A 1972 meeting between Nixon and his chief of staff produced an informal directive to “destroy’’ the “pip-squeak’’ running for Democratic vice president, according to scribbled notes.
In a memo three years earlier, Nixon’s staff assistant describes placing the movements of the Kennedys under observation in Massachusetts after Edward M. Kennedy drove off a bridge in an accident that drowned his female companion.
The materials show Nixon as sharp-witted, crude, and sometimes surprisingly liberal.
In one letter, he solidly endorses the Equal Rights Amendment, saying that for 20 years “I have not altered my belief that equal rights for women warrant a constitutional guarantee.’’ The amendment failed.
Yet in a taped conversation with George H.W. Bush, then GOP chairman, he pitched the recruitment of pretty women in particular to run for the party, after two caught his eye in the South Carolina Legislature.
Watergate was a gathering drumbeat through it all. A nine-page handwritten note by Nixon domestic policy adviser Kenneth Cole reflects on the unfolding “Saturday night massacre,’’ when Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and lost the two top Justice Department officials in October 1973.
Cox was pressing relentlessly for Nixon’s White House tape recordings as he investigated the president’s involvement in the Watergate coverup. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus, balked at Nixon’s decision to fire Cox - and were removed.
Cole recommended demonizing the investigator - a tactic President Clinton and his aides would try in his own impeachment drama years later, against prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
“Cox wanted to keep this an unending crisis of the body politic,’’ Cole wrote, laying out an argument for Nixon partisans that would be called talking points today.
