1972 - Nixon vs. McGovern
Nixon campaigns in 1972; Courtesy of the Nixon Presidential Library
President Richard M. Nixon’s reelection campaign raises an unprecedented $60 million — the equivalent of $289 million in today’s dollars — to finance a win-at-all-costs effort. Just before the Federal Election Campaign Act, which requires reporting of all contributions, takes effect in April, Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President (known by the acronym CREEP) moves aggressively to take advantage of a loophole in the old law that allows unlimited off-the-books contributions to a candidate who has not formally declared he is in the race. By pressuring deep-pocketed donors to make large cash contributions, Nixon is able to collect $20 million, including $6 million in the last two days before the deadline. Chicago insurance executive W. Clement Stone, who explains he is determined that Nixon “wouldn’t lose because of a lack of funds,” gives more than $2 million. Stone becomes the poster boy for future caps on the size of contributions.
Much of Nixon’s hefty treasury is ill-gotten. Thirteen companies give $780,000 in donations, which eventually will lead to the conviction of 21 executives for violating the 1947 law banning corporate giving. Another contributor, under-investigation financier Robert Vesco, doesn’t deliver his briefcase containing $200,000 in cash until three days after the new law requiring disclosure takes effect. Nevertheless, Maurice Stans, CREEP’s finance chairman, puts the money in his safe, somehow forgetting to report it until the following year, when the illegal donation is exposed by The Washington Star. Vesco later will flee the country ahead of federal charges that he embezzled $220 million from investors.
What Nixon’s men spend all this money upon is just as sleazy. CREEP funds, for example, finance a “dirty tricks” operation, headed by Donald Segretti, which harasses Democratic Senator Edmund S. Muskie, a would-be Nixon challenger, with myriad pranks, including phoning in fake orders of pizza and liquor for Muskie events, and printing and distributing fake Muskie literature designed to embarrass him. Meanwhile, inside the Muskie campaign, a volunteer secretly on the CREEP payroll intercepts correspondence and speech drafts, which are photographed and passed on to Nixon aides. Muskie eventually is forced to drop out of the race, paving the way for Nixon’s preferred opponent, Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota, to win the Democratic nomination.
But things get even weirder. G. Gordon Liddy, CREEP’s general counsel, meets with an official of the Central Intelligence Agency to discuss, by Liddy’s later account, possible methods for assassinating investigative journalist Jack Anderson. Afterward, Liddy compensates the CIA man for his time with a $100 bill from Nixon campaign funds. And just before the new regulations requiring detailed disclosure of campaign expenditures takes effect, CREEP allocates $250,000 for a clandestine intelligence operation against the Democrats, headed by Liddy.
In May, a team of operatives breaks into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., with the goal of planting listening devices and stealing sensitive documents. That burglary goes relatively smoothly, but a return visit in June goes badly, when a security guard notices adhesive tape that the team had placed on locks, and calls police. The police apprehend five intruders, including James McCord, CREEP’s security director. Liddy and White House consultant E. Howard Hunt, who are guiding the operation by radio from a nearby hotel room, manage to escape. The Nixon campaign subsequently doles out $75,100 in $100 bills to the burglars as hush money, but the financial trail ultimately proves hard to cover. Eventually, the FBI will trace $114,000 deposited in Watergate burglar Bernard Barker’s Miami bank account to checks originally made out by Nixon campaign donors, including Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer Daniels Midland Company in Decatur, Illinois, the nation’s largest agribusiness.
Largely because of cover-up efforts by Nixon and his lieutenants, the scandals surrounding the 1972 election don’t unfold quickly enough to negate Nixon’s enormous advantages, financial and otherwise, over McGovern. (By comparison, the Democrat has raised a paltry $40 million.) In November, Nixon wins an astonishing 520 electoral votes and takes the popular vote by 60.7 percent to 37.5 percent. After the election, Nixon rewards 13 large donors, who have given a total of $706,000 to his reelection effort, by naming them to ambassadorships. But before long, it all will come crashing down.
SOURCES: Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Touchstone Books), 1995; Dennis McClellan, “Obituaries: Clement Stone, 100; Self-Made Millionaire, Philanthropist,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2002; Douglas Martin, “Clement Stone Dies at 100; Built Empire on Optimism,” The New York Times, September 5, 2002; “A Brief History of Money in Politics: Campaign Finance — and Campaign Finance Reform — in the United States” (Washington, D.C.: Center for Responsive Politics, 1996; Gil Troy, “Money and Politics: The Oldest Connection,” The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1997; “More Questionable Campaign Cash,” Time, March 12, 1973.
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