Remarkable new evidence of Nixon's treason

[Prospero]

This weekend the BBc in London presented a remarkable programme with evidence - including previously unheard and classified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson - revealing that Rchard Nixon, in the closing stages of his 1968 electoral campaign deliberately sabotaged the Paris peace talks which could have ended the Vietnam war. Through his people - including Henry Kissinger - he lobbied and persuaded the South Vietnamese to change their minds about attending the talks - leading to a continuation of the war with the loss of 20,000 American lives and countless thousands of Vietnamese dead.

I can find no evidence this has yet been reported in the US.

Among those involved and still alive were henry Kissinger who should now be tried for treason.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668

The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'
By David Taylor
Archive On 4

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations - he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but said nothing.

After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations none of his successors have dared to do it. But Nixon wasn't the first.

He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency.

"They will provide history with the bark off," Johnson told his wife, Lady Bird.

The final batch of tapes released by the LBJ library covers 1968, and allows us to hear Johnson's private conversations as his Democratic Party tore itself apart over the question of Vietnam.

Charles Wheeler was the BBC's Washington correspondent from 1965 to 1973
He learned in 1994 that LBJ had evidence of Richard Nixon's sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks, and interviewed key Johnson staff
Wheeler died in 2008, the same year the LBJ tapes were declassified
David Taylor was his Washington-based producer for many years

The 1968 convention, held in Chicago, was a complete shambles.

Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters clashed with Mayor Richard Daley's police, determined to force the party to reject Johnson's Vietnam war strategy.

As they taunted the police with cries of "The whole world is watching!" one man in particular was watching very closely.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was at his ranch in Texas, having announced five months earlier that he wouldn't seek a second term.

The president was appalled at the violence and although many of his staff sided with the students, and told the president the police were responsible for "disgusting abuse of police power," Johnson picked up the phone, ordered the dictabelt machine to start recording and congratulated Mayor Daley for his handling of the protest.

The president feared the convention delegates were about to reject his war policy and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey.

So he placed a series of calls to his staff at the convention to outline an astonishing plan. He planned to leave Texas and fly into Chicago.


He would then enter the convention and announce he was putting his name forward as a candidate for a second term.

It would have transformed the 1968 election. His advisers were sworn to secrecy and even Lady Bird did not know what her husband was considering.

On the White House tapes we learn that Johnson wanted to know from Daley how many delegates would support his candidacy. LBJ only wanted to get back into the race if Daley could guarantee the party would fall in line behind him.

They also discussed whether the president's helicopter, Marine One, could land on top of the Hilton Hotel to avoid the anti-war protesters.

Daley assured him enough delegates would support his nomination but the plan was shelved after the Secret Service warned the president they could not guarantee his safety.

The idea that Johnson might have been the candidate, and not Hubert Humphrey, is just one of the many secrets contained on the White House tapes.


They also shed light on a scandal that, if it had been known at the time, would have sunk the candidacy of Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon.

By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks - or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had "blood on his hands".

The BBC's former Washington correspondent Charles Wheeler learned of this in 1994 and conducted a series of interviews with key Johnson staff, such as defence secretary Clark Clifford, and national security adviser Walt Rostow.


We now know...

After the Viet Cong's Tet offensive, White House doves persuaded Johnson to end the war
Johnson loathed Senator Bobby Kennedy but the tapes show he was genuinely devastated by his assassination
He feared vice-president Hubert Humphrey would go soft on Vietnam if elected president
The BBC's Charles Wheeler would have been under FBI surveillance when he met administration officials in 1968
In 1971 Nixon made huge efforts to find a file containing everything Johnson knew in 1968 about Nixon's skulduggery
But by the time the tapes were declassified in 2008 all the main protagonists had died, including Wheeler.

Now, for the first time, the whole story can be told.

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.

At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.


The Paris peace talks may have ended years earlier, if it had not been for Nixon's subterfuge.

Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.

So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.

He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador's phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to "just hang on through election".

Johnson was told by Defence Secretary Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace.


Nixon went on to become president and eventually signed a Vietnam peace deal in 1973
In a series of remarkable White House recordings we can hear Johnson's reaction to the news.

In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: "We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move."

He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.

When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.

The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.


Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.

So they decided to say nothing.

The president did let Humphrey know and gave him enough information to sink his opponent. But by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency. So Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway.

Nixon ended his campaign by suggesting the administration war policy was in shambles. They couldn't even get the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table.

He won by less than 1% of the popular vote.

Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.

The White House tapes, combined with Wheeler's interviews with key White House personnel, provide an unprecedented insight into how Johnson handled a series of crises that rocked his presidency. Sadly, we will never have that sort of insight again.

[fivekatz]

The interference with the Paris Peace Talks was included in a documentary called "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" which made the case that Kissinger was a war criminal. I can't remember if that documentary was produced in the US, Canada or the UK but it is at at least 6 years old and the story that Nixon via back channels was encouraging North Vietnam to hold off until after the election. It is available via Netflix streaming for those who have Netflix and are interested.

In hindsight looking at how hard it was for the Nixon Administration to come to terms with North Vietnam it is very speculative that LBJ was going to get a deal done before the election.

At any rate the interference with the process by Nixon and Kissinger is rather deplorable and yet another feature of Nixon's willingness to win at all costs.

Robert Dallek did an awesome book based on the LBJ tapes called Flawed Giant. It is important to keep in mind that Johnson had the ability to pick and choose what he'd record and used it. Nixon found the controls cumbersome and ordered his assistant Chief of Staff (Alexander Butterfield) to install a continuous recording system.

And with that move came the smoking gun and the only resignation of the Presidency in the history of the US.

[buttslinger]

I grew up 15 minutes from Mount Vernon, I went there ONCE.
I've read books on Lincoln, FDR, Jefferson, but there were a bunch of Presidents that were pretty wild or unusual. Many World leaders have commented that being the leader of a Democracy is not really being the leader, nobody is, and that it took them eight years to really get a grip on what they were actually doing.
I remember Nixon, everybody my age knew he was a prick, there were always demonstrations going on, once I was standing on the lawn of the Washington Monument and I glanced over to see Allen Ginsburg standing next to me. Another time I was almost crushed when the Police forced back the crowd and I got pinned against a car with my bicycle impaling me. My friend Vicky once got on an elevator with Kissinger and some other guy, she said he was pissed at how slow the elevator was going.
At the CPAC this weekend, they elected Rand Paul as their man for the White House in 2016. Sarah Palin spoke.
I consider the 2000 election weirder than the Nixon years. And the Bush Term more destructive than Nixon's. Agnew was a joke, Cheney was a Monster.
Nothing will happen to Kissinger, he'll get a pass.

[Prospero]

"Nothing will happen to Kissinger, he'll get a pass. "

Yes... he is annointed isn't he.. an elder spokesman on world affairs now, consulted by the Whit House an others.

[hippifried]

Not sure what it is, but something about this story doesn't ring true. If memory serves, the Paris talks were delayed time & again for every pettiness imaginable, & the "South VietNamese" were constantly griping about being out of the loop & treated like an irrelevant afterthought by everybody else concerned. Now we're all supposed to believe that escalation of the war for another 5 years was because of an election scam perpetrated by Nixon/Kissenger around the time of the convention? I'm no Nixon fan by a long shot, but I'm no fan of conspiracy theories either.

[Prospero]

Well the BBC programme was not a conspiracy theory - unless LBJ and his team including Hubert Humphrey - made it up. There were tapes, finally released by the LBJ estate of long conversations involving many key people including Nixon and LBJ - which proved that Nixon's people talked directly to the South Vietnamese, including their president, to dissuade them from taking part in the talks when he could, it is said, deliver a better and more congenial peace settlement once h was President.
LBJ and Humphrey with the proof in their hands, decided not to reveal this to the US public for the reasons mentioned in the BBC summary above - that they thought the gap had closed and they would in the election and that if they revealed that they'd been bugging and taping high officials.

I wish i could post the link to the show here - available online on the BBC iPlayer - but that doesn't work outside of the UK.

[fivekatz]

Not sure what it is, but something about this story doesn't ring true. If memory serves, the Paris talks were delayed time & again for every pettiness imaginable, & the "South VietNamese" were constantly griping about being out of the loop & treated like an irrelevant afterthought by everybody else concerned. Now we're all supposed to believe that escalation of the war for another 5 years was because of an election scam perpetrated by Nixon/Kissenger around the time of the convention? I'm no Nixon fan by a long shot, but I'm no fan of conspiracy theories either.

Few thoughts:

The Paris Peace accords may or may not have gone anywhere. North Vietnam would not accept the same terms from Nixon as LBJ had on the table in 1968.

But it is not absurd to think Nixon would have tried to slow down the talks. Just calling an end to the bombing of the North in late October of 68 made the election one of closest in the 20th Century. It is easy to see Nixon losing the election in that light if rather than simply ending carpet bombing the US has struck a peace agreement.

Nixon just like LBJ hated the war feeling it interfered with his greater agenda. But just like LBJ Nixon's actions were informed by the history of WWII and the fear of being the first US President to "lose a war". So he found himself in the same cycle of escalation as LBJ though his tactics were to expand battlefronts rather than increase troop strength.

So while it is very possible that Nixon through back channels helped slow the Paris talks to increase his odds of winning election, I think it is a leap to assume that the talks would have succeeded any way or that HHH would have escalated withdrawal from Vietnam by capitulating further than LBJ was or Nixon eventually did.

[flabbybody]

I will read this in its entirety when I'm on my PC but I smell some ugly anti-Nixon propaganda drenched with historical lies. The 40 year intellectual agenda to discredit President Nixon's legacy will never end. My first vote in a presidential election was for him in '72 and I do not regret it for a moment. I'll try to respond to this intelligently

[robertlouis]

I will read this in its entirety when I'm on my PC but I smell some ugly anti-Nixon propaganda drenched with historical lies. The 40 year intellectual agenda to discredit President Nixon's legacy will never end. My first vote in a presidential election was for him in '72 and I do not regret it for a moment. I'll try to respond to this intelligently

Blimey. I'd always thought you were a dyed in the wool lifetime Democrat, Flabby. Was George McGovern not attractive in any way back then?

Serious question, by the way. I wholly respect your views.

[trish]

"Dick Nixon," is a name?? I always took it to be an imperative statement.