Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508070106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Though he pretended to rely on political instinct, Nixon used polls to shape policy and campaign strategy and manipulate popular opinion, two researchers conclude in the summer issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.
For instance, Nixon used internal polls to test alternate running mates for his 1972 re-election ticket, the researchers said. He didn't tell Vice President Spiro Agnew about it.
Among other findings by political scientists Lawrence R. Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Robert Y. Shapiro of Columbia University:
Fearing leaks, Nixon only gave the Republican National Committee and the Committee to Re-elect the President ``sanitized'' results of surveys they had paid for. Officials of both committees fought repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, with Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman for full access.
Haldeman set up a $300,000 ``special account'' in the White House for a polling operation so secret not even Nixon's own pollster, Robert Teeter, was told about it.
Nixon also kept Teeter - later the chief campaign strategist for presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush - from seeing results of a poll with questions about Watergate, the scandal that would topple his presidency.
``P. requested NO access including WH Staff,'' Haldeman wrote on a confidential Sept. 18, 1972, memo relaying Teeter's request for ``Watergate Incident'' data.
Other memos indicated White House lawyer Herbert Kalmbach, who would spend six months in jail for campaign-law violations, set up a Delaware shell corporation with private funding to hide administration sponsorship of polls.
Haldeman scribbled in a Dec. 21, 1971, memo that in a separate note, ``H. approved ... a shell.''
Nixon gave much polling work to firms perceived to share his beliefs and, hoping to sway a hostile Congress, pushed them to publicize positive findings while not disclosing White House sponsorship, the authors said.
``Polling was ammunition for a guy who was politically beleaguered,'' Jacobs said.
Jacobs and Shapiro searched presidential archives and interviewed former Nixon aides, including Haldeman before he died in 1993. Nixon, who died last year, refused to cooperate, Jacobs said.
The authors made their discoveries while tracing the rise of presidential polling. President Lyndon Johnson and especially Nixon turned the White House ``public opinion apparatus'' into an institution, they concluded.
Nixon and Haldeman - who had been an advertising executive and was familiar with market research - substantially improved the quality of White House polls and analysis of their results, Jacobs said.
In all, the Nixon administration spent at least $1.1 million on polls - equivalent to about $4 million today.
In a Dec. 30, 1969, memo to Haldeman, President Nixon wrote he thought he could get ``very valuable information'' from private ``telephone quicky polls'' on key issues.
``The purpose will not be to help us work out our policy but let us know what obstacles we confront in attempting to sell a policy,'' Nixon asserted.
Jacobs and Shapiro found evidence that Nixon did much more with his polls.
Records show, for example, the White House commissioned a poll to gauge whether Nixon should reduce Lt. William Calley's life sentence for the My Lai massacre. Then Nixon placed Calley under house arrest.
Nixon would write in his 1990 memoir ``In the Arena'' that ``Campaigns should pay for fewer polls, and pay less attention to those they take.''
But former Nixon aide Harry Dent told Jacobs in an interview: ``Nixon would not have taken an initiative on any particular areas without looking at some statistics. Nixon did not fly through planet Earth by the seat of his britches.''
by CNB