Heroes, Hacks, and Fools: Memoirs From the Political Inside by Ted Van Dyk

Author:Ted Van Dyk [Dyk, Ted Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political, History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9780295989709
Google: 7NoTCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 26309120
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2007-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

11

STRANGE PRESIDENTS, NIXON AND CARTER

To those of us active in national politics during the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed incredible that Richard Nixon had rebounded from a presidential-election loss, a humiliating California gubernatorial-election loss, Watergate, and Vietnam to be twice elected president. Yet, if Albert Camus' remark that “character is fate” ever was to have relevance, it certainly came to apply to Nixon, whose feelings of inferiority and paranoia led him to an internal vision in which he was surrounded by enemies who had to be destroyed before they could destroy him.

Nixon made his political mark with charges of disloyalty approaching treason against real and imagined political adversaries in his California campaigns and in the Congress. He clearly violated the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from conducting national diplomacy, in his 1968 scheming with South Vietnamese president Thieu to block Vietnam War peace negotiations so that both he and Thieu might benefit politically. The 1972 break-in at the Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate office complex led him into cover-ups and lies which in the end brought down his presidency. Many theories have been advanced regarding the purpose of the break-in. To those knowledgeable about activities at either party's national headquarters, the break-in seemed absurd. No major secrets—certainly no secrets justifying the risk of the presidency itself—exist in party headquarters. Real power and planning in any presidential campaign rest not at party headquarters but in the organizations of the candidates themselves.

My own theory about the Watergate break-in is that Nixon feared that Democratic Chair Larry O'Brien might have files there regarding a relationship between Nixon's brother, Donald Nixon, and government officials and private individuals in the Dominican Republic, or regarding Nixon's own relationship with the Howard Hughes organization. O'Brien himself had such relationships. Whether or not O'Brien had any such files, however, they never came to light in the 1972 campaign, and were never mentioned by any Nixon associate as the purpose of the break-in. Otherwise there was no apparent justifying reason for so large a risk.

After Nixon's 1972 reelection, it became known that he had authorized surveillance of political and Vietnam War critics, and also break-ins at their homes and offices. The existence of a Nixon “enemies list” became public. A front-page story in the Washington Star revealed that Frank Mankiewicz and I had been singled out for special Internal Revenue Service scrutiny of our tax returns. (It probably was the best IRS insurance I could have secured; in the years since, I have never received a tax audit.) During 1974 congressional investigations into campaign “dirty tricks,” Gary Hart, Mankiewicz, and I were subpoenaed by Republican committee staff for questioning about alleged McGovern-campaign tricks rivaling those of the Nixon campaign's. I also was asked about alleged 1968 Humphrey-Muskie campaign espionage and sabotage directed toward the Nixon campaign. It gave me an opportunity to read into the record the fact that there had been none. In 1968, Humphrey staffer Eiler Ravenholt had followed the Nixon campaign with a tape

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.