Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (16 page)

  a man & no one will ever forget it
⁵

Even while Nixon & Co. were plotting Ted Kennedy’s political destruction, the president was feigning friendship with Ted. On August 4, 1969, after a breakfast briefing of the legislative leaders of both parties, Nixon invited Ted into his office for a private chat. Bob Haldeman was present to take notes of the conversation.

[The president] told [Kennedy] he understood how rough it was, etc. Said he was surprised to see how hard the press had been on him, especially because they like him, but you have to realize they are your enemy at heart, even if they do like you, because their prime motivation is the story.
⁶

· · ·

I
N THE SPRING
of 1970, shortly after publication of the official inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, detective Jack Caulfield composed a memo suggesting a plan of action to undermine Ted Kennedy if he chose to run against Nixon in 1972.

On April 30, 1970, Caulfield wrote:

[Murray] Chotiner [a political dirty trickster who had been involved in all of Richard Nixon’s campaigns] and I have discussed this matter and we both agree that the media will do an initial effective exposure of the distortions. For the long haul, either this November or [the presidential election year of] ’72, we can program, if need be, a very damaging document for public consumption…. When and if it becomes necessary, we can take the step recommended above. In the meantime, I will keep the document in my possession. It is ready for your perusal any time.
⁷

Former detective Tony Ulasewicz explained the mysterious reference to a “document” in his 1990 memoir,
The President’s Private Eye
. “Staff members of the Republican National Committee were kept busy clipping and pasting together every newspaper article and editorial [about Chappaquiddick] that broke into print,” Ulasewicz wrote. “The White House wanted a record of the attack on Kennedy’s credibility to use if Kennedy ever sought the Presidency. A scrap-book of the articles and editorials was put together and given the title ‘At an Appropriate Time.’”
⁸

Nixon probably never saw the scrapbook. But he liked Caulfield’s idea, and during a presidential flight to Rome in September
1970, he ordered Haldeman to create a “campaign attack group.” The president wanted the members of this group—Murray Chotiner, speechwriter Pat Buchanan, and political operative Lyn Nofziger, among others—to obtain the income tax returns of Nixon’s potential Democratic opponents in 1972, including Ted Kennedy’s.

The illegal White House campaign against Ted didn’t stop there.

In December 1970, clandestine photos, taken in Paris and showing Ted carrying on with an “Italian princess,” were sent by the White House to Edmund Muskie to be used against Ted in the 1972 Democratic primary.

In June 1971, according to Haldeman’s notes, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reported to Nixon that

Teddy Kennedy is now in the position of practically being a total animal. At the opening of the Kennedy Center, he went to work on Christina Ford, whom he had also propositioned at the Carlyle…. He walked up to her door, said he wanted to screw her, and she said that they couldn’t because of the press, and he said the press will never touch me. He pulled the same thing on Edgar Bergen’s daughter [Candice]…. So we need to take advantage of this opportunity and get him in a compromising situation if we can.
⁹

O
N MAY
15, 1972, while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, for the Democratic presidential nomination, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, was shot by a would-be assassin. The near-fatal attack convinced many people that all presidential contenders—even those who had not yet won their party’s nomination—should be given Secret Service protection, and Nixon immediately seized on this idea as a way to plant spies on Ted Kennedy.

“Is there anyone [in the Secret Service] we can rely upon?” Nixon asked Erlichman at a meeting in the Oval Office.

“Yeah, yeah,” Erlichman replied. “We got several.”

“Plant one, plant two guys on [Kennedy],” Nixon said. “This would be very useful.”

Later, Nixon added: “We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch. Ruin him…. It’s going to be fun.”

And so, Nixon assigned a Secret Service detail to Ted Kennedy, even though Ted hadn’t declared his candidacy for the nomination and hadn’t asked for protection. Perhaps smelling a rat, Ted called off the protection after a few weeks.

I
N THE END
, Ted Kennedy decided not to run in 1972, and Nixon scored a landslide victory over his ineffectual Democratic opponent, George McGovern. Several months after the election, James McCord, one of the burglars convicted of breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter to U.S. District Court Judge John J. Sirica. In his letter, McCord charged the Nixon administration with covering up the Watergate conspiracy. His letter helped set off the Watergate investigation that consumed the country for the next two years.

On March 13, 1973, Nixon met in his office with John Dean, the White House counsel. During their long, rambling conversation, which was secretly tape-recorded by the president, Dean and Nixon discussed a strategy to counter the Watergate investigation being conducted by his Democratic adversaries in Congress.

Dean informed the president that William Sullivan, the former head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations who had been fired for insubordination by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, had
come forward with an offer of help. Sullivan was prepared to blow the whistle on Nixon’s Democratic predecessors—Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—for using illegal means to spy on American citizens. For instance, Sullivan could testify that he had personally mailed tapes in 1964 to Coretta Scott King containing secret recordings of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., with other women.

Nixon was curious to know what Sullivan wanted as a quid pro quo for his cooperation.

“He wants back in the Bureau very badly,” Dean said.

“That’s easy,” Nixon replied.

However, for reasons that have never been explained, Nixon did not give Dean permission to unleash William Sullivan against Nixon’s enemies. Instead, Dean and Nixon got sidetracked on a different subject—the illegal $100,000 slush fund from CREEP that had been used to pay for the dirty-tricks campaign against Ted Kennedy.

Dean
: There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there are going to be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President. I’d be less than candid if I didn’t tell you the—there are …

President
: I see …

Dean
: [Y]ou’ll recall that sometime … right after Chappaquiddick, somebody was put up there [on Martha’s Vineyard] to start observing. Within six hours.

President
: Did we?

Dean
: That’s right.

President
: I didn’t know that.

Dean
: That man watched that—he was there for every second of Chappaquiddick, uh, for a year, and almost two years he worked for, uh, he worked for Jack Caulfield …

President
: Oh, I heard of Caulfield, yeah.

Dean
: … when I came over here [to the White House], I inherited Caulfield …

President
: Yeah.

Dean
: Well, if they get to those bank records … and they say, “What are these about? Who is this fellow … that you paid?” There comes Chappaquiddick with a vengeance. This guy is a, is a twenty-year detective on the, uh, New York City Police Department.

President
: In other words, we—… [
unintelligible
] consider that wrong, do we?

Dean
: Well … it’s going to come out and the whole thing is going to turn around on that one. I mean, if Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into…. [The detective] talked to everybody in [Edgartown]. He’s the one who caused a lot of embarrassment for Kennedy already…. He went up there as a newspaperman. “Why aren’t you checking into this? Why aren’t you looking there?”—bringing the press’s attention to things. The guy did a masterful job.

President
: … why didn’t we get it [the damaging information on Ted Kennedy] out anyway?

Dean
: Well, we sort of saved it. [
laughs
]
¹⁰

B
UT IT WAS
no laughing matter. For by now, Ted Kennedy had become aware of Nixon’s machinations. To save his foundering presidency, Nixon was prepared to resort to what some were calling a “doomsday scenario.” He threatened to disclose the most
damaging secrets of the Kennedy administration—namely, that President John Kennedy had secretly plotted to assassinate foreign leaders and had illegally wiretapped the telephone conversations of American citizens.

Nixon had two goals in mind. First, he wanted to show that his abuses of power, which were known collectively as “Watergate,” were no worse than those that had been committed by John Kennedy. And second, by discrediting the record of the Kennedy administration, Nixon hoped to eliminate the Kennedy mystique and undermine Ted’s claim to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.

This time, Nixon had it right: Ted had his sights set on 1976. And Ted was under no illusions; he understood that Nixon would stop at nothing to discredit him. That left Ted with little choice: if he wanted to keep his 1976 hopes alive, he had to take on Richard Nixon.

Ted had an unusually able man to assist him in the largely subrosa campaign that he waged against Richard Nixon. The man’s name was Jim Flug, and he was the chief counsel on Ted’s Administrative Practices and Procedures Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. Working closely with Ted Kennedy, Jim Flug gathered a mountain of incriminating information against the Nixon administration, which was used later in the Watergate investigation.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield went along with the Kennedy-Flug probe, but Mansfield ruled that, when the time came, no Democrats with presidential ambitions could sit on the committee investigating the Nixon administration. Mansfield wanted to avoid the appearance of a partisan witch hunt. And that automatically eliminated Ted Kennedy from the public fray.

Nonetheless, Ted managed to play a vitally important, if unheralded, role in the Watergate proceedings. He made sure that Sam Ervin’s Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices,
which investigated Watergate, was invested with the necessary power to do its job. He brought in his old friend Burke Marshall to monitor the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry. Marshall in turn recommended his protégé, John Doar, to become the special counsel of the impeachment inquiry. Ted and Jim Flug rewrote key sections of the charter under which Harvard professor Archibald Cox would function as the independent Watergate special prosecutor. Cox was a fierce Kennedy partisan who had served as solicitor general in John Kennedy’s administration.

And so, by 1973, the impeachment juggernaut was in the hands of many people loyal to Ted Kennedy. When President Nixon subsequently ordered Cox to be fired, Ted Kennedy called the firing “a reckless act of desperation by a president who is afraid of the Supreme Court, who has no respect for law and no regard for men of conscience.” The next day, Ted put his staff to work researching the historical precedents for a Senate impeachment trial of Richard Milhous Nixon.

The embattled president never resorted to the “doomsday scenario.”

14

I
N NOVEMBER
1973, as the tenth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination approached, tragedy struck the Kennedy family yet again. It began when Ted Kennedy’s middle child, Teddy Jr., who had just turned twelve, complained of a pain in his right leg that wouldn’t go away.

The boy didn’t take his complaint to his father, who was absorbed by the Watergate investigation. He didn’t tell his mother, either, because Joan was thousands of miles away in Europe, where, according to
Washington Post
gossip columnist Maxine Cheshire, she was “leading a life of her own.” Instead, Teddy Jr. went to Theresa Fitzpatrick, his governess, who passed on the boy’s concerns to Ted.