CRP’s manipulation of public opinion to support mining Haiphong Harbor

The CRP’s campaign to manufacture support for President Richard Nixon’s decision to mine Haiphong Harbor converted money, staff labor, and ordinary channels of public response into staged evidence of popular approval. It did not merely argue for the decision: operatives paid for apparent citizen endorsements, constructed a poll result, and destroyed material that could expose how the result had been produced. The effort’s significance lies in that chain—from a political objective to fabricated public signals, and from those signals to an official account of public opinion.

Background and Political Purpose

A disaffected CRP official described the campaign to Bob Woodward as an instance of a larger willingness to choose a dishonest method even when an honest one could have achieved the same result. The example he gave was the decision to mine Haiphong Harbor, which he said had come roughly five months before the election. Some people at the committee believed that the decision could make or break President Nixon’s prospects. Their effort was therefore directed not only at defending a policy but at making support for it appear broad and spontaneous.

The official said the CRP spent $8,400 on false telegrams and advertisements to stir up support. Money paid for telegrams sent to the White House praising the decision, giving press secretary Ron Ziegler a basis to announce that a large proportion of the messages supported the President. The campaign also paid for a purportedly independent advertisement in The New York Times opposing an editorial against the mining. These were different media and different gestures, but they served the same purpose: to make organized campaign activity look like a public response arising outside the committee.

Staged Endorsements and the Advertisement

The advertisement, headed The People vs. the New York Times, presented itself as the statement of roughly ten independent people. Its signatures suggested that citizens were sufficiently outraged by the editorial to spend their own money expressing disagreement. The CRP official said that appearance was false: the committee paid for the advertisement using forty $100 bills from the pile in Maurice Stans’s safe. The printed display of supposedly independent conviction was thus financed with campaign cash, while its presentation concealed the source of that financing.

The ad’s question—who could be believed, the newspaper or the American people—made the construction especially pointed. It set a newspaper’s editorial judgment against an imagined popular voice, even though the supposed citizens’ intervention had been arranged and paid for by the CRP. Likewise, the telegrams did not simply register sentiment already in circulation; the committee funded messages designed to generate a favorable count that could then be cited publicly. In both cases, the operation manufactured evidence of consent and obscured the machinery behind it.

The WTTG Poll

On the day The Washington Post published its account of the Haiphong campaign, James Dooley, a nineteen-year-old former head of the CRP mailroom, came to the newsroom and told Woodward that the committee had also rigged WTTG’s poll on whether viewers supported the President’s decision. The local Metromedia station had invited viewers to mail in cards indicating agreement or disagreement. Sample ballots appeared in advertisements in The Washington Post and the Star, making the poll a visible measure of public opinion that the campaign could try to influence.

Dooley described a labor-intensive operation. The press office ran the project, and work at the committee ground to a halt while staff members were assigned to fill out fifteen postcards each. Ten people spent days obtaining different stamps and cards and varying their handwriting to disguise the source of the responses. Thousands of newspapers were purchased from newsstands so that poll ballots could be clipped out and mailed. Dooley estimated that the CRP sent at least 4,000 ballots supporting Nixon’s decision.

The reported totals reveal how consequential those submissions were. WTTG announced that 5,157 respondents agreed with the President and 1,158 disagreed. Dooley said that without the CRP ballots, Nixon’s side would at best have lost by a single vote: 1,158 to 1,157. The committee’s intervention did not merely enlarge an existing margin; on his account, it reversed the result. A poll that appeared to measure viewers’ opinions instead registered, in substantial part, a campaign’s organized effort to produce the answer it wanted.

Exposure, Denial, and Meaning

After the ballots had been clipped from the newspapers, the workers worried that the purchased papers might reveal the operation. Someone ordered them shredded. Dooley said James McCord was in charge of the shredder and was upset by the ton of newspapers piled around the shredder room, but that the papers were destroyed as directed. The destruction followed directly from the practical trace left by the poll-rigging: the materials needed to generate false responses also risked exposing their coordinated origin.

Woodward asked Devan Shumway, the CRP spokesman, whether the poll had been rigged. Shumway replied that election participants did what they could, said the committee assumed the other side would do the same, and acknowledged proceeding on that assumption without knowing whether it was true. Asked whether he meant the North Vietnamese, he clarified that he meant the McGovern forces. The response offered a justification based on presumed reciprocal conduct, not a denial that the CRP had acted. It also recast a specific operation—staff-generated ballots, disguised handwriting, purchased newspapers, and their subsequent destruction—as ordinary electioneering.

The Haiphong campaign therefore joined political persuasion to the manufacture of its apparent proof. Paid telegrams could be announced as public reaction; a committee-financed ad could claim the authority of independent citizens; and a rigged poll could report a margin that the submitted ballots had helped create. The episode exposed the gap between a public signal and the process that produced it. Its central irony is that an operation designed to demonstrate popular approval depended on concealing the campaign’s own hand.