Nixon gave Ted Kennedy bodyguards -- to spy on his personal life.

From the Guardian via Truthout:

Washington - Richard Nixon considered Ted Kennedy such a threat that he tried to catch him cheating on his wife, even ordering aides to plant secret service bodyguards to spy on the senator's behaviour.

"Do you have anybody in the secret service that you can get to?" the US president asked his aide John Ehrlichman in a stark series of Oval Office conversations about Kennedy before the 1972 election. "Yeah, yeah," Ehrlichman replied.

"Plant one," Nixon said. "Plant two guys on him. This could be very useful."

Nixon made clear that the secret service protection afforded Kennedy before the 1972 election would be rescinded after. Then, said the president, "if he gets shot, it's too damn bad". His aides disdainfully referred to Kennedy supporters as "super-swinger jet-set types".

Tape recordings from the Nixon White House betray a preoccupation with the Kennedy mystique and how that might be used against the Republican president by the last surviving brother, who died on Tuesday aged 77. Nixon wanted a sharp and private eye kept on Kennedy's movements after the Chappaquiddick scandal, hoping to catch him with a woman other than his wife, Joan.

Nixon's men had investigators tail Kennedy on a Hawaii vacation and when he was at his Martha's Vineyard haunts.

Mortified, they told Nixon that Joan Kennedy wanted to wear "hot pants" to a White House function until her husband talked her out of it. But Ted's behaviour? In the aftermath of his scandal he was careful not to step out of line, the tapes suggest.