The Kennedy Half-Century (63 page)

Nixon’s fundamental relationship with JFK was competitive, but not always. Few realize that Nixon saved one of JFK’s best-known programs, the Peace Corps. Early in his presidency, Nixon had been inclined to phase out
the Corps, as well as other activist divisions of the New Frontier and Great Society, but he thought better of it in time. When Southern conservatives in Congress linked the Peace Corps to the widely despised spending category of foreign aid and slashed the Peace Corps budget, Nixon found funds in other areas to transfer to the Corps, enabling it to continue operating at full strength.
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Had Nixon wanted to damage JFK’s legacy in a prized area, and do so without fingerprints, this would have been the perfect opportunity.

Presidencies are personal in the moment, but in history, they are judged by substantive achievements and epic failures. In many ways, Nixon had the better of Kennedy in both historic categories. Nixon’s painfully slow but successful winding down of Vietnam, his shrewd playing off of China and Russia to produce spectacular diplomatic breakthroughs, and some creative domestic policies (such as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and a reorganization of the federal government) may eventually restore some luster to a presidential reputation destroyed by extensive Watergate abuses.
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That was Nixon’s hope in retirement.

That Richard Nixon resented John Kennedy is obvious, and his antipathy was not irrational. For reasons ranging from personal charm to Democratic tilt within the news media, JFK was loved and touted by the press throughout his national career in a way that Nixon could never match or even approach. Press adulation probably made at least 119,000 votes’ worth of difference in 1960, and Nixon lived with this bitter reality for years. Where JFK triumphed, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was assured of glowing, long-lasting coverage; when he fell short (the Bay of Pigs), the press moved on. His private vices, such as reckless womanizing, were ignored. In cases where Kennedy policy led to disaster (Vietnam), there was an automatic might-have-been excuse to the discussion. Because of his assassination, John Kennedy was untouchable, and this must have galled the flesh-and-blood, here-and-now Nixon from time to time. Nixon’s feats seemed to fade more quickly, his fiascoes were sometimes exaggerated, and like Lyndon Johnson, Nixon could never compete with a saintly ghost.

It is hard to fault Nixon for insisting that the Vietnam record prominently display its Kennedy-Johnson lineage. Johnson’s role was far greater, but JFK initiated the era of major involvement. Nixon was determined to remind the public of this fact, and he quoted JFK at length in his much ballyhooed November 1969 televised address on Vietnam: “In 1963, President Kennedy, with his characteristic eloquence and clarity, said: ‘We want to see a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence. We believe strongly in that. We are not going to withdraw from that
effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.’”
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Even more important in Nixon’s assessment, Kennedy played a central role in the overthrow and murder of Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. Nixon had long believed the Diem assassination was a crucial turning point in forcing more U.S. involvement, and he frequently referred to it in public and private.
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Nixon tried to resolve the Indochina catastrophe he had been handed as best he could, given his determination not to let the Communists win and to achieve “peace with honor.” Along the way, Nixon and his staff never hesitated to let the two prior administrations take the political hit. Of the two, Nixon preferred to target Kennedy’s. Johnson had been bedeviled by the same band of Kennedy loyalists and “Eastern establishment, Ivy League elites” that targeted Nixon, even though many of them had supported Kennedy’s original Vietnam involvement.
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When the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, giving the public access to the secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Nixon aide Charles Colson wrote to chief of staff Haldeman, “The [Democrats] are very well aware that the major thrust of this controversy will eventually become the Kennedy-Johnson mishandling of the war … We should encourage [Capitol] Hill to carry on well publicized hearings [on] the Kennedy-Johnson papers and over how we got into Vietnam [and] the skill with which the President is managing to get us out.” The dirty-tricks side of Colson also surfaced here: “We could of course plant and try to prove the thesis that Bobby Kennedy was behind the preparation of these papers because he planned to use them to overthrow Lyndon Johnson. (I suspect that there may be more truth than fantasy to this.)”
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A legitimate Nixon inquiry into the Diem assassination morphed into another dirty trick. During the Pentagon Papers controversy, Nixon ordered his senior staff, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, to comb through everything they could find on Diem’s murder and the Kennedy role in it.
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At the same time, Nixon asked Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, to share his agency’s classified internal documents with White House staffers. Nixon promised to keep the documents secret. “Listen, I’ve done more than my share of lying to protect [the CIA and] it was totally right to do it,” he said. Nixon wanted unrestricted access to Langley’s JFK files. “Who shot John?” he asked Helms. “Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Nixon to blame?”
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Helms never turned over the JFK files, but he cooperated with the Diem investigation.

The Diem assignment worked its way down the chain of command into the hands of White House aide E. Howard Hunt.
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As he investigated, he
found that certain critical, timely diplomatic cable traffic was conveniently missing or possibly tampered with. Years later, it was learned that JFK had indeed engineered a cover-up and ordered incriminating cables at the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department destroyed.
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Instead of pursuing this legitimate angle, Hunt—claiming orders from Colson—forged documents incriminating Kennedy and his administration in the Diem debacle.
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As ex-Nixon counsel John Dean told me, “Hunt had a rather simple solution as a former CIA operative. He got his scissors and craft knives out and started phonying up cables by using other cables and patching them together and then Xeroxing them … [Colson] convinced a journalist to publish this story which would’ve indeed hung the murder of Diem on John Kennedy. The story fell apart, however, when the editors asked to see the original copy and the cut-and-pasted version didn’t look as good as the Xeroxed version.” When the forgery was eventually revealed in the spring of 1973, it became a larger scandal than the killing of Diem.
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In this and so many other episodes, one is drawn to a lesson learned too late by President Nixon. In the conclusion to his final speech in the White House on August 9, 1974, Nixon told his assembled staff, “never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
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That became the central lesson of the multilayered scandal that demolished any chance Nixon had of being as well remembered as John Kennedy.

As he began to sink under the weight of Watergate, Nixon and his associates often insisted that dirty tricks and eavesdropping had been the techniques of a series of presidents, certainly including JFK, and again they were correct. For example, Kennedy had left 125 tapes and 68 Dictabelt recordings of conversations, and Lyndon Johnson had made extensive tapings, too, without the knowledge or permission of the other participants.
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In March 1973, Nixon urged John Ehrlichman to “make the subtle point that the highest number of [FBI wire]taps was when Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General and, incidentally, that was before the war in Vietnam had heated up … [G]et across the fact that it was during the Kennedy Administration and the Johnson Administration that the FBI was used for surveillance on newsmen and everybody else … Bobby Kennedy had FBI agents rout newspapermen out of bed in the middle of the night and put them under grilling as to what they knew about a possible price rise by steel companies. This kind of thing, of course, goes far beyond anything we have attempted in the national security area.”
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Later, in July, Nixon urged his new chief of staff, General Alexander Haig, to pursue similar themes: “This Administration has never used the FBI for purely political purposes—both Kennedy and Johnson did … In other words, rather than being the most repressive Administration in these areas
it is perhaps the least repressive Administration despite the fact that we had a massive problem to deal with in terms of domestic violence and, therefore, had much more justification than either Johnson or Kennedy had for enlisting all agencies of the government to deal with that violence.”
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After his resignation, in his memoirs, Nixon stressed the excuse that “everybody did it”:

My reaction to the Watergate break-in was completely pragmatic. If it was also cynical, it was a cynicism born of experience … [DNC chairman] Larry O’Brien might affect astonishment and horror, but he knew as well as I did that political bugging had been around nearly since the invention of the wiretap. As recently as 1970 a former member of Adlai Stevenson’s campaign staff had publicly stated that he had tapped the Kennedy organization’s phone lines at the 1960 Democratic convention. Lyndon Johnson felt that the Kennedys had had him tapped; Barry Goldwater said that his 1964 campaign had been bugged; and Edgar Hoover told me that in 1968 Johnson had ordered my campaign plane bugged …
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… I decided that I wanted all the wiretaps of previous administrations revealed. It was Bobby Kennedy who had authorized the first wiretaps on Martin Luther King. Ultimately King was subjected to five different phone taps and fifteen microphone bugs in his hotel rooms. The Kennedys had tapped newsmen. They had tapped a number of people instrumental in the passage of a sugar import bill they considered important.
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Nixon’s memory was selective, though. His administration extensively used the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the CIA to serve its political needs just as his predecessors had. The age of the imperial presidency had enabled Kennedy and Johnson to get away with their deeds. Nixon was caught, and his web of lies, deceits, and unconstitutional pretensions during Watergate brought down his presidency in an unprecedented way, through resignation in the face of near-certain House impeachment and Senate conviction. Had John Kennedy lived and if his extramarital entanglements had been exposed, he would probably have been forced to resign. Had Lyndon Johnson won a second full term and continued the Vietnam War as Nixon did, he might have triggered abuse-of-power revelations, too, and been forced to leave office early. But JFK by assassination and LBJ through early retirement avoided that fate.

Nixon believed that his political enemies were behind the Watergate revelations. He pointed to Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the
Washington Post
who had been a close JFK confidant, and to Watergate special prosecutor
Archibald Cox, who had worked for JFK in 1960 and been recommended for the prosecutor’s role by Ted Kennedy.
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Nixon might have added that his many foes in a heavily Democratic Congress were eager to do their part in his collapse. (JFK and LBJ were fortunate to have had their party firmly in charge of Capitol Hill throughout the 1960s.) Yet for all the assistance and cheerleading that President Nixon’s adversaries gave to his demise, Nixon caused his own downfall, and he was also the man occupying the White House when the hefty bill came due for long-term presidential abuse of power. That bill would have arrived eventually in any event, but Nixon hastened it with his attitudes as well as deeds. “The more successful Nixon became, the more vengeful he became,” noted John W. Dean. “It’s really quite remarkable. Nixon didn’t mellow with his success, he became embittered by it.”

For a short period, mainly in 1972, JFK’s legacy had dimmed because of Nixon’s spectacular foreign policy successes, just as Kennedy’s domestic record was almost completely eclipsed during the 1965 heyday of the Great Society. But Richard Nixon discovered what Lyndon Johnson already knew: In the broad sweep of history, their presidencies were judged inadequate. Nixon and Johnson had much longer lists of achievements, but fundamental personal faults led to policy disasters and, ultimately, their undoing. More than a decade after Kennedy’s death, compared to both his successors, JFK retained the lion’s share of the American people’s affections.

Ironically, as Nixon fought to keep the White House in his final days, he argued that the nation could not endure another failed presidency, specifically citing Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s early exit.
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When he resigned, he elevated his handpicked vice president, Gerald R. Ford, to the nation’s highest office.
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Americans immediately recognized that he was a pleasant, uncomplicated man who had none of the neuroses that had troubled LBJ and Nixon. After more than a decade of trauma, citizens welcomed a chance to heal.
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