The unreleased Nixon White House tapes show Richard Nixon plotted "the ultimate dirty trick" by trying to plant evidence to make it look as if Democratic politics were implicated in the assassination attempt on George Wallace, The New Yorker reported.
An article by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh in the Dec. 14 issue of the magazine says tapes from the Nixon administration show the then-president conspired with White House Counsel Charles Colson to plant evidence in the 1972 assassination attempt on Wallace, then governor of Alabama and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.Nixon and Colson wanted to make it appear as if supporters of another Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. George McGovern, were linked to the attack, The New Yorker report said.
The article, titled "Nixon's Last Cover-Up: The Tapes He Wants the Archives to Supress," deals with previously undisclosed material contained on the thousands of reels of tape from Nixon's administration that are currently under lock and key in the National Archives and Records Administration. The former president is fighting to block the release of the tapes.
Wallace was shot and seriously wounded on May 15, 1972, during a campaign rally at a Maryland shopping center. The attack left him paralyzed from the waist down.
The would-be assassin was Arthur Bremer, an unemployed busboy from Milwaukee. Hersh said Secret Service agents searched Bremer's apartment, apparently without a warrant, and discovered it was strewn with various political tracts and handwritten notes.
After learning this just hours after the shooting, Nixon and Colson, his special counsel, decided to plant McGovern campaign literature in Bremer's apartment in an attempt to make it look as if Democratic Party politics were involved in the assassination attempt. With Wallace out of the race, liberal Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota appeared to be the most likely contender for the Democratic nomination and would thus be Nixon's opponent in the general election.
"Nixon is energized and excited by what seems to be the ultimate political dirty trick: The FBI and the Milwaukee police will be convinced, and will tell the world, that the attempted assassination of Wallace had its roots in left-wing Democratic politics," Hersh wrote.
He said Nixon and Colson ordered former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt - later to play a key role in the planning of the Watergate break-in - to Milwaukee to remove Bremer's political tracts and replace them with McGovern campaign literature. However, the plan was canceled when the FBI got to Bremer's apartment first and sealed it off.