Nixon Aides Ran a Covert Polling Operation : Presidency: He hid information even from his senior Administration officials. He used it to shape policy and manipulate popular opinion.

NEW YORK —  A review of President Richard M. Nixon’s archives finds that his aides used covert funding for an unprecedented White House polling operation and that he hid sensitive results--or even the polls’ existence--from senior Administration officials.

Though he pretended to rely on political instinct, Nixon used polls aggressively to shape policy and campaign strategy and manipulate popular opinion, two researchers conclude in the summer issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.

For instance, Nixon used internal polls to test alternate running mates for his 1972 reelection ticket, the researchers said. He didn’t tell Vice President Spiro Agnew about it.

Among other findings by political scientists Lawrence R. Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Robert Y. Shapiro of Columbia University:

* Fearing leaks, Nixon only gave the Republican National Committee and the Committee to Re-Elect the President “sanitized” results of surveys they had paid for. Officials of both committees fought repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, with Nixon Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman for full access.

* Haldeman set up a $300,000 “special account” in the White House for a polling operation so secret that not even Nixon’s own pollster, Robert Teeter, was told about it.

Nixon also kept Teeter--later the chief campaign strategist for Gerald R. Ford and George Bush--from seeing results of a poll with questions about Watergate, the scandal that would topple his presidency.

“P. requested NO access including WH Staff,” Haldeman wrote on a confidential Sept. 18, 1972, memo relaying Teeter’s request for “Watergate Incident” data.

* Other memos indicated that White House lawyer Herbert Kalmbach, who would spend six months in jail for campaign-law violations, set up a Delaware shell corporation with private funding to hide Administration sponsorship of polls.

Haldeman scribbled on a Dec. 21, 1971, memo that, in a separate note, “H. approved . . . a shell.”

* On a May 4, 1971, memo, Haldeman wrote that White House special adviser Charles Colson should be denied access to a poll that Colson had designed and offered to have a “front man” pay for. “And we can pay for it--the front man was in case we released it,” Haldeman scrawled.

* Nixon gave much polling work to firms perceived to share his beliefs and, hoping to sway a hostile Congress, pushed them to publicize positive findings while not disclosing White House sponsorship, the authors said.

“Polling was ammunition for a guy who was politically beleaguered,” Jacobs said in an interview.

Jacobs and Shapiro searched presidential archives and interviewed former Nixon aides, including Haldeman before he died in 1993. Nixon, who died last year, refused to cooperate, Jacobs said.

The authors made their discoveries while tracing the rise of presidential polling. Lyndon B. Johnson and especially Nixon turned the White House “public opinion apparatus” into an institution, the researchers concluded.

Nixon and Haldeman--who had been an advertising executive and was familiar with market research--substantially improved the quality of White House polls and analysis of their results, Jacobs said.

John F. Kennedy commissioned 93 private polls from 1958-63, Johnson 130 from 1963-68, and Nixon 233 from 1969-72, including 153 during his 1972 campaign, the researchers said.

In all, the Nixon Administration spent at least $1.1 million on polls--equivalent to roughly $4 million today.

In a Dec. 30, 1969, memo to Haldeman, Nixon wrote he thought he could get “very valuable information” from private “telephone quicky polls” on key issues.

“The purpose will not be to help us work out our policy but let us know what obstacles we confront in attempting to sell a policy,” Nixon asserted.

Jacobs and Shapiro found evidence that Nixon did much more with his polls.

Records show, for example, that the White House commissioned a poll to gauge whether Nixon should reduce Lt. William Calley’s life sentence for the My Lai massacre. Then Nixon placed Calley under house arrest.

Nixon would write in his 1990 memoir “In the Arena”: “Campaigns should pay for fewer polls, and pay less attention to those they take.”

But former Nixon aide Harry Dent told Jacobs in an interview: “Nixon would not have taken an initiative on any particular areas without looking at some statistics. Nixon did not fly through planet Earth by the seat of his britches.”