Younger voters may not know who Dick Morris is - except
that's a vocal critic of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Before his fall from
grace (due to a prostitution scandal similar to that of New York
Governor Spitzer), he was one of the Clinton insiders - a Friend of
Bill, deeply involved in day-to-day strategic planning. He was privy to
some of the Clinton administration's deepest, darkest secrets.
He has been equally vocal about his assessment of
Hillary's mental and emotional fitness to be president, and not in a
very flattering way.
"The most famous example of somebody crying
on the campaign trail was [Edmund] Muskie. Everybody felt that after he
cried, that he was not fit to be president.
I believe that there could well come a time when there is such a serious
threat to the United States that she breaks down like that. Hillary is a
control freak. She really believes in controlling everything.
Probably everybody knows somebody like this in their lives.... They're
firm and they're rigid and they do what they're supposed to do. They're
disciplined and then when it doesn't work, as opposed to bend, they
break.
I saw her break right after she lost Congress in '94, when she was
sobbing over the phone to me, saying:
'I'm bewildered. Nothing's working. My judgment's wrong. I just don't
know what's happening. Dick, what should I do?'
And that's what you're seeing here with her. It's an out-of-control
feeling by someone who HAS to be in control all the time....
Presidents don't cry. I think people will--and they should--perceive
this as weak. It's one thing to cry when you're with victims, when
you're recalling an emotional experience of happiness, but it is quite
another to cry out of self-pity and loss of control.
I can imagine a situation where the Congress doesn't pass her programs,
or where Iran rejects her initiative, or the war isn't going well, and
that same sense of 'I tried to do it all right and now all of a sudden,
it's screwing up and I don't know what to do about it' could
INCAPACITATE HER AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF."
The first candidate to "break down" on the
presidential campaign trail was Democrat Ed Muskie in 1972, who had been
Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968. His tears cost him the election.
From the beginning, he was the leading presidential candidate of his
party. Some polls showed the senator had the best chance of winning the
general election. He had tons of endorsements from establishment
figures. And though the ideologues in his party had little use for him,
he retained a lot of support from his earlier run for national office.
Despite all that, Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie failed to win the
Democratic nomination in 1972.
I've been thinking quite a bit about the decline of Ed Muskie in '72
as I've watched the downward spiral of Sen. John McCain's campaign.
There are differences between the two, to be sure. But I remember the
good press that Muskie got in 1968, when he was Hubert Humphrey's
running mate; how he rallied his party with a nationally broadcast 1970
election-eve speech that brilliantly contrasted with President Nixon's
rather strident effort to rally the GOP troops; and how he headed into
1972 with a head of steam.
The unpopular Vietnam War was raging in 1971-72, and while Muskie was
opposed to it, he did not do so with the fervor of one of his rivals for
the nomination, Sen. George McGovern (D-SD). Cautious in nature, Muskie
also suffered when Humphrey, his ticket-mate from four years earlier,
decided to join the fray as well. Still, Muskie, who was born just 25
miles from New Hampshire, was the odds-on favorite to win the primary
there in '72; a poll in January had him with 65 percent of the vote.
Most of his opponents, except for McGovern, stayed out of the state in
anticipation of a huge Muskie win.
But Muskie's emotional response on the streets of Manchester to a
scathing editorial, in the Union Leader newspaper, attacking
his wife did not help his cause. He won the March 7 primary, but with an
unimpressive 46 percent of the vote. A week later he finished a dismal
fourth in Florida, and that was the beginning of the end. A similar
fourth-place finish in Wisconsin led to his decision to suspend his
campaign in late April.
What the public did not know until much later was that
his opponent, Richard Nixon, as one of the infamous Dirty Tricks, had
had Muskie drugged with LSD (according to statements attributed to CIA
spook Miles Copeland).
But even more intriguing is what Miles Copeland,
longtime CIA heavyweight, had to say about Muskie’s subsequent
breakdown and Hunt’s possible role therein:
On one occasion, Jojo’s [a pseudonym for a high-level
CIA officer] office was asked for an LSD-type drug that could be slipped
into the lemonade of Democratic orators, thus causing them to say
sillier things than they would say anyhow. To this day, some of my
friends at the Agency are convinced that Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy or
somebody got hold of a variety of that drug and slipped it into Senator
Muskie’s lemonade before he played that famous weeping scene.
(SOURCE: Miles Copeland, The Real Spy
World (London: Sphere Books Limited, 1978), p. 299.)
Muskie had been the target of several Nixon Dirty Tricks.
One of the people at the center of Nixon's dirty tricks team was Karl
Rove, according
to Tony Ulasewicz, one of those convicted in the Watergate scandal.
Until he formally joined the McCain team, Rove was openly advising Hillary
Clinton on how to beat Obama.
Someone had to take care of these people, so CREEP (The
Committee to Re-elect the President) ordered the establishment of
several secret teams assigned to carryout political espionage and
harassment operations against the Democrats. Placed in charge of one
such team was a young California lawyer named Donald H. Segretti (Dorman
113).
Segretti himself signed up some of his own men, one was
Robert M. Benz, who hired seven others to help him out, one of his
helpers was Douglas Kelly (114). Douglas Kelly helped handle a big
political enemy by the name of, Senator Edmund Muskie, of Maine.
Senator Muskie got it pretty bad from CREEP. At a
Florida rally for Democratic contender George Wallace of Alabama, they
distributed more than one thousand anti-Wallace cards that purported to
come from the Muskie Camp. One side, the cards read, IF YOU LIKED
HITLER, YOU'LL JUST LOVE WALLACE. On the other side, they read, CAST
YOUR VOTE FOR SENATOR EDMUND MUSKIE, when in fact the Muskie
organization had nothing to do with the cards.
During another occasion, Kelly sneaked into a Muskie
news conference and released two white mice whose tails were bedecked
with ribbons reading, MUSKIE IS A RAT FINK. Kelly also once hired a
young woman to run naked outside Muskie's hotel room while shouting, 'I
love Ed Muskie'. The attacks didn't stop there. they went on and on.
Segretti and Benz even got Senator Humphrey one good
time. They went and distributed phony invitations, to black communities
in Milwaukee, to a free all you can eat lunch with beer and wine, and
several special guests. when in fact the supposed lunch was non
existent.
Bibliography
Dorman, Michael. Dirty Politics, from 1776 to Watergate. I Dag
Hammarskjold Plaza. New York, NY 10017; Delacorte press, 1979.
Ehrlichman, John. Witness to Power, The Nixon Years. 1230 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY 10020; Simon & Schuster, 1982. Fremon, David
K. The Watergate Scandal in American History. 44 Fadem Road.
Springfield, NJ 07081; Enslow publishers, inc. 1998 Heritage, American.
The words of Watergate. October, 1997; 48/6. Jaworski, Leon. The right
& the power. prosecution of Watergate. Toronto, Canada; Fitzhenry
& Whiteside limited, 1976. Kutler, Stanley. Abuse Of Power. 1230
Avenue of the Americas. New York, NY 10020; Simon & Schuster, 1997.
--- The Wars Of Watergate. 1230 Avenue of the Americas. New York, NY
10020; Simon & Schuster, 1990. Looking back at Watergate. USA Today.
November, 1994; v123 n2594 p.90(4). Lukas, J. Anthony. Nightmare. The
underside of the Nixon years. New York, NY; The Viking Press, 1976.
Schell, Jonathan. The Time of Illusion. Toronto Canada; Random House,
1976. Sirica, John. To set the record straight. W.W. Norton &
company. New York, London. Ungar, Sanford J. FBI, An uncensored look
behind the walls. Boston, Massachusetts; Little Brown & Company,
1976.
In “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72,”
[Hunter S. Thompson] described the campaign leading to Richard Nixon’s
re-election as president with terms like “brutal” and
“depraved,” speculating that Democratic Sen. Ed Muskie was under the
influence of an obscure African psychoactive drug and bemoaned Nixon’s
looming victory by proclaiming, “Jesus, where will it end? How low do
you have to stoop in this country to become president?” — CNN
Muskie, who was the clear frontrunner in the New
Hampshire primary, was responding to a couple of nasty articles in the
conservative Manchester Union Leader. The paper had published a story
suggesting that Muskie's wife Jane used an ethnic slur to describe
Americans of French-Canadian descent. Muskie, standing on the steps of
the Union Leader and denouncing the false reporting of the paper, broke
down in tears. The media picked up on the event and, in suggesting that
Muskie demonstrated weakness, helped erode Muskie's support. He barely
eked out a victory in New Hampshire over Sen. George McGovern and went
on to lose the national primary race. It turned out that the Union
Leader's story about Jane Muskie was based on a forged letter prepared
by Richard Nixon's campaign. The perpetrator of the forgery was one
Donald Segretti, later jailed in the Watergate scandal for, among other
things, planting forged documents and criminal conspiracy. During the
1972 campaign, Segretti became aware of a young Republican political
activist in Texas who showed much promise in the dirty tricks
department. His name -- Karl Rove.
