This Day in Presidential History (Watergate as Campaign-Finance Scandal)

June 17, 1972—Two decades after Richard Nixon narrowly survived the revelation of a “slush fund” maintained by supporters for his personal expenses, one of the seven arrested for breaking into Democratic National Headquarters was revealed to have $25,000 from the President’s reelection campaign committee in his bank account. The succeeding cascade of revelations surrounding Watergate eventually drove the President from office.

Over the years, the cause of Watergate has been traced back to several factors. Nixon’s paranoia and vindictiveness led him to overstep ethical and legal restraints at every turn, of course. In The Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell examined the series of national-security events that made the President insistent on hunting down enemies, foreign and political, everywhere. And in Miami, Joan Didion saw the involvement of Cuban exiles as part of a larger pattern stretching back to the Bay of Pigs and forward to the Iran-contra scandal.

But there is another explanation for the vast mushroom cloud of corruption that has come to be subsumed under the “Watergate” rubric, one that began with Nixon’s first appearance on the national ticket and that continues to the present day, with the huge campaign contributions that already, in the wake of two Supreme Court rulings, hold the potential to unhinge our political system. That factor was memorably summarized in the cryptic but apropos advice delivered by Deep Throat (now known to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt) to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward: “Follow the money.”

In a retrospective on the scandal they helped break, Woodward and his former Post colleague Carl Bernstein reflect that it is a mistake to believe that in the case of Watergate, the cover-up was worse than the original crime. On the contrary, they write: “At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.”

Woodward and Bernstein have organized the massive scandal as a series of five Nixon “wars”: against the  anti-war movement, the media, Democrats, the American system of justice, and even history.

Examining all of these is beyond the scope of this blog. But there is one strand that I have seen only analyzed once in the last several months: John Blake’s CNN report on Watergate as the result of campaign-finance abuses. Funds from the Committee to Reelect the President (the acronym, CREEP, is appropriate) were eventually used as hush money to buy, for awhile, the silence of the seven original defendants in the case. 

For years, many—including myself—have wondered how Nixon could be so crazy as to steal an election that, considering his opponent, he already had in the bag.

But that ignores the fact that, from the first few months of his Presidency, Nixon had worked, through his minions, to eliminate, in the primaries or before, his strongest potential Democratic opponents until he was left with the one, George McGovern, that was the least electable. Crucial to that effort was Herbert Kalmbach, the President’s personal lawyer, who distributed funds for key “dirty tricks” operations along the way to be used against several candidates:

*Ted Kennedy: In July 1969, as soon as the Chappaquiddick scandal exploded, the Administration determined to send operatives to the scene. Jack Caulfield, an “on-staff detective” for domestic-policy adviser John Ehlichman,  posed as a reporter, bringing along another former New York police detective, Tony Ulasewicz. The latter’s $22,000-per-year salary came from a secret Nixon political fund handled by Kalmbach. One would have thought that Kennedy had put himself permanently out of commission in terms of winning the White House. But Nixon's paranoia about what the family could do knew no bounds, and he was determined to speed Kennedy's fall any way he could

* Hubert Humphrey: The former Vice-President, still enjoying much support from labor unions and other parts of the liberal wing of the party, appeared ready for another run. GOP campaign operative Donald Segretti (to whom Kalmbach paid leftover campaign funds) fabricated a letter on Humphrey’s stationery stating that Rep. Shirley Chisholm (also a candidate for President that year) had been committed at one time to a mental institution. The target of the letter wasn’t Chisholm but Humphrey, who would then have to answer press questions about a dirty trick he hadn’t committed. Another letter falsely accused Humphrey of consorting with a prostitute.

* Henry Jackson: The Senator from Washington, while retaining significant labor support, was less assailable as a liberal because of his pro-military, pro-Israel stances. Jackson still stood at a major disadvantage in the primaries and the upcoming convention because of delegate-selection rules that favored George McGovern, but CREEP hoped to move him faster out of the primaries with a fake letter claiming he was homosexual.

* George Wallace:  In 1971, terrified that the racist Alabama governor would divert votes from the President’s reelection campaign, either as a Democrat or (as he had in 1968) as a third-party candidate, Nixon designated Kalmbach to fund Wallace’s opponent, Albert Brewer: first, with $100,000 delivered in the lobby of a New York City hotel, then with another $330,000 when Brewer managed to gain a runoff against the incumbent. (As if that weren’t enough, Nixon instigated an IRS probe of Wallace, then through longtime aide Murray Chotiner leaked the results to investigative columnist Jack Anderson.) Had Wallace not been shot in Maryland in 1972, his campaign funds would have been badly strained in any attempt to challenge the President.

* Edmund Muskie: The U.S. Senator from Maine, who had impressed greatly as Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, was considered Nixon’s most formidable opponent in 1972. Kalmbach paid  Segretti more than $43,000 from leftover campaign funds to run a covert operation aimed at bringing Muskie down. In addition, the campaign used $1,000 a month to fund a spy in the candidate’s own midst: his chauffeur, Elmer Wyatt, who would photograph internal memos, position papers, schedules and strategy documents, and deliver copies to John Mitchell, the attorney general transitioning to Nixon's campaign manager.  One of these “dirty tricks” worked better than they could have planned. A “letter to the editor” to the Manchester Union-Leader, concocted by a White House staffer, claimed that Muskie had condoned a racial slur, “Canucks,” on those of French-Canadian descent. Muskie’s angry denunciation of the letter in the middle of a snowfall gave a misleading impression that he had been weeping. Support for the candidate immediately sank, and he ended up falling by the wayside in the primaries.

 

Nixon’s last campaign reflected the burning anger and cynicism he had felt ever since moving onto the national stage in 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower selected the 39-year-old U.S. Senator from California as his running mate. What was turning out to be an excellent chance at high office almost unraveled in September with the New York Post revelation that, following his 1950 Senate campaign, Nixon had created an $18,000 "slush fund" to pay for his political expenses. There was nothing illegal about this—in fact, other candidates for President also maintained such funds—but the appearance of impropriety and hypocrisy (the Republicans had been complaining about influence peddling by Harry Truman's Missouri "cronies") almost led Eisenhower to throw his running mate overboard. The GOP Presidential nominee only allowed Nixon one last chance, on national TV, to explain himself.

Nixon’s subsequent “Checkers” speech (named for the dog he invoked as one of the results of the fund) not only cleared his name but issued a challenge to other candidates to make similar detailed financial reports. The press interpreted it as a thrust at the Democrats’ Adlai Stevenson (who, it turned out, had a similar legal fund), but it was also meant as a dig at Dwight Eisenhower, who had enjoyed favorable tax treatment over sales of his memoir, Crusade in Europe.

As Garry Wills noted in Nixon Agonistes, the general, listening to the speech, broke a pencil in annoyance when he heard Nixon’s challenge to “other candidates.” Yet he swallowed his anger and met Nixon afterward and said, “You’re my boy.”

Nevertheless, the narrow escape left Nixon with even more cynicism about politics than he had before. Protests about virtue were hypocritical, he felt. Instead of trying to reform the process, he would exploit it to the greatest extent possible.

Though the abuses were not without precedent, it still remained the case that the Nixon campaign raised (or lowered) political dirty tricks to a truly black art. No longer would major donors receive a winking acknowledgement that a major diplomatic post might be their reward; Kalmbach had now told them, per Nixon’s instructions, that anyone who wanted to be an ambassador had to contribute at least $250,000. Others were told that if they did not contribute to the campaign, they could expect not to be listened to.

The costs of all this were considerable. At a time when America’s role in the world was being increasingly questioned, embassy posts went to incompetents with no other qualifications than large bundles of cash. Moreover, an administration that claimed to be more pro-business than the Democrats hiked corporations’ operational costs with their massive bribery schemes. The administration’s secret collusion with members of the milk-price cooperative American Milk Producers, Inc. artificially drive up the price of milk in return for $2 million in campaign contributions (collected, once again, by Kalmbach). The deal, administration staffers estimated, would cost the government about $100 million. “Better get a glass of milk,” Ehrlichman told an associate. “Drink it while it’s cheap.”

In the wake of Watergate, one of the key reforms passed by Congress attempted to curb the campaign-finance abuses that made the dirty tricks, the break-in at Democratic headquarters, and the subsequent cover-up possible. But much of this was gutted by the Supreme Court—first in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), which stuck down campaign-expenditure limits, equating money with free speech, then with the even more insidious Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling (2010), which opened the floodgates to anonymous donors and superPACS. The potential exists now, at the Presidential level, not just for another Watergate but for the kind of wholesale bribery of legislatures by robber barons that made passage of the Seventeenth Amendment so necessary. (See my prior post on the latter.)