The Original Watergate Stores Page 5

  Segretti’s first approach, said Shipley, came on June 27, 1971. “He called me before then and told me he would be in Washington and he came to a dinner party at my apartment at South Four Towers (4600 S. Four Mile Run Drive, Arlington) the night before,” said Shipley. “Nothing was said about it then. The next morning I met him for breakfast and drove him to the airport — Dulles.”

  According to Shipley, he picked Segretti up that morning, a Sunday, at the Georgetown Inn, where — hotel records show — a Donald H. Segretti stayed in room 402 on June 25, and June 26,1971 (total bill $54.75, including $2.25 in telephone calls). In addition, travel records obtained by The Washington Post show that Segretti bought a Washington-San Francisco-Monterey (Calif.) airline ticket on June 27 (departure Dulles).

  On the way to Dulles, said Shipley, Segretti “first mentioned the deal. He asked would I be interested because I was getting out of the Army. We were both setting out shortly…and didn’t have anything lined up. He mentioned on the way to Dulles that we would do a little political espionage.”

  Shipley continued: “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He (Segretti) said: ‘For instance, we’ll go to a Kennedy rally and find an ardent Kennedy worker. Then you say that you’re a Kennedy man too but you’re working behind the scenes; you get them to help you. You send them to work for Muskie, stuffing envelopes or whatever, and you get them to pass you the information. They’ll think that they are helping Kennedy against Muskie. But actually you’re using the information for something else.

  “It was very strange,” Shipley recalled. “Three quarters of the way to the airport I said, ‘Well, who will we be working for?’ He said, ‘Nixon’ and I was really taken aback, because all the actions he had talked about would have taken place in the Democratic primaries. He (Segretti) said the main purpose was that the Democrats have an ability to get back together after a knockdown, drag-out campaign. What we want to do is wreak enough havoc so they can’t.”

  Shipley said he told Segretti, “Well, it sounds interesting; let me think about it.”

  In addition to Shipley, Roger Lee Nixt of Dennison, Iowa, and Kenneth Griffiths of Atlanta, Ga., said they turned down similar offers from Segretti, with whom they served in Vietnam. Both declined to discuss the offers in detail, but they acknowledged that Segretti had told them they would be engaged in sub rosa activities — similar to those described by Shipley — to aid President Nixon’s re-election.

  Still another lawyer who served with Segretti in Vietnam, Peter Dixon of San Francisco, also said Segretti made him an offer. However, Dixon said he told Segretti, “No thanks,” before any details of the job were revealed. I said, “Gee, I’m not interested in political matters, and I’m not a Republican anyway,” said Dixon.

  The most detailed account of Segretti’s activities was given by Shipley, who said he wrote a memorandum to himself about the episode, “because it all seemed so strange.”

  At one point during the four-month period when Segretti was trying to recruit him, said Shipley, he approached a friend who worked for Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) and was advised to try and “string him (Segretti) out to see what he’s up to.” Although “I don’t like these type of shenanigans,” Shipley said, he never subsequently contacted anyone else about the matter and said he has not been questioned by the FBI about Segretti.

  During a meeting on July 25, said Shipley, Segretti “didn’t go into much detail because it was mostly ‘Are you with me or not?’” When he asked Segretti exactly what would be expected of him, in participating in clandestine activities, Shipley said he was told:

  “‘Enlist people, be imaginative’ One thing he stressed was asking lawyers because he didn’t want to do anything illegal. It wasn’t represented as a strictly strong-arm operation. He stressed what fun we could have. As an example, he gave this situation:

  “‘When a rally is scheduled at 7 p.m. at a local coliseum by a particular candidate, you call up and represent to the manager that you’re the field manager for this candidate and you have some information that some rowdies, some hippies or what-have-you are going to cause trouble. So you ask him to move the rally up to 9 o’clock — thereby insuring that the place would be padlocked when the candidate showed up at 7.’”

  Shipley said he was asked by Segretti to fly to Atlanta to enlist their Army colleague, Kenneth Griffiths, in the project, but that he never made the trip. However, when visiting Griffiths last Christmas, said Shipley, “Griffiths mentioned to me that Segretti had been in contact with him and that Griffith had expressed absolutely no interest at all.”

  The last time he heard from Segretti, said Shipley, was on Oct 23.1971, when “he called from California and asked me to check into Muskie’s operation in Tennessee…I just never did anything about it”

  “At one time during these conjectural discussions,” Shipley continued, “Segretti said it might be good to get a false ID to travel under, that it would be harder for anyone to catch up with us. He mentioned he might use the pseudonym Bill Mooney for himself…

  “Segretti said he wanted to cover the country,” Shipley continued, “that he would be more or less the head coordinator for the country. But some of the things he proposed to do didn’t seem that damaging, like getting a post office box in the name of the Massachusetts Safe Driving Committee and awarding a medal to Teddy Kennedy — with announcements sent to the press.”

  “The one important thing that struck me was that he seemed to be well-financed,” Shipley said. “He was always flying across the country. When he came to Washington in June he said he had an appointment at the Treasury Department and that the Treasury Department was picking up the tab on this — his plane and hotel bill.”

  Segretti later told him, Shipley said that “it wasn’t the Treasury Department that had paid the bill, it was the Nixon people. He said, ‘Don’t ask me any names.’”

  (According to travel records, Segretti criss-crossed the country at least half of 1971. Stops included Miami, Houston, Manchester, N.H., Knoxville, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Portland, Ore., Albuquerque, Tucson, San Francisco, Monterey and several other California cities.)

  (Federal investigators identified the following jurisdictions as the locations of the most concentrated Nixon undercover activity: Illinois, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Florida, and Washington, D.C.)

  Segretti told him one other major element about his covert work, said Shipley: “He intended to go into a law firm near Los Angeles by the name of Young and Segretti — he said it was a cover, that he would be doing only political work.”

  According to the California Bar Association, Segretti’s law office is at 14013 West Captain’s Row, Marina Del Rey, California.

  There in an apartment surrounded by comfortable furniture, piles of photograph records, tomato plants, a stereo receiver, a tape deck and a l0-speed bike, Segretti was found last week by Post special correspondent Myers.

  Questioned whether he knew Alex Shipley, Roger Lee Nixt, Kenneth Griffiths, or Peter Dixon, Segretti asked, “Why?” Informed that they had said Segretti attempted to recruit them for undercover political work, he replied “I don’t believe it.” Then he declined to answer a series of questions except to say either, “I don’t know,” “No comment,” or some similar response.

  At one point, Segretti said: “This is all ridiculous and I don’t know anything about this.” At another point he said: “The Treasury Department never paid my way to Washington or anywhere else.” Biographical details about Segretti, who stands about 5 feet 8 and weighs about 150 pounds, are minimal.

  From Army colleagues and classmates at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California in Berkeley, it is known that he was raised on the West Coast.

  After receiving his law degree, he served as a Treasury Department attorney in Washington for less than a year, according to friends , and then entered the Army as an officer in the Army
Judge Advocate General Corps.

  A Treasury Department spokesman confirmed that Segretti, in 1966 and 1967, worked as an attorney in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency here.

  About a year of Segretti’s Army service, friends said, was spent in Vietnam, with American Division headquarters in Chulai and U.S. Army Vietnam headquarters at Longbinh.

  Nixon Wins Landslide Victory; Democrats Hold Senate, House; McGovern Admits Defeat; President Calls for Harmony

  By David S. Broder

  Washington Post Staff Writer

  Wednesday, November 8, 1972

  Richard Milhous Nixon yesterday won re-election as President of the United States in a landslide victory rivaling the greatest of American political history.

  Victorious in at least 47 states but facing continued Democratic domination of both the House and Senate, the 50 year-old Chief Executive told the nation his “huge landslide margin means nothing” unless “all of us can work together to achieve our common goals of. . . peace for all nations. . . and that new progress and prosperity that all Americans deserve.”

  The President spoke from the White House Oval Office just before midnight, after receiving a telegram of concession and congratulation from defeated Democratic nominee George McGovern.

  The South Dakota senator, though buried in an electoral defeat of historic dimensions, refused to concede that his platform of immediate peace in Vietnam and populist reform at home had been repudiated along with his candidacy.

  Referring to the Nixon stands he had condemned in his long struggle for the presidency, McGovern said from Sioux Falls: “We do not rally to the support of policies we deplore. We love this country and we will continue to beckon it to a higher standard.”

  Yesterday, however, only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia followed McGovern’s standard. With the outcome in Minnesota and Alaska still in doubt, Mr. Nixon was in a position to match or exceed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s modern record of carrying all but two states in 1936.

  With 74% of the nation’s precincts reporting, the vote was:

  ELECTORAL VOTE / POPULAR VOTE

  Nixon: 508 / 35,564,006

  McGovern: 17 / 21,544,216

  Both winner and loser referred to the Vietnam war issue that dominated all others in their disjointed campaign.

  Mr. Nixon said that “we are moving swiftly” toward “peace with honor, the kind of peace that will last.” A Vietnam settlement, he said, could launch “the greatest generation of peace, true peace, for the whole world that man has ever known.”

  McGovern told his supporters and a national television audience he would not “shed any tears tonight” because he was convinced “we have pushed this country in the direction of peace.”

  Looking back at the 22-month campaign, in which he was the underdog at every stage, the 50-year-old South Dakotan said: “If we pushed the day of peace just one day closer, then every day of bone-crushing effort was worth the sacrifice.”

  In conventional political measurements, however, McGovern was destined to go into the history books as one of the all-time great losers — ranking with Barry Goldwater, Alf Landon, Herbert Hoover and Horace Greeley.

  In his fifth national campaign, Mr. Nixon got from the voters what he asked — “a new majority.” He toppled traditional Democratic Strongholds in the North and made the Solid South solidly Republican.

  While Mr. Nixon won the strongest victory imaginable in an election that posed what he called “the clearest choice in this century,” the certainty of continued Democratic control of Congress underlined Republican National Chairman Bob Dole’s comment that “this is a personal triumph for Mr. Nixon — and not a party triumph.”

  The President rolled up huge margins in many states. The contrast to his razor-thin victory in 1968 could not have been more dramatic.

  He carried all five states that went for Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace on the third-party ticket in 1968, as polling-place interviews indicated three-quarters of the former Wallace backers moved behind the Nixon candidacy.

  McGovern had clear victories only in the District of Columbia and Massachusetts, as such former Democratic strongholds as Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Michigan and Texas fell into the Nixon column.

  Mr. Nixon had carried none of those states in either of his previous tries for the presidency in 1960 and 1968. This time he got them all — as well as Arkansas, which had not gone Republican since 1868.

  Vice President Agnew did most of the Republican campaigning in Wallace country, and in an appearance at a Republican victory celebration at the Shoreham Hotel. Mr. Nixon paid tribute to his running-mate as an outstanding campaigner, who ‘never lost his cool’ and who proved he could “take it and dish it out.”

  Wallace, whose own try for the Democratic nomination was halted by a would-be assassin’s bullets, commented that the returns were “an indication that the people of this country are moving to the position that we thought ought to be the position.”

  The Alabama governor said he would work “to get the Democratic Party back to being the party of the average citizen.”

  Harry S. Dent Jr., a White House aide identified with the strategy for attracting the Wallace vote, said “the Southern strategy is working — in fact, it’s working all over the country.”

  The Nixon coattails helped the Republicans pick up Senate seats in Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma and New Mexico, but those gains were offset by Republican losses in Kentucky, Iowa, Maine and South Dakota.

  The coattails were also important in seven House contests won by Republicans. They also played a part in holding such embattled positions as the Indiana governorship.

  But in an election marked by the record ticket-splitting, the outstanding characteristic was the durability of House incumbents. Of the first 286 House races decided, only seven saw the defeat of incumbents seeking re-election and only 12 marked a clear shift of party control of the district.

  There was some swapping of seats among the governors — who have increasingly become a target of voters’ wrath in recent years.

  Democrats took over Republican-held governorships in Delaware and Vermont, while Republican Christopher (Kit) Bond, 33, became the first GOP executive in Missouri since 1940. Several other major races — including those in Illinois, North Carolina, Texas and Washington — where still undecided.

  In the most-publicized gubernatorial battle, Gov. Arch A. Moore Jr. (R) of West Virginia derailed the political ambitions of Secretary of State John D. Rockefeller IV (D) with a close but clear victory.

  Whatever the spotty character of the Nixon coattails, the muscle of his personal victory was impressive.

  The Nixon coattails helped the Republicans pick up Senate seats in Virginia, North Carolina and New Mexico, but those gains were more than offset by Republican losses in Kentucky, Iowa, Maine and South Dakota.

  Analyses from NBC and CBS computers indicated that Cleveland went to the President by 50,000 votes and that Mr. Nixon was splitting even with McGovern in such other traditional Democratic strongholds as Chicago and Philadelphia.

  The network analyses showed Mr. Nixon won a majority of the votes from Catholics, blue-collar workers, union members and Italo-Americans, all of whom had been Democratic in 1968. About three-quarters of the 1968 Wallace supporters backed the President.

  The network polling also indicated that first-time voters — a main target for McGovern — split their votes about evenly and that the President scored gains among both Jews and blacks, though they remained predominately Democratic.

  Former Secretary of the Treasury John B. Connally, who headed the Democrats for Nixon organization, said the outcome “reflects the great confidence of the American people in the President . . . Senator McGovern . . really misjudged the American people. He is outside the mainstream of his party.”

  On the other hand, Democratic vice president candidate Sargent Shriver t
old party workers at the Washington Hilton, “You are the vanguard of the future.”

  Voting reports through the day were as mixed as the weather — fair through much of the country but rainy in parts of the Midwest. Officials reported heavy turnouts in some cities, below average in others.

  Advance indications were that between 80 million and 85 million would vote in this, the first election in American history where 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds were eligible to vote.

  The census Bureau estimated that about 108 million of the 140 million Americans of voting age were registered or otherwise qualified to vote.

  Mr. Nixon and his wife were up early in the morning to cast their ballots in a San Clemente, Calif., schoolhouse near the Western White House. The President spent more than five minutes in the voting booth — apparently struggling like any other voter with the two-foot-long California ballot that contained referenda on issues from legalizing marijuana to reimposing the death penalty.

  The First Family flew back across the country to the White House for a dinner with their two daughters and sons-in-law.

  McGovern chose to go back to South Dakota to receive the returns that would mark the success or failure of his 22-month quest for the presidency.

  The 50-year-old senator, who started the longest campaign of this century in January, 1971, voted in his boyhood town of Mitchell.

  Accompanied by his wife, Eleanor, and four of their five children, McGovern cast what he said was a straight Democratic ballot in the classroom wing of a Congregational Church.

  Mindful, perhaps, of the national polls predicting he would be defeated by landslide proportions, the Democratic nominee asked bystanders to “say a little prayer for me.”

  While McGovern awaited the outcome in Sioux Falls, an atmosphere of total confidence wrapped the White House.

  Early in the evening, Communications Director Herbert G. Klein predicted Mr. Nixon would carry at least 48 states.