CHAPTER FIVE.

The Madness in the Mind: Rage and Conspiracism in the President 

In the summer of 1969, in the first year of his presidency, Nixon became absorbed by the incident at Chappaquiddick. The mysterious death of Edward Kennedy’s companion offered mass political fodder. The youngest Kennedy did not report his car crash off Chappaquiddick Island to the police until nine the following morning.

There were questions of “heavy drinking.” Some observers were calling the accident “politically fatal.” Others called it a cover-up. Kennedy’s hometown paper, the Boston Globe, dubbed the accident the “most famous traffic fatality of the century.” With Chappaquiddick the previously untouchable Kennedys were suddenly tainted. Nixon was, as Haldeman noted, “fascinated.”

Kennedy left a family steak cookout at 11:15 pm with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28—a former secretary to his brother Robert. Kennedy tried to explain. The dirt road. The wooden bridge. The salt-water inlet. "I remember thinking, as the cold water rushed in around my head that I was for certain drowning,” he reported amidst the clicks and clatter of the press conference. “Then water entered my lungs, and I actually felt the sensation of drowning. But somehow I struggled to the surface alive,” Kennedy said. “I have no recollection of how I got out of the car.” Then 37 years old and husky, a wave of still-dark thick locks, he swore, “I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down…in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful.”

Nixon had believed that Ted Kennedy would be his strongest competitor for the 1972 presidential election. But with the revelation of how the junior senator from Massachusetts abandoned his black Oldsmobile Delmont in Poucha Pond, how Kopechne drowned that late July night, Kennedy’s misdeed all but disqualified him from the presidential race. “What if he were President and the Russians phoned on that hot line and said they were going to bomb us within the hour and he forgot to report it to the Pentagon?” groused one New Orleans cab driver. “I think his nine-hour period of confusion stemmed from just too many tragedies,” sympathized a housewife from Seattle. Another star-crossed Kennedy, Ted appealed to the “fancies and fantasies of the public,” wrote a Nixon aide. He was all that Nixon was not, a mix of glamor, ease, largesse. Naturally the president could rejoice in so swift a disarmament of a Kennedy as Chappaquiddick. He could bask in the revelation of the salacious crime, in the unmasking of his foe.

Yet Nixon did not. Or at least not exclusively. Less than two weeks after the incident, during an otherwise uneventful visit to the White House by a clutch of senators, Nixon took Kennedy aside. He comforted him. He identified with the tragedy. Indeed, Nixon traded one hated foe for another. He complained of the highfalutin media’s base treatment of the Massachusetts senator. After such favorable coverage through his life, how quickly their loyalties had shifted from the once princely Kennedy. He needed to understand, Nixon impressed, that the press “are your enemy at heart even if they do like you, because their prime motivation is the story.”

William Safire sat across the room out of earshot, simply watching the two. “Nixon, who had experienced premature political burial himself, was talking gently and reassuringly, and Kennedy was listening,” the speechwriter recalled. For ten minutes, the two maligned figures huddled too softly to hear. Gone was the president’s bile. Gone was his ire toward those dwelling in Camelot. Nixon’s sympathy came not for the young Kopechne or from some long-enduring fondness for the youngest Kennedy. He identified with the up-and-comer suddenly cast aside as the tragic knave, the (all-at-once) outsider. Kennedy’s fall from grace lifted him up in the president’s estimation to a suddenly sympathetic figure.

After huddling with Kennedy, Nixon gathered his thoughts. Scrawling a note in case he was asked at the next press conference, he felt inspired. He wrote a Longfellowian anthem for the defiant losers, for those comebacks for which his name had become synonymous.

            Defeat—doesn’t

            finish a man—

            Quit—does—

            A man is not finished

            when he’s defeated

            He’s finished

            when he

            quits.

For Nixon, disaffection was a badge of honor. Marginality carried within it a status as he aimed for the counter-establishment to replace the establishment. He looked to the Silent Majority to become the new radical chic. And the press was the enemy. Journalists “are your enemy at heart,” Nixon consoled the young Kennedy. Their story was not his story. The press’s story was the insiders’ account, the establishment’s that, Nixon was convinced, threatened his outsider’s logic, that ridiculed and laughed at him, that conspired against him.

To combat such apparent unfairness, in the tradition of the mad Fool, Nixon forwarded a riddling of power turned on its head. In such topsy-turvy of morals, fair was foul as he attempted to turn foul fair. The colluded against was justified in becoming the colluder as he judged that his enemies’ misdeeds countenanced his own, as he felt entitled to level the field, to play fast and furious, to hoodwink. His strategy bore both ends of the “madman theory”: the madness and the play. Among his fraternity of aides and deputies, the young Donald Segretti, a “secret recruiter” of potential fellow dirty tricksters for Nixon, liked to stress “what fun we could have.” The Nixonites liked to call their tactics “rat-fucking.” For even if Nixon did not have a developed sense of humor, he certainly favored a political style of gamesmanship. He was Slippery Dick Nixon, Tricky Dick or, as was the novelist Philip Roth’s want, Trick E. Dixon…