Besieged: Nixon saw enemies all around him

[December 03, 2008]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- In December 1972, when a less complicated president might have been relishing a big re-election victory a month earlier, Richard Nixon had enemies on his mind.

One of them, North Vietnam, would soon be rained with bombs. Nixon's other foes merely received his vitriol.

"Never forget," Nixon tells national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped Oval Office conversation revealed Tuesday. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.

"Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

The conversation was on Dec. 14, 1972, four days before the U.S. unleashed a massive series of air attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong aimed at getting North Vietnam to negotiate more seriously in peace talks.

"We're going to bomb them," Nixon told Kissinger and adviser Alexander Haig, green lighting one of the most controversial acts of the war. "We'll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it's Christmas withdrawal."

The Nixon Library, run by the National Archives, posted nearly 200 hours of White House tape recordings online and opened 90,000 pages of documents in its latest release of material from his administration.

The tapes include a conversation Nixon had with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin earlier in December. Nixon wanted the Soviets to lean on Hanoi to negotiate seriously in the lagging talks.

"Your government and I -- we've got bigger fish to fry than this damn thing," Nixon said, meaning the war. "The main thing is to get this one out of the damn frying pan so that we can get busy, on with other things." He called Vietnam an "irritant."

Kissinger later called the decision to resume bombing the loneliest one Nixon had made thus far. In their Dec. 14 meeting, he is heard telling the president: "We have to convince them that we are not easily pushed around."

Peace negotiations resumed in early January and quickly produced agreement, although largely on terms negotiated before the bombing.

Nixon scholar Luke A. Nichter said the latest tapes show "President Nixon was more involved in the minutia of the Vietnam War than we previously thought, at least during the Christmas bombing period." Nichter runs nixontapes.org, devoted to dissemination and analysis of Nixon's taped meetings and phone calls.

More than 2,200 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House have been made available by the National Archives, with some 1,200 hours still to come.

Paradoxically, said Nichter, "one of the most secretive presidential administrations in American history will over time become the best chronicled because of the tapes."

The latest documents underscore the degree to which Nixon's distrust of so much around him was reflected by his suspicious aides.

Nixon's operatives dished dirt on the president's critics and public figures, including their marital, mental and drinking problems, and struggled to contain growing public unrest over the war in Vietnam.

In one memo, Alabama Gov. George Wallace was branded a "psychotic" who could be useful in making trouble for his fellow Democrats. Thomas Eagleton's treatments for mental illness were reported to Nixon's secretary in other correspondence before that disclosure forced him to resign from the 1972 Democratic ticket.

The records show that Nixon kept an exceptionally close eye on anti-war and civil rights protests, even the most benign.

Senior FBI official Mark Felt regularly reported to Nixon and his national security team on events as minor as a high-school cafeteria fight in which seven students were arrested and a peaceful sit-in by 20 college students in Rhode Island.

Felt was up to much bigger things on the sly. He was Deep Throat, feeding revelations to The Washington Post about the Watergate scandal that would ultimately bring Nixon down.

Even as Nixon campaigned toward a landslide re-election in 1972, he felt besieged on multiple fronts.

In an August 1972 memo to aide Charles Colson, he complained that New York business and financial writers were in the bag for Democratic opponent George McGovern "and are trying to do us in."

That attitude permeated his staff, the documents suggest, as aides looked for ways to take on unfriendly organizations and people.

White House staff assistant John R. Brown III appealed in one memo for "a coordinated Congressional and columnist attack on the question of the Urban Coalition's tax exempt status," because its chairman, John Gardner, had started a lobbying group seen as hostile to Nixon's agenda.

Patrick Buchanan, a special assistant to Nixon and now a conservative commentator, wrote to Nixon's top aide and to the attorney general about Wallace, the longtime civil rights opponent who was challenging McGovern for the Democratic nomination.

"From an excellent source in Alabama comes word Governor Wallace is 'getting psychotic,' that he has serious marital problems and that he is 'not what he used to be,' Buchanan wrote in January 1972. He said this could affect "just how much of an embroglio he can create at the Miami Beach convention."

Wallace was shot in May while campaigning in Maryland and spoke at the Democrats' Miami convention from his wheelchair.

Also in Buchanan's files was a letter to Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, from St. Louis supporter Sam Krupnick, telling Nixon aides that McGovern's running mate had been in and out of a St. Louis mental institution.

The letter said Eagleton "was suffering from acute alcoholism. He still has a whiskey voice. He came by it honestly." The letter also addressed allegations about Eagleton's marriage.

Inside the administration, even the government's statistician did not escape political scrutiny.

The knock against him, as related by a December 1971 memo from Colson, was that he stuck to numbers, "applies little imagination to the statistics" and is "a very poor advocate for our point of view."

Suspicions about federal employees in Nixon's own administration did not die off after the election. Buchanan proposed a "housecleaning" of insufficiently loyal workers.

He described the Latin American office of the Peace Corps as "a hotbed of Kennedy-Shriver types," and said of the Health, Education and Welfare Department: "Those responsible for the concerted and continuing effort to win support for discredited child development 'schemes' should be ferreted out."

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On the Net:

Nixon Presidential Library and Museum:
http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/

The National Archives: http://archives.gov/

Analysis and tapes: http://www.nixontapes.org/

[Associated Press; By CALVIN WOODWARD]

Associated Press writers Gillian Flaccus in Yorba Linda, Calif., and Pete Yost and Natasha Metzler in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.