How in the hell does a Republican manipulate the Democrat primaries?
I spent a fair portion of my time at TU and most of my adult life reading about the Nixon Presidency. I’ve had the opportunity to interview Nixon appointees and count a few as mentors and friends. Sadly, many die each week.
The Cliff Notes is that a Presidential run is really not that different from running for student council in high school. Not as true today as 1972, but still true.
The Nixon campaign and the Nixon White House had multiple independent dirty tricks operations. Many operating without knowledge of the other. There were finance people raising money to support them who had no idea their efforts were being used to take money from people for this purpose. One of those fundraisers put over $1 million in cash on a private jet flying out of Bartlesville Municipal Airport for a destination unknown.
That money, presumably, and other money was used to fund efforts at falsifying campaign events, forging policy papers, putting out fake press releases and generating other dirty tricks designed to make Democratic primary candidates look bad to voters and think other Dems were behind it. They broke into peoples homes and offices, planted bugs, they even ordered hundreds of dollars worth of delivery pizza to strap campaigns of cash days before the end. If you’ve ever worked a presidential campaign run by professionals in Iowa or NH, you know that to this day, you can’t order pizza delivered. You send an intern. The first page of the playbook is calling Dominos and every other pizza joint and telling them in no uncertain terms you will refuse delivery.
Pat Buchanan was part of one effort inside the White House and wrote a lengthy memo on what needed to be done to pit one Democratic candidate against the other and to leave McGovern alone so he would emerge the nominee and the one most easily beaten using the Nixon strategy of working class northern whites, Catholics, moderate Democrats who opposed the war, Southern whites silent on integration, veterans, law enforcement and women opposed to the ERA and abortion. A lot of people think the Clinton campaign did something similar in the 2016 primary with disinformation attributed to various Republican candidates against each other so that Trump would emerge. The conventional thinking at the time would be that he would self destruct and when he didn’t the Grab Their Pu/;
video was floated. He certainly did get an inordinate amount of free air time from left leaning media in the primary, particularly MSNBC.
G Gordon Liddy was also inside the White House and asked the Attorney General of the United States in his office for $1 million dollars for a bizarre series of proposals to compromise Democratic candidates and surrogates including kidnappings, extortion, wire tapping, honey pot schemes and a long list of other felonies. Mitchell went to prison because even though he declined to approve Liddy’s initial ideas in front of witnesses, he did control a bank account that disbursed $500,000 that Liddy said was for the Watergate wire taps. Scholars believe that Mitchell knew or had been told by the President about other dirty tricks operations on the campaign side and was told to monitor the phone to see if the DNC knew that and was planning on dropping it right before Election Day. That’s why they went in a second time into the Watergate. Most people think it was one burglary. It was actually a second burglary to improve the location of bugs because Nixon wasn’t getting the reassurances he wanted from the transcripts of the bugs planted in the first job. And that team wasn’t the only set of political covert ops guys operating for Nixon.
I could go on for days. People were out of control in the Nixon White House and felonies were committed. The President encouraged them then covered some of them up. They felt they were justified at the time based on the level of social unrest in the country. Given that armed mobs were marching in the streets in the thousands to end the war almost daily outside the White House and the 101st Airborne was camped on the White House ellipse with live ammunition and tanks to keep order, they may have been somewhat justified in being concerned what American would have looked like if McGovern won.
