Nixon's Crimes

July 10, 2008

Richard Nixon

Former President Richard Nixon beat his wife, Pat, before, during, and after their White House years. Along the way, he sucker-punched a long list of aides and others who miffed him.

by Don Fulsom

Richard Nixon was certainly one of our most bared-knuckled political fighters. But probably no other American politician actually punched, pushed, kicked, slapped, shouldered, shoved or upended as many folks who'd ignited—usually without malicious intent—his volcanic temper. The way he repeatedly behaved would land most people behind bars.

Nixon's flying fists were usually dispatched as "sucker punches"—unexpected blows from out of left field when the target's guard was fully down. Nixon threw one such punch at a political aide—and a disabled one at that—nearly 50 years ago. Had that been confirmed at the time, the newspaper headline might have read, "Vice President Assaults Crippled Campaign Consultant." But the punch, which joins myriad evidence of Nixon's violent nature, only became verified in a newly released document from the National Archives.

The incident itself took place in the fading hours of Nixon's bitterly waged, losing 1960 presidential race against Sen. John Kennedy. The day before the election, Nixon put on a four-hour telethon from a Detroit studio. As airtime approached, Nixon became infuriated with TV consultant Everett Hart because Hart had declined to run a last-minute errand for the vice president. Before the aide even considered putting up his dukes, however, the short-fused Nixon let go with a haymaker to Hart's rib cage. One of the aide's arms was shriveled and he was recovering from major cardiac surgery. On loan to the Nixon campaign from a top Madison Avenue ad agency, Hart quit on the spot and refused to ever work for Nixon again.

April 15, 2007

Howard Hughes in the 1940s with his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane in Inglewood, California.

In the early years of the Nixon presidency, billionaire Howard Hughes bribed Nixon with $100,000 in cash. When Hughes's secret lobbyist Larry O'Brien became Democratic Party chairman, Nixon had O'Brien's phone at the Watergate tapped to find out if he knew about the bribe.

by Don Fulsom

"I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness. Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life … If we select Nixon, then he, I know for sure knows the facts of life." – Howard Hughes, early in the 1968 presidential campaign.

In the annals of disastrous U.S. political payoffs, nothing is ever likely to top Howard Hughes's $100,000 gift to President Richard Nixon. That's because Nixon's subsequent paranoia over the illegal contribution led, in large measure, to the Watergate burglary and its cover-up – which, of course, ultimately forced Nixon to evacuate the White House just steps ahead of his eviction in August 1974. One month later, a presidential pardon from his handpicked successor and loyal old friend, Gerald Ford, likely saved Nixon himself (some 40 Nixon administration officials were jailed for Watergate crimes) from spending any time behind bars.

In the early years of Nixon's presidency, power-hungry, episodically nutty billionaire Howard Hughes secretly bribed his favorite corrupt politician with $100,000 in cold cash. The money was skimmed from a Hughes gambling casino in Las Vegas – "siphoned like a sip of champagne from the Silver Slipper," according to a later account by columnist Jack Anderson.

Aug. 30, 2004 Updated Jan14, 2007

Nixon addressing his cabinet and White House staff
prior to his departure, Aug. 9,1974.

On the eve of the release of the "smoking-gun tape," President Nixon cut a blanket pardon deal with Vice President Ford that would put Ford in the Oval Office eight days later.

by Don Fulsom

Thirty years ago, President Gerald Ford stunned the nation by granting his crooked predecessor, Richard Nixon, a preemptive blanket pardon for all of his White House crimes. He did so, Ford said, for the good of the country: "My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it."

The pardon got the ex-president off the legal hook on a host of criminal activities he had ordered, led and/or covered up. The Watergate crimes alone ranged from burglary to campaign sabotage, espionage, and illegal fund-raising, and included efforts to exploit, subvert or pervert the Justice and State Departments, the CIA, the IRS, the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as a wide variety of other assaults on the U.S. Constitution and on the rules of democratic fair play.

February 5, 2006

President Richard Nixon with Bebe Rebozo (left) and J. Edgar Hoover (center)
at the "Florida White House". Credit: National Archives.

By the time he became president in 1969, Richard Nixon had been on the giving and receiving end of major underworld favors for more than two decades. Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg.

by Don Fulsom

During the height of the Watergate scandal, Atty. Gen. John Mitchell's wife, Martha, sounded one of the first alarms, telling a reporter, ''Nixon is involved with the Mafia. The Mafia was involved in his election.''

White House officials privately urged other reporters to treat any anti-Nixon comments by Martha as the ravings of a drunken crackpot.

Time, however, has proved Mrs. Mitchell right.

Richard Nixon's earliest campaign manager and political advisor was Murray Chotiner, a chubby lawyer who specialized in defending members of the Mafia and who enjoyed dressing like them too, in a wardrobe highlighted by monogrammed white-on-white dress shirts and silk ties with jeweled stickpins. The monograms said MMC, because – perhaps to seem more impressive – he billed himself as Murray M. Chotiner, though, in reality, he lacked a middle name.

In this cigar chomping, wheeler-dealer, Nixon had found what future Nixon aide Len Garment called ''his Machiavelli – a hardheaded exponent of the campaign philosophy that politics is war.''

When Nixon went on to the White House, both as vice president, and later as president, he took Chotiner with him as a key behind-the-scenes advisor – and for good reason. By the time he became president in 1969, thanks in large part to Murray Chotiner's contacts with such shady figures as Mafia-connected labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, Richard Nixon had been on the giving and receiving end of major underworld favors for more than two decades.

October 15, 2003 (updated 03/22/09)

Richard M. Nixon press conference releasing the transcripts
of the White House tapes, 04/29/1974.

Nixon's ties to the assassination of President Kennedy run deep, from his association with Jack Ruby, his ties to Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia, and his connection to CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. On a tape recorded in Nixon's White House office in 1972 he told two top aides that the Warren Commission Report pulled off "the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated." No one knew that better than he did.

by Don Fulsom

Seared into the memories of all Americans who lived through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is exactly where they were on November 22, 1963. Yet private citizen Richard Nixon, who — believe it or not — was in Dallas, could not recall this fact in a post-assassination interview with the FBI.

The interview dealt with an apparently false claim by Marina Oswald that her husband —alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald — had targeted Nixon for death during an earlier trip to Dallas. A Feb. 28, 1964 FBI report on the interview said Nixon "advised that the only time he was in Dallas, Texas, during 1963 was two days prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

While Nixon eventually came clean regarding his whereabouts on that fateful day, he seemed touchy whenever the matter was raised. For example, in a 1992 interview with CNN's Larry King, Nixon interjected he was in Dallas "In the morning!" when King cited the presumed geographical coincidence. Nixon left Dallas on a flight to New York several hours before Kennedy's noontime arrival at Love Field.

June 15, 2009

Jack Anderson

Richard Nixon detested syndicated reporter Jack Anderson and put right at the top of his “enemies list.” When Nixon-ordered CIA and FBI volunteered surveillance of the muckraker failed to dig up any dirt, the plot to assassinate Anderson took on a life of its own at the White House.

by Don Fulsom  

During Richard Nixon’s presidency, Jack Anderson was America’s premier investigative journalist—and Nixon’s most despised. In the most chilling crime contemplated by the President’s men, Anderson was targeted for assassination.

A strict moralist, Anderson’s stated lifetime goal was to keep government honest. A devout Mormon, he viewed his reportorial undertaking as a noble summons from the Almighty.

Former Anderson legman Howard Kurtz recalls that Anderson was gentle, patient and avuncular “with the young and ambitious wannabes who rotated through his small office.” He adds that Anderson’s “ability to persuade people at the highest level of government to share secrets with him was uncanny, especially in an era when most journalists were deferential toward the nation’s leaders and when top political columnists had cozy relationships with the high and mighty.”

Anderson was the last of the old-time muckrakers and, according to his biographer, Mark Feldstein, “an important transitional figure in the evolution of adversarial journalism …” Feldstein conceded, however, that Anderson would sometimes stoop fairly low to get a good story:  “He swiped secret documents, used bugging equipment to eavesdrop on conversations, and jubilantly savaged his enemies, unconcerned with such journalistic niceties as fairness and balance,” the author pointed out in a 2004 interview with The Washington Post.

June 29, 2009

Sen. Edward Kennedy

Chappaquiddick was a bonanza for the Kennedy-hating Nixon, who tried many tactics to catch Ted Kennedy in an extra-marital affair in order to derail his anticipated 1972 presidential bid.

by Don Fulsom

In the summer of 1969, President Richard Nixon was licking his chops to discover just what had really happened to Edward Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts.  He speedily dispatched two undercover White House investigators to the scene of the suspicious watery car crash that took the life of Kopechne, Kennedy’s companion. Nixon told top aide Bob Haldeman he didn’t want Kennedy to get away with anything.  Haldeman wrote a diary entry saying the President believed Kennedy “was drunk, escaped from the car, let (Mary Jo) drown, said nothing until police got to him.  Shows fatal flaw in his character, cheated at school (Kennedy was expelled from Harvard for cheating), ran from accident”

When the senator went on TV to tell his version of what happened, Nixon privately noted many “gaps and contradictions,” adding: “I could not help thinking if anyone other than a Kennedy had been involved and had given such a patently unacceptable explanation, the media and the public would not have allowed him to survive in public life.”