Table Of ContentCopyright © 2014 by Roger Stone with Mike Colapietro All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-603-4
eISBN: 978-1-63330-060-0
Printed in the United States of America
To my beloved wife, Nydia, who supports me when I am right and when I am
wrong, and my beloved dogs, Milhous, Taft, Dewey, Pee Wee, Buster, and Oscar.
All noble dogs.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION Nixon’s the One!
CHAPTER ONE The Man
CHAPTER TWO “Your Good Dog”
CHAPTER THREE Murray and the Mob
CHAPTER FOUR The Great Train Robbery
CHAPTER FIVE Ike and Dick
CHAPTER SIX Stolen
CHAPTER SEVEN “California Needs a Decisive Leader”
CHAPTER EIGHT The Wilderness Years
CHAPTER NINE The Bright Young Men
CHAPTER TEN The Big Enchilada and Rise of the Merchandisers
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Comeback
CHAPTER TWELVE Plastic and Steel
CHAPTER THIRTEEN A New Beginning
CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Break-ins
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Gemstone
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Nixon and the Bushes
CHAPTER SEVENTEENWoodstein
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN “Pardon Me”
CHAPTER NINETEEN Fighting For His Legacy
APPENDICES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
To view index, go to http://nixonssecrets.com/Bookindex
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Anyone writing a book about Richard Nixon is blessed with an abundance of
sources. The most durable figure in American politics in the twentieth century,
Nixon has been the subject of fascination and public debate for six and a half
decades. The literature runs the gamut from devastating psychological profiles
such as Fawn M. Brodie’s Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character and
Arthur Woodstone’s Nixon’s Head, which can find no redeemable qualities in
Nixon, and Lord Conrad Black’s Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, which can find
no fault in the man.
In order to grasp the full scope of Nixon and to carefully balance both his
attributes and his faults, one must delve deeply into the literature on our thirty-
seventh president. William Safire’s Before the Fall is required reading for anyone
who wants to understand Nixon, as is Raymond K. Price’s With Nixon. The
three-volume biography of Nixon by historian Stephen Ambrose presents a fine
and balanced portrait of Nixon and his times. The fact that Ambrose wrote an
excellent multivolume biography of Dwight Eisenhower gave Ambrose
additional insight into the complicated relationship between Ike and Dick. The
New York Times reporter Tom Wicker’s One of Us has the same balance and
perspective.
I am particularly indebted to Nixon law partner Leonard Garment for his
iconoclastic view of Nixon as reflected in Crazy Rhythm and In Search of Deep
Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time.
Jules Witcover is perhaps the best reporter on the 1968 campaign with his
much overlooked The Year the Dream Died, his The Resurrection of Richard
Nixon, and his more recent Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy
Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Witcover’s shrewd insights and eye
for color make him one of the best political reporters of our time.
Generally speaking, the books by Theodore White on US presidential elections
are close to worthless. White, an affable man, was mesmerized by the stylish and
dashing John Kennedy. White in his seminal The Making of the President, 1960
would weave a narrative in which Kennedy is a star and Nixon is a black-hatted
villain. White bought into JFK’s expensively promoted image of style, grace, and
intellectualism. Kennedy’s young and carefully dressed wife and his beautiful
young children were part of the mystique. White wondered why the Nixon
entourage would treat him coolly when he joined the Nixon campaign tour
wearing a Kennedy button. Fortunately three authors have written retrospectives
on the 1960 campaign, which put the photo-finish election in better perspective.
First among these is David Pietrusza’s 1960—LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic
Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies. Also invaluable for a more balanced
assessment of that race is Professor Edmund F. Kallina Jr.’s Kennedy v. Nixon:
The Presidential Election of 1960, although the good professor underestimates the
important role of organized crime in stealing votes for Kennedy. The Kennedy
Brothers by former Arizona Secretary of State Richard D. Mahoney is the
definitive account of the efforts of the Chicago mob to intimidate voters in that
city as well as the mob’s earlier role in the West Virginia primary. Also required
reading for a better understanding of the 1960 election is W. J. Rorabaugh’s The
Real Making of the President.
Because of the circumstances of his death and the effects on him by his
brother’s assassination, public awareness of Robert F. Kennedy is more vague
today. Because of Robert Kennedy’s tactics in the 1960 election, he is an
extraordinary factor in the Nixon narrative. I relied upon the aforementioned
The Kennedy Brothers by Richard D. Mahoney as well as Jeffrey K. Smith’s Bad
Blood: Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, and the Tumultuous 1960s and Jeff
Shesol’s Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and the Feud that
Defined a Decade. Robert Kennedy was among the most ruthless political
operators of the 1960s, a fact you won’t find in Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert
Kennedy and His Times.
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter J. Anthony Lukas, in his stunning book
Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, bores in on several areas of
Watergate and the Nixon administration where knowledge is scant, including
the role of Robert Bennett and his CIA front the Mullen Company in the
breakin, the 1969–71 wire tapping on Nixon’s aides, the Howard Hughes–Nixon
relationship, the Saturday night massacre, and the connection between the
Watergate breakin and a high-end house of prostitution operating out of the
Columbia Plaza Apartments only blocks from the Watergate.
Although most Nixon loyalists heap abuse on investigative journalist Anthony
Summers book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, I
found it both fascinating and readable. Don Fulsom’s Nixon’s Dark Secrets has an
agenda but is also valuable. The reporting of Dan E. Moldea is invaluable,
particularly regarding Nixon’s long and complicated relationship with Teamster
leader James “Jimmy” Hoffa.
I am, however, particularly indebted to four ground-breaking journalists who
have had the courage and tenacity to examine the accepted Watergate narrative
and poke substantial holes in it. Secret Agenda by Jim Hougan is the important
first cut at permeating the many falsehoods the public accepts about Watergate.
In their book Silent Coup, Leonard Colodny and Robert Gettlin advanced the
narrative first uncovered by Hougan. Working with Tom Shachtman, Colodny’s
Forty Years War outlined in graphic detail the foreign policy hard-liners
attempts to undo Nixon’s policy of détente. Fox News White House
Correspondent James Rosen’s biography of Nixon Attorney General John N.
Mitchell, The Strong Man, fifteen years in the writing, is a vital corrective for
many of the myths of Watergate. A must-read is also veteran journalist Phil
Stanford’s White House Call Girl, which breaks important new ground in the
Watergate narrative.
The public can more accurately understand what really transpired in
Watergate through the writing and scholarship of former White House lawyer
Geoff Shepard, who has exhaustively examined the words and actions of former
White House Counsel John Dean and has written a devastating critique of
Dean’s most recent book, The Nixon Defense. This analysis is included in this
volume as Appendix 5.
Beyond these authors as well as many others, I am indebted to Craig Shirley,
Michael Caputo, former Reader’s Digest Washington Editor Bill Schulz, Jeffrey S.
Bell, Douglas Caddy, Ed Cox, Scott and Sonia Kaiser, John Taylor, Andrew
Cettina, Travis Irvine, Sharon Kaplan, Dianne Thorne, Robert Morrow, William
Maloney, and Roger Ailes. I am indebted to our publisher Tony Lyons of
Skyhorse Publishing, a man of uncommon courage, my editors Steve Price and
Krishan Trotman, and of course, my coauthor Mike Colapietro, who labored
without complaint to make our deadlines.
Roger Stone
Miami Beach, Florida
