18. J. Edgar Hoover wanted Richard Nixon as President and worked to elect him to the office
When Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, ran for the Presidency in 1960 his boss, incumbent President Dwight David Eisenhower, was tepid in his endorsement. J. Edgar Hoover wanted Nixon to be elected, and after the disappointment in 1960 he worked to ensure Nixon prevailed when he ran again in 1968, and for re-election in 1972. In 1971 the former Attorney General for the United States and erstwhile Nixon law partner John M. Mitchell served as the head of Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President (with the acronym CREEP, surely the most apropos such designation in the history of American politics). Hoover used FBI sources to funnel politically volatile information to Mitchell for use by the Nixon campaign. It was information provided by Hoover which led the Nixon White House to create the White House Investigations Unit, the official name for what became famous as the White House Plumbers.
According to a Hoover memo which eventually found residence in his Confidential files, and which was shared with John Mitchell, information critical of the FBI was being fed to the McGovern campaign by disenchanted agents. McGovern used the information, which included revelations of illegal surveillance on American citizens, to attack Hoover and by extension the Nixon Administration. The names of individuals to which information was linked included journalists and columnists, and Hoover provided their names, as well as the names of their sources. They became the basis of what later was known as the White House Enemies List. Thus Hoover and Nixon, with Mitchell as an intermediary, using illegally obtained information to discredit the Democratic candidate for President, while Nixon ran on a platform which described him as the Law and Order candidate, enjoying a ringing endorsement from the long-term director of the FBI, America’s greatest lawman, J. Edgar Hoover.