The Committee to Re-Elect the President AKA: CREEP

Since Franklin Roosevelt, American Presidents have been bound by a two-term limit. That means that most of our modern Presidents have concentrated a great deal of energy in their first term, running for a second term. The desire to hang on to the office for the whole eight years is immense and no President wanted it more than Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon won his first term in 1968 by a hundred electoral votes over contender Hubert Humphrey. This kind of win sounds good on paper but Nixon was one of the few men that actually knew what it felt like to lose a Presidential election. He had lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and if JFK's brother Robert had not been assassinated in 1968, it's possible Nixon could have lost a second time. Aside from Hubert Humphrey sucking, one of the main reasons Nixon won the 1968 election was because he said he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. By 1971, the war was still going and just about the time when all first-termers start work on re-election campaigns, Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers.

The President feared the Pentagon Papers because they were documents that proved the Vietnam War was bullshit. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was bullshit and most of all, Nixon's plan to end the war was bullshit. Initially, Nixon set forth his Attorney General - John Mitchell - to fight the release of the (NYTimes and Washington Post serialized) Pentagon Papers. After the SCOTUS ruled against Mitchell's DOJ, old John retired as AG and became the head of Richard Milhous Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President. It was called CREEP for a reason and that reason was dirty tricks.

The dirtiest trick CREEP played was to create the White House Special Investigations Unit. This crack team, headed by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, was given the mission to stop any further leaks that would harm Nixon. They were known as the Plumbers. The Plumber's first job was breaking into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in order to find incriminating evidence on the man that leaked the Pentagon Papers. CREEP had a lot of associates, one of them being Donald Segretti, a lawyer that specialized in campaign tricks like stealing a target's stationary and forging disparaging documents. All of these folks took campaign money from CREEP, issued by the likes of campaign manager Jeb Magruder, former AG John Mitchell and former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans. Creep also raised under-the-table money from millionaire Armand Hammer.

CREEP, its minions, benefactors and overlords formed a cabal that would have Richard Nixon re-elected at any cost. In the film version of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, the character Deep Throat explains how these people broke laws and slaughtered ethics:

"They were frightened of Muskie and look who got destroyed. The wanted to run against McGovern and look who they're running against. They bugged. They followed people, false press leaks, fake letters. They cancelled Democratic campaign rallies. They investigated Democratic private lives. They planted spies, stole documents and on and on. Now, don't tell me you think this was all the work of little Don Segretti."

In the end, all of the men in the photo above were convicted and sent to jail. Members of the President's staff were convicted and sent to jail. 40 government officials were indicted and all of it because Dick Nixon had issues with self-esteem.

CREEP's present-day counterpart?

The White House Iraq Group