At the height of the Watergate scandal, 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden claimed that New York Sen. Robert Kennedy had been guilty of spying on political opponents.
The future vice president’s comments came during a May 1973 speech at the City Club of Cleveland in Ohio when he was a 30-year-old freshman U.S. senator for Delaware, which was revealed in an audio recording of the event released this year. He was asked by a female audience member if “to the best of his knowledge” any members of the Democratic Party had ever engaged in political trickery such as illegal bugging.
“Sure, yes I do. But bugging isn’t the question, kiddo, we’re not even talking about bugging,” said Biden, now 76, referring to the allegations that members of President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign installed microphones and other recording devices in the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.
“You know, the rumor was that Robert Kennedy used to walk into his office in the morning when he was a senator and pick up the phone and say, ‘Hello everybody, how are ya?’ And if the counter to that was that the reason he was able to pick up the phone and say that was when he was attorney general, he was doing the bugging. So, you know, I’m sure bugging has gone on and that’s offensive to everyone. It’s particularly offensive to me who’s being bugged — if I am.”
He added, “But truly, it has gone on.”
During his tenure as attorney general, Kennedy gained a reputation for brazenly approving wiretaps on a number of notable political figures. In October 1963, Kennedy approved a wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr. after the civil rights leader refused to cut ties with Stanley Levison, a confidant of King and a former financial backer of the Communist Party USA.
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That spying continued through 1965 and included wiretaps on King when he attended the 1963 Democratic National Convention. It wasn’t until the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities completed its report on the scandal in 1974 that members of the public found out the Justice Department’s surveillance included recording conversations that various lawmakers had with King.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover defended the government’s behavior by pointing to King’s relationships with left-wing radicals. Biden’s remarks at the Ohio event indicate how many Democrats at the time were less concerned with any potential spying done by Nixon’s associates and more that the White House was engaging in a cover-up of any illegal activity. Throughout the hour-long event, Biden repeatedly emphasized that the blame over Watergate should not rest on the shoulders of the Republican Party but “administrative bureaucrats.”
He said, “It is wrong to blame politicians, those of us who hold elective office.”
Two months before Biden spoke, the infamous Nixon tapes had been released to the public, demonstrating the president’s knowledge of the break into the DNC’s headquarters and his attempts to bribe those involved with the crime.
