Fifty years ago, as John F. Kennedy was getting sworn in as president, Nixon felt that Kennedy had stolen the election — but it went far beyond a little ballot-stuffing, Mark Feldstein says:
It began in the fall of 1960, when the Kennedy campaign spread word that Vice President Nixon had secretly pocketed money from billionaire Howard Hughes, whose far-flung business empire was heavily dependent on government contracts and connections. Reporters for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Time magazine corroborated the allegations, but their editors feared publishing such explosive information in the last days of the tightly fought campaign.
So the Kennedys turned to two crusading liberal columnists, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who had been attacking Nixon for the past decade. It was “a journalistic atrocity” to conspire with “the Kennedy hawkshaws to help us get the goods on their opponent,” Anderson admitted, but scoring a scoop to destroy Nixon was simply too tempting to pass up.
Anderson dropped by the Washington office of Kennedy lawyer James McInerney. With “a pride that only the diligent investigator can know,” Anderson recalled, the Kennedy operative pulled out “a neatly arranged packet which I devoured unceremoniously.”
The confidential documents revealed how Hughes had funneled to the Nixon family $205,000 (worth about $1.6 million today) using various intermediaries, including one of Nixon’s brothers, to disguise the transaction. Later evidence would show that the vice president had personally phoned Hughes to ask for the money, which was used to help Nixon pay for an elegant, 9,000-square-foot Tudor house in Washington with eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, a library, a butler’s pantry and a solarium.
How did JFK’s campaign obtain this incriminating evidence? By paying the contemporary equivalent of $100,000 to a Los Angeles accountant named Phillip Reiner, one of the Hughes middlemen used to conceal Nixon’s role in the deal. Reiner was a Democrat who recently had had a falling-out with his partners. With his attorney, Reiner had contacted Robert Kennedy, his brother’s campaign manager. Soon after, a break-in occurred at the accountant’s old office — and the Kennedys suddenly acquired a thick file filled with secret records documenting Nixon’s shady deal. (Reiner’s estranged partner filed a burglary report with the police, but the crime was never solved.)
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Indeed, the mysterious break-in to recover Nixon’s incriminating financial documents convinced him that such burglaries were standard practice in national politics. Nixon vowed that he would never be caught unprepared again, and he ultimately established his own corps of hard-nosed operatives to carry out espionage and sabotage, which culminated in the botched break-in a dozen years later at the Watergate office of the Democratic Party.
Nothing unusual here. Thieving politicians crawling over each others’ partially cannibalized bodies in search of fresh meat. Standard fare.
JFK’s dirtiest trick was to plagiarize Kahlil Gibran’s famous exhortation to politicians not to be parasites (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”)
He directed it against the citizens it was intended to protect, standing it on its head by telling them to “do for” the State. And people bought it.
Heckuva Job..uh…Brownie.