The Arrogance of Power (34 page)

Nixon's public persona that year gave many the impression that deliberately or not, he never took the gloves off, that this was a “new” Nixon, no longer the political “alley fighter” of old. Kennedy, for his part, came across as a Sir Galahad, the good knight of the New Frontier. The true picture was murkier.

Both sides played the spying game, even against members of their own parties. John Ehrlichman, on the road for the first time, played chauffeur to Nixon's Republican rival Nelson Rockefeller before the convention, as a cover for gathering intelligence.

“The Kennedy fellows were really much better at the dirty stuff than we were,” Ehrlichman recalled. “The Nixon campaign staff always felt a bit outclassed.” Nixon claimed in his memoirs that he had been faced “by the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized for a presidential campaign.”

“The dirtiest trick of all in 1960 was the manner in which the Kennedys manipulated the ‘religious issue' for their political benefit,” wrote Victor Lasky, a self-described “freelance writer” who was in fact a longtime Nixon friend and front man.
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Kennedy was of course a Catholic, and no one of that faith had ever before been elected president. Nixon, as a Quaker himself and
member of a minority faith, was to declare his pride in having resisted all efforts to exploit the religious factor. The Kennedys, he claimed, “repeatedly made religion an issue even as they professed that it should not be one” in order to woo voters who were fellow Catholics.

The allegation of Democratic chicanery was later attached to a flood of anti-Catholic hate mail sent out anonymously to Catholics. Robert Kennedy said the Nixon side spent a million dollars on such anti-Catholic propaganda. Lasky and Nixon countered that the mailings were, rather, organized by “one of Bobby's hatchet men,” an agent provocateur working to trigger Catholic sympathy for Kennedy.
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From Texas meanwhile came a claim that as in 1946 and 1950, Nixon supporters were making anonymous phone calls. Before hanging up, callers would ask: “Would you vote for a Catholic?” or “Do you want the pope to boss the president?”

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”

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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 Giancana 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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.”