Nixon's Secret (30 page)

Ruby would later have a key role in the cover-up of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, rubbing out the alleged killer of the president, Lee Harvey Oswald, while in Dallas police custody. Oswald was a CIA asset, a Mafia stooge, a patsy, and finally, a liability. From the moment Nixon saw Oswald shot on national television, he recognized the spark plug who pulled the trigger.

“The old man was as white as a ghost,” Nick Ruwe told me. “I asked him if everything was all right.”

“I know that guy,” Nixon muttered.

Ruby’s involvement would make it crystal clear to Nixon that Lyndon Johnson and Carlos Marcello were up to their necks in the Kennedy assassination. Nixon also understood the CIA’s unhappiness with Kennedy over both the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile crisis. In fact, President Nixon would try in vain to secure proof of the CIA’s involvement in Kennedy’s murder.

There is evidence that Nixon’s CIA Cuban hit squad, Operation 40, made an appearance in Dallas during the time of the assassination. Years later, on his deathbed, E. Howard Hunt confessed involvement in the JFK assassination. Hunt said that he was approached to be a “benchwarmer” on the assassination, which was known in certain channels as “The Big Event.” Was Hunt in Dallas on November 22, 1963? In 1974, The Rockefeller Commission concluded that Hunt used eleven hours of sick leave from the CIA in the two-week period preceding the assassination. Saint John Hunt, E. Howard’s son, remembered his mother informing him on November 22, 1963, that Howard was on a “business trip” to Dallas that day. Later, eyewitness Marita Lorenz testified under oath in a district court case in Florida that she saw Hunt pay off an assassination team in Dallas the night before Kennedy’s murder. “One of the things he [E. Howard] liked to say around the house was let’s finish the job,” said Saint John Hunt. “Let’s hit Ted Kennedy.”

Operation 40 members and future Watergate burglars Frank Sturgis and Bernard Barker had similar, ridiculous alibis for where they were during the Kennedy Assassination. “I remember, sir, that I saw the assassination of President Kennedy on television,” Sturgis testified to the Church Committee.
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Barker also testified that he was watching television that afternoon and witnessed “the whole parade, how the whole thing happened.”
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The two men were lying. The Kennedy assassination was not shown live on television or replayed later that tragic day. The first airing of the assassination would not be shown until 1975, when Geraldo Rivera aired it on his late night program
Good Night America
.

In fact, Barker was in Dallas on November 22 and identified by eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza. In 1975, when shown a photograph, Deputy Seymour Weitzman identified Barker as the man he ran into behind the fence on the grassy knoll. Barker showed Weitzman Secret Service credentials, and Weitzman regrettably let him go. The man “had dirty fingernails and hands that looked like an auto mechanic’s hands.” Eyewitness Malcolm Summers also encountered the man with the gun on the knoll, whom he later identified as Bernard Barker.

Three Dallas Police Department officers—Weitzman, D. V. Harkness, and Joe Marshall Smith—said that they also encountered men disguised as Secret Service agents just following the assassination. Officer Smith, directed to the grassy knoll from a woman who heard the shots, ran into someone who flashed him Secret Service credentials. This could only have been a counterfeit agent because all the Secret Service agents with the motorcade proceeded instantly to Parkland Hospital.

If the Operation 40 team was in Dallas and Bernard “Macho” Barker was the man guarding the knoll, it meant that Nixon’s authorization for the CIA recruitment of Mob assassins to assist in the assassination of Fidel Castro before the 1960 election had backfired. I believe Nixon fully understood that this plan had gone awry and had morphed into the assassination of JFK. The cast of characters involved in both endeavors (and later, the Watergate break-in) is more than coincidental.
60 Minutes
producer Don Hewitt would recall an anecdote revealed to him by Senator Howard Baker. Baker asked Nixon who really killed Kennedy. “You don’t want to know,” Nixon tersely replied.

* * *

“History intervened,” his colleague Len Garment noted. “John Kennedy’s death had the ironic consequence of restoring Richard Nixon to life as a national political figure.” Nixon had sensed his opportunity immediately. The very morning after the assassination Nixon would convene a handful of his advisors to assess the impact and regeneration of his political career and trajectory to the White House.
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Although he wanted the 1964 nomination, he had neither the organization nor fundraising capability, nor the time to launch a serious bid. He realized his one chance to be the 1964 nominee would be to emerge as a
compromise
candidate after the party’s liberal and conservative wings slugged it out. Once again Nixon would count on his acceptability to the broad middle and the grudging support he could get from both wings of the party lest each be saddled with leadership from the hated others. Nixon recognized that Barry Goldwater was accident-prone and probably too extreme to win the general election, while he knew that wide swaths of the Republic faithful couldn’t abide Nelson Rockefeller. Central to Nixon’s stealth effort would be a concerted effort to remain unseen as favoring either faction so as to become unacceptable to either while at the same time constantly advertising his “availability.”

It is also important to note that Nixon would call for victory in Vietnam and criticizing the Johnson administration for not doing enough in Vietnam and not doing what they were doing fast enough. This also probably fueled Nixon’s continued standing with both rank-and-file Republican voters and some party professionals. Free of the constraints of servicing the Eisenhower administration, Nixon was blazing his own trail, and his attacks on the issue assured that Nixon was the second choice of many Goldwaterites and certainly better than the loathed Rockefeller.

While early polls showed Nixon with strong residual strength, Nixon knew that many party conservatives were still upset by what they thought was a “me too” campaign against JFK in which Nixon should have laid out a more stark ideological difference.

With Goldwater and Rockefeller attacking each other, a draft movement emerged in New Hampshire for Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s old 1960 running mate, then serving as US ambassador to Vietnam for President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon, disclaiming any intention to become an active candidate but insisting that he would be “available for any role that the party chose him for” counted on his own write-in the Granite State honchoed by former Governor Wesley Powell.

While Nixon’s total was barely respectable, he noted that he had spent no money on the effort, whereas the Lodge forces had been able to finance several statewide mailings with detailed instructions on how to write in the ambassador’s name. Paul Grindle, David Goldberg, and Gerald “Gerry” Carman, later GSA Director under Ronald Reagan, ran the Lodge write-in.

All the while Nixon maneuvered the primaries, he played a cagey backstage game urging first Lodge, then Romney, and finally Pennsylvania governor William Scranton to stop Goldwater. Late in the contest he would get Eisenhower, who feared a Goldwater national candidacy to urge Scranton to run. Nixon, by and large, kept his behind-the-scenes maneuvering from the public eye.

Nixon’s next opportunity to demonstrate his strength was in the Nebraska primary. Again a write-in effort was required because having his name on the ballot would require a certificate of candidacy that he did not want to sign. Nixon had always run well in Nebraska. Former Eisenhower Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton was now back in Hastings, Nebraska, as a newspaper publisher. Seaton directed an aggressive write-in effort. It is important to note that write-ins were easier to execute in Nebraska and that Nebraska Republicans had a record of being adept at them.

Nixon himself would visit Omaha for a long-scheduled “non-political” speech before a luncheon of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Nixon’s speech got broad coverage in the Cornhusker State. Seaton unleashed a direct mail blitz to educate Nebraska voters on how to write-in Richard M. Nixon. The results were impressive.

In April, an
Associated Press
poll of Republican party chairmen showed that among the party professionals, Nixon was “the most likely nominee,” 526 for Nixon to 427 for Goldwater, but when asked to express a personal preference, the vote was 722 for Goldwater and 301 for Nixon.

Nixon’s next opportunity would be in the Oregon primary, where his name appeared on the ballot, as all probable candidates were listed and he would be required to sign an affidavit stating that he would not
accept
to have it removed. Rockefeller would mount a major effort in the state while Goldwater would stumble badly.

Rockefeller camped out in the state while Goldwater made himself scarce. A big win by Rockefeller would obscure a strong showing by Nixon despite the fact his 1960 finance chairman, Cliff Folger had trouble raising money for the effort, facing amazing resistance from well-heeled businessmen who used to cough up sizable checks for Dick Nixon. The Lodge operatives led by Maxwell Rabb and Robert Mullin were undermined when Lodge asked that his name be removed from the ballot without signing the required form. Lodge himself was silent and absent. Suddenly running on the slogan “He cared enough to come,” Rockefeller won a smashing victory while Nixon kept pace with Goldwater.

Nixon immediately recognized that the deadlock he required could only be produced by the results of the looming California primary. The Goldwater forces sent political director Dick Kleindienst to California to take the helm of their campaign in the Golden State. Rockefeller would retain the high-powered political consulting firm of Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts to run his California effort. Spencer and Roberts would emerge as key players in the election of Ronald Reagan only two years later.

Although he would pour millions in the state, Rockefeller’s efforts would be ruined by the birth of his son, Nelson Rockefeller Jr., with his second wife, Margarita “Happy” Fitler Rockefeller. Voters were rudely reminded that Rockefeller had dumped his first wife Mary Todhunter for the younger Mrs. Fitler, who was also married at the time. None of this sat well with Republicans. Goldwater would narrowly win the primary and end any doubts that he would be the Republican nominee.

Nixon realized that Goldwater was piling up delegates in the unheralded caucuses and state conventions. Nixon badly tipped his hand when he attended a Republican governors conference in Cleveland, where he met privately with both Governor George Romney and Governor William Scranton to urge both to enter the lists and “stop Goldwater.” After months of trying to cultivate Goldwater, Nixon went public in an attack on the Arizona Senator in a press briefing at the conference.

Nixon fired a frontal attack at the senator’s stands on foreign policy, Social Security, the TVA, “right to work” laws, and civil rights.

“Looking to the future of the party,” he said, “it would be a tragedy if Senator Goldwater’s views as previously stated were not challenged—and repudiated.”
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Even more surprisingly, Nixon now urged Romney to enter as an active candidate. For five months, Nixon had been maneuvering for a stalemate, after which Nixon would be tapped as the natural compromise candidate. Now he was trying to rush that process in six short weeks. With Rockefeller dead and Scranton apparently uninterested, Romney was the only man to play the role of Nixon’s stalking-horse. But Romney declined.

Goldwater was furious at Nixon’s remarks and fired back, “I guess he doesn’t know my views very well. I got most of them from him.” He even added, “Nixon is sounding more like Harold Stassen every day.”
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Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota, ran for president in 1944, 1948, 1952, 1964, 1968, 1976, and 1980.

Nixon would enlist Eisenhower to privately urge Scranton to make the last-ditch “establishment” bid to stop the surging conservative revolution going on in the Republican Party. Neither Ike nor Dick would publicly endorse Scranton, however. Nixon had attacked Goldwater to set the stage for a white knight whom was neither Romney nor Scranton. Nixon was still angling for another shot at the brass ring as the “only man who could unite both the moderate and Goldwater forces.”