![]() ![]() On October 31, in response to a query from the Associated Press on “how would you combat the growth of organized crime,” Nixon said it was “essential” to strengthen the Justice Department’s organized crime division and enable the recording of phone conversations of suspects, permitted in a just-passed 1968 federal law but opposed by President Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general, Ramsey Clark. Nixon, then the frontrunner in the polls, in an October 29 guest column, blamed the lack of progress on organized crime on the lame-duck Johnson administration for refusing “to support legislation for wiretap authority against organized crime, an essential tool.” ![]() Specifically, the news media asked the candidates, Republican Richard Nixon, Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party candidate and Alabama Governor George Wallace, how they would attack organized crime if elected. In the final days before the 1968 presidential election, the so-called “war on crime” was the top domestic issue of the day. Edgar Hoover in 1971 at the president’s Key Biscayne, Florida, home. President Richard Nixon, right, sits with close friend Bebe Rebozo, left, and FBI Director J. ![]()
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