1972 Elections in the United States

The Event American politicians run for office

Date November, 1972

The transformative 1972 election included illegal activities that, when fully uncovered, led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon under threat of imminent impeachment, conviction, and removal from office.

The election of 1972 set in motion a series of events that led to the scandal of Watergate, the trial and conviction of many high-level government officials, and the resignation of Nixon. The election colored the politics of the 1970’s, but it had its roots in earlier elections. President Nixon had been elected in 1968 by a margin of about 500,000 votes and had previously lost the 1960 presidential race by a margin of only 112,000 votes. The 1970 congressional contest had been equally close. The Vietnam War controversy, including well-publicized antiwar demonstrations, combined with the close election apparently aggravated Nixon’s near-paranoid state of mind and led him to use very aggressive campaign tactics through his Committee to Re-elect the President.

Manipulation of Democratic Campaigns

The illegal events that came to constitute the Watergate scandal began long before the 1972 election. Nixon apparently feared that Massachusetts Democratic senator Ted Kennedy would be his opponent. As the last surviving Kennedy brother, Ted Kennedy would have been almost assured of the presidential nomination if he chose to run. Senator Kennedy came under White House-controlled surveillance, which included wiretaps. When it became clear that Kennedy would not enter the presidential race, White House attention shifted to other potential democratic challengers.

Senator Edmund Muskie, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and Senator Hubert H. Humphrey all became targets, not only of surveillance but also of deliberate efforts to sabotage their nomination campaigns in order to make sure they would not become the Democratic nominees. Representative Shirley Chisholm, Senator Birch Bayh, and Senator George McGovern were spared these “dirty tricks” since they were regarded as the weaker potential Democratic nominees.

Senator Muskie, the 1968 Democratic vice presidential candidate, became the first casualty. Muskie gave a well-received 1970 national congressional campaign address on behalf of Democratic candidates, received credit for helping the party, and became the 1972 Democratic presidential campaign favorite. As a political moderate who had won gubernatorial and senate elections in a Republican state, Muskie was not to be taken lightly. However, the Nixon campaign managed to portray Muskie as a loser. For example, no candidate anticipated that the Iowa caucuses would be the subject of intense media scrutiny since they were accidentally scheduled on January 24, 1972, the first time a delegate selection effort had ever been held so early. When Muskie did not automatically receive a clear 50 percent majority (instead of a solid 35.5 percent plurality over McGovern, with his 22.6 percent second-place finish), the national press proclaimed that his campaign was in trouble.

Muskie then reacted with an ambitious drive to achieve a win in New Hampshire. Although Muskie defeated McGovern by 46 percent to 37 percent, the media then declared Muskie was out of the running despite two major wins, again because the pluralities were not majorities. The media also portrayed negatively an emotional speech that Muskie made against the conservative New Hampshire newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, for a negative story it printed about his wife. Only later was it discovered that White House operatives had engineered these events by sending a forged letter to the newspaper claiming that Muskie’s wife had called New Hampshire’s French Canadian descendants by the disparaging title of “Canucks.” Combined, these events resulted in negative news coverage, caused Muskie’s campaign financing to slow to a trickle, and led him to drop out on April 27.

With Muskie gone, Senators Humphrey and Jackson struggled to emerge, but the Nixon forces had planned for this possibility by planting false campaign material in which Humphrey and Jackson accused each other of various sexual peccadilloes. Although the accusations were false, both campaigns wasted precious time refuting the bogus charges and wrongly blaming the opponent instead of Nixon for the false attacks.

As Governor George C. Wallace campaigned in Maryland, he was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. His would-be assassin was judged insane and not connected to any political force. Although there were suspicions about Nixon campaign involvements, Nixon’s motive was unclear since Wallace was unlikely to win the Democratic nomination and would have been the weakest conceivable Democratic candidate if he had been nominated.

These clandestine activities were quite possibly successful since the eventual nominee, McGovern, represented policy interests far from the mainstream of American politics and seemed the weakest candidate. The manipulative activities might seem reprehensible, but they were not clearly illegal. The climate did make it easier for Nixon campaign operatives to decide that even illegal activities were permissible.

The “Plumbers’ Unit” and Watergate

As an incumbent, Nixon had considerable assets. He had negotiated a strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, made a dramatic diplomatic initiative toward the People’s Republic of China, and had the potential to negotiate an end to American involvement in Vietnam. With these advantages, his campaign’s behavior in the 1972 election campaign does not seem rational. Nixon’s fears were so deep that he was obsessed with secrecy in his administration. When Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level researcher, photocopied about three thousand pages of top-secret documents called the Pentagon Papers and made them available for publication by TheNew York Times (and eventually other major newspapers), Nixon was furious even though the documents damaged the previous administration. He ordered the Justice Department to seek a permanent injunction against The New York Times and the other recipients of Ellsberg’s photocopied documents. The resulting litigation went all the way to the Supreme Court before the Nixon administration lost the case.

Nixon also ordered a top-secret group of operatives, paid for by his campaign, to break into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to obtain damaging information on him. This illegal activity eventually resulted in the dismissal of the charges against Ellsberg that would almost certainly have resulted in his conviction since he clearly divulged secret government documents. Since this group was charged with “stopping leaks” of classified information, it was code-named the Plumbers’ Unit.

The Plumbers’ Unit then began a new effort: to obtain clandestine telephone surveillance of the Democratic National Committee’s top official in the organization’s office at the Watergate office complex. Initially, they placed two telephone listening devices, or “bugs,” on two telephones but discovered that one of them malfunctioned. The plumbers were returning to fix the defective bug when a security guard discovered their burglary. Upon their apprehension, it was clear from their suits and ties that they were not ordinary burglars, but the Nixon administration managed to cover up its connection to the crime until after Nixon won the presidential election.

Their true purpose was hidden until the early months of Nixon’s second term, when the cover-up began to unravel. When fully exposed, several top White House officials and cabinet officials were convicted of crimes and went to jail. These convictions soon exposed Nixon’s role in the cover-up and led him to resign when he understood he was on the verge of being impeached and convicted in the U.S. Congress.

The 1972 General Election Campaign

The Nixon administration intended to undermine the Democrats’ attempt to win the White House in 1972, but it would be wrong to suggest that its activities were completely responsible for the outcome. The Republican efforts to interfere with the Democratic nomination process probably went a long way toward undermining the stronger candidates and allowing McGovern to be nominated. Still, the Democrats bear the responsibility for their own failings. The Democratic Party’s own reform efforts, headed by Senator McGovern and Representative Donald Fraser, changed the Democratic National Committee’s delegate selection process in a way that made it possible for a radical “fringe” candidate, such as McGovern, to become the nominee despite his unpopular views. The presumably stronger candidates also individually made mistakes in their campaigns that were exploited by the White House.

Once McGovern was nominated, the White House defined him as an unacceptable radical. McGovern then aggravated the situation by putting forward Missouri Democratic senator Thomas F. Eagleton as his vice presidential running mate. McGovern failed to investigate his choice thoroughly before announcing his decision and thereby neglected to learn that Eagleton had three times been hospitalized for severe depression. When this was discovered, questions about the extent of his treatment, such as whether he had received electroshock therapy, dominated the news. McGovern, who had positioned himself as a candidate above unsavory political behavior, then pressured Eagleton to withdraw, all the while publicly maintaining that he was still behind his running mate. When Eagleton finally gave in to McGovern’s pressure, the truth of McGovern’s duplicity further undermined his candidacy by suggesting that, despite his claims to be above politics, he behaved in a typically political fashion. McGovern appeared even more inept when a succession of political leaders whom McGovern approached as replacements all turned him down, sensing his impending defeat. Finally, R. Sargent Shriver agreed to serve even though his only claim to national prominence was as the first director of the Peace Corps and as Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law.

In the general election, Nixon trounced McGovern with the largest popular vote margin in history, although not the highest percentage of the two-party vote, and a landslide win in the Electoral College. Nixon’s success did not much help the Republican Party’s representation in the House of Representatives and Senate. Democrats continued to hold a majority of seats in both houses and were in control of both houses of Congress during the Watergate investigations and the impeachment proceedings.

Impact

The 1972 election and the Vietnam War had a profound effect on the politics and character of the 1970’s. To the extent that the 1960’s represented idealism, any naïve commitment to idealism was lost during this period. America had witnessed a concerted effort by a sitting president to subvert the election process for his own benefit. While he had been caught, it was still dispiriting to know that he had succeeded in winning an election and had resigned only when a mountain of evidence had been gathered against him. President Gerald R. Ford, Nixon’s successor, suffered from the effects since his presidency was seriously damaged by his decision to pardon Nixon of any crimes he might have committed. Moreover, that a relative political outsider, such as Jimmy Carter, could win the presidency after Ford seems likely given the trauma of the events that flowed out of the 1972 election. The 1972 election will be remembered as one of the most important elections not only of the 1970’s but also of the last half of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. The classic account by the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal.

Dean, John W. Blind Ambition: The White House Years. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. This is the memoir of Nixon’s White House counsel, who was first ordered to cover up the crime and later went public when Nixon attempted to make him the “fall guy” for the cover-up.

Jaworski, Leon. The Right and the Power: The Prosecution of Watergate. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976. Memoir of the man appointed to complete the prosecution of Nixon and who successfully sent several high-level cabinet officers and White House staffers to jail.

Polsby, Nelson W., and Aaron Wildavsky. Presidential Elections: Strategies and Structures in American Politics. 9th ed. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1996. This classic text on presidential elections sets the 1972 election against a background of other elections in the twentieth century.

Sirica, John J. To Set the Record Straight: The Break-In, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Memoir of the federal judge who sentenced the Watergate burglars to long prison terms.

Sussman, Barry. The Great Cover-Up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate. 3d ed. Arlington, Va.: Seven Locks Press, 1992. Barry Sussman, Bernstein and Woodward’s Washington Post editor and the first who understood the full significance of the burglary, updated his earlier book with evidence later uncovered.