Nixon's Crimes

March 6, 2011

Between March of 1969 and August of 1973, President Nixon illegally bombed Cambodia, causing over three-million tons of bombs to rain downs on the neutral country and the deaths of an estimated half-million Cambodian citizens.     

by Don Fulsom        

In mid-March 1969, President Richard Nixon launched “Operation Breakfast,” the first assault in the first stage of the Henry Kissinger-inspired covert carpet-bombing of defenseless and neutral Cambodia.

From the start of this surreptitious warfare, records were falsified to hide the attacks.  They were reported as strikes against Communist forces within Vietnam.

In the first attack, scores of Guam-based B-52 Stratofortresses—operating in waves—struck enemy ammunition dumps, fuel depots and troop concentrations three miles inside the Cambodian border.  Initial reports indicated that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces there had been disabled.

Jan. 10 ,2011

Daniel Ellsberg (left)

The WikiLeaks disclosures of top-secret government documents recall the time in 1971 when the intrepid Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” to The New York Times to hasten the end of the Vietnam War.   

by Don Fulsom

In the summer of 1971, The New York Times published the "Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Defense Department study critical of U.S. war efforts in Vietnam.  The huge report had been methodically stolen and duplicated by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst who had turned against the war.  He leaked copies to Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

Newly declassified tapes show President Richard Nixon first realized the seriousness of the leak during a June 13th noontime telephone call from National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s top deputy, Alexander Haig:

Haig:  This goddamn New York Times expose [is] of the most highly classified documents in the war.

Nixon:  Oh, that!  I see!  I didn’t read the story.  You mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?

Haig:  This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.

By the time Nixon talked to Kissinger himself a short time later, the President was climbing the walls over the leak:

Nixon:  That Henry, that to me is just unconscionable, this is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.

       Kissinger: Exactly, Mr. President.

Nixon: Doesn’t it involve secure information, a lot of other things? What kind of—what kind of people would do such things?

       Kissinger: It has the most—it has the highest classification, Mr. President.

       Nixon: Yeah. Yeah.

Kissinger: It’s treasonable! There’s no question it’s actionable. I’m absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.

Next on the tape, the President gives his chief foreign policy advisor permission to call Attorney General John Mitchell to determine the options for prosecuting the newspaper. 

Sept. 17, 2010

Air Force Gen. John Lavelle

President Richard Nixon’s criminalities and cover-ups continue to be exposed, 36 years after the Watergate scandal forced him from office.

by Don Fulsom 

Recently declassified tapes and documents from President Nixon’s archives exploded a bombshell about how Nixon framed and slandered a distinguished U.S. military commander in Vietnam, Air Force Gen. John Lavelle.

In 1972, Lavelle became Nixon’s fall guy for obeying what turned out to be the commander in chief’s own top-secret orders to expand the bombing of North Vietnam in late 1971 and early 1972.

Nixon didn’t want to take the heat for that decision, unpopular with critics of the war—so Lavelle was sacrificed as the scapegoat, stripped of two of his four stars, and sacked.

July 10, 2008

Richard Nixon

Former President Richard Nixon beat his wife, Pat, before, during, and after their White House years. Along the way, he sucker-punched a long list of aides and others who miffed him.

by Don Fulsom

Richard Nixon was certainly one of our most bared-knuckled political fighters. But probably no other American politician actually punched, pushed, kicked, slapped, shouldered, shoved or upended as many folks who'd ignited—usually without malicious intent—his volcanic temper. The way he repeatedly behaved would land most people behind bars.

Nixon's flying fists were usually dispatched as "sucker punches"—unexpected blows from out of left field when the target's guard was fully down. Nixon threw one such punch at a political aide—and a disabled one at that—nearly 50 years ago. Had that been confirmed at the time, the newspaper headline might have read, "Vice President Assaults Crippled Campaign Consultant." But the punch, which joins myriad evidence of Nixon's violent nature, only became verified in a newly released document from the National Archives.

The incident itself took place in the fading hours of Nixon's bitterly waged, losing 1960 presidential race against Sen. John Kennedy. The day before the election, Nixon put on a four-hour telethon from a Detroit studio. As airtime approached, Nixon became infuriated with TV consultant Everett Hart because Hart had declined to run a last-minute errand for the vice president. Before the aide even considered putting up his dukes, however, the short-fused Nixon let go with a haymaker to Hart's rib cage. One of the aide's arms was shriveled and he was recovering from major cardiac surgery. On loan to the Nixon campaign from a top Madison Avenue ad agency, Hart quit on the spot and refused to ever work for Nixon again.

April 15, 2007

Howard Hughes in the 1940s with his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane in Inglewood, California.

In the early years of the Nixon presidency, billionaire Howard Hughes bribed Nixon with $100,000 in cash. When Hughes's secret lobbyist Larry O'Brien became Democratic Party chairman, Nixon had O'Brien's phone at the Watergate tapped to find out if he knew about the bribe.

by Don Fulsom

"I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness. Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life … If we select Nixon, then he, I know for sure knows the facts of life." – Howard Hughes, early in the 1968 presidential campaign.

In the annals of disastrous U.S. political payoffs, nothing is ever likely to top Howard Hughes's $100,000 gift to President Richard Nixon. That's because Nixon's subsequent paranoia over the illegal contribution led, in large measure, to the Watergate burglary and its cover-up – which, of course, ultimately forced Nixon to evacuate the White House just steps ahead of his eviction in August 1974. One month later, a presidential pardon from his handpicked successor and loyal old friend, Gerald Ford, likely saved Nixon himself (some 40 Nixon administration officials were jailed for Watergate crimes) from spending any time behind bars.

In the early years of Nixon's presidency, power-hungry, episodically nutty billionaire Howard Hughes secretly bribed his favorite corrupt politician with $100,000 in cold cash. The money was skimmed from a Hughes gambling casino in Las Vegas – "siphoned like a sip of champagne from the Silver Slipper," according to a later account by columnist Jack Anderson.

Aug. 30, 2004 Updated Jan14, 2007

Nixon addressing his cabinet and White House staff
prior to his departure, Aug. 9,1974.

On the eve of the release of the "smoking-gun tape," President Nixon cut a blanket pardon deal with Vice President Ford that would put Ford in the Oval Office eight days later.

by Don Fulsom

Thirty years ago, President Gerald Ford stunned the nation by granting his crooked predecessor, Richard Nixon, a preemptive blanket pardon for all of his White House crimes. He did so, Ford said, for the good of the country: "My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it."

The pardon got the ex-president off the legal hook on a host of criminal activities he had ordered, led and/or covered up. The Watergate crimes alone ranged from burglary to campaign sabotage, espionage, and illegal fund-raising, and included efforts to exploit, subvert or pervert the Justice and State Departments, the CIA, the IRS, the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as a wide variety of other assaults on the U.S. Constitution and on the rules of democratic fair play.

February 5, 2006

President Richard Nixon with Bebe Rebozo (left) and J. Edgar Hoover (center)
at the "Florida White House". Credit: National Archives.

By the time he became president in 1969, Richard Nixon had been on the giving and receiving end of major underworld favors for more than two decades. Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg.

by Don Fulsom

During the height of the Watergate scandal, Atty. Gen. John Mitchell's wife, Martha, sounded one of the first alarms, telling a reporter, ''Nixon is involved with the Mafia. The Mafia was involved in his election.''

White House officials privately urged other reporters to treat any anti-Nixon comments by Martha as the ravings of a drunken crackpot.

Time, however, has proved Mrs. Mitchell right.

Richard Nixon's earliest campaign manager and political advisor was Murray Chotiner, a chubby lawyer who specialized in defending members of the Mafia and who enjoyed dressing like them too, in a wardrobe highlighted by monogrammed white-on-white dress shirts and silk ties with jeweled stickpins. The monograms said MMC, because – perhaps to seem more impressive – he billed himself as Murray M. Chotiner, though, in reality, he lacked a middle name.

In this cigar chomping, wheeler-dealer, Nixon had found what future Nixon aide Len Garment called ''his Machiavelli – a hardheaded exponent of the campaign philosophy that politics is war.''

When Nixon went on to the White House, both as vice president, and later as president, he took Chotiner with him as a key behind-the-scenes advisor – and for good reason. By the time he became president in 1969, thanks in large part to Murray Chotiner's contacts with such shady figures as Mafia-connected labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, Richard Nixon had been on the giving and receiving end of major underworld favors for more than two decades.