Nixon Targeted Kennedys After Pentagon Papers

Angry over disclosure of the Pentagon Papers for heightening opposition to the Vietnam War, President Nixon vowed to embarrass the Kennedy family and get even with liberals by declassifying secret documents relating to foreign affairs fiascos of the 1960s, according to new Watergate-era tape-recordings released Thursday.

“There’s something we can really hang Teddy [Sen. Edward M. Kennedy] or the Kennedy clan with,” Nixon told an aide in a 1971 meeting in the Oval Office, referring to two fiascos of the John F. Kennedy administration: the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the assassination of South Vietnam’s president.

The new recordings, totaling 54 minutes, are filled largely with profanity-laced discussions of foreign affairs and show Nixon at his combative height. After Nixon’s death in 1994, his heirs agreed to the release of such “abuse of government power” tapes.

Discussing the overthrow and violent death of South Vietnam’s U.S.-supported ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem, in a 1963 coup, presidential aide Charles W. Colson suggested to Nixon in August 1971 that Senate hearings on the Pentagon Papers should also focus on the Democrats and Diem.

“Can you imagine [elder Democratic statesman] Averill Harriman before that committee, explaining why he didn’t get Diem out of Vietnam when he had the chance and kept him in a church where he was vulnerable?” Colson asked.

“I want that out,” Nixon replied. “I want him before the committee.”

‘Liberal Press’ Wants No Talk of Diem

The Pentagon Papers, secret Defense Department documents, had been obtained and leaked in June 1971 by antiwar protester and former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg.

Without specifying how, Nixon said that several Democrats, including Sens. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine), could be tarred by the Diem episode. But Nixon added, “The liberal press, they don’t want that Diem incident talked about.”

John D. Ehrlichman, another top Nixon aide, interjected that “on the negative side,” information about the overthrow of Diem “exposes the CIA, and the inference will be drawn that that wasn’t just the CIA in former administrations but that’s the way they still operate.”

Nixon, however, said he was “going to let the CIA take a whipping on this” for failing to prevent the overthrow of the pro-Western Diem.

Nixon later told a press conference that President Kennedy bore complicity in the “murder” of Diem and charged that Kennedy had sent the first combat troops to Vietnam, although the Kennedy administration called them military advisors.

On another tape, Nixon said that Americans should be “getting their minds on the unbelievably incompetent way that these clowns handled the Bay of Pigs” in 1961.

“Now that damn thing’s got to come out,” he told presidential assistant Alexander M. Haig. Kennedy “should have resigned,” Nixon declared.

‘Plumbers’ Broke Into Office

Ellsberg figured in the Watergate scandal because, three months after his 1971 leak of sensitive Pentagon documents, a band of White House operatives, led by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt--known as “the plumbers” unit--broke into his psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills in search of files that they could use to discredit Ellsberg.

The following year, Hunt and Liddy were involved in the Watergate break-in that ultimately led to Nixon’s forced resignation.

John H. Taylor, executive director of the Nixon Presidential Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, on Thursday defended Nixon’s statements in the newly released tapes.

The public should understand, Taylor said, that, while Nixon had no advance knowledge of the Beverly Hills break-in, he was anguished by Ellsberg’s theft of documents because he was trying to withdraw troops from Vietnam and strengthen that nation.