Nixon's Secret (8 page)

45
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 110.

46
.   Richard Nixon,
The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
, p. 29.

47
.   William Costello,
The Facts About Nixon
, p. 31.

48
.   Leonard Lurie,
The Running of Richard Nixon
, p. 41.

49
.   Conrad Black,
A Life in Full
, p. 61.

50
.   Edmund Kallina,
Kennedy v. Nixon
, p. 43.

CHAPTER THREE

MURRAY AND THE MOB

“Wherever you find Murray Chotiner, there is a trail of blood behind.”

—Capt. Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary.
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s a nineteen-year-old staffer for President Nixon in 1972, the youngest member of the staff (excluding Young Voters for the President), part of my responsibility was to receive a daily news summary, which Pat Buchanan’s shop at the White House compiled by 7 a.m. by scouring the daily newspapers and teletypes to prepare for the president, the vice president, White House Chief of Staff Haldeman, and the White House senior staff. It went first to Jeb Magruder’s office (he was a California marketing guy, pulled in through Haldeman to run the Committee to Re-elect the President, which we abbreviated as CRP, but the media would later dub CREEP), and then to the office of Fred LaRue, a lanky and taciturn Mississippi Republican who had been part of the crowd that snatched the nomination for Goldwater and was by 1972 a close confidant of Attorney General John Mitchell. From there, I took it to Robert Mardian, who had been an assistant attorney general under Mitchell and was his eyes and ears at CRP. Later in the campaign, Fred Malek would join my distribution list. He was sent by White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman to keep an eye on Jeb Magruder. I remember that when I delivered to Fred at 7:20 a.m. each morning, he was in his office but always in his stocking feet. I liked him.

The best part of my job was hand delivering a copy of it to the small, dark, secret office of Murray Chotiner, located catty-corner from the White House in a different building from CRP. Murray was not on the directory, and his door didn’t even have a number. Chotiner, a portly Jewish attorney originally from Pittsburgh, had moved west with his brother. They prospered as criminal defense attorneys mostly for Mob guys. Murray and his brother had represented over 221 hoodlums in one year. More importantly, Chotiner was the first “political consultant.” Murray Chotiner understood how to communicate systems and the need to push simple and understandable,
mostly negative,
messages to the voters. Chotiner would be present for the duration of Nixon’s political career; although at many points hidden in the shadows, he was always only a phone call away.

Chotiner’s secretary didn’t get in until 8 a.m., and I knew if I delivered the news summary at 7:45 a.m., Murray himself would answer the door. After making my third delivery to him in person, Chotiner asked me my name, where I was from, and how the hell I got my job. I told him I was a proud protégé of Connecticut Governor John Lodge and that I loved Richard Nixon. He smiled, and our relationship bloomed.

Murray was paunchy with dark, wavy hair and deep circles under his eyes. He was always wearing an expensive suit and usually a Jack Ruby–type fedora. The best way to describe Murray was rumpled; he had a penchant for silk ties and jeweled stickpins, described by the
New York Times
as a man who “buys good clothes, but manages to wear them in such a way that he looks more like an accountant or an instructor in a technical school.”
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He was unkempt but expensively dressed with a cigar frequently clenched between his teeth. I can still remember Murray with a salami sandwich in one hand and the racing form in the other. Frequently, his tie was stained with cigar ashes.

It was from Chotiner that Dick Nixon learned the dark arts of politics. Murray was
the
pioneer. His theory was simple: Make every election about the other guy. Identify his weakest point and pound on it relentlessly. Attack morning, noon, and night. Attack, attack, attack, never defend, always pivot and attack. Chotiner drilled this into the green Nixon, and it was, by 1960, ingrained in the future president’s blood.

“Attack, attack, attack, never defend,” was the Chotiner mantra that I would adopt for Stone’s Rules, my own list of axioms regarding the practice of politics and life. Chotiner “didn’t mind accepting the fact that politics is shabby most of the time, filled with lies and deceptions,” Nixon’s future White House counsel Len Garment later said.
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Fresh from the war, Nixon, a political neophyte, enlisted Chotiner for his run for congress against five-term incumbent Horace Jeremiah “Jerry” Voorhis. Chotiner was the only paid Nixon staffer on the ‘46 campaign, netting $500 as a consultant after giving Dick a perfunctory inspection. Chotiner had previously masterminded Earl Warren’s run for governor of California and at the time was running William Knowland’s senatorial campaign. Chotiner had served as field director for Warren and when given credit for constructing the Nixon image would retort, “The real man I created was Earl Warren.” This drove Warren crazy.

Warren despised Chotiner. Although not displeased with his overwhelming victories in
both
major party primaries (California had this strange cross-filing system in which candidates could run, despite their party affiliation, in the other parties primary—a relic from the reform period of progressive Governor Hiram Johnson), which Chotiner had engineered. But Chotiner’s aggressiveness and tactics appalled the starchy Warren. Chotiner would ultimately mastermind Nixon’s way onto the Eisenhower ticket, which thwarted Warren’s own ambition to be president. Even after Chotiner was briefly made the general counsel of the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations on the White House staff, Warren would never be in the same room as him. But Chotiner did, in fact, create him.

Nixon major domo Bob Haldeman disliked Murray because the old man was one of the few who could contact Nixon directly and needed no appointment. Chotiner would handle ornate ballot security efforts for the 1968 race, dubbed “Operation Eagle Eye,” designed to ensure that the kind of voter theft that had defeated Nixon in Illinois and Texas in 1960 did not happen again. Beyond that, few knew exactly what Chotiner did, but everyone knew Murray had the president’s private phone number and that he and Nixon spoke late at night after “the old man” had a few belts.

In 1956, not long after Nixon’s ascension to the vice presidency, Chotiner got jammed up for influence peddling and became a target for Senate Labor Committee Counsel Robert Kennedy. Kennedy was probing organized crime connections in the labor movement and accused Chotiner of influence peddling. Congressional investigator and Kennedy operative Carmine Bellino, a constant foil to Nixon who would later order the bugging of Nixon’s hotel room on behalf of Kennedy prior to the 1960 debate, discovered a $5,000 check made out to “M. Chotiner” from a New Jersey uniform manufacturer convicted of defrauding the government.
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Murray tried to explain away the check and dodge the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, but Bellino, dogged in his pursuit, found an informant who further contextualized Chotiner’s dealings. “The informant,” Bellino recalled, “stated that Chotiner had been engaged because of his friendship with Nixon and Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, and he was expected to help in connection with the tax case then being considered for possible prosecution by the Department of Justice . . .”
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Although Murray would beat the rap, Chotiner’s name would be irreversibly damaged, and it required him to operate in the background in the 1958 and 1960 campaigns. Still, Murray would be in Nixon’s suite and try to console the angry candidate when Nixon flamed out in the 1962 California governors race. Murray was not present at any of the seminal meetings regarding Nixon’s nascent 1968 comeback, but he would always be there, lurking in the shadows.

It is clear that Chotiner had a career-long influence on Nixon. Haldeman hated him because he could always get through to Nixon and couldn’t be blocked. The rest of the White House feared him. He had a White House pass and senior mess privileges at the “Casa Blanca” as the Nixon men called it.

During the Nixon-Voorhis run, Chotiner was an effective political operative. Young Nixon excelled at public speaking and debating. Murray took the callow, young Nixon and showed him the bag of tricks. Chotiner had a fourteen-thousand-word treatise on political operations and tactics he would use to teach to future political operatives in Republican Party training schools that gave insight on the early campaigns of Richard Nixon.

Chotiner’s political chops are covered well in
The Facts about Nixon
by William Costello:

Chotiner was one of the fathers of the new synthetic Madison Avenue-style politics in America. For years Hollywood had shown what could be done with movie stars and crooners by conditioning and manipulating attitudes. The early crudities of press gentry had over the years been refined. Big business had added respectability by pioneering market research, opinion polling, mass advertising and the niceties of product identification. Chotiner’s discovery was that, by choosing an acceptable stereotype, a political personality could also be packaged and merchandised without reference to any of the serious issues of life and politics.

To wage a successful campaign, you must begin “one full year ahead,” Chotiner prescribed, “because you need that time to deflate your opposition. . . . There are many people who say we don’t want that kind of campaign in our state. They say we want to conduct a constructive campaign and point out the merits of our own candidate. I say to you in all sincerity that, if you do not deflate the opposition candidate before your own candidate gets started, the odds are that you are going to be doomed to defeat.”
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The manifesto also gave perspective on the fair use of what his opponents would call “dirty tricks.”

“What is the difference between legitimate attack and smear? It is not a smear if you please, if you point out the record of your opponent . . . of course, it is always a smear, naturally, when it is directed to our own candidate.”
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Murray was a maven for research. “Find out everything you can. Canvass their neighbors. Go through their garbage. Have your opponent followed. Everyone has something. Find it. Sift their voting records—look for damaging votes or votes that can be made to sound damaging. Go to the newspaper morgues and dig up every word the son of a bitch has ever said. Reduce the quotes to index cards. Sort them by subject. Look for inconsistencies and contradictions. Pull their deeds and access their mortgages. Grease the local police and find out what they know. Find something to hit ‘em with,” Murray told me while gnawing on the end of a cigar. Murray was the early king of “oppo research.”

Although single-minded when necessary, Chotiner was a supremely practical pol. His rough tactics were to win votes, not aggravate the opposition, although he understood they would have that effect. Chotiner had nothing but disdain for the sophomoric “dirty tricks” of the 1972 campaign. “It’s not about pissing off your opponent, it’s about winning votes. A hundred percent of your time should be spent pummeling your opponent to the mat and never letting him up. If your energies and resources aren’t used for winning votes, what is the point?”

Chotiner later thought the UCLA and USC frat boys around Nixon—like Haldeman and Ehrlichman and their underlings—lost sight of the ball. “A real candy-ass,” said Murray of Magruder. “Those guys are going to get Dick in trouble one day.”

Chotiner reserved special disdain for White House counselor Charles “Chuck” Colson, a toughtalking ex-marine who had come to the White House from the staff of Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall. Colson’s strategies about how to woo Catholics, unions, and other key elements of the silent majority appealed to Nixon. While Colson wooed the Teamsters for a 1972 endorsement, Chotiner quietly brokered the deal in which the prison sentence of imprisoned Teamster official Jimmy Hoffa would be commuted and Hoffa would be barred from future union activity to the delight of the mobsters who had taken firm control of the union in Hoffa’s absence.

Colson’s love of intrigue and dirty tricks appealed to Nixon’s dark side. Colson also had access to Nixon, which was granted through Nixon’s instructions to Haldeman. “He’s a total phony,” Chotiner told me. “Half the shit he says in memos he’s doing never gets done. He’s bullshitting Dick and seeking to expand his empire,” the paunchy pol told me. Chotiner particularly hated Colson’s tendency to question the loyalty to Nixon of anyone who disagreed with his plans.

* * *

Chotiner maintained many strange relationships. In his biography, Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, who excoriated Nixon on the Senate Watergate Committee, maintained a cordial relationship with Murray. In his biography he recalled an olive branch Chotiner had extended him in a 1970 Senate race:

Before Dodd announced his candidacy, I was approached by Murray Chotiner, who was best known as a longtime hatchet man for Richard Nixon. Chotiner did not enjoy a savory reputation in Washington, but for one reason or another he had been good to me. When I opposed Nixon on any issue, or from time to time said things as a House member that weren’t complimentary, Chotiner always took up my cause in the White House. He was not just a friend but a good friend.

Chotiner came to me and said, “Lowell, if you would like, we will encourage Tom Dodd to get in this race. Do you think you can profit by a three-way race?” The idea was that Dodd would siphon Democratic votes from Duffy.

I said, “Listen, Murray, I don’t want you guys laying a finger on this race, I don’t want you doing anything. Nothing; I can win on my own. I don’t need a three-way race.” Chotiner said, “If that’s your wish, I’ll convey it.”
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