What Me Paranoid?

SAN FRANCISCO: Recently released tapes from Richard Nixon's years in the White House show that Watergate wasn't the start of his dirty tricks campaigns against rival Democrats. Thirteen months before the Watergate break-in -- a full year and a half before the 1972 election -- Nixon recorded himself telling top aides to get serious about gathering intelligence. In a conversation on May 28, 1971, Nixon told then-White House Chief-of-Staff H.R. Haldeman to "put permanent tails" on Democratic front runners Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. "Keep after 'em," he said. "Maybe we can get a scandal." The comments, reported in Friday's San Francisco Examiner, came from among the more than 200 hours of Nixon White House tapes made available by his estate for research in November. Convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy called the conversation the "genesis" of the break-in. But Samuel Dash, former chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, said the planning for activities made famous by Watergate started much earlier. Regardless of whether it is the beginning or just one point in his paranoia, the tape does provide an interesting moment in which Nixon expresses doubt about authorizing his lieutenants to act against Democrats. "I don't know. Maybe it's the wrong thing to do," he said. "But I have a feeling if you're gonna start, you got to start now." And the rest, they say, was history.