10 Crimes of the Nixon Administration

The Secret Bombing of Cambodia

From March 1969 to May 1970 under the direction of Richard Nixon, the United States carried out a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, using B-52 heavy bombers to carpet bomb areas of the country where there were suspected rest and resupply areas for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. The bombing was called Operation Menu, and when it was completed it was followed by another bombing operation which would continue until 1973. Operation Menu was so secret that it bypassed the normal chain of command for the Air Force.

The bombings began at a time when the United States was attempting to establish full diplomatic relations with the Cambodian government, led by Prince Sihanouk. The Prince was aware of the North Vietnamese refuge areas along the border, in fact, he had agreed formally with China to allow the North Vietnamese to enter the border areas. He had also agreed to allow US and South Vietnamese troops who were actively pursuing them to cross the border if they were following up from an engagement. Henry Kissinger later claimed that this was tantamount to the Prince giving his permission for the bombing.

The Cambodian government complained of the American bombing in their country over 100 times on the floor of the United Nations, only to have the United States deny any intrusions into their airspace, other than minor incidents caused by faulty navigation. On one occasion the Cambodians specified the use of B-52s in their protest. In May 1969 the bombing was reported in The New York Times, which reported that the story had come from an unnamed source highly placed within the Nixon administration. An outraged Nixon ordered J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap (illegally) the suspected source.

There was a little follow-up to the story by the rest of the news media and for several more years, the bombing of Cambodia was kept from the Congress, other than five Congressmen whose support on the Appropriations Committee was vital. When one of the military officers involved in the planning questioned the legality of the operation to his superior, his efficiency reports fell, ruining his career. This officer then wrote to Senator William Proxmire, asking for guidance on American policy regarding the bombing of a neutral nation. Proxmire initiated hearings in the Senate.

The hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee coincided with the Watergate hearings and investigation and drew far less media attention. The committee found that the covert operation and the attempts to keep it secret exceeded the authority of the White House and that the administration had lied not only to Congress but to the most senior civilian and military leaders of the Air Force. Henry Kissinger later claimed (falsely) that the Cambodian government had requested American bombing of their country to stop the influx of North Vietnamese troops and said, “…I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue…”

Read More:

• Nixon Asks Congress For More Aid For Cambodia (1970)
• The US Withdraws Its Forces from Cambodia (1970)

The White House Plumbers

Daniel Ellsberg was an analyst for the RAND Corporation and then for the US Government, in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara. He spent two years working in Vietnam under the State Department and in 1967 returned to Rand, where his work included contributing to a Pentagon-funded study of the Vietnam situation, a history which later became known as the Pentagon Papers. Through his work Ellsberg came to oppose the war, later writing that rather than being a civil war with the United States backing one side, it was and had always been a war of foreign aggression, beginning with the French, and continued by the United States.

After Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers and leaked them to the press the public came to learn of the massive deceptions from the government over the conduct of the war. The release of the documents, which the Supreme Court ruled could not be suppressed by the Nixon administration, revealed that as far back as the Kennedy administration the government was aware that the war was virtually unwinnable by the South Vietnamese. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations had kept this belief from the American people and the Johnson administration had, “…systematically lied not only to the public but also to Congress…” regarding the conduct of the war.

Nixon was outraged at the leaks and ordered members of his staff, with offices in the White House, to find the means to discredit Ellsberg, though he was but one of several contributors to the documents. The staff members took to calling themselves the White House Plumbers and began to find ways to carry out Nixon’s orders. One of their earliest operations was to plan a burglary, thus they conspired to commit a felony while in the West Wing of the White House. They planned to burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles, Dr. Henry Fielding.

The break-in was reported back to the White House as being unsuccessful in that Ellsberg’s file could not be located. Dr. Fielding told authorities in Los Angeles that he found Ellsberg’s file on the floor of his office, and that the file had been rifled through. When Nixon aide John Ehrlichman informed the President that an “operation” had taken place and aborted he cautioned the President that it was something that was, “…better that you don’t know about.” In his personal notes, Ehrlichman recorded the “operation” as Hunt/Liddy Special Project Number 1. This referred to the two men with offices in the White House, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.

Hunt and Liddy did not take or copy Ellsberg’s file when they entered Fielding’s office with three other men recruited from the CIA because it did not contain the type of information which would have sufficiently discredited or embarrassed Ellsberg. Hunt believed that such information may have existed in a separate file kept at Fielding’s home. Hunt and Liddy proposed a second burglary, this one of Fielding’s home, to search for any additional records. Hunt and Liddy created a plan for this “second operation” and presented it to Ehrlichman, who decided not to approve its execution, considering it to be too risky.

Early Wiretaps of Nixon Administration Officials

When the secret bombing of Cambodia began to be leaked to the press several of Nixon’s top aides believed the leaks to have come from within the offices of the National Security Council. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s Secretary of State, was determined to convince Nixon that the leaks were from elsewhere. Kissinger approached J. Edgar Hoover and requested that several of Nixon’s top political aides and the office and home telephones of several reporters be tapped as a means of identifying the source of the leaks. These wiretaps began in 1969.

Hoover informed Kissinger that the FBI suspected Kissinger’s aide at the National Security Council, Morton Halperin, was the source of the leak to New York Times reporter Henry Beecher, who had first broken the story. Hoover ordered that Halperin’s phone be tapped, and for the next nearly two years the illegal tap was in place to monitor Halperin’s communications. Once the secret bombing was revealed there were no further follow-ups to the story containing additional information in the press. Halperin holds the distinction of being the first person known to be the victim of an illegal wiretap ordered by the Nixon administration.

Once the first wiretap to control leaks was installed others soon followed. The Vietnam War had been a major factor during the 1968 election campaign. Nixon ordered the creation of a team less than two weeks into his first administration to begin planning his re-election campaign in 1972. As the Nixon Administration went on he ordered, through the FBI, the wiretapping of leaders of the anti-war movement, and public figures who were outspoken against the war. Nixon also ordered the creation of a list of those figures who were considered his political enemies.

What came to be called the White House Enemies List was actually two lists, one of 20 individuals revealed in 1973, and another of 576 individuals which was exposed later that year. The first list of 20 was compiled for John Dean, Nixon’s White House Counsel who explained its purpose as, “…how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” In a memo to administration official Lawrence Higby. The intent was to have the Internal Revenue Service harass the persons on the list of twenty with continuous tax audits.

Actor Paul Newman was on the list, and later described his place there as his greatest achievement. Morton Halperin, suspected of leaking the story of the Cambodian bombing, was on the list as well. When newsman Daniel Schorr read the list on television in 1973 he was surprised and amused to come upon his own name. Schorr had previously had his neighbors questioned by the FBI regarding his personal habits and activities in an attempt to discredit him. The IRS through its Commissioner, Donald Alexander, refused to comply with the request for audits on the individuals listed as Nixon’s enemies.

Illegal Slush Funds and Money Laundering

Nixon’s biggest scandal, known as Watergate, is remembered as a botched burglary and a massive attempt to cover it up. But that is not what brought down the Presidency. Investigations into the burglary and the subsequent cover-up revealed massive financial fraud, the misuse of campaign funds, the maintenance of slush funds controlled by the Attorney General of the United States, money laundering, and other financial improprieties. Nixon administration officials used techniques amounting to extortion to extract illegal and secret campaign donations from businesses and persons.

As the investigation into the burglary began in 1972, it was quickly learned that the money to pay the legal fees for the men arrested inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee had come from the Committee to Re-elect the President. Officially called the CRP it quickly became derisively referred to as Creep. The money had followed a circuitous path from donors through banks to cover its source, before ending up in the bank accounts of the burglars. Further investigation revealed that all of the burglars, including E. Howard Hunt were paid salaries by the CRP.

Nixon officials extorted money from businesses, corporate officers, and wealthy individuals through the threat of IRS audits. The extortion efforts resulted in the campaign receiving donations in cash, often arriving at the offices of the CRP in bags. The Nixon administration during its first term responded to donations with quid pro quo, easing regulations for donors through the use of waivers for specific areas, or calling off previously established investigations or legal actions. Nixon’s campaign workers weren’t the only people involved in the establishment and control of secret slush funds.

In 1969 H.R. Haldeman, the President’s Chief of Staff received orders from the President to create a secret slush fund to be used to provide financial support to Nixon loyalists during the 1970 mid-term elections. Nixon wrote to Haldeman in his order, “One of our most important projects for 1970 is to see that our major contributors funnel all their funds through us.” The intent of the fund, which was designated Operation Townhouse, was to give the administration control over the “donations” avoiding the Republican National Committee.

At least 19 Republican candidates for the Senate in the 1970 mid-term elections received support from Operation Townhouse, all of them personally approved by the President. One of them was George H. W. Bush, of whom Nixon said that he was, “…a total Nixon man. He’ll do anything for the cause.” When Bush was running for President in 1980 he claimed that he had reported the donation, despite the existence of documents in the National Archives which show that he did not. Despite the donation, which totaled $106,000, Bush lost that election to Lloyd Bentsen.

Nixon Colluded with Milk Producers to Increase the Price of Milk

The Associated Milk Producers Inc, was a consortium of milk producers who wanted an increase in milk subsidies, artificially increasing the cost of milk to the consumer. In 1971 Nixon met with the AMPI and negotiated a deal through which the milk subsidies would be increased by $100 million dollars, in return for a $2 million dollar campaign contribution, broken up and routed to the campaign coffers through the creation of several political action committees or individual donors. Nixon met with officials of the AMPI personally, and the agreement was negotiated for the most part by John Ehrlichman.

Former Nixon aide Murray Chotiner left the White House in 1971 to return to the practice of law. He was retained by the AMPI to improve the group’s access to the White House, since Chotiner had an over twenty-year association with the President. Before the donations for subsidies the AMPI twice delivered cash to Herbert Kalmbach, the President’s longtime friend and private attorney, as contributions to Operation Townhouse. The lobbying through the use of illegal donations and personal relationships got the AMPI access to the President in March, 1971.

During the meeting in the White House the President warned the AMPI representatives not to discuss donations while he was in the room. Nixon tried to make small talk with the AMPI representatives, suggesting that they market milk as a mild sedative, a safe alternative to a sleeping pill. When the AMPI representatives tried to return to the subject of the money Nixon responded, “Don’t say that while I’m sitting here. Matter of fact, the room’s not tapped. Forgot to do that.” When the meeting was over Nixon’s aides, led by Ehrlichman, finalized the deal. Ehrlichman suggested they celebrate with a glass of milk, while it was still relatively cheap.

After the meeting, Harold Nelson, president of the AMPI, and Chotiner transferred the $2 million to Kalmbach. When the deal was exposed Nelson was convicted and went to jail, as did another AMPI official, David Parr. Nixon was not prosecuted for his involvement in the affair as the pardon he received from his successor, Gerald Ford, covered all of his high crimes and misdemeanors. The $100 million to the AMPI was absorbed by milk consumers and the taxpayers. AMPI as a corporate entity was found guilty of violating campaign donation laws and fined $35,000, equivalent to about $145,000 in 2018.

The IT&T San Diego Convention Scandal

President Nixon wanted the city of San Diego to be the site of the 1972 Republican National Convention, where he would accept the nomination of his party for a second term. The problem was San Diego was not inclined to go to the expense of hosting the convention. Despite the chaos which the convention would bring with it, including antiwar protests, civil rights protests, the need for increased security, the shortage of accommodations, and other problems faced by the city it was agreed that the convention would take place there, bolstered with corporate sponsorship in the form of $400,000 pledged from IT&T. The city also applied for a grant of nearly $1 million from the Nixon Justice Department to help fund the additional police needed to provide security.

Meanwhile, John Mitchell, the Attorney General, and other Justice Department officials negotiated pending antitrust litigation involving IT&T in a manner which benefited the communications giant and obscured the reasons for which the government had brought the suit in the first place. The Justice Department had filed the suit to determine if an existing law applied to the mergers of conglomerates, a decision which would have to be made by the courts. The Nixon administration essentially dropped the suit, after receiving promises that IT&T would, through a subsidiary, help fund the Republican convention in the city which the President preferred.

On February 29, 1972, a column by syndicated writer Jack Anderson revealed a memo written by a lobbyist for IT&T which directly linked the $400,000 pledge to the dropping of the lawsuit by the Nixon administration. Further investigations in San Diego revealed evidence the administration obstructed justice in several instances of investigations into prominent Republicans in San Diego who had used various illicit practices to ensure that the city would apply to host the convention. The Senate opened hearings into the Justice Department decision.

The Nixon White House launched a defamation campaign against the writer of the memo, Dita Beard, who had written that the $400,000 pledge had “gone a long way” towards achieving the settlement which IT&T wanted and that, “Certainly the President has told Mitchell to see that things are worked out fairly.” Mitchell told the Senate investigators that he had nothing to do with the negotiations over the litigation but later revelations and testimony as Watergate expanded revealed that he had been directly involved, and tapes of Nixon discussing the deal in the Oval Office also emerged.

In the end, to avoid the taint of scandal surrounding the convention, the Republicans moved the event to Miami Beach. Subsequent investigations took a back seat as the Watergate scandal began to unravel late in the year. The Nixon administration was furious at the way the story was leaked and in response to rumblings that the Justice Department might reinitiate the litigation involving IT&T the company placed the memo’s writer under surveillance. The Watergate break-in occurred as the scandal over the IT&T pledge, extracted by the Nixon administration as a quid quo pro, was still being investigated by several news organizations.

More Money Laundering

With new campaign financing regulations scheduled to go into effect in April 1972, the CRP focused in the late winter of 1972 on raising as much money as possible. Campaign contributions would have to be reported after April 7, but the money received before then could be laundered and thus be untraceable when it came time to report donations. Herbert Kalmbach collected secret donations, much of it in cash, under the explicit instructions of Richard Nixon, who made it known that the reward of an ambassadorship would require a donation of a quarter of a million dollars.

Most of the money (but not all, to have no money to report on April 7 would have been an obvious falsehood) was laundered through banks in Mexico and Venezuela, some of it by the White House Plumbers. Cash was placed in safes in the White House and the offices of the CRP, run by former Attorney General Mitchell, who was leading the President’s re-election campaign. More cash was hidden in safe deposit boxes around the country. Some of the money was routed by E. Howard Hunt hired young volunteers for the Democratic Party, to report back to the CRP as spies.

CRP Finance director Maurice Stans began a fundraising drive across the country, focused on the South, and helped donors set up laundering systems so that their donations could not be traced. On this funding drive, Stans used the velvet glove and the iron fist. Promises of easy access to the White House and threats of government investigation if donations weren’t forthcoming were used as necessary. By law, corporations were not allowed to make direct donations to political campaigns, but the means of transferring funds via banks in Mexico and Venezuela, which did not allow the subpoena of bank records, allowed for these illegal contributions to be made.

The illegally acquired campaign funds were to be used by the CRP and the White House Plumbers to fund the so-called White House Dirty Tricks which were already being employed to discredit Democratic candidates, certain reporters, newspapers, and other news outlets. They were also used for travel and other expenses, and other illegal activities which would mark the remainder of Richard Nixon’s time in office. The campaign funds were also diverted, illegally, to cover the legal fees of the men caught in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. CRP funds were used to send thousands of telegrams to the White House claiming to support the mining of Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam, prepared by campaign operatives under false names.

Nixon’s defenders have long claimed that these operations were all done without his approval or even knowledge and that they were deliberately kept from the President. The papers and tapes held in the Nixon Presidential Library and the later testimony of thousands of individuals inside the administration and outside of government provides overwhelming evidence that Nixon was not only aware of the fundraising and its illicit use, in many instances he directed where some of the money was to be spent. Following the arrest of the Watergate burglars, for example, Nixon called Haldeman and suggested that he have Bebe Rebozo start a fund for their defense in Miami. The slush fund money could then be deposited in the defense fund.

The Watergate Break-In

The Watergate break-in was one of the most famous burglaries of all time, for all the wrong reasons. There wasn’t one break-in, there were at least two. They were part of a campaign of what their protagonists considered were dirty tricks, which included felony burglary, illegal wiretaps, defamation of character, the planting of false stories later denied to embarrass political enemies, and much more as the whole thing unraveled. The entire plan was approved by John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, with knowledge of the plan held by White House Counsel John Dean, by April 1972. The first entry into the Watergate complex was scheduled for May.

In May a successful break-in (successful in that it wasn’t immediately discovered) allowed for illegal wiretaps to be placed on two telephones. However one of the taps did not work properly and a second burglary was planned to repair or replace the device. During this burglary, the men were caught inside the complex and the Nixon administration moved quickly to gain the upper hand over the investigation. Whether Nixon knew of the burglary in advance has never been established with certainty, but there is anecdotal evidence that he did not. One of his initial responses, when informed of the burglary, was to ask who had ordered the operation, at least according to Haldeman.

Within hours of learning of the burglars being in custody Nixon suggested setting up a fund through his friend, Bebe Rebozo, and using campaigns contributions routed through the fund to provide for the burglars’ defense. Several payments went through Mexican banks from CRP coffers to the burglars. It is possible that some of these funds were payments for the continued silence of the burglars over the subject of how high up the chain of command knowledge of the CRP activities was known, in other words, blackmail. The media response was tepid other than that of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and to some extent TIME Magazine.

One of the immediate defenses of the Nixon administration was to attack the media, using both the President’s Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and the Vice President, Spiro Agnew, to condemn the coverage that was there. The Attorney General, John Mitchell also condemned the coverage and The Washington Post was banned from the White House. These attacks were largely successful, and polls showed the public’s distrust of the press rose to levels of around 40% before the election, in which Nixon won a second term in a landslide. It wasn’t until after the election when knowledge of the various financial and other irregularities began to emerge on a daily basis, that the scandal gained traction.

The Watergate burglars were convicted, arrested and sentenced to prison in early 1973. The sentencing judge, John Sirica, tried to pressure E. Howard Hunt and two more of the burglars into trying to make a deal for information by sentencing them to 40 years in prison. Spiro Agnew came under investigation for accepting bribes and kickbacks as Governor of Maryland, and though it had nothing to do with Watergate, it added to the sense of scandal surrounding the entire Nixon administration. One by one Nixon’s associates and aides were implicated in the ever-widening scandal, indicted, convicted, and sent to prison.

The Crimes of Richard Nixon

There are those today who continue to defend Richard Nixon, using his foreign affairs expertise as an example of the good he did for the country. They claim that he ended the Vietnam War and opened relations with China as examples of his foreign affairs acumen. Many claims that Nixon didn’t do anything that all President do and that he had no knowledge of Watergate. Many of Nixon’s other crimes are unknown to these defenders, who believe Watergate to have begun and ended with a second-rate burglary which he did not authorize and of which he was unaware before the fact. Nixon’s crimes extended far beyond Watergate, and after he was pardoned by President Ford were largely forgotten.

It was the extent of those crimes, which the Congress was becoming increasingly aware of as the visual media focused on the Watergate hearings which led to Nixon’s downfall. The general public was increasingly concerned only with whether the President directed a cover-up. If Ford had not given Nixon a pardon for all of his crimes the investigation over what is called Watergate would have continued. In fact, several investigations did continue as the full extent of the illegal activities practiced by Richard Nixon and his accomplices continued to come under scrutiny of journalists, investigators, and government activities. With the possibility of a trial eliminated by Ford’s pardon, the public turned its attention to other things.

Before and after Nixon’s resignation, members of the Nixon administration were tried and sent to jail. Forty-eight members of the administration were convicted, some for actions which had nothing to do with the break-in at the Watergate Complex, an event for which they had no prior knowledge nor participation. Charles Colson and Egil Krogh were sentenced to prison for their activities regarding Daniel Ellsberg. Former Attorney General John Mitchell was sentenced to 1 to 4 years imprisonment, he served 19 months. Nixon’s two closest White House aides, H. R. Haldeman (Chief of Staff) and John Ehrlichman (Chief Domestic Adviser) each served 18 months in prison.

One of the remaining questions about the Watergate scandal is why Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes which contained evidence of his own involvement in the cover-up of the burglary. Once the existence of the tapes was made known to the investigating committee the act of destroying them would have been considered tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice, both impeachable offenses. Nixon believed that the principle of executive privilege protected him from surrendering the tapes and once the Supreme Court decided that it did not there was no other action available to him. In 1975 Nixon gave secret testimony to a Grand Jury (transcripts released in 2011) in which he discussed modifying some of the tapes’ content when they were initially released to the public in transcript form, protected from self-incrimination through his pardon.

The Watergate scandal so affected the American psyche that every major political scandal since has been labeled by some with the word gate. Watergate covers a vast number of illegal activities, but it does not begin to cover all of the crimes committed by Richard Nixon and members of his administrations. Whether conservative, moderate, or liberal, all Americans should consider their extent and intent when exploring them further. Nixon’s legacy should not be rehabilitated but studied in detail to prevent other abuses of the public trust and executive power in the highest elected office in the land.

Where do we get this stuff? Here are our sources:

“The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House”, by Seymour Hersh, 2013

“Wild Man: the life and times of Daniel Ellsberg”, by Tom Wells, 2001

“The enemies list revisited”, by John Dean, Boston College Magazine, Winter, 2005

“The Ends of Power”, by H. R. Haldeman and Joseph DiMona, 1978

“The Gores, the Bushes, and Watergate”, Slate, August 22, 2000

“More Spilled Milk”, Special to the New York Times, The New York Times, March 28, 1974

“Maurice Stans, Alone”, by Ken Ringle, The Washington Post, June 14, 1992

“All the President’s Men”, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, 1974

“Richard Nixon committed far greater crimes than the Watergate Break-in”, by Vincent Browne, The Irish Times, June 19, 2013

“Will”, by G. Gordon Liddy, 1980