Having spent eight years as Vice President to Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon was the natural choice for a Republican candidate in 1960, even though Eisenhower was unable to name a single idea he had contributed, when asked by a reporter: “If you give me a week, I might think of one”. Nixon himself later confided to Bob Haldeman: “I saw Dwight Eisenhower alone about six times in the whole deal”. Nixon had been mostly busy in clandestine operations. 



On the day of his victory over Nixon in 1960, whom he had known from their political beginnings, John Kennedy commented to a friend: “If I’ve done nothing for this country, I’ve saved them from Dick Nixon”. He couldn’t have foreseen, of course, that Nixon would be back in 1968 to win the Presidency after his brother Robert’s assassination. While Johnson is, to this day, the only American President to forgo a second term due to unpopularity, Nixon would become the only President to resign under the threat of impeachment; the Watergate scandal and the subsequent release of conversation recordings revealed to the public Nixon’s paranoia, hypocrisy and cynicism. After his resignation, Nixon’s psychiatrist since 1952 Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker (who had privately expressed concerns over the President’s mental health), suggested in a New York Times article that from then on, Presidential candidates be subjected to a psychiatric evaluation.



In 1968, Nixon won by a narrow margin over the Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey would probably have won if Johnson had managed to put an end to the Vietnam war, as he was hoping to do in the last months of his term. In October, his Administration had announced a “bombing halt” and convinced the leaders of South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong to enter into negotiations. The peace talks, planned in November, would have given the Democratic candidate a decisive advantage in the elections. But Nixon sabotaged the plan by secretly promising a better deal to South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu and persuading him to boycott the talks. At the same time, he told the American people: “If in November this war is not over, I say that the American people will be justified in electing new leadership, and I pledge to you that new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific”. Nixon’s secret emissary to the South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem was a Chinese diplomat named Anna Chennault (the widow of a Lieutenant General and a member of Nixon’s campaign team), who acknowledges her role in her 1980 autobiography, The Education of Anna, as does Bui Diem in his 1987 memoir, In the Jaws of History. In a book co-written by Jerrold Schecter (The Palace File, 1986), Nguyen Tien Hung, adviser to President Nguyen van Thieu, quotes Thieu outlining Nixon’s assurances to him in 1968: “He promised me eight years of strong support: four years of military support during his first term in office and four years of economic support during his second term,” further making it clear that “economic support” meant military arms.



Johnson found out about Nixon’s maneuver; on his request, Hoover had wiretapped conversations between Chennault and Bui Diem. When leaving the White House, Johnson entrusted his National Security aide Walt Rostow with a file chronicling Nixon’s Vietnam gambit, consisting of scores of “secret” and “top secret” documents. Rostow labeled the file “The X Envelope” and kept it secret until after Johnson’s death on January 22, 1973 (two days after Nixon was sworn in for a second term). Rostow then gave the file to the LBJ Library, recommending it to be opened 50 years later. The LBJ Library didn’t wait that long, however; on July 22, 1994, the envelope was opened and the archivists began the process of declassifying the contents.



Shortly after taking office in 1969, Nixon was told by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about the wiretaps that Johnson had ordered against the Nixon campaign team. So Nixon knew there was a classified file somewhere containing the evidence against him, but had not been able to locate it. When the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, Nixon’s mind turned again to locating that file. The Pentagon Papers, compiled under the order of McNamara before leaving office, and leaked to the press by RAND Corporation whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, chronicled many government lies until 1968. Nixon feared that his Vietnam gambit would also be leaked. The first transcript in Stanley Kutler’s Abuse of Power, a book on Nixon’s recorded White House conversations relating to Watergate, is of an Oval Office conversation on June 17th 1971, in which Nixon orders Bob Haldeman, in the presence of Henry Kissinger, to break into the Brookings Institution (a centrist Washington think tank) where he believes the 1968 file (referred to as on “the bombing halt stuff”) might be: “Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” In a June 30th 1971 conversation on the same subject, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA officer Howard Hunt: “You talk to Hunt, I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. … Just go in and take it.” One year later, Hunt was convicted for having planned the break-in into the headquarters of the Democratic Party, in the Watergate building, by a team of burglars led by a member of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) and four former CIA Bay of Pigs participants (Frank Sturgis and three Cuban exiles). The Watergate scandal would soon cause Nixon’s downfall.



In the three-page “memorandum for the record” that he joined to Johnson’s secret file on Nixon’s Vietnam gambit, Rostow expressed regret that Johnson had chosen, for “the good of the country”, to keep quiet about Nixon’s Vietnam peace-talk sabotage, which he considered high treason — as unauthorized and secret dealings with a foreign power in times of war must be considered. But the reason for Johnson’s silence may have had less to do with “the good of the country” — what good could come from a Nixon Presidency and a prolonged Vietnam war? —, than with Nixon’s ability to blackmail Johnson back about how he had become President. For Nixon certainly knew that the truth of Kennedy’s assassination had been smothered by Johnson himself. After all, the Vice President that Nixon would appoint in 1973 before resigning, Gerald Ford, had participated directly in the cover-up as a member of the Warren Commission.



Had Nixon himself been involved in any way in the 1963 Dallas coup? For one thing, he was in Dallas in the morning of November 22, 1963, after having attended the bottlers’ convention as a representative of his client Pepsi-Cola. And by another strange coincidence, Jack Ruby had worked for Nixon: a recently declassified FBI memo dated November 24th 1947 states that “one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago [...] is performing information functions for the staff of Congressman Richard Nixon, Republican of California”, and that he should “not be called for open testimony” by a congressional committee investigating organized crime. Shortly after, Rubenstein moved to Dallas and shortened his name into Ruby. Those two coincidences do not prove any direct involvement of Nixon in the assassination of his nemesis John Kennedy, but they reinforce the probability that he knew enough to make Johnson think twice before revealing Nixon’s dirty trick on Vietnam.



Nixon did not possess any secret file on the case, but he knew where to look for one. The man from whom he tried to get such valuable information was Richard Helms, who was heading the CIA since 1966. Testimonies from two of Nixon’s Chief Aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, indicate that Nixon asked Helms for the secret file on Dallas from his very first year in office, but that Helms — The Man who Kept the Secret, as his biographer Thomas Powers calls him — never gave in. Four years later, when Nixon became entrapped in the Watergate scandal, he tried to use what he knew about Kennedy’s assassination to pressure Helms into taking responsibility for the failed burglary. He directed his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman to tell Helms that, “if it gets out, […] it’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA”. Haldeman is convinced, like Ehrlichman, that the “Bay of Pigs” was actually a code phrase between Nixon and Helms: “in all those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination”. It appears, therefore, that Nixon was threatening to reveal the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination, though he never really had the means to do it. Helms refused to yield and was ousted in 1972, but Nixon, trapped by his own monitoring systems within the Oval Office, fell in turn two years later.



The exposure and coverage of the Watergate scandal still passes today as proof of the independence of the American media and their effectiveness against anti-democratic power. But the Church Committee has shown that since the inception of Operation Mockingbird twenty years earlier, the CIA had accumulated considerable hidden power over the media, through a network of friendly or fully owned directors, editors and journalists. Bob Woodward, the journalist who broke the Watergate scandal, had a rather curious background: he had been hired by the Washington Post on a government recommendation, relayed by the President of the Washington Post himself — none other than the former Navy Secretary to President Johnson, Paul Ignatius. Woodward had no experience in journalism; rather, after graduating from Yale, he had worked five years for the Navy in the communications sector with top secret security clearance. It was Woodward who established the link between Watergate and Nixon’s CREEP team by revealing that the Watergate burglars were in possession of a check signed by Hunt, who was then working for the White House Counsel Charles Colson. Woodward never revealed the name of his informant, famously known as Deep Throat, but some suspect Richard Helms to be the source of the leaks, as well as of the poorly planned operation itself which, as Nixon writes in his memoirs, was so unprofessional that “it almost looked like some kind of setup”.



Nixon was elected in 1968 on the premise that he had a secret plan to end the war. Indeed, he once explained it to Bob Haldeman: “I call it the ‘Madman Theory,’ Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace”. In fact, not only Nixon prolonged the war for four years after his election, adding to the toll 21,000 American deaths, 110,000 among Allied South Vietnam soldiers, 500,000 among their enemies, and untold numbers of civilian casualties, but two months after his election, he secretly and illegally expanded the war into Cambodia, triggering a massive bombardment under the codename Breakfast, followed by Lunch, Dessert, Snack, Dinner and Supper – all of which leading to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, an exceptionally bloody, tyrannical regime responsible for the extermination of one third of the Cambodian population.



Nixon’s role in Latin America was little better: as Vice President to Eisenhower and working with the CIA, Nixon oversaw the operations in Guatemala, and the preparations for the invasion of Cuba that led to the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. As president, he decided with his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and under the influence of the corporate lobby Council on Latin America, to overthrow the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, elected in 1970. In 1976, the Select Committee on Intelligence established that, before the inauguration of Allende, the CIA had tried to bribe the commander in chief of the Chilean Army, René Schneider Chereau, into leading a military coup. But the general was faithful to the Constitution of his country and eventually became an obstacle to the planned coup. In response, a CIA team led by David Atlee Phillips assassinated the general and then orchestrated a disinformation campaign designed to blame the murder on Allende. $10 million was spent in efforts to corrupt other army officers in preparation for the coup, which materialized in September 11, 1973, when Allende was attacked in his presidential palace, and “committed suicide”. The United States would help maintain for seventeen years the fascist dictatorship of General Pinochet.



In 1974, the new president Gerald Ford asked his new CIA director William Colby to clean up the Agency. Colby fired a number of officers and agents and, in late December, submitted to the Attorney General a 693-page document (colloquially called the “Family Jewels”) on the illegal operations of the CIA. Ford then found himself forced to appoint a Presidential commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller; the Rockefeller Commission revealed various abuses, but was mostly intended for damage control; unsurprisingly, its report concluded that there was “no credible evidence” of CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. Ford’s initiative, however, was soon overtaken by the Senate, which created its own commission led by Democrat Frank Church, to investigate the Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The Church Committee published between 1975 and 1976 fourteen separate reports on the abuses perpetrated by intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives also headed up its own commission, under the direction of Otis Pike. The reports of the Church and Pike Committees demonstrated the CIA’s involvement in assassinations or attempted assassinations of foreign leaders like Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo or Ngo Dinh Diem. The findings led to a swell of public outcry, and forced Ford to issue an Executive Order prohibiting operations “involved in the murder of a political leader for political purposes”. Now aware of the Agency’s assassination activities, the American public began to suspect that such activities could be linked to the Dallas crime. Abraham Zapruder’s film, broadcast on television in March 1975, would further help to raise an urgent request to reconsider the conclusions of the Warren Commission, leading the House of Representatives in 1976 to create the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reopen the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King (Bobby Kennedy was not officially included).

The HSCA, however, met with fierce political opposition. Its General Counsel Richard Sprague, who had refused to sign a confidentiality clause on all documents provided by the CIA, became the victim of a violent defamation campaign and forced to resign; he was then replaced by Robert Blakey, who accepted the rules of the CIA and the lone gunman narrative. Robert Tannenbaum, Sprague’s Deputy Counsel in charge of the investigation into Kennedy, resigned in turn stating that the HSCA was now engaged in the construction of a “false history”, as he explained in 1995. Simultaneously in January 1976, George H. W. Bush replaced William Colby at the CIA, who had been a little too cooperative with the Church Commission. Together Blakey and Bush would kill the investigation by agreeing to appoint George Joannides as the intermediary between the CIA and the HSCA, who would then obstruct the investigation. The press did not realize until much later that in 1963, George Joannides had been the CIA agent charged with the management and financing of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) or Cuban Student Directorate — the group of Cuban exiles most virulently against Kennedy. The HSCA could never break the surface of the plot, and contented itself only to conclude a “probable conspiracy”.