headquarters. He also got that
much closer to JKF's old stomping grounds, where he made inroads on
Kennedy's
support among the gravitas-laden in the financial sector, and indeed the
Nixon reinvention as a northeasterner was one of several junctures at which
the two candidates' life experiences were parallel, or entwined. (Chris
Matthews' book Kennedy and Nixon makes the two seem virtually
interchangeable.) JFK, favored to win reelection to the presidency in 1964,
was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Nixon had just left Dallas
on a corporate-sponsored trip, addressing local business audiences on behalf
of Pepsi, the day Kennedy arrived. This preemptive strike or advance action
against the Kennedy charm becomes somewhat more piquant in light of an
anecdote reported by the then-Dallas Herald newspaper, that Nixon twitted
Kennedy mildly on his use of a "bubble car" for protection - perhaps
contributing to influence Kennedy to ride in an open vehicle in his Dallas
motorcade.

Kennedy's younger brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy was
assassinated in June 1968, shortly before the point at which he would
undoubtedly have won the Democratic nomination for president, perhaps
running against Nixon, in 1968. Robert Kennedy's campaign had been in effect
kick-started by the popular and charismatic candidate Eugene McCarthy, whose
courageous stand against the Vietnam War made him widely adored among
younger voters and was co-opted by RFK. When RFK died leaving no dominant
candidate for the Democrats, Nixon landed the Republican nomination. He was
also handed a convenient opportunity to split the anti-war vote in the 1968
election by offering little feelers in the direction of "peace with honor"
etc - leaving open a hope that he would end the Vietnam War, to which poor
Hubert Humphrey was irrevocably tied, without promising to do so. (A similar
strategy worked in the 2006 congressional elections for Joe Lieberman, who
managed to split the enormous anti-war vote in Connecticut that would
otherwise have overwhelmed him at the polls.)

So Nixon squeaked through in 1968. The race was so close that according to
one analysis I heard, Nixon would have lost the election if an average of
one vote per precinct had gone to Humphrey. (My late father, disgusted by
the Vietnam War, wrote in George McGovern's name that year.)

Thus the deep and intense paranoia of the Nixon camp, and the Nixon
administration, in 1972. Faced with a candidate they pretty much knew they
could overwhelm - George McGovern, a genuine War World II hero opposed in
spite of his stodgy respectability by at least two-thirds of the nation's
newspaper publishers; buttressed by the immense advantages of incumbency;
and supported by an enormous monetary war chest; they still feared the
unknown power of the ghost rising from Kennedy's grave. And this in spite of
two events that alone should have generated White House confidence: on July
18, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy, the late president's youngest brother, was
the driver in a fatal car accident at Chappaquiddick that eliminated him as
a presidential candidate; and on July 20, 1969, the USA put the first men on
the moon.

Factor in the positive feelings generated by President Nixon's trip to China
early in campaign year 1972, and you should have - with the 20-20 of
historical hindsight - a situation far too politically calm and confident to
generate a third-rate break-in of the headquarters of the Democratic
National Committee at the Watergate in Washington D.C. in May and June 1972.

Given this history, the published motive of the White House for backing this
action - namely, to find out what Larry O'Brien, then-chairman of the
Democratic National Committee was up to - is intriguing. The eponymous
wikipedia entry does not even list O'Brien among persons connected to
Watergate; for that matter, the wikipedia entry on O'Brien does not mention
his tenure at the Watergate during this critical if brief period.

But the intriguing topic of Nixon's motives has to wait for a further post.

For now, here broadly are the facts not in dispute. The break-in included
efforts to wiretap the DNC office. The break-in was ordered, financed, and
to some extent directly known by higher-ups in the Nixon campaign and in the
Nixon White House, which were largely interchangeable. The cover-up after
the men who committed the break-ins were arrested went to the highest levels
of the White House.

These were times when it was not seen as acceptable for a president, even a
Republican president, to instigate dirty tricks including wire-tapping the
offices of the loyal opposition, or to engage in covering up or otherwise
impeding investigation into what was, after all, lawbreaking by any
standard.

After extensive investigation (in spite of White House and other GOP
opposition, aided by George H. W. Bush among others) and televised
congressional hearings that put public television on the map in this
country, Nixon resigned as president.

_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson