The Committee for the Re-election of the President’s campaign to manufacture support for mining Haiphong turned political advocacy into a staged performance of popular consent. Committee money paid for false telegrams and advertising, while staffers organized public activity and flooded a television poll with fabricated ballots. The operation sought not merely to argue for the President’s decision, but to make that decision seem backed by citizens acting on their own.

Background and Political Stakes

A disaffected Committee for the Re-election of the President official described the episode to Bob Woodward as part of a broader pattern: when honest and dishonest methods promised the same result, the committee had chosen the dishonest one. The decision to mine Haiphong, the official said, had come about five months before the election and seemed to some staff members capable of making or breaking Richard Nixon’s presidency. Their response was to spend $8,400 on false telegrams and advertisements designed to stir up support.

The account connected this campaign to the Committee for the Re-election of the President’s wider effort to shape political appearances. Money was used to generate messages to the White House praising the decision, so that White House spokesman Ronald Ziegler could announce a high level of public support. The campaign thus manufactured both the apparent voices of citizens and a convenient measure of their supposed approval. Public opinion was not simply being persuaded; it was being staged for presentation.

Paid Messages and the Newspaper Advertisement

The operation included a paid advertisement in The New York Times criticizing an editorial that had opposed the mining. The official gave Woodward a copy. Headlined The People vs. the New York Times, it presented its signers as roughly ten independent people who had supposedly been moved to spend their own money in protest. According to the official, that impression was false: the Committee for the Re-election of the President had paid for the advertisement with forty $100 bills from the pile in Maurice Stans’s safe.

The advertisement’s appeal rested on a contrast between a newspaper and an imagined public speaking with one voice. Its question, asking whom readers could believe—the newspaper or the American people—claimed to represent popular judgment while concealing the committee funding behind the display. The false telegrams and the advertisement were distinct instruments, but they served the same purpose: to turn organized campaign activity into evidence that support had arisen independently.

The WTTG Poll

A second account revealed an even more direct effort to manufacture a numerical majority. On the day the story about the Haiphong campaign appeared, James Dooley, a nineteen-year-old former head of the committee mailroom, told Woodward that the Committee for the Re-election of the President had rigged WTTG’s poll on whether viewers supported the President’s decision. The local Metromedia station had asked viewers to send in cards indicating agreement or disagreement; sample ballots appeared in advertisements in The Washington Post and the Washington Star.

Dooley described a coordinated effort run through the committee press office. Work reportedly ground to a halt while staff members were told to fill out fifteen postcards each. Ten people spent days buying different kinds of stamps and cards and varying their handwriting to make the responses look as though they came from different individuals. Thousands of newspapers were bought so that the poll ballots printed in them could be clipped out and mailed in. Dooley said that at least 4,000 ballots supporting Nixon’s decision were sent from the committee.

WTTG reported 5,157 responses in favor of the President and 1,158 against. Dooley’s comparison made the effect of the committee’s submissions stark: without them, he said, the President would at best have lost by one vote, 1,158 to 1,157. The published total therefore presented as a popular verdict what the account described as a result substantially built by campaign staff and fabricated responses.

Dooley also recounted what happened after the ballots had been clipped from the newspapers. Staff members feared that the purchased papers might expose the scheme, and someone ordered them shredded. James McCord was in charge of the shredder and was upset by the large quantity of newspapers in the shredder room, Dooley said, but the papers were destroyed as directed. The reported destruction extended the operation beyond fabrication: materials that might have revealed how the poll was assembled were removed.

Exposure and Significance

When Bob Woodward asked committee spokesman Devan Shumway whether the poll had been rigged, Shumway replied that in an election people did what they could, and that the committee had assumed the opposing side would do the same. Asked whether he meant the North Vietnamese, he clarified that he meant the McGovern forces. The exchange offered a defense based on presumed reciprocity rather than a denial that the committee had acted. It also reframed the operation as ordinary campaign behavior even as the evidence described purchased materials, falsified handwriting, and destroyed newspapers.

The episode showed how several kinds of manufactured evidence could reinforce one another: paid messages to political leaders, an advertisement masquerading as independent civic protest, and poll totals made to resemble a spontaneous public response. The separate accounts came from a disaffected committee official and Dooley, whose disclosure supplied specific mechanics and numbers. Together, they exposed the gap between an appearance of popular support and the organized campaign labor and money used to produce it.