Shady funds through foreign powers, digging up dirt, and an election won: the Nixon playbook
His re-election committee was known as CREEP, and he feels too relevant
It was April 5, 1972 and Pennzoil president Bill Liedtke had only one more day to meet his deadline. He had everything — luggage filled with cash, his private jet on standby and his pilot on the ready — everything but the Mexican money.
Liedtke, the oilman who had developed a reputation as a political fundraising powerhouse during Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, paced in his downtown Houston office as he grew increasingly anxious waiting for José Díaz de León, a Mexican businessman who was personally delivering $100,000 in cash.
All of it — $700,000 in cash and checks that Liedtke had bundled — was headed for the coffers to make sure Nixon stayed in the White House for a second term. The Nixon campaign wanted the money by April 6, the day before a new law requiring federal campaigns disclose their donors went into effect. Maurice Stans, finance chair of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President — later derisively known as CREEP — emphatically told fundraisers they must beat that deadline for the sake of the president, as well as the donors.
CREEP was made up of a couple dozen close Nixon aides who could be trusted to handle the most sensitive and unscrupulous operations. They included former attorney general John Mitchell, Nixon’s personal attorney Herbert Kalmback, finance counsel G. Gordon Liddy, security coordinator James McCord, Nixon’s special counsel Charles Colson and a young Roger Stone. (Colson once said he would “walk over my own grandmother” to get Nixon re-elected. And Stone later did work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.)
Over the course of two months, a handful of so-called pickup men crisscrossed the country, taking in massive donations in what amounted to a shakedown scheme in which CREEP told individuals and corporations that Nixon would win and they had better get on board or face possible IRS audit. In the eyes of many, it was extortion.
Díaz de León did finally arrive later that afternoon, dumping onto Liedtke’s desk a $100,000 donation from Robert Allen, president of Gulf Resources and Chemical Company. Concerned that his shareholders would discover the sizable donation, Allen funneled it through a Mexico City bank by sending the $100,000 to Díaz de León, head of Gulf Resources’ Mexican subsidiary, marking it as a “legal fee.” He then converted the money into four checks, payable to himself and then cashed them at a bank and packed them into suitcases.
Two of Liedtke’s most trusted Pennzoil executives rushed to the Houston airport and boarded the company jet bound for Washington. Hours later, they landed in the capital and sped directly to the committee’s headquarters at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, diagonal from the White House.
That $700,000 capped off the two-month fundraising blitz by the committee that took in a total of $20 million ($120 million in 2017 dollars) before the new disclosure law went into effect. Hugh Sloan, the treasurer of the committee, later described an “avalanche” of cash to make sure Nixon was re-elected.
Although donor names were unknown at the time, the race for cash was an open secret in Washington, as were the ramifications. In a March 24 press conference, one reporter asked Nixon, “Mr. President, will you give us your views on the general proposition of large political contributions either by corporations or individuals in terms of possible getting something back for it?”
“Nobody gets anything back,” replied Nixon. “As a matter of fact, I think some of our majors complaints have been that many of our business people have not received the consideration that perhaps they thought that an administration that was supposed to be business-oriented would provide for it.”
In truth, corporations certainly expected something in return, and Nixon delivered. His administration intervened in an antitrust action against one corporation that had donated and relaxed regulations for a milk company that had done the same. But because donors were kept secret at the time, preferential treatment was not obvious to outside observers.
But in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, James McCord, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, and Eugenio Martinez were apprehended after a security guard at the Watergate complex noticed that several doors leading from the stairwell to various hallways had been taped to prevent them from locking. The intruders were wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, cameras, and almost $2,300 in sequential $100 bills. A subsequent search of their rooms at the Watergate turned up an additional $4,200, burglary tools, and electronic bugging equipment.
Although there was no immediate explanation as to the objective of the break-in, an extensive investigation ensued, eventually unveiling a comprehensive scheme of political sabotage and espionage designed to discredit Democratic candidates. McCord, who was one of the burglars, was also Nixon’s security chief for CREEP. And it was discovered that Barker, a former CIA operative, had recently deposited a $25,000 check from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President.
What had been sold as a fundraising effort to re-elect Nixon became a slush fund for the dirtiest of dirty tricks in American political history. Over the next two years, prosecutors, congressional investigators, and journalists untangled a conspiracy involving a clandestine sabotage campaign against Democrats, hush-hush cash drops for CREEP surrogates in phone booths, and millions in illegal corporate contributions.
FBI agents soon established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for a massive undercover anti-Democratic operation. According to federal investigators, CREEP had forged letters and distributed them under Democratic candidate’s letterhead, leaked false and manufactured information to the press, seized confidential Democratic campaign files, and followed Democratic candidates’ families in order to gather damaging information.
By the time Watergate was fully broken open, 69 individuals were indicted and 30 of them were convicted. Nixon was named a co-conspirator in the indictments — a first for a U.S. president — but he evaded an indictment for himself.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned as president and his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him a month later, saving him from criminal charges. Ford reasoned: “By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”
