The Enduring Secrets of Watergate

Oliver has his own theory about what insights the wiretap on his phone could have given the Republicans: a window into the end game of the Democratic nomination. As it turned out, Oliver was in the middle of the last-ditch effort by Democratic state chairmen to head off the nomination of liberal South Dakota Senator George McGovern.

"The California primary was the first week of June," Oliver recalled in an interview with me years later. "The state chairs were very concerned about the McGovern candidacy," foreseeing the likelihood of an electoral debacle.

So the state chairmen commissioned a hard count of delegates to see whether McGovern's nomination could be headed off, even if the anti-Vietnam War senator secured California's bounty of delegates with a victory in the state's winner-take-all primary.

Other Democratic campaigns had failed to catch fire or blew up in the early months. Secretly, Nixon's reelection team had targeted former front-runner, Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, with dirty tricks like stink bombs exploded at Muskie events, bogus pizza orders and fake mailings that spread dissension between Muskie and other Democrats.

In summer 1971, White House political aide Patrick Buchanan had written a memo identifying Muskie as "target A." Buchanan's memo said "Our specific goals are (a) to produce political problems for him, right now, (b) to hopefully help defeat him in one or more of the primaries (Florida looks now to be the best early bet, California, the best later bet), and (c) finally, to visit upon him some political wounds that would not only reduce his chances for nomination -- but damage him as a candidate, should he be nominated."[6]

"Muskie had some votes though he had been finished off early," Oliver said. "Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson had a lot of votes. Terry had nearly 100 votes scattered over 22 states and including some influential delegates. McGovern was having a hard time getting a majority. The state chairmen wanted to know whether or not, if he won the California primary, he would have the nomination wrapped up or whether there was still a chance he could be stopped."

"The best way to find out was through the state chairmen because in those days not all primaries were binding and not all delegates were bound," Oliver said...

"Don Fowler, the state chairman in South Carolina, took the lead in trying to use the state chairmen's network to get an accurate assessment. Most of the information was gathered by me and Margaret Bethea, a member of Fowler's staff.

"We called every state chairman or party executive director to find out where their uncommitted delegates would go. We were doing a real hard count. We knew better than anybody else how many delegates could be influenced, who were really anti-McGovern. We had the best count in the country and it was all coordinated through my telephone."

So, while Nixon's political espionage team listened in, Oliver and his little team canvassed state party leaders to figure out how the Democratic delegates planned to vote. "We determined on that phone that McGovern could still be stopped even if he won the California primary," Oliver said. "It would be very close whether he could ever get a majority."

The Texas Showdown

After McGovern did win the California primary, the stop-McGovern battle focused on Texas and its Democratic convention, scheduled for June 13, 1972. "The one place he could be stopped was at the Texas State Democratic Convention," Oliver said.

A Texan himself, Oliver knew the Democratic Party there to be a bitterly divided organization, with many conservative Democrats sympathetic to Nixon and hostile to McGovern and his anti-Vietnam War positions.

One of the best known Texas Democrats, former Governor John Connally, had joined the Nixon administration in 1970 as Treasury Secretary and was helping the Nixon campaign in 1972.

In The Haldeman Diaries, Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman describes Connally providing valuable insights about the inner workings of the Democratic Party. Nixon's team even broached the idea with Connally that he might replace Spiro Agnew as Nixon's vice presidential running mate, an offer Connally declined. [7]

Many other Texas Democrats were loyal to former President Lyndon Johnson who had battled anti-war activists before deciding against a reelection bid in 1968. "There had been a major fight in Texas between the Left and the Right, between the liberals and the conservatives," Oliver said. "They hated each other. It was one of these lifetime things."