You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [90]
Worse, investigations were soon to reveal that former attorney general John Mitchell had personally approved numerous illegal activities against the 1972 campaign run by Nixon’s Democratic opponent, George McGovern. In this tangle of lies, lawbreaking and betrayal of public trust, opinion began to turn against the president, despite his continued denials of wrongdoing.
There is little doubt that these men acted with the knowledge, if not on the orders, of then-president Nixon. The question is, having been elected to one of the most powerful positions in the world, with a high approval rating (at the time of the break-in in 1972, Nixon won reelection by a landslide against challenger McGovern), why did Nixon and his supporters feel the need to go to such extremes, to not only break the law but to later perjure themselves about it?
To understand what happened, we first need to understand the man at the center of the controversy. To some, Richard Nixon was a canny negotiator, able to stand up to the greatest perceived dangers of the late ’60s and early ’70s — Communist China and the Soviet Union — and bring them to heel. To others, he was an opportunist, adapting his policies for expediency rather than any strong belief, and to yet others he was a hardheaded conservative, out of touch with the times and refusing to listen to the growing antiwar and civil rights movements, despite his election campaign promise to end the war.
He was likely all of those things, depending on your perspective. Smart, yes. Canny, savvy, egotistical — and above all a survivor. But what he was, unarguably, was one of the greatest paranoids to ever hold elected office.
According to aides, he was convinced that he was under constant attack by “liberals, Democrats, intellectuals, journalists, and the Eastern establishment elite,” all of whom were determined to see him fail. Nixon didn’t just fear shadow enemies, either — he named names, keeping a list of people he believed to be actively plotting against him called the Opponents List and Political Enemies Project. Handed over to the Senate during the course of investigations, the list included people like actor Paul Newman; Ed Guthman, an editor at the Los Angeles Times; and Alexander E. Barkan, national director of A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s committee on Political Education; as well as a number of congressmen and senators who had at one time or another opposed Nixon or supported his rivals.
During his presidency, Nixon ordered recording devices be placed in the Oval Office so that he could keep everything said on record, to “preserve an accurate record of his tenure in office” (Washington Post). It may have been to ensure that no one was able to claim he said something he didn’t, or to keep records of what other people agreed to, or perhaps, simply, to ensure that he had accurate records when he chose to write his memoirs, as most presidents do.
Whatever his reasons, it was a ploy that would backfire on him badly in July 1973, when White House aide Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of these tapes, which were then subpoenaed by a special prosecutor investigating Watergate, and by the Senate committee.
Nixon refused, claiming executive privilege, which was later refuted by the courts. Ordered to hand over the tapes, Nixon finally did in April 1974, saying “[these] include all the relevant portions of all of the subpoenaed conversations that were recorded, that is, all portions that relate to the question of what I knew about Watergate or the coverup and what I did about it.” (Nixon’s speech of April 29, 1974).
However, it was soon determined that there was a gap of more than eighteen minutes in the tape of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on June 20, 1972. A group of technical experts eventually determined