Memos Show Herschensohn Watergate Role : Politics: As a White House aide in 1973, he wrote numerous proposals aimed at keeping Nixon in office. The Senate candidate says there is ‘a degree of unfairness’ in revealing the papers now.

The year was 1973 and the presidency of Richard M. Nixon was sinking with each new disclosure in the Watergate scandal when a determined White House official named Bruce Herschensohn started hatching creative strategies to boost Nixon’s image.

Herschensohn proposed enlisting Lady Bird Johnson, the popular wife of former Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, to help rescue Nixon. “She has the stature, the party affiliation, the credibility, even the right sex, to be of tremendous impact,” Herschensohn wrote in an internal memo.

One Herschensohn plan suggested using “every device and friend we have” to attack the Senate Watergate committee hearings for destroying the careers of innocent people in the same way the infamous McCarthy hearings did in the 1950s. Another memo prodded the President’s men to get Nixon to tell or laugh at a Watergate-related joke to put Americans at ease.

The ideas penned by Herschensohn, the Republican candidate for one of two U. S. Senate seats from California this year, were culled from 12,000 pages of Herschensohn papers in the Nixon files at the National Archives outside Washington. Although Herschensohn was neither directly involved in Watergate nor a high-ranking White House aide, the documents reveal his total devotion to defending Nixon at the height of one of the nation’s worst political crisis.

The documents also offer some insight into the ideology of Herschensohn, 59, the only one of the four Senate candidates who has never held an elected office and whose only public record consists of thousands of radio and television commentaries he delivered for KABC in Los Angeles.

In the memos, Herschensohn railed against the “hypocrisy” of the American Civil Liberties Union and blamed much of the President’s woes on the liberal, anti-Nixon bias of the national media, a view he still holds. Back then, he often accused the major TV networks of using subtle propaganda techniques to link Nixon with the burglary of Democratic headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex. Herschensohn’s criticisms, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite remarked at the time, reflected the “paranoia” of the Nixon White House.

In a lengthy telephone interview last week, Herschensohn said there is “a degree of unfairness in (The Times’) reprinting” internal memos he wrote nearly 20 years ago. He said the letters were written--many late at night--for the eyes of Nixon aides whom he regarded as close friends, not the general public who will judge him at the polls in November.

Herschensohn campaign manager Ken Khachigian, also a former Nixon aide, said: “Any of us who worked in the Nixon White House are gun-shy about memos that get pulled out 20 years later. . . . These have been used in such a way to either surprise, ambush or embarrass.”

Khachigian bemoaned a double standard in Washington that makes public the internal documents of Administration officials but keeps secret the private papers of members of Congress, including Herschensohn’s opponent, Rep. Barbara Boxer (D--Greenbrae).

Herschensohn remains a devoted Nixon supporter and is not the least bit embarrassed by the Watergate scandal. Herschensohn said that “by and large” he feels as strongly today that Nixon was innocent as he did during the crisis.

Nixon made a rare campaign appearance at a Washington fund-raiser April 6 to benefit Herschensohn’s campaign against Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Palo Alto). Herschensohn said he intends to seek Nixon’s help again in his quest to win the six-year seat being vacated by Democrat Alan Cranston.

Nixon “has absolutely the highest regard for Bruce and has kept up their friendship since the old days,” said Nixon spokeswoman Cathy O’Connor.

Herschensohn was hired by the Nixon White House in 1972 as a deputy special assistant to the President. In that role, he attended Cabinet meetings, wrote speeches and suggested ideas. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, he was put in charge of organizing a nationwide “Support the President” campaign directed from within the White House.

He reported to H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, the White House chief of staff and Nixon alter-ego who was convicted of conspiracy in the ensuing Watergate cover-up and served 18 months in prison. Haldeman said in an interview that Herschensohn’s influence within the White House grew as the Watergate crisis dragged on.

“I know the President thought very highly of (Herschensohn) and that he became, after I left in April, 1973, a very strong backer of President Nixon,” Haldeman said. “He was highly thought of by his colleagues. It was felt he was doing an extremely valuable task for the President in his waning days.”

Indeed, one of Herschensohn’s central qualities was his loyalty to the President, said former Nixon speech writer and confidant Patrick J. Buchanan. “Bruce wanted to fight on. . . . He was one of those who thought Nixon should continue the battle, even after some of us were recommending resignation.”

On Aug. 8, 1974, the day before Nixon became the first U. S. President to resign from office, Herschensohn met alone with Nixon for 30 minutes.

“I was trying to discourage him from resignation,” Herschensohn said. “I made a number of arguments. One of them was . . . that so many presidents had done the (same) kinds of things. . . . The American people were not able to put any of this in context. Their belief was that this was quite different than administrations before it.”

Herschensohn said it was common knowledge in Washington that wiretapping of private conversations “went on with regularity” in the Johnson and John F. Kennedy administrations.

In the year before Nixon resigned, Herschensohn wrote 16 memos regarding Watergate that are contained in the Nixon papers. Six letters were written to Lawrence M. Higby, one of Haldeman’s top assistants and now a senior vice president for the Los Angeles Times.

“He was constantly churning out ideas,” Higby said of Herschensohn. “He was very well regarded by his colleagues . . . but that’s not to say everyone agreed with everything he said.”

For the most part, Herschensohn acknowledged, his recommendations on Watergate were not accepted. Nonetheless, they were interesting and provocative. Some examples:

* On March 23, 1973, Herschensohn suggested to Higby that the White House arrange for an “independent source” to publish an expose on tactics used in recent presidential campaigns by both major parties. “If this documented and factual book could be published prior to the (Senate Watergate) hearings, it could help in terms of public opinion,” he wrote. “Perspective is missing on this.”

Herschensohn said that campaign “dirty tricks” were commonplace in presidential elections, but only Nixon was castigated for using them.

* Herschensohn began an April 4 memo: “Though I know it’s a confession filled with peril, I liked (Republican Senator) Joe McCarthy and so I hate to recommend the following. . . . Through every device and friend we have, we should continually bombard the public with comparisons between the McCarthy-Army hearings and the Ervin committee hearings.” Sen. Sam Ervin was chairman of the committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

The first line, Herschensohn said, was intended as a joke. He was not kidding about the second sentence. In the early 1950s, McCarthy caused wide controversy by alleging that he had a list of card-carrying Communists who had infiltrated the federal government. Many of the employees were blacklisted. The McCarthy list was “only the pettiest preamble to the blacklist originated in 1973” against anyone remotely connected to Watergate, Herschensohn wrote in a magazine article in December, 1983.

“People whose names were mentioned in the hearings in an idle, passing-by way, suffered tremendously,” Herschensohn said.

* On April 23, Herschensohn pleaded with Haldeman not to resign. “With you gone, everything would be aimed at the President. . . . Please keep standing up and stay or the President will be hurt.”

Haldeman resigned on April 30, 1973.

* Three days after Haldeman resigned, Herschensohn cooked up a contingency plan. “Let us assume things get even worse,” he wrote to Nixon aide Richard Moore. “There is an American figure who, I believe, could be our savior: Lady Bird Johnson. If she could speak to the nation in a carefully worded speech, telling them of the massive burdens of the presidency, and how important it is to stand by our President at a time like this, it could have a chilling effect upon those who, with suppressed but obvious glee, condemn the President. For a period such as that, she has the stature, the party affiliation, the credibility, even the right sex, to be of tremendous impact.”

Herschensohn explained: “Obviously, I wouldn’t write that way now. . . . If writing it in 1973, I felt in 1992 someone from the Los Angeles Times would be asking me about that line, I wouldn’t have put it in.”

* On May 15, Herschensohn suggested to Higby that Nixon take a lighthearted approach to the crisis that was enveloping his Administration in much the same way President Kennedy had used humor to great advantage.

“When a man is obsessed with something, he cannot joke about it,” Herschensohn wrote. “I feel the nation is worried that the President is under an obsession. The clear sign that an obsession is over is when a man can show a degree of humor toward that obsession.”

He went on: “If one piece of humor, which casts no aspersion upon individuals, can be engineered and told by or laughed at by the President, it might be a sign of relief for the public which wants ‘to be done with it.’ It could prove he’s done with it. It, of course, won’t end things, but it could be a source of medicine.”

* Several months after White House Counsel John Dean accused Nixon of participating in the Watergate cover-up within a few days of the burglary, Herschensohn suggested in a Dec. 7, 1973, memo that Nixon should personally receive a petition of support from a Baltimore woman who claimed to represent 15,500 people.

“As she explains herself, she is part Indian and part white with black blood. Wow! What a photo opportunity!”

Herschensohn explained: “That is the PR in me from those days. I was working for the President. I wanted the President to come out successfully in this. I was thinking of everything I could that was legitimate to do. I think that was legitimate.

“Look, I was talking in the same way I would talk to a buddy over a beer.”