For Nixon, enemies all around

New tapes, memos show him besieged

President Richard M. Nixon walked with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird in 1973. (Associated Press/File)

WASHINGTON - In Richard Nixon's time, all the president's men fretted about threats on every front: disquiet out on the streets, disloyalty inside the administration, and trouble from political opponents who had to be discredited at any cost.

Documents and recordings released yesterday show Nixon's operatives dishing dirt on the president's critics and public figures, including their marital, mental, and drinking problems, and struggling to contain growing public unrest over the war in Vietnam. The president starkly set that tone.

"Never forget," Nixon tells national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped Oval Office conversation revealed yesterday. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.

"Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

The conversation was on Dec. 14, 1972, four days before the United States unleashed a massive bombing campaign on Hanoi and Haiphong aimed at getting North Vietnam to negotiate more seriously in peace talks.

"We're going to bomb them," Nixon told Kissinger and adviser Alexander Haig, green lighting one of the most controversial acts of the war. "We'll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it's Christmas withdrawal."

Kissinger later called the decision to resume bombing the loneliest one Nixon had made thus far. In their Dec. 14 meeting, he is heard telling the president: "We have to convince them that we are not easily pushed around."

The Nixon Library, run by the National Archives, opened nearly 200 hours of tape recordings and 90,000 pages of documents in its latest release of material from his administration.

In one memo, Alabama Governor George Wallace was branded a "psychotic" who could be useful in making trouble for his fellow Democrats. Thomas Eagleton's treatments for mental illness were reported to Nixon's secretary in other correspondence before that disclosure forced him to resign from the 1972 Democratic ticket.

The records show that Nixon kept an exceptionally close eye on antiwar and civil rights protests, even the most benign.

Senior FBI official Mark Felt regularly reported to Nixon and his national security team on events as minor as a high-school cafeteria fight in which seven students were arrested and a peaceful sit-in by 20 college students in Rhode Island.

Felt was up to much bigger things on the sly. He was Deep Throat, feeding revelations to The Washington Post about the Watergate scandal that would ultimately bring Nixon down.

Even as he campaigned toward a landslide reelection in 1972, Nixon felt besieged on multiple fronts.

In an August 1972 memo to his chief counsel Charles Colson, he complained that New York business and financial writers were in the bag for Democratic opponent George McGovern "and are trying to do us in."

Patrick Buchanan, a special assistant to Nixon and now a conservative commentator, wrote to Nixon's top aide and the attorney general at the time about Wallace, the longtime civil rights opponent who was challenging McGovern for the Democratic nomination.

"From an excellent source in Alabama comes word Governor Wallace is 'getting psychotic,' that he has serious marital problems and that he is 'not what he used to be,' Buchanan wrote in January 1972. He said this could affect "just how much of an embroglio (sic) he can create at the Miami Beach convention."

Wallace was shot in May while campaigning in Maryland and spoke at the Democrats' Miami convention from his wheelchair.

Also in Buchanan's files was a letter to Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, from St. Louis supporter Sam Krupnick, telling Nixon aides that McGovern's running mate had been in and out of a St. Louis mental institution and "was suffering from acute alcoholism. He still has a whiskey voice. He came by it honestly." The letter also addressed allegations about Eagleton's marriage.