One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon Read Online Free PDF Page A

“this contribution from the Italian.” Nixon liked to reward his contributors when he could: as president, he personally approved millions of dollars in covert support to right-wing Italian politicians through the CIA and tens of millions in weapons sales to the Greek colonels through the Pentagon. American corporate executives who gave at least four million dollars to the campaign off the books knew whom to call when delivering their contributions: Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951, fiercely loyal and famously tight-lipped. She made the appointment when the president of Phillips Petroleum personally delivered fifty thousand dollars in cash to Nixon at the candidate’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. She told Nixon about an off-the-record “seven-figure contribution” collected by Wiley Buchanan, a Texas millionaire who had served as Eisenhower’s White House chief of protocol. And she privately recorded a fifteen-thousand-dollar donation from the former Cuban ambassador Nicol á s Arroyo M á rquez. “He was in Washington when Castro took over,” she noted. “RN knows him.”
    The 1968 Nixon campaign also had the ability to tap wellsprings of cash whose ultimate source is still a mystery. Robert C. Hill, the Republican National Committee’s foreign policy chairman, reported to the Nixon campaign on September 29, 1968, that “RN’s Committee in Mexico” had access to a cache controlled by Win Scott, the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City since 1956. Scott had personal ties to Mexican presidents, the nation’s security ministers, and wealthy Republicans with haciendas in Mexico. Hill said the station chief had “between three and five million dollars to play with.” Hill had been Eisenhower’s ambassador to Mexico; Nixon would make him ambassador to Spain. The millions remain untraceable. Four years after the 1968 election, campaign cash in Mexican banks would provide a link in the chain of events that began the agonies of Nixon’s downfall.
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    These transactions were only one cog in the Nixon machine. The candidate’s days were consumed with the ceaseless grind of politics: recording television ads, making stump speeches, calibrating the vote in every state. In early October, with the election a month away, Nixon held a solid lead in the polls. He knew of, and feared, only one thing that could derail him: a dramatic development in Vietnam. Vice President Humphrey’s campaign had been hamstrung by his loyalties to Lyndon Johnson; antiwar liberals were loath to support him. But if Johnson stopped the bombing of North Vietnam, brokered a cease-fire, or brought a peace deal in the Paris talks, the Democratic nominee might garner millions of votes from war-weary Americans. A peace agreement could swing the election.
    “Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm” against a bombing halt, Ambassador Diem reported to President Thieu on October 23. Thieu responded that South Vietnam might indeed oppose it; he believed that Nixon, the staunch anticommunist, would cut a better deal than any Democrat.
    The National Security Agency, spying on America’s allies as it had done since its creation, intercepted these cables in Saigon and reported their gist directly to President Johnson. The NSA and the FBI also monitored the embassy of South Vietnam in Washington, so LBJ knew what transpired in the telephone calls and diplomatic cables on both ends of the conversation.
    But Nixon had his own spy in the White House, “someone in Johnson’s innermost circle,” in his words. The next day, the candidate learned without question that the United States had struck a secret pact with North Vietnam to stop the bombing and seek peace. The election was ten days away. “I immediately decided that the only way to prevent Johnson from totally undercutting my candidacy at the eleventh hour was for me to make public the fact that a bombing halt was