Panning for Gold

Why Oppo Researchers Love Presidential Libraries

The National Archives runs 13 presidential libraries, containing the records of presidents from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush. (The Barack Obama Presidential Library is under construction. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library is currently a website; no physical location has been announced.) They even offer a nifty passport book; you collect stamps each time you visit another presidential library; once the passport is full, you can show it any library and receive a “special gift.”

For my book on the Watergate, I found material in each of these libraries. (Most of that was done via email, so I’m not eligible for my “special gift,” sadly.) Some of the best stuff came from the Kennedy library, including the hate mail the first Catholic president received after the Washington Post reported that the company behind the Watergate, an Italian real estate conglomerate, had “Vatican financial ties.”

All types of people visit presidential libraries and museums, including history buffs, school kids — and opposition researchers.

That’s because presidential libraries contain more than 600 million pages of text, nearly 20 million photographs, over 20 million feet of motion picture footage, and nearly 100,000 hours of audio and video.

As Willie Sutton famously said when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Another reason: The day-to-day conversation within a White House, via memo or e-mail, can be very frank. For example, one aide might complain to another that a certain politician is becoming a pest. A politician may reach out to a White House pal and share dirt on a rival. You get the picture.

From an oppo researcher’s perspective, a presidential library is a river filled with golden nuggets. You just need to know where to dip your pan.

Difficult to Please

In 1992, my firm was under contract to the research department at the Republican National Committee. Among our assignments: scour various presidential libraries for their files on the Democrats competing for the presidential nomination.

Then Ross Perot got under the skin of someone in the George H.W. Bush White House, and the RNC asked us to take a look at the Texas businessman as well.

At the time, Richard Nixon’s papers had not yet found their current home in Orange County, California. They were kept in a nondescript government office building in College Park, Maryland. I sent a researcher there to poke around.

He reported back after a couple of days. The archives had hundreds of pages of material related to Ross Perot. My researcher placed an order to have them copied and shipped to me in Sacramento, California. He also said the National Archives staff was cheerful and pleasant, and the place was pretty quiet overall.

When the files arrived in California, they exceeded expectations.

The Nixon crowd loved to write memos to each other, and Ross Perot provided plenty of reasons to sound off.

In 1971, Nixon aide Dwight Chapin warned his colleagues Perot felt White House aides were consistently ignoring his requests for information. The same year, George H.W. Bush also reported Perot was miffed. From a May 1992 story by Washington Post reporter John Mintz:

George Bush, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, ran into Perot at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York in 1971 and said "Perot seems to think he hasn't been getting very much White House attention of late," a 1971 memo reported. Perot was incensed that a Life magazine article about people Nixon talked to had not mentioned him, Bush said.

The pattern of dealings was so consistent — “Perot offers help, officials do him a favor, Perot stalls” — that Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, asked his close aide Gordon Strachan to investigate.

Strachan found that Perot gave no money to Nixon's 1968 campaign, but that Perot had asked for and received White House help in persuading the Internal Revenue Service to allow an EDS [Electronic Data Systems] tax deduction for the salaries of the seven EDS employees dispatched to the campaign…

In 1970, Perot pledged to give $250,000 to a White House effort to raise money for congressional Republicans but did not pay up. In 1972, Perot gave no money to the Nixon reelection effort, but funneled $229,000 through EDS employees.

When Perot complained that HEW cost him $1 million by giving his Medicare contract in California to another company, the White House tried to get it back for Perot but was too late, Strachan wrote.

All this was, of course, in stark contrast to the folksy, outsider image Ross Perot was marketing to voters as he campaigned around the country in 1992. From the New York Times:

Ross Perot, whose incipient Presidential campaign is based largely on his image as an outsider, was closely allied with the Nixon White House, often asked for special favors and promised contributions to Nixon public-relations efforts, according to documents in the National Archives.

And from Margaret Carlson, in TIME magazine:

ROSS PEROT BASES HIS CRUSADE for the presidency on being an outsider, a political ingenue who wouldn't know a Gucci-shoed lobbyist if he tripped over one. This reformer would have the public believe he has nothing in common with the fools in Washington. He supports a ban on "these guys with their alligator shoes," who swarm over the halls of Congress trying to open loopholes large enough to drive their leased Jaguars through.

The problem is that Perot is one of these guys, albeit in wingtips with a military shine. He has backslapped and arm-twisted with the best of them, winning lucrative non-bid government contracts and appealing decisions he didn't like to higher, more malleable authorities, having loosened them up with huge gifts. Beneath Perot's white shirts and CEO bluster beats the heart of an insider who has been playing the game for 25 years.

Great stuff. But not enough.

Line Forms Here

After the political press corps was done chewing on the Perot-Nixon bone, they hungered for more.

My contact at at the RNC asked me to find anything in the Nixon papers that might link Perot to the “Milk Fund Scandal,” an imbroglio so obscure it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page. (You can read more about it here.)

My researcher drove back to College Park, parked his car, and went into the National Archives reading room. Since his last visit, the place had changed.

It was now packed with reporters sitting at desks, digging through the Perot material for themselves, hoping to find anything that had been missed in the coverage thus far. Other journalists waited in line to submit their requests for more files. There was signage with the total amount due for the “Ross Perot Files,” payable to the “National Archives of the United States.”

My researcher completed a call slip and joined the queue. When a clerk finally called him to the counter, she recognized him. She wasn’t cheerful anymore. “You!” she said, gesturing to the journalists milling about. “You started all of this!”

He sheepishly submitted his request for the “Milk Fund” papers and raced out the door.

(Photo credit: Shutterstock.)