Money: A Murder Story
1 May, 2014The Renminbi’s Inexorable Rise
1 May, 2014Discovery Channel Magazine, May 2014
From the moment Richard Milhous Nixon took office in 1968, he put a premium on knowing all about the opposition. “Information and money,” writes Fred Emery in Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon , one of the principle sources for this article. “These two indispensible political commodities were immediately pinpointed by Richard Nixon as cardinal to his reelection four years later.”
Even before his inauguration in 1968, Emery says, Nixon wrote clear instructions to Bab Haldeman, his chief of staff, instructing him to build up funds, including “a private fund for secret political purposes. The Nixon men were to run up huge amounts by methods close to extortion. This approach contributed mightily to Watergate and to the abuses associated with its initial cover-up.”
Emery also notes how Nixon – who would contest five elections in all, including two as vice-president, and who in 1960 lost to John F Kennedy by just 113,000 votes – seemed driven by a fear of losing, perhaps because when he took office both houses of Congress were controlled by the opposition. “Nixon never seemed to have accepted that he had finally won. From the outset of his presidency, Nixon seemed obsessed by the fear of being a one-term president.”
In Nixon’s own memoirs, he writes: “I decided that we must begin immediately keeping track of everything the leading Democrats did. Information would be our first line of defense.”
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