WASHINGTON — In newly released papers from his presidency, Richard Nixon directs a purge of Kennedy-era modern art — “these little uglies” — orders hostile journalists to be frozen out and fusses over White House guest lists to make sure political opponents don’t make it in.
As his lieutenants built an ambitious political espionage operation that tapped scribes as spies, Nixon is shown preoccupying himself with the finest details of dividing friend and foe.
The Nixon Library, run by the National Archives, released some 280,000 pages of records yesterday from his years in office, many touching on the early days of political spycraft and manipulation that would culminate in the Watergate scandal.
The latest collection sheds more light on the long-familiar determination of Nixon’s men to find dirt on Democrats however they could. Memos attempt to track amorous movements of Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat whom Nixon’s operatives apparently feared the most. Journalists secretly hired by Nixon’s men reported on infighting among Democratic presidential contenders.
After the Chappaquiddick scandal in 1969, when Kennedy drove off a bridge in an accident that drowned his female companion, Nixon hoped to derail the married senator’s presidential hopes by catching him with more women. The new collection includes daily notes by Gordon Strachan, assistant to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, touching on this effort.
“We need tail on EMK,” he wrote from one meeting, referring to Kennedy by his initials. The idea: “get caught w[ith] compromising evidence . . . Bits and pieces now need hard evi[dence].”
And Nixon despised the cultural influences of the Kennedys and their liberal circles.
In a Jan. 26, 1970, memo to Haldeman and secretary Rose Mary Woods, the president demanded that the administration “turn away from the policy of forcing our embassies abroad or those who receive assistance from the United States at home to move in the direction of off-beat art, music and literature.”
He called Lincoln Center a “horrible monstrosity” that shows “how decadent the modern art and architecture have become,” and declared modern art in embassies “incredibly atrocious.”
“This is what the Kennedy-Shriver crowd believed in and they had every right to encourage this kind of stuff when they were in,” he wrote. “But I have no intention whatever of continuing to encourage it now. If this forces a show-down and even some resignations it’s all right with me.”
Nixon put aside his own tastes when he saw political advantage, however, as in a January 1970 memo about TV talk-show hosts.
“I would like to invite, even though I don’t like most of these people, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas,” he wrote. “This could payoff in great measure to us.”