MODERATOR: Senator Dole, 10 days ago when Senator Mondale raised the issues of Watergate and the Nixon pardon, you called it the start of a campaign mudslinging. Two years ago when you were running for the Senate you said that the pardon was prematurely granted and that it was a mistake. You were quoted by The Kansas City Times as saying, “You can’t ignore our tradition of equal application of the law.” Did you approve of the Nixon pardon when President Ford granted it? Do you approve of it now and, if the issue was fair game in your 1974 campaign in Kansas, why is it not an appropriate topic now?
DOLE: It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it’s not a very good issue any more than the war in Vietnam would be or World War II or World War I, or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century.
I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit. If we want to go back and rake that over and over and over, we can do that. I think Senator Mondale doesn’t want to do that. And it seems to me that the pardon of Richard Nixon is behind us. Watergate is behind us. we have this vision for Americans who are really concerned about those people out there and their problems, yes, and their education and their jobs, we ought to be talking about that.
I know it strikes a responsive chord in some to kick Richard Nixon around. I don’t know how long you can keep that up. How much mileage is there in someone who’s been kicked, whose wife suffered a serious stroke, who’s been disgraced in office and stepped down from that office. I think after two years and some months it’s probably a dead issue.
But let them play that game. That’s the only game they know.
MODERATOR: Senator Mondale.
MONDALE: I think Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as hatchet man tonight by implying and stating that World War II and the Korean War were Democratic wars.
Does he really mean to suggest to the American people that there was a partisan difference over involvement in the war despite Nazi Germany. I don’t think any reasonable American would accept that.
Did he really mean to suggest it was only partisanship that got us into the war in Korea? Did he really mean to forget that part of the record where Mr. Nixon and the Republican Party wanted us to get involved earlier in the war in Vietnam, and long after Mr. Nixon and the Republican party promised to finish the war in Vietnam, they kept urging us forward, and that in fact it was the Democratic Congress that passed the law ending the war in Vietnam and preventing a new war in Angola?
Now on Watergate, we are not charging, and he knows it, his involvement in Watergate. What we’re saying is that they defended Mr. Nixon up to the last.