Eideard

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Richard Nixon considered Ted Kennedy such a threat that he tried to catch him cheating on his wife, even ordering aides to plant secret service bodyguards to spy on the senator’s behaviour.

“Do you have anybody in the secret service that you can get to?” the US president asked his aide John Ehrlichman in a stark series of Oval Office conversations about Kennedy before the 1972 election. “Yeah, yeah,” Ehrlichman replied.

“Plant one,” Nixon said. “Plant two guys on him. This could be very useful…”

Because Kennedy was not a presidential candidate in 1972 he did not qualify for full-time secret service protection. But Nixon offered it to him, given the assassinations of his brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy…

“You understand what the problem is,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman on 7 September 1972. “If the [son of a bitch] gets shot they’ll say we didn’t furnish it [protection]. So you just buy his insurance.

“After the election he doesn’t get a … thing. If he gets shot it’s too damn bad. Do it under the basis, though, that we pick the secret service men.

Nixon pressed for more wiretaps and a combing of tax records, not only on Kennedy but other leading Democrats. “I could only hope that we are, frankly, doing a little persecuting,” he said.

Republican “family values” have always been guided by corruption and deceit.

The Dems are just ordinary sleazy politicians. For the Republicans, the battle against representative democracy is a commandment in their state religion.