The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers

Author:Anthony Summers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-10-23T03:26:11+00:00

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Nixon wanted “permanent tails” placed on “Teddy”—Edward Kennedy—“Muskie”—Senator Edmund Muskie, the likely Democratic front-runner—and “Hubert”—Humphrey, the former vice president Nixon had narrowly defeated in 1968.

Muskie and Kennedy were on the Enemies List along with George McGovern, who would in fact emerge as the Democrats’ candidate for 1972. However real the threat posed by the last Kennedy brother, Nixon still obsessed about the Kennedy legacy.

“Nixon was ill at ease,” Kissinger recalled of a 1969 visit to Berlin, “worried that the turnout would be compared unfavorably with that for Kennedy in 1963. Only after he was assured repeatedly that no unfavorable comparisons could possibly be drawn did he relax.”

Although Edward Kennedy had recently been elected assistant Senate majority leader, his presidential hopes had been severely compromised in the summer of 1969 by the tragedy—and international sensation—of Chappaquiddick.

Nixon “called me over to tell family about Teddy Kennedy’s escapade,” Haldeman recorded in his diary, “. . . late last night in Martha’s Vineyard, drove his car off a bridge into a pond, left girl in it to drown. . . . Lots of peculiar possibilities . . . . [President] wants to be sure he doesn’t get away with it . . . very interested . . . feels it marks the end of Teddy.”

If Nixon was confident that Chappaquiddick spelled an end to Kennedy’s career, his actions belied it. At the president’s behest, Ehrlichman sent one of his permanent undercover men—retained on a twenty-two-thousand-a-year salary paid by Nixon’s personal attorney—to the scene of the drowning within hours.2 He stayed there for days, posing as a Philadelphia Enquirer journalist and reporting back several times daily to the White House.

A week later Nixon was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, welcoming the Apollo astronauts back from the first moon landing. The mission was the fulfillment of a dream first articulated by President Kennedy, and the president now called it “the greatest day since the Creation.” His mind, though, was still on the car wreck in a Massachusetts pond.

Nixon reached Ehrlichman by radiotelephone, aboard a train, for an update on Chappaquiddick. Later, when Kennedy presented his version of the accident in a nationwide broadcast, an aide in Washington held a phone to the radio so that Haldeman could listen in Guam. “P still very interested,” Haldeman noted, “has a lot of theories.”

Nixon would claim in his memoirs that he felt “deeply sorry” for Kennedy over Chappaquiddick. Two weeks afterward, following a meeting at the White House, he took him aside to say he “understood how tough it was. . . .” The record contains nothing to indicate he was genuinely sorry, however, and a former aide thought he was actually “overjoyed” at Kennedy’s plight.3

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