The Abuse of Richard Nixon
Thimmesch, Nick
The Alternative: An American Spectator • April 1976 • Volume 9, Number 7 Nick Thimmesch The Abuse of Richard Nixon • • Back in those miserable months of 1973 and 1974, many defenders of...
...Hoffa was finally "gotten" when a Teamster, in league with the "squad," spied on Hoffa and produced evidence that Hoffa was trying to bribe a juror...
...Walter Sheridan, the former FBI man who showed unblinking loyalty to Kennedy, headed the special squad out to get Hoffa...
...Thus, the executive wing of government, under the Kennedys, used its power in an attempt to defame one of its critics (a felony in itself, according to 18 U.S...
...Critics claim that Nixon and Kissinger instituted the taps to check the loyalty of staffers, and that there was no substantive need for them...
...Chennault or the South Vietnamese embassy on November 2, 1968, when he was campaigning in Albuquerque...
...George Wallace and his brother, Gerald...
...In the meantime...
...Adverse material from that report was leaked to columnist Jack Anderson...
...The FBI subsequently reported that Johnson was interested in the activities of Mrs...
...What other people were wiretapped, followed by FBI agents, intrestigated on a "name check" basis...
...Nor:did they give: more than casual attention to the ..strange case of Judith Campbell (Exner), who alternated her favors between President Kennedy and Sam Giancana, a mobster murdered before he could testify about his alleged role in the assassination plot of Cuban Premier Fidel Castro...
...Katzenbach and Gilpatric (Kennedy-men) are partners in that firm, and both were called in to testify...
...Finally, it was stated that Nixon allowed the now infamous "Plumbers" unit to be established...
...here: The man certainly abused the "Pi:Avers of his office, and his abuses were reprehensible...
...Chennault was spied on in New York City and Washington, according to FBI man Sullivan, "for the purpose of developing political information which could be used against Mr...
...According to Clark Mollenhoff, such an investigation would have reached right into the Oval Office of LBJ . But Johnson held sway over Jordan, and the Democrats outvoted the Republicans, 42-33, to back him and stop the inquiry...
...But Doar also wanted other agencies of government to be used in keeping track of urban troublemakers...
...Most of them were secure with majorities of their own party in Congress, and they all presided in times when Washington was not in the mood to disembowel itself—as was the case during Nixon's Administration...
...In a "Top Secret" statement which the Senate Watergate Committee had, but never pursued, FBI man Sullivan described now Johnson had the FBI set up a "special squad at the [1964] convention to be of assistance to him in various ways...
...In 1952, 174 IRS officials were fired, and nearly all were subject to criminal charges...
...Barry Goldwater's staff, a witness in the Bobby Baker case, government bureaucrats, people attending the 1964 Democratic convention, Mrs...
...But it wasn't until the Church committee was forced to do a little digging that it learned that President Johnson ordered "name checks" on at least seven journalists, including NBC's David Brinkley, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press, and Joseph Kraft, the syndicated columnist...
...No one questioned Doar's thoughtful approach to the awesome chore of collecting the evidence and making a case for impeachThe Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 7 ment charges...
...As Charles Shaffer, an eager member of the squad, said: "Some people say Kennedy was out to get Hoffa...
...One of the worst activities of the FBI is to institute 'a "name check," meaning to collect raw material about a given person, much of it misinformation supplied by his enemies...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator • April 1976 • Volume 9, Number 7 Nick Thimmesch The Abuse of Richard Nixon • • Back in those miserable months of 1973 and 1974, many defenders of President Nixon thought he was being unfairly vilified by the press and by Congress: These apologists did not excuse Nixon's abuses of Presidential power, but they thought that his predecessors had likewise abused the power of their office, and that it was unfair to single out Nixon for condemnation...
...Mitchell, and put into place under the direction of FBI Director Hoover, with reports on the tapped conversations going to Kissinger...
...And it is clear that the transgressions of the Nixon Administration on this score were small compared with those of previous Administrations...
...He asked mewhen was the earliest I could start...
...Other investigative agencies of the federal government might also furnish intelligence information, for example, the intelligence unit of Internal Revenue Service...
...I found that in Detroit this unit, under the direction of John Olszewski, had by far the best knowledge of the Negro areas in Detroit...
...But President Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, did:authorize "Operation Mongoose;_': a secret war against Castro which-was an attempt to :Overthrow his regime `That program' ritifved' Roswell Gilpatric:and Goodwin, and at one point, pusheaa Scheme to disable Cuban sugar worriers with chemical spray...
...Members of Sen...
...Too bad that in this time of telling all, Sen...
...Additionally, Sen...
...Code 1503...
...Though Robert Kennedy denied that he authorized any probing of Lasky, he admitted, after insistent questioning by the late Sen...
...Let us turn now to the Johnson Administration, which, according to William C. Sullivan, onetime assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, used the FBI for political purposes more than any other Administration...
...California Republican Congressman Bob Wilson, in a speech in the House, described how a publisher was wined and dined at the White House and then sent to see Attorney General Kennedy at the Justice Department...
...From New York, other Kennedymen announced that...
...Though a federal judge declared that Nixon had no prior knowledge of the Plumbers' burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, the burglary was authorized by members of the President's staff...
...The records also show that on Oct...
...Edward Kennedy announced that it was inconceivable that his late brother, the President, would ever authorize an assassination of a foreign leader...
...For example, when Victor Lasky's unflattering portrait, JFK: The Man and the Myth, rose to number one on the best seller list, Lasky found himself under investigation by the Justice Department...
...Church also hired Robert .S...
...Some are convinced that there is a "Protect Kennedy Organization" at work in Washington, and that it numbers prominent Senators, journalists, lawyers, and activists who cannot bring themselves to the notion that all was not well in Camelot...
...Lasky maintains that he was actually "followed" during this period, and thought it somewhat humorous that the "overzealous" official was a former Senate committee investigator who specialized in wiretapping...
...Johnson also had the FBI do "name checks" on dozens of people who sent telegrams to the White House in 1965 critical of U.S...
...Louis man escape prosecution on tax fraud...
...In 1964, when Johnson's top aide, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a homosexual situation in the men's room of a YMCA near the White House, Johnson had Bill Moyers ask the FBI to run "name checks" on all persons employed in Senator Barry Goldwater's office...
...But what about the charges in Article II dealing with the abuse of Presidential power...
...The FBI, in 1965, re-fused a request from the Criminal Division of the Justice Department to wiretap a witness in the Baker investigation...
...J. Edgar Hoover had told Johnson, according to Moyers, that two employees of the Republican National Committee, former Goldwater staffers, might have tried to entrap Jenkins...
...Or will we ever know the full story of the Kennedy Administration...
...But Mitchell and Hoover opposed this decision, and Nixon withdrew his approval five days later...
...however, the Church committee investigation of intelligence activities has revealed a wealth of material about previous Administrations which may put Nixon's in some perspective...
...True or not, we did see a parade of men who served in high posts in the Kennedy Administration—Robert S. McNamara, Richard Goodwin, Theodore Sorensen, Roswell Gilpatric, McGeorge Bundy, and John McCone—testify that they never heard President Kennedy or Robert Kennedy issue direct orders to assassinate Fidel Castro or even to indulge in serious discussion of such a plot...
...DirY,f4ntOri' his predecessors in the abuse ' ,4lower...
...Why Baldwin, his secretary, and the Newsweek reporter were wiretapped was never explained...
...We learn that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did not halt these questionable practices by the FBI, and actually were happy to make use of them...
...The alibi was that this "security squad" would "guard against militants, etc...
...President Johnson wanted something done about it quickly, and Attorney General Clark had the word...
...Thus Mrs...
...When the.* ' es of...
...Senators which the FBI had picked up as a "bonus" in its electronic surveillance of foreign intelligence targets for national security purposes...
...For example, Iowa's Governor William Beards-ley was indicted and convicted on an income tax charge after a prominent Iowa Democrat urged the action on the Democratic Administration of Harry Truman...
...Everett Jordan isn't alive to tell why he didn't push the full investigation of the case through the Rules Committee which he headed...
...According to information developed by the Church committee, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized wiretaps in 1962 on New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin and his secretary, which lasted about one month...
...Soon, the publisher issued an order that columnists and newsmen on the paper were to let up in their criticism of the New Frontier...
...The recent revelations about the Kennedy and Johnson Whites Houses show only the tip of the iceberg: who' knows what else went on during their Administrations...
...So by comparison, Nixon was hardly in the same league with his predecessors...
...What is *hidden ,at the Kennedy Library...
...Now, nasty as all this business is, it is hardly new in Washington, as Clark Mollenhoff, the journalist who became Nixon's ombudsman, can well testify...
...He brought in Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy, and Richard Goodwin, who had no real knowledge of the assassination plots, and just kept saying that they couldn't imagine Jack Kennedy doing anything like that...
...Perhaps utilization of other agencies' intelligence potential is too big and difficult a task, :but I raise it for your consideration...
...None of these Presidents ever faced the remotest possibility of impeachment...
...Presidents have alternately used the IRS to "get" political enemies, as well as to do favors for friends...
...All these statements came from the P.K.O...
...Included in the assistance rendered was the development of political information useful to President Johnson...
...Then Marshall, former counsel to IBM, recommended that Church hire F.A.O...
...But my point is that Adam and Eve did not meet at the Watergate...
...Anna Chennault, Spiro Agnew, Vietnam war protesters—all fell under federal surveillance because of Johnson's feelings of fear and vengeance...
...Church protected the Kennedys...
...Another way the Kennedys abused 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 power was in their attempts to get even with people who had crossed them...
...President Truman's appointments secretary, Matthew Connelly, was convicted with T. Lamar Caudle on charges of defrauding the government by accepting oil royalties in return for helping a St...
...2) John Ehrlichman secured from the IRS the tax returns of Lawrence O'Brien, Democratic The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 5 National Chairman...
...At the time, the Republic was afflicted with endless racial disorders in the cities...
...Protect Kennedy Organization') and sounded like they came out of the same typewriter...
...Maybe it's ethical, but it's all too cozy...
...Or consider the second general charge in Article II—that President Nixon had misused the FBI, the Secret Service, and "other executive personnel" by unconstitutionally directing them to use wiretapping and other forms of surveillance on citizens "for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office...
...What documents wete and :AT.: being destroyed...
...It has been suggested, however, that their purpose was to influence Rep...
...Garden Plot" were publrki,e' , ,was :the military, not Clark or D Secretary Clark Clifford or Lyndod qii:oson,, father of these schemes...
...Anna Chennault, widow of the famous leader of the "Flying Tigers," who became a prominent Republican activist...
...It was obvious that Church was trying to cover up for the Kennedys...
...Subsequently, Lasky was charged by several Democratic state chairmen as being an ex-Communist, and National Chairman John Bailey described him as a "Birchite," though neither description fits...
...Sheridan ordered all manner of federal manpower into action, including FBI men and a team of 20 lawyers...
...I knew where he was 24 hours a day," Sheridan bragged...
...But IRS Director Johnnie Walters refused to comply with the Dean request, and the matter was dropped...
...Church's investigators did not press their case too hard on this one...
...Similarly, Johnson ordered the FBI to check telephone toll call records in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to determine if Vice Presidential candidate Spiro Agnew had phoned Mrs...
...While the returns showed large amounts of income, Ehrlichman' s attempt to link this income with Howard Hughes apparently failed...
...and Peter Fenn, son of, Dan Fenn, onetime assistant to President Kennedy, and presently Director of the Kennedy Library...
...Doar, however, has never even been called to testify about it...
...It was charged that: 1) H.R...
...Impeachable...
...Vietnam policy...
...Doar referred him to Burke Marshall (Kennedyman), a member of the screening committee for the Kennedy Library, and Marshall was hired as a consultant...
...What cover-ups were arranged, what Monies disbursed at the Justice Department, what _threats Made on...
...Will we tver-know the whole story of the Bobby Baker case, how this remarkable wheeler-dealer used his White House connections, and whether President Johnson could have been dragged through it the way Nixon was through Watergate...
...Whatever the peccadilloes of President Kennedy, there is good reason to question his judgment, in terms of national security, in getting involved with a woman who not only was intimately linked with a Mafia figure, but one who was dealing With the CIA on a plan to assassinate Castro...
...This argument that Nixon's Administration was no different than his predecessors' became thinner and thinner as his case weakened and his misrepresentations swelled...
...Robert F. Kennedy never would have allowed anything like that either...
...The Narcotics Bureau is another possibility, and finally, my experience in Detroit suggests that the Post Office Department might be helpful...
...Chennault and Agnew because he was "apparently suspicious that the South Vietnamese were trying to sabotage his peace negotiations in the hope that Nixon would win the election and then take a harder line towards North Viet Nam...
...Bob) Haldeman, invoking the President's authority, arranged to get from the IRS the report of its investigation of Gov...
...At the very least the intelligence unit should know where the poverty programs are operating, where the Neighborhood Legal Services are located, who is staffed there so that if there were a need in a particular area, the unit would know where to go to get additional factual material...
...According to Church committee material, names of other critics of Johnson were also sent to the FBI to be checked and reported on...
...Republican Administrations made sure that prominent Democrats who let their taxes slip got plenty of heat from the IRS...
...It was the power and money of the federal government brought to force against a single citizen, though admittedly a seamy one...
...According to Marvin Watson, a White House aide, Johnson became quite "exercised" when he learned about this in 1967, and ordered the FBI to conduct a "run down" on the man who headed the Criminal Division in 1965, as well as four officials in the Treasury Department, and specifically, to determine whether any of these people had associations with Robert F. Kennedy...
...Johnsonian power, activated by political anger, came to bear on the Bobby Baker case in 1967...
...It preceded it by eons...
...Roosevelt's was second on his list...
...FBI agents, Hoffa claimed, were disguised as bellhops, desk clerks, maids, and doormen in the hotel where the Teamsters held their convention...
...30, 1968, Johnson asked the FBI to conduct "physical surveillance" of Mrs...
...According to Olszewski, the Alcohol, Tax and Tobacco Unit has the best intelligence on the geography of ghetto areas...
...Kenneth Keating, that an overzealous" official had undertaken such an investigation without Kennedy's approval...
...This unit was autonomous, arrogant, ruthless, powerful, never lacking for funds, and probably illegal...
...This is a sensitive area," he wrote, "but the poverty programs, the Labor Department programs and the Neighborhood Legal Services, all have access to facts which a unit in the Department might find helpful...
...No one has charged that anything is illegal in this memorandum, but the potential for abuse is dear...
...There was no more flagrant abuse of power in the Kennedy Administration, however, than the establishment of a "Get Hoffa Squad" which Robert Kennedy built into the Justice Department with the full knowledge of his brother, the President...
...There did seem to be a disproportionate number of people with Kennedy connections in the CIA investigation...
...President Johnson secured the returns of countless individuals, and often sent copies of those returns to his crony, Abe Fortas, or to the Fortas law firm, for perusal...
...Who knows whether previous Presidents would have also tried to obstruct justice, if they had been subject to such a blistering investigation...
...Said Goldwater: "The first few witnesses on assassinations all put their finger on the Kennedy White House...
...Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, despite repeated denials, had all manner of foes and suspects, including newsmen, wiretapped...
...A former IRS Commissioner, Joseph D. Nunan, Jr., was indicted and convicted...
...But Robert Kennedy's hatred of Jimmy Hoffa was obsessive, and in his Justice Department, Hoffa belonged to him...
...then Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, to come round to the Kennedys' wishes on a pending sugar bill...
...These Presidents were also smart enough not to install constant tape-recording systems in the Oval Office, nor, above all, to squander their political power ineptly...
...The taps were regarded as legal at the time, were authorized by Attorney General John...
...In short, LBJ ordered a spy-squad to work for his personal political purposes which included snooping on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther King...
...3) John Dean asked the IRS to develop information on some 575 members of Sen...
...Wouldn't you know, one of young Fenn's assignments was to check into the files on Robert F. Kennedy at the Kennedy Library...
...I said two calendar months...
...He is also finally revealed to be responsible for the wiretapping and bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Now if wiretapping, creating a short-lived "Huston Plan," and breaking into a private citizen's office are considered impeachable offenses, what do we know about any similar activity taking place in previous Administrations...
...He said be here Monday...
...Sullivan commented: "Nothing of this scope had ever been done before or since, to my memory...
...There followed a discussion of a possible antitrust violation involving the publisher's paper...
...He had witnesses called back, trying to get them to change their testimony...
...George McGovern's campaign staff...
...Second, it was stated that Tom Charles Huston, acting on Presidential order, drafted a plan of interagency surveillance, surreptitious entries, and mail covers, and got tentative approval from Nixon...
...Now, remember John Doar, who, as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, carefully and soberly considered the sins of Richard Nixon...
...Now that we know some more about previous Administrations, however, wouldn't it be interesting to measure them by the charges drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee against President Nixon...
...On September 27, 1967, John Doar, as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, sent a 12-page confidential memo to Attorney General Ramsay Clark on the problem of troublemakers in urban areas...
...the Army operation he approved that Spied on civilianirotiVeMakers in major cities...
...the tele one, what civil servants fired :or tr erred...
...Nor did they try to justify the Watergate cover-up, but they thought it unfair that only Nixon's Administration was so closely scrutinized...
...Consider Section 1, for example, wherein it was charged that Nixon personally and through his subordinates endeavored "to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens confidential information contained in income tax returns...
...and to cause tax audits and investigations "in a discriminatory manner...
...Doar recommended that a "single intelligence unit" be established to analyze the enormous output of the FBI "about certain persons and groups who make the urban ghetto their base of operation...
...Harold Cooley (D.-N.C...
...As evidence 'for this charge, it was stated, first, that between 1969 and 1971 Nixon, with Henry Kissinger attending to the details, had 17 persons wiretapped, including journalists and White House staffers, ostensibly to determine who was leaking information to the press about national security matters...
...When Robert F. Kennedy was Attorney General, he had the IRS send income tax materials and returns on many labor racketeers, and some of this information was leaked to the press...
...Senator Barry Goldwater, who is sometimes weak on specifics, claims Sen...
...Kennedy had the FBI pursue steel company executives and newsmen alike during the steel crisis of 1962...
...The Washington Post ran an article wherein Richard Goodwin described a situation where he was alone with Kennedy and the President told him he would never get involved in any assassination scheme...
...When the Democrats were in, they did the same to name-Republicans...
...By the time on August 9, 1974 when the helicopter took him away, tears and all, to exile in San Clemente, almost everyone was convinced of his singular perfidy—so that even now the pundits rave hysterically whenever his name is mentioned...
...Richard Nixon's White House may have been like Milton's "Palace of Pandemonium," and Washington at the time could be thought of as "the burning lake of Hell," but the Fall of Man did not occur in his Administration...
...Assistant Commissioner Daniel L. Bolich was indicted on personal tax fraud, and indicted again as a key figure in the tax-fix ring run by Henry Grunewald in Washington...
...Now the "name check" that the Nixon White House ran on CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr has been written about ad nauseam...
...The suspicions of Hoover and Johnson were unfounded...
...The IRS combed the tax returns of Teamster officials and the firms they had contracts with...
...aught the hell...
...The Truman Administration was rife with IRS scandals...
...FBI men stole Teamster records and then accused Teamster leaders of destroying them...
...McNa mara's former son-in-law, Barry Carter, to serve as deputy chief of the military intelligence investigation...
...Nixon" in the Presidential campaign...
...If Nixon had been so involved, no question but a Democratic Congress would have impeached him for it...
...The charges in Article I about obstruction of justice, and in Article III about contempt of Congress, refer mainly to the Watergate break-in and cover-up, and are therefore unique to the Nixon Administration...
...All these Kennedy taps were justified as in the interest of "national security...
...The pursuit was relentless...
...And Bobby couldn't wait...
...Church asked John Doar (Kennedyman) for advice on which legal talent to hire...
...But then no one knew about the "Doar Plan," which has just been revealed in the last few months...
...We learn, for example, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to snoop on hundreds of Americans who had sent FDR telegrams "all more or less in opposition to national defense" dr that approved Charles Lindbergh's criticism of Roosevelt...
...Nor was Ramsay Clark ever questioned about "Operation Garden Plot...
...This official attempted to learn whether Lasky was connected with subversive activities...
...Well, let me tell you, they are 100 percent right...
...So the Criminal Division had the Bureau of Narcotics in the Treasury Department do the job...
...No absolution of Nixon is 13.04i...
...Still other FBI materials show that Kennedy authorized wiretaps on at least six other American citizens, including three officials from his own executive branch, a Congressional staff member, and two registered lobbying agents for foreign interests...
...His loyalists presented him with a leather wallet embossed with the very words the jury foreman uttered when he announced the verdict against Hoffa...
...FBI records showed that Kennedy authorized wiretaps on a reporter for Newsweek magazine in 1961 as part of an investigation of a leak of classified information...
...Kennedy rough stuff often came down on the press as well...
...Kennedy was so delighted that he threw a party for the "Get Hoffa Squad" in Georgetown...
...Again, a perverse use of national security...
...A few years later, I-toover was sending "Personal and confidential" letters to President Truman which contained tidbits of political intelligence—reports of Communist influence in a Senator's speech, advance word that a scandal was brewing which would be "very embarrassing to the Democratic administration," and confidential reports on which publications were going to break stories exposing organized crime and corrupt politicians...
...The Eisenhower Administration also willingly received confidential advisories from the FBI on the role of Communists in the civil rights movement and derogatory raw files on individuals charging the federal government with racial discrimination...
...If Richard Nixon is guilty of anything at all, it is that he threw away the overwhelming support given him by the American people in 1972...
...And no other President leaned on the FBI to investigate citizens suspected of being his "enemies" as Lyndon Johnson did...
...And Johnson, like President Nixon, was happy to receive political information on U.S...
...8 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976...
...A book by Esther and Robert James told how Hoffa was convinced he was followed by FBI agents constantly, had his phone tapped, his mail opened, and electronic listening devices beamed at him from half-a-mile away which were aided by invisible powder that agents rubbed on his clothing...
...Schwartz, a partner in Cravath, Swaine and Moore, the law firm representing IBM, and general counsel to the committee...
...On an organizational chart at Justice, the labor and racketeering unit is a subdivision of the Organized Crime Section of the Criminal Division, and that's where the Hoffa investigation belonged...
...But the Kennedys loved to punish and reward the press, and Baldwin and the Newsweek reporter were strong critics of the man John F. Kennedy named as his Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara...
...As of this writing, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not determined the true intent of the other six taps...
...Johnson was told by the FBI that there were no such records...
...As Mollenhoff points out in Game Plan for Disaster, there is "no way in which access to tax returns can be used to harass an honest man, but an unscrupulous taxing agency can grant favored treatment" to political friends when protected by IRS secrecy...
Vol. 9 • April 1976 • No. 7
