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.


SOCK IT TO ME??? - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qRZvlZZ0DY)

[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.

[robertlouis]

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

Well, I know a guy called Nick Dixon.....

[flabbybody]

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.
There were many Republicans to admire when I grew up in the 70's. John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller , and yes Nixon. They believed that a robust free market economy could partner with government , not be at odds with it. New York State Governor Rockefeller pioneered a financing mechanism that created affordable public housing for millions of low income families. It become the model for many urban areas in America. I didn't become dissatisfied with the GOP til relatively recently.

[Prospero]

I went to school with a kid called Dick Head.

[Prospero]

Oh and really Flabby it is a huge shame you cannot hear the hour long programme. It really isn't part of some conspiracy, just extremely good and diligent reporting.

[giovanni_hotel]

Mildly shocked.
It's not a coincidence America forever lost its absolute faith in the federal government after Nixon was impeached then pardoned by President Ford.

The POTUS would need heads stuck on pikes on the lawn of the Oval Office to see time in prison.

[martin48]

When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the musical satirist Tom Lehrer declared "It was at that moment that satire died." And so it seems to be even truer

[fivekatz]

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 intelligentlyIn fairness, whatever the intellectual agenda was to discredit Nixon, RMN did more to discredit himself than his "enemies" ever could have.

On the plus side of his ledger was an impressive vision that he could open relations with China and the USSR. He was a progressive by today's GOP standards having signed into law the EPA.

But he also did a lot more than Watergate, which is why he and his team went to such ends to cover it up. When he could not get the FBI to do extra-constitutionl spying on US citizens he believed to be political enemies, he created his own force, commonly nicknamed The Plumbers. When it came time for re-election, in effort to run up the score, the force that had been used to spy on US citizens including Daniel Ellsburg was converted into a campaign operation that first sabotaged Muskie so that Nixon could run against the weaker McGovern and then got caught bugging the Democratic headquarters. He became an active part of the conspiracy to cover up the break-in's connections to the White House, most likely because once the ties to the the CREEP became clear the WH connections would become clear.

Even if you believe his escalations/expansion of the war in Southeast Asia was either warranted or limited by the conventional wisdom of the moment the entire Watergate affair was much bigger than a political prank and exposed a very dark side of Nixon that clouds the positive contributions of his presidency.

The intellectual community did not make up his early involvement or his firing of a special prosecutor in an attempt to hide the illegal activities his administration had engaged for at least two prior to the break-in at the Watergate.

It is perhaps a shame that his achievements are clouded by his darker side but that was his fatal flaw in hindsight and one that began way before he was President. He was a complex character in history to say the least.

[buttslinger]

Before Nixon the idea that a President could be corrupt was unthinkable. The press corps knew FDR was a cripple, and Kennedy was cheating on Jackie, but the idea that a President could use the office to settle personal grudges was a game changer in US politics.

Presidential History is pretty rich, makes a good hobby.

My psychiatrist gave me the "quick test" to see how "with it" I was....he told me to recite all the US Presidents backwards. I got back to 1932.

[Stavros]

A few thoughts on this thread:

1) The North Vietnamese had no way of knowing if either the Democrats or the Republicans were going to win the election; they had no reason to engage in political gambits with a man who might deliver nothing in return, be it Humphrey or Nixon.

2) The 'Tet Offensive' earlier in the year indicated that militarily neither side could win the war, even if this was not accepted by some of the US military establishment at the time. Vietnam caused the onset of a crisis in the defence policy of the USA and was a critical component in the eventual collapse of the 'containment strategy' that had dominated US foreign policy in the Cold War period since George Kennan's telegram of 1946. Nixon, Ford, and Carter in effect tried to maintain a broken chariot. It was the Presidency of Ronald Reagan which dealt the coup de grace to containment and opted for an aggressive posture which included pre-emption and military engagement -and although Nixon in 1968 was presented as a conservative who pledged to roll back much of LBJ's welfare programmes, it was Reagan who became the first apostle of 'neo-liberal economics' even though ultimately he borrowed more money than any previous govt in US history, which 'neo-liberals' are not supposed to do. Hence the Project for a New American Century and the George W Bush administration.

3) In 1968 the Democrats had lost the aura that had accompanied the election victory of JFK in 1960, LBJ was loathed by the liberals for escalating the war in Vietnam, and loathed by the Conservatives for his 'War on Poverty' and particularly the 'Great Society Program'. The Democrat candidate in 1968, Hubert Humphrey lacked coherence and charisma, had no political solution to Vietnam, and was viewed as the candidate of an increasingly divided party 'held hostage' by special interest groups. The Democrat Convention in Chicago of 1968 and the riots on the streets in Chicago and other US cities were a serious -possibly a fatal- blow to the image of the Democrats at the time.

4) Kissinger and Nixon were obsessed with the 'Soviet threat' and believed that policy in Saigon was dictated by Moscow. When, in 1969 the USSR and China came close to an all-out military conflict at the height of the Great People's Cultural Revolution, Zhou EnLai made a desperate appeal to the USA to talk to the Russians in an attempt to prevent China becoming involved in a conflict it could not win. The advantage to the US was obvious, as Nixon and Kissinger believed this would weaken the 'Communist bloc' internationally. Nixon's reputation as the man who 'opened the door' to China in the West should be seen more as Nixon trying to get one over on the USSR. Nixon then used this apparent dialogue with one Communist govt (in Beijing) to mount a broader policy of Detente with the other one (in Moscow) which at least suggests that when the possibility of all-out war with the potential use of nuclear weapons arose (as it did again in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973) Nixon was prepared to defuse the situation with diplomacy. In spite of the SALT talks that followed, conservative analysts concluded that the USSR got one over on the USA by using detente as a smokescreen while it built up its military resources throughout the 1970s.

5) Nixon by today's standards was a middle of the road conservative; the key differences that have emerged on both sides of the Atlantic since the breakdown of the different types of 'consensus politics' that dominated US and British policy after 1945 are marked by Thatcher and Reagan who shifted the centre ground several degrees to the right (or if you prefer, promoted more 'neo-liberal' policy ideas), so that even when Clinton in the US and Blair in the UK came into power, they operated from a position in which certain ideas about government spending, taxation, and welfare were taken for granted. We are living with the consequences of the collapse of consensus politics and the embrace of some kind of free market capitalism which either cannot co-exist with the political systems we have, or which just doesn't work anyway.

[flabbybody]

Stavros, today's Tea Party would consider Nixon a wild big government liberal. Please remember that the Great Society legislation enacted by LBJ actually went into effect during the Nixon administration. Instead of overturning Medicare and Medicaid (the strategy advocated by candidate Romney vis a vis Obamacare), President Nixon did the heavy lifting by converting enlightened laws into workable government programs that became vital cogs in the American safety net. Today's Medicare has far more of Nixon's fingerprints than LBJ's. President Nixon also believed in universal health coverage but was advised against pursuing the concept because of political infeasability.

And it's just not fair to assign some ulterior motive to Nixon's overture to Red China. That's why politicians do stuff. The US State department's Chinese policy was a joke under every president after WWll, treating tiny Taiwan like they were the seat of government. Nixon ushered in modern American foreign policy that eventually resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union.

[Stavros]

I agree with your arguments about Nixon's social policy Flabbybody, but not the complaint about an 'ulterior motive' on China. I don't think Nixon or Kissinger knew much about China at the time, and do believe that they viewed the opening as a means of weakening the USSR which was their priority. I doubt Nixon was even interested in China, he had little real knowledge of the world -I think it was either Seymour Hersh or Bob Woodward who pointed out that Nixon referred to Africans as 'Jiggies' and spent only a few hours in the entire continent during his Presidency.

I also don't think it is possible to assign to Nixon the end of the Containment policy that had dominated US policy in the Cold War, though Vietnam was an important element in that. I think the impact of Vietnam on foreign policy both intellectually, and in terms of its practitioners was quite profound -it led to a crisis in policy making which some neo-conservatives would consider timidity bordering on cowardice, but became for the military caution in the deployment of troops overseas -the only deployment I think Carter sanctioned was the ill-fated attempt to rescue the hostages in Tehran; even Reagan's deployments were either catastrophic -Lebanon, for example; or needlessly exaggerated -Grenada. The military build up in the USSR in the 1970s was not in itself the one causal factor in the demise of Communism, but the culmination of decades of mismanagement in the context of an economy that had no room to grow; nobody read Hillel Ticktin's relentless critiques of the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s because he was a Trotskyist, but he was predicting its collapse before most people. Nixon's policies were part of a complex mix, but I am not convinced that in the case of the USSR they were decisive.

Also, I don't think that even if Nixon had been in contact with 'the enemy' in 1968 this would have been a 'treasonous' act, so this whole treason thing is overblown. Was Jane Fonda tried for treason?

[fivekatz]

I agree with your arguments about Nixon's social policy Flabbybody, but not the complaint about an 'ulterior motive' on China. I don't think Nixon or Kissinger knew much about China at the time, and do believe that they viewed the opening as a means of weakening the USSR which was their priority. I doubt Nixon was even interested in China, he had little real knowledge of the world -I think it was either Seymour Hersh or Bob Woodward who pointed out that Nixon referred to Africans as 'Jiggies' and spent only a few hours in the entire continent during his Presidency.

I also don't think it is possible to assign to Nixon the end of the Containment policy that had dominated US policy in the Cold War, though Vietnam was an important element in that. I think the impact of Vietnam on foreign policy both intellectually, and in terms of its practitioners was quite profound -it led to a crisis in policy making which some neo-conservatives would consider timidity bordering on cowardice, but became for the military caution in the deployment of troops overseas -the only deployment I think Carter sanctioned was the ill-fated attempt to rescue the hostages in Tehran; even Reagan's deployments were either catastrophic -Lebanon, for example; or needlessly exaggerated -Grenada. The military build up in the USSR in the 1970s was not in itself the one causal factor in the demise of Communism, but the culmination of decades of mismanagement in the context of an economy that had no room to grow; nobody read Hillel Ticktin's relentless critiques of the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s because he was a Trotskyist, but he was predicting its collapse before most people. Nixon's policies were part of a complex mix, but I am not convinced that in the case of the USSR they were decisive.

Also, I don't think that even if Nixon had been in contact with 'the enemy' in 1968 this would have been a 'treasonous' act, so this whole treason thing is overblown. Was Jane Fonda tried for treason?Kissinger certainly had gone into detail after he left government that the opening of relations with both the USSR and China was part of a plan to ensure that a growing divide between the two great communist powers widened. They called the policy "triangulation". It did take a great deal of insight and political chops to do it given the atmosphere that had been created by politicians from Truman forward about the evils of the two nations.

While I see the connective tissue in crediting detante with the beginning of the end of the USSR and the Cold War but honestly the failings of Soviet economic management probably had much more to do with the fall of the Soviet empire than any US President including Reagan whose myth includes that he brought the Soviet's to their knees by escalating the arms race beyond their capacity to fund it.

Nixon's Vietnam policies IMHO were informed by his times and his generations belief in the lessons of WWII and the acceptance of the domino theory.

If not for his obsessive fear of leaks and political enemies Nixon would certainly have been remembered as a great President, as would have Johnson if not for his escalation of Vietnam and his lack of credibility and forth coming during the escalation.

Whether you can consider intimating to an enemy that you will provide better terms if they wait until you win office to negotiate is treason or not is a hard call. It is at a minimum a pretty immoral and selfish tact to gain power.

Then again the escalation of Vietnam was primarily a political ploy by LBJ to obtain a landslide by taking away Goldwater's only attack by lying about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Amazingly the two guys were mirror images in some ways. Hyper ambitious men who had inferiority complexes and were more than willing to break rules in their quest to be historically great figures.

And in the end both left office with great disapproval and both had great accomplishments diminished by their fear of others and their devious natures.

[hippifried]

giovanni_hotel:
Richard Nixon was NOT impeached.

Prospero:
I didn.t say the BBC was creating or part of a conspiracy theory. But they're giving it credence, & so are you. The innuendo ridden theory is that Nixon was somehow able to steal the '68 election by stalling the Paris Peace Talks. That's not what happened. He just got the 43 0r 44% of the popular vote that he would have gotten as the Republican candidate anyway. George Wallace sucked off about 12% of the vote. Mostly "conservative" Democrats who normally would have leaned toward Humphrey. I don't think Kissinger or Nixon had much clout with Wallace, & the American Independent Party considered Kissinger the devil incarnate.

[fivekatz]

The election wasn't close by the Electoral College with most of what Wallace having bled off probably would have gone to Nixon as the South had pretty much swung away from the Democrats after the Civil Rights act of 64 and Voting Rights act of 65. What we think of today as Red States all either went to Nixon or Wallace with the exception of Texas which LBJ still had the juice to deliver to HHH.

1968 marked the end of what was called the "New Deal Coalition" which was what today seems a mismatched political alliance of labor, intellectuals, southern conservatives and minorities. Nixon was able to bleed of southern conservatives and part of labor through a n appeal to "middle Americans" who were scared and angry about civil rights, hippies, race riots and women's liberation movements.

Just the same the popular vote was very close and HHH had come from way behind because LBJ stopped the bombing of North Vietnam just about a week before the election. That probably fuels the belief by some that a peace treaty would have swung the election HHH's way and it may have improved turnout enough for HHH to prevail though he did carry a lot of other baggage as VP to LBJ during a period of great domestic social unrest.

While Nixon wasn't impeached, his resignation avoided certain impeachment and in all likelihood his conviction as the White House tapes were very damaging when combined with his long denial of involvement in the cover-up. In fact Ford's pardon is probably the only reason Nixon did not face criminal charges for obstruction of justice.

Wallace did scare Nixon in 72 as evidenced by the WH tapes before Wallace was crippled in an attempted assignation. Nixon in many ways laid the ground work for the conservative coalition that has been dominant in American politics since 1980. But I agree with others that Nixon would be considered a liberal by today's GOP.

[fivekatz]

To add to Nixon's "liberal" credentials he embraced Keyesian economics, taking the US off the gold standard and used wage and price controls to attempt to slow inflation. His policy towards health care was not that different than Obamacare and he supported the creation of HMO's and the strengthening of Medicare and Medicaid.

He walked both sides of the fence on both civil rights and the equal rights amendment for women.

IMO his actions in the creation of the plumbers and the cover-up not only violated a lot of laws, it created a rift between the GOP and the Democrats that has continued to escalate in aftermath of his resignation and has led us to a point where the GOP rather see the incumbent Democratic President fail than the country succeed.

While unintended in some ways and calculated in others, RMN was perhaps the single most powerful devisive force in 20th Century America.

[flabbybody]

gentlemen (and ladies), have we forgotten the Yom Kippur war that threatened Israel's extinction?
Soon after the beginning of the 1973 Soviet- backed Arab invasion Kissinger coordinated an emergency airlift of American fighter bombers, cargo planes, tanks and helicopters. The sheer tonnage of war material delivered to the middle east in a matter of days was unmatched in military history. Very quickly afterwards, US trained Israeli pilots had Egyptian ground troops in all out retreat and Brezhnev couldn't dial RMN's phone fast enough to beg for a face saving peace accord. Egypt would never again launch a preemptive strike on its Jewish neighbor.

Please don't say Nixon saving Israel was motivated solely by his hatred for the Russians (It was certainly justified). Who cares why any leader does anything. The only thing that matters is the final outcome of events.

[fivekatz]

From Huff Post today an interesting twist how far the GOP has drifted since Nixon's days:


WASHINGTON -- Last year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked the Democratic convention platform for its "shameful" decision to omit a reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. But in a sign of how U.S. politics have changed in 40 years, President Richard Nixon complained in 1972 of the Democrats' "dishonest" platform language declaring the city Israel's capital.

Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, agreed with his condemnation during a previously unreported taped conversation from June 29, 1972. "To make Jerusalem the capital of Israel is not the platform of a major American national party," Henry Kissinger told Nixon. "That is what I find so revolting here." The tape is one of a collection housed at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

[Stavros]

gentlemen (and ladies), have we forgotten the Yom Kippur war that threatened Israel's extinction?
Soon after the beginning of the 1973 Soviet- backed Arab invasion Kissinger coordinated an emergency airlift of American fighter bombers, cargo planes, tanks and helicopters. The sheer tonnage of war material delivered to the middle east in a matter of days was unmatched in military history. Very quickly afterwards, US trained Israeli pilots had Egyptian ground troops in all out retreat and Brezhnev couldn't dial RMN's phone fast enough to beg for a face saving peace accord. Egypt would never again launch a preemptive strike on its Jewish neighbor.

Please don't say Nixon saving Israel was motivated solely by his hatred for the Russians (It was certainly justified). Who cares why any leader does anything. The only thing that matters is the final outcome of events.

You are right in one sense, wrong in another. William Quandt, in Decade of Decisions (1977, but still a classic study) argues that with all his domestic woes, principally Spiro Agnew's resignation, Nixon showed little interest in the conflict and left the day to day management of it to Kissinger; however, he does say that it was Nixon who made the decisive decision on October 13th to supply Israel directly (p183). And yes, both the USA and the USSR were calling for a halt to the conflict at the same time as arming both sides, as neither the US nor the USSR could see any real purpose to it.

However, it was primarily a Cold War event as far as the US was concerned because it touched directly on US-USSR relations at a delicate moment for detente, and was in part a consequence of the arms escalation that had taken place in the Middle East after 1967 with the US supplying Israel and the USSR supplying Egypt and Syria. It was the failure of diplomacy between 1967 and 1973 which led to the war, and the failures of the war which led to more arid diplomacy until Sadat completely changed the agenda in 1977.

So I think that your emphasis is wrong. It was LBJ who began the unqualified support of Israel in 1967, a policy that remains in place to this day; it was supported by both Nixon and Kissinger even though neither was able to make any real progress in resolving the core issues to the detriment of all involved.

[fivekatz]

Let's face it, the US interest in Israel has a whole lot to do with it's geographic proximity to so many oil producing nations.

The last US president who went out on a limb over Israel was Truman, who recognized Israel against the advice of General Marshall, who at that point was his Secretary of State. It was Marshall's opinion that recognizing Israel as a State would alienate the oil producing nations. Marshall wasn't completely wrong and while Truman respected him more than any other man in his government he recognized Israel.

Egypt's accepting overtures from the USSR and later the formation of OPEC insured that every US president to follow was and has seen Israel as a strategic ally.

[Stavros]

Not at all -Eisenhower was cool on Israel which is why their nuclear ambitions in the 1950s were met by France, and it was his reluctance to get involved in the Suez affair that in the long run undermined Britain's pre-eminence in the Middle East to the advantage of the USA, although that was not his intention at the time. OPEC was formed in 1960, the USA did not support Israel unconditionally until 1967; the strategic and economic relationship between Saudi Arabia and the USA has always been a difficult issue in relations between Israel and the USA; oil is not athe key component of it. Because the Cold War is over it seems the dominant strategic axis in world politics between 1945 and 1991 has been dumped/forgotten, yet it was crucial to so many issues and events.

Even as late as 1988 when Gorbachev had been in power for like 3 years I was having tetchy conversations with Americans about 'Soviet intentions' in South Africa...

Finally, as new oil and gas fields are discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel itself is becoming a hydrocarbon state in the region. Are you really saying that the large pro-Israeli political groups in the US have no influence at all on your country's Middle Eastern policies?

[fivekatz]

I am not saying that the pro-Israel lobby has no effect an US policy but the fact remains that we consider them a strategic ally in large part due to the geographic location. And you make very strong points about Eisenhower and I really had not considered those.

Israel's policies towards Palestinians is troubling at best and the US completely looks the other way for the most part and I do not think it is all the power of the Pro-Israel lobby. Israel is clearly seen and has been for sometime now as a strategic location in the Gulf by the US military and civilian leaders.

What I am saying is that my country's foreign policies have been dictated by capitalist interests since the end WWII and my country's interests in the region are based on oil supply, not a moral imperative. Whether it was embracing dictators over freely elected communists, colony rule over communists, the invasion of Iraq or how long it took us to get involved in the Baltic all have their roots in the economic interests of the nation IMHO.

BTW Nixon was some what anti-semetic in his "private" conversations on the WH tapes, even as he put much trust and power in to the hands of Kissinger and other Jewish-Americans he would use inflammatory slurs about those folks when they had curried his disfavor.

[Queens Guy]

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.


How is this proof that Nixon did anything, if it is just LBJ on tape? All it proves is that LBJ made the allegation in private. Unless they played the illegally recorded tapes, where Nixon or his people discussing their plans, this is nothing.

If Provider A said that Provider B had an STD, and there was a tape of Provider A saying that Proider B had an STD, that doesn't prove anything about Provider B. It just proves that Provider A did in fact make the allegation.

I'm not sticking up for Nixon, but unless there are other tapes, I don't see how this proves anything.

[flabbybody]

So an occasion use of an ethnic slur in private convo now classifies someone as an anti-semite? some of this is getting absurd

[fivekatz]

So an occasion use of an ethnic slur in private convo now classifies someone as an anti-semite? some of this is getting absurdA bit more about the absurdity:

By George Lardner Jr. and Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 1999; Page A31


Beset by the leak of a top-secret history of the Vietnam War and rising unemployment statistics that were hurting his standing in the polls in summer of 1971, President Richard M. Nixon lashed out repeatedly at "the Jews" he saw at the root of his problems.
"The Jews are all over the government," Nixon complained to his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, in an Oval Office meeting recorded on one of a set of White House tapes released yesterday at the National Archives. Nixon said the Jews needed to be brought under control by putting someone "in charge who is not Jewish" in key agencies.

Washington "is full of Jews," the president asserted. "Most Jews are disloyal." He made exceptions for some of his top aides, such as national security adviser Henry Kissinger, his White House counsel, Leonard Garment, and one of his speechwriters, William Safire, and then added:

"But, Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?"

Haldeman agreed wholeheartedly. "Their whole orientation is against you. In this administration, anyway. And they are smart. They have the ability to do what they want to do--which is to hurt us."

Elsewhere on the tapes, Nixon denies being antisemitic, but his attitude toward Jews was starkly displayed in the approximately 445 hours of White House tape recordings made between February and July 1971 and released yesterday--the first comprehensive disclosure of confidential discussions between Nixon and his closest advisers. Only portions of recordings dealing with the Watergate scandal and other abuses of governmental power, along with semi-public meetings in the Cabinet room, had been released before.

The newly released tapes give an unprecedented insight into the workings of the Nixon White House, punctuated by the president's frequent coarse comments on prominent figures, including Supreme Court justices, leading newspaper publishers and officials in his own administration.

They show Nixon talking about selling ambassadorships, railing against Jews and other minorities, complaining about the drinking habits of leading members of Congress, and exchanging conspiracy theories with Kissinger and other top aides.

In many cases, Nixon's tirades were touched off by news leaks and political setbacks, such as the occasion at the beginning of July 1971 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released figures showing that unemployment was on the upswing. Concerned that news of the joblessness was hurting him in the polls, Nixon demanded the ouster of the director of the bureau, Julius Shiskin, and asked his hatchet man, Charles Colson, to investigate the ethnic background of officials in the agency.

"They are all Jews?" Nixon exclaimed when Colson listed the names.

"Every one of them," Colson replied. "Well, with a couple of exceptions. . . . You just have to go down the goddamn list and you know they are out to kill us."

In a later conversation the same day--July 3--Nixon and Haldeman discussed Jewish penetration of the National Security Council staff. "Is Tony Lake Jewish?" Nixon demands, referring to a young Kissinger aide who went on to become national security adviser under President Clinton.

"I've always wondered about that," Haldeman replies.

"He looked it," says Nixon, without reaching a firm conclusion. [Lake is not Jewish].

When The Washington Post gave front-page coverage in April 1971 to a survey showing 60 percent support for antiwar demonstrations among residents of affluent District neighborhoods, Nixon complained that the results were loaded.

"Bob," he explained to a receptive Haldeman, "there's a hell of a lot of Jews in the District, see . . . The gentiles have moved out."

Such complaints were overshadowed by the controversy surrounding publication of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, that first appeared in the New York Times and later in The Post and other newspapers. Two days after the articles first appeared, the Justice Department moved to enjoin publication and the battle soon moved to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the government June 30 in a 6-3 decision.

The decision dismayed Nixon, even though he told Colson he had expected such an outcome. That afternoon, he expressed special chagrin at Justice Potter Stewart, whom he described as "a weak bastard" who had been "overwhelmed by the Washington-Georgetown social set." The next morning, in a telephone conversation with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, he said he hoped he would "outlive the bastards" on the high court.

"We have got to change that court," he told Hoover, adding that the "stinking decision" had stolen the headlines from his own visit to FBI headquarters, where he had given a tough law-and-order talk.

The two men exchanged views on "a conspiracy" among leading Washington journalists and the man who leaked the classified history, Daniel Ellsberg, to embarrass the government. Hoover observed that he had seen Post Publisher Katharine Graham on television the night before commenting on the decision, and described her as "an old bitch."

"She is a terrible old bag," agreed Nixon.

The tapes shed more light on the sometimes tortured relationship between Nixon and Kissinger. At one point, in March 1971, the national security adviser threatened to resign because of critical articles in the news media that he blamed on a jealous secretary of state, William P. Rogers. "I produce an almost pathological reaction in him now," Kissinger told Nixon. "I am such an offense to his ego."

Nixon consoled Kissinger, but later commented to other aides that Kissinger was attempting to gain total control of "everything that comes to me" on foreign policy. "What he does not realize is, I don't read his goddamn papers . . . I just skim it."

Nixon praised Kissinger as "the man that has the greatest influence on me," but said he did not want to rely on him entirely. "Sometimes he is as wrong as hell. Sometimes Rogers has a good idea, not very often."


© 1999 The Washington Post Company

[fivekatz]

and some more Nixon:

He then blasts both barrels of vitriol at the Jews. "The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality." Another time, he named several top Jewish advisers – including Henry Kissinger, his legendary national security adviser – and argued that they felt a need to compensate for an inferiority complex.
"What it is, is it's the insecurity," he said. "It's the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that's why they have to prove things."
What's so Freudian about these anti-Semitic diatribes is that Nixon is, in fact, describing his own psychologically-flawed, narcissistic personality
Kissinger, meanwhile, is revealed to be the ultimate stooge.
In a separate recording, he and Mr Kissinger – a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany - made bluntly clear that they had no interest in helping Jews escape persecution in the Soviet Union or immigrate to America.
"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy," Mr Kissinger said. "And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."
Nixon makes a final, ugly insinuation about Jewish draft dodgers before a final homily on the blacks – at that time dying in disproportionate numbers in the paddy fields of the Mekong Delta, on the orders of the commander-in-chief.
In a conversation with Rose Mary Woods, his secretary, Nixon said that a colleague has "sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he's been in New York … He says well, 'They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.' So forth and so on." The president continued: "My own view is I think he's right if you're talking in terms of 500 years. I think it's wrong if you're talking in terms of 50 years," he said.

[fivekatz]

and another:

Richard Nixon's reputation as a hateful, vindictive anti-Semite was reinforced late last month when the National Archives, which has been releasing the 3,700 hours of Nixon's tape-recorded White House conversations in installments since 1996, dropped another batch.
Whenever new Nixon tapes are released, the next-day stories invariably highlight the most outrageous tidbits, which typically include some anti-Jewish slurs. This go-round was no exception. Along with Nixon's apparently unserious threat to nuke Vietnam, reporters pounced on this 1972 exchange about Jews in the media between Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham:

BG: This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain.
RN: You believe that?
BG: Yes, sir.
RN: Oh, boy. So do I. I can't ever say that, but I believe it.
BG: No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something.
As the Chicago Tribune noted, Nixon, Graham, and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman also cracked anti-Semitic jokes, discussed which journalists were Jewish, and lamented that Washington reporting had deteriorated since Jews entered the trade. (As the National Archives explains here, there are no complete transcripts of the tapes. However, historian Stanley Kutler edited a valuable collection of transcripts relating to Nixon's Watergate transgressions, entitled Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, and a University of Virginia project is planning to publish volumes of additional transcripts.)

As in the past, the recent reports of Nixon's Jew-bashing were followed by professions of shock. (The Anti-Defamation League's press release is here.) Such shows of indignation are probably on balance a good thing, reaffirming as they do that the president shouldn't be seeking revenge against a particular ethnic group. Yet they also betray either an incredibly short memory or a measure of disingenuousness. Have journalists forgotten the identical slurs heard on earlier tapes? Or the stories in 1994 reporting that, according to Haldeman's then-just-published diaries, Graham spoke to Nixon of"Satanic" Jews? Nixon's loyalists are no less opportunistic. For them the periodic disclosures serve as occasions to pen op-eds explaining why their benefactor, despite the slurs, really wasn't a Jew-hater. (The late Herb Stein, Nixon's [Jewish] chief economist, wrote one of these apologias in Slate.)

Defending Nixon from charges of anti-Semitism has occupied his supporters for a half-century. The accusations date to the postwar years, when the American right remained closely tied to the unvarnished anti-Semites of the '30s who railed against the"Jew Deal." Although Nixon never publicly voiced any of this old-fashioned bigotry, some of his political kinsmen did, and his strident anti-communism played with the Jew-hating fringe. (Extreme anti-communism always contained an anti-Semitic component: Radical, alien Jews, in their demonology, orchestrated the Communist conspiracy.) In Nixon's early campaigns, anti-Semitism was a latent theme.

When the Republicans nominated Nixon as their vice-presidential candidate in 1952, some opponents accused him of anti-Semitism. Nixon had Murray Chotiner, his (Jewish) campaign manager, secure the ADL's stamp of approval. Still, into the summer voters inundated campaign headquarters with letters asking about Nixon's feelings toward Jews. The candidate sometimes responded himself, with his characteristic earnestness."I want to thank you for … your courtesy in calling my attention to the false rumor that I am anti-Semetic [sic]," he wrote in one reply."I am enclosing a copy of a letter which Murray Chotiner has sent to these people which, I believe, is self-explanatory." The questions were kept alive by a brief flap over the revelation that in 1951 Nixon had bought a home whose deed prohibited its resale or rental to Jews. And they haunted him in his 1956, 1960, and 1962 campaigns as well. The anti-Semitism issue loomed large enough in the 1960 presidential race that Newsweek's Raymond Moley devoted a column to defending Nixon while New York's (Jewish) Sen. Jacob Javits did likewise on the Senate floor.

When Nixon was elected president in 1968, a general feeling existed, said his (Jewish) aide William Safire, that"Nixon just doesn't like Jews." To combat this impression, Nixon loyalists emphasized things Nixon did that were"good for the Jews." The main example was his delivery of arms to a besieged Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That argument was weak, since Nixon's support was both equivocal and contingent; he never believed in the moral necessity of a Jewish homeland. On other issues, the politics of Jews—overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic—and Nixon's remained far apart.

What rendered the apologias untenable was the public release of White House tape transcripts during the 1974 Watergate endgame. Safire recalled that Arthur Burns, a (Jewish) friend whom Nixon appointed Federal Reserve chairman,"felt especially incensed about the ethnic slurs on the tapes. [Leonard] Garment, [Nixon's (Jewish) counsel], Stein and I all felt that sinking sensation in an especially personal way. It simply did not fit in with all we knew about Nixon's attitude toward Jews, and it fit perfectly with most Jews' suspicions of latent anti-Semitism in Nixon, which all of us had worked so hard to allay."

Since 1974, the publication of aides' memoirs and the release of more tapes have shown that Nixon made anti-Semitic references more often than Safire and others suspected. Sometimes, he simply grouped all Jews together in an unseemly way ("[Supporters of] the arts, you know—they're Jews, they're left wing—in other words, stay away"). Other times, he was more explicit (calling supporter Robert Vesco, who later fled the country to escape criminal charges,"a cheap kike"). Sometimes he chalked up nefarious behavior to Jews ("The IRS is full of Jews," he told Haldeman, when the IRS commenced an audit of the Rev. Billy Graham."I think that's the reason they're after Graham, is the rich Jews").

At least once the anti-Semitism appears to have had hard consequences. As Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein first reported in The Final Days, and as White House memos later confirmed, Nixon feared that a"Jewish cabal" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was skewing data to make him look bad, and he instructed his aide Fred Malek to tally up the Jewish employees at the bureau—a count that probably resulted in the demotion of two Jews. (It later forced Malek's own resignation from George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign.)

Still, Nixon's loyalists haven't shied from defending him. Garment has argued that Nixon's words on the tapes are just private mutterings, too fragmentary to allow the conclusion that he was anti-Semitic. Others have used the"some of his best aides were Jewish" rejoinder, pointing to Burns, Chotiner, Garment, Safire, Stein, and of course Henry Kissinger (about whom Nixon privately made anti-Semitic comments). Still others, including Nixon Library Director John Taylor in a 1999 letter to Slate, contend that when Nixon said"Jews," he really meant something like"anti-war liberals," at whom he was justifiably angry.

All these claims can be easily countered. To the dismissal of Nixon's remarks as just"private," one could argue that private comments are actually more revealing than public remarks of someone's true feelings, especially since overt anti-Semitism has become taboo. And this response, like Taylor's, begs a key question: If he's not anti-Semitic, why does Nixon vent his anger at anti-war liberals by focusing on their Jewishness? Making their ethnicity central to his complaint, when their ethnicity is nowhere at issue is, arguably, exactly what defines anti-Semitism. As for the prevalence of Jewish aides in Nixonland, again one has to understand how prejudice works. Anti-Semites, racists, and other bigots construct a definition of a group based on stereotypes and then direct their hatred toward the group. When they encounter an individual who seems to defy the stereotype—a friend, an aide, a Cabinet secretary—the negative view of the group as a whole isn't called into question; rather, the nonconforming friend gets defined as an"exception," allowing the hostile picture of the group as a whole to stand. On the tapes, Nixon and Haldeman are often heard discussing exactly these sort of"exceptions."

Perhaps most important, all these apologias for Nixon seem aimed at keeping him free of some permanent stigma, of being branded with a scarlet A. But this is ultimately just a semantic concern. There's no way to settle whether Nixon was an anti-Semite—not just because you can't peer into someone's soul, but also because there's no litmus test for anti-Semitism. No, Nixon didn't hate all Jews personally, nor did he use unreconstructed Henry Ford-style anti-Jewish appeals—though, of course, virtually no major public figure in the last 50 years has. Yet clearly he thought and spoke of Jews as a group, more or less united in their opposition to him, possessing certain base and malign characteristics, and worthy of his scorn and hatred. You don't have to call that anti-Semitism if you don't want to. But there's no denying it represents a worldview deserving of the strongest reproach.

[Stavros]

I am not saying that the pro-Israel lobby has no effect an US policy but the fact remains that we consider them a strategic ally in large part due to the geographic location. And you make very strong points about Eisenhower and I really had not considered those.

Israel's policies towards Palestinians is troubling at best and the US completely looks the other way for the most part and I do not think it is all the power of the Pro-Israel lobby. Israel is clearly seen and has been for sometime now as a strategic location in the Gulf by the US military and civilian leaders.

What I am saying is that my country's foreign policies have been dictated by capitalist interests since the end WWII and my country's interests in the region are based on oil supply, not a moral imperative. Whether it was embracing dictators over freely elected communists, colony rule over communists, the invasion of Iraq or how long it took us to get involved in the Baltic all have their roots in the economic interests of the nation IMHO.

BTW Nixon was some what anti-semetic in his "private" conversations on the WH tapes, even as he put much trust and power in to the hands of Kissinger and other Jewish-Americans he would use inflammatory slurs about those folks when they had curried his disfavor.

I think you need to look at the broader picture, as US relations in the Middle East, though they have been dated back by sme scholars to the 19th century, can be said to have begun in earnest in Saudi Arabia in 1942. This was not just a matter of gaining access to oil, which had been discovered there in 1938, but was also part of the Anglo-American rivalry that continued long after and of which Suez is one of the low points (or high points depending on your bias).

And, indeed, was possible because of the rift between Britain and Abdul Aziz ibn Saud that began during the First World War and worsened after it. Saud had been brought onto the Imperial bus in 1916 with the usual trappings: a ceremonial sword,, a demonstration of the aeroplane, and £5,000 a month (in gold); but Abdul Aziz had ambitions that stretched beyond the Najd and the British backed the Hashemites in the War, gave them entire states to rule over after it, and were none too pleased when Saud decided to take Mecca by force in 1925 (successfully), and also, twice, invaded TransJordan, repelled on both cases by those weird aeroplane things.

The US was able to use the technical abilities of Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) as a lever to get into the Kingdom and the rest, as far as super-giant oil fields, colossal wealth and 'strategic interests' are concerned, is history. But, as the Middle East became increasingly divided within itself, and prone to external influences, so you simply must add in the Cold War to the mix.

You can even argue that change a few names and you have a continuation of the 'Great Game' which dominated imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia in the 19th century and which led to the concession in 1901 that gave the British not the Russians access to Persian oil. Russia has had 'designs' on warm water ports in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and even today as I write it is claimed that Russia is negotiating with Cyprus over offshore gas fields, the deal possibly being that Russia helps with the financial crisis in Cyrpus as Gazprom is allowed to explore and develop (Greek) Cyrpriot resources. Oil AND politics, note the importance of both.

Moreover, while the British saw the nationalisation of oil in Iran in 1951 as a threat to the integrity of British Imperial rule, for the US it was about the 'Communist threat' posed by the USSR's links with the small but influential Tudeh party in Iran. In this crisis, oil was a factor for the UK, it was not for the USA, which saw it as a Cold War episode. You can write in capitalism as part of the USA's foreign entanglements in a very general sense because the US is capitalist, but specific cases do not always match up exactly, after all, the neo-Cons in Iraq and Afghanistan believed they were not just changing a regime, but changing whole societies as well, a form of 'revolution from above' that even Marx and Engels thought was doomed to failure.

Nixon's language was often as crude as Johnson's, that's the kind of man he was, and how different was he from many other Americans of his generation?

[Prospero]

Re Nixon - interesting essay in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books on his relationship to Eisenhower - who really disdained him and did not want him running as his VP.

[hippifried]

Oh. So now the whole topic has been blown off because Nixon was an asshole? Wow, big discovery. Didn't like Jews, huh? Well here's a headline: He didn't like anybody!

Somebody in here said Nixon was Keynesian because he took us off the gold standard. Not so. There was no real gold standard to start with. Not enough gold on the planet. It was a peg valuation under the Bretton Woods agreement, as authored by John Maynard Keynes, where the rest of the world's currencies were pegged to the dollar & the dollar was the reserve. The "Nixon shock" of '71, which debased the dollar, was the arbitrary abrogation of that treaty, & plunged us into a stagflation spiral that we're still struggling with. Keynesian, huh?

[fivekatz]

I am not sure you can draw any straight line in US economics from the early 70's straight through to today. I'd sure like to hear more about your thoughts on that because I personally believe there have been at least three distinct eras that have been the results of the prevailing times in addition to inherited policy, circumstance and the US policies of those eras.

Here's a little bit about the Keynesian connection:

1971: "We are all Keynesians now"; end the gold standard

On Aug. 15, 1971, Richard "We are all Keynesians now" Nixon announced the US government would default on its pledge to deliver gold to any foreign government holding US dollars at the rate of one ounce of gold for each $35.

In addition, wage and price controls were put in place, along with a 10% import tariff. Instead of the markets collapsing, the move was immediately praised by the Chamber of Commerce, and the stock market soared.

This was the third broken promise by our government regarding gold backing to our dollar. Lincoln did it in the Civil War, and FDR did it in 1933 when he confiscated gold from the American people and made it illegal for American citizens to own gold.

In 1971, the shift to a new monetary regime was an unprecedented experiment in global monetary planning, a wholesale plunge into the world of paper currency. With no backing for the dollar at all, Americans became completely reliant on the Federal Reserve to manage our money and to do so without any outside discipline
Source: End the Fed, by Rep. Ron Paul, p. 44-45 , Sep 16, 2009

I think the thread has roamed all over the place since the original topic of Nixon's possible interference with the 1968 Paris Peace Talks to gain an advantage in that year's election. There have been the usual arguments about his legacy and discussion of whether his support of Israel was based on Cold War and economic policies or some greater conviction.

Is it that unusual for any conversation about RMN dealing with his many failings and his many accomplishments?

[hippifried]

1965: "We are all Keynesians now."; Milton Friedman, Keynes' arch nemesis, & founder of the other economic theory, anti-Keynesianism. This phrase might even predate '65, but I'm not a researcher & don't really care. The phrase seems to pop up whenever anti-Keynesians cause another economic crisis that has to be fixed through government intervention. That happens every time anti-Keynesians gain enough power to have any say-so whatsoever over economic policy.

Keynes was a gold bug (or at least he was too easily persuaded to seem that way). As far as I'm concerned, the flaw in his approach was insistence on a tangible reserve. It was Friedman who basically convinced Nixon to shock. Supply side interventionism can't work if there's a way to control currency valuation by central banks, other than plain addition.

[fivekatz]

We seem to be talking in circles here. What Nixon did and you call shock was considered very liberal policy at all the time. It was an example of his willingness IMO of moving away from the conservative dogma of his era to do what he believed was in the best interest of the US.

There are those that believe that this move was a terrible on, though as you point out it was quite inevitable as their wasn't enough gold in the earth to back all the currency on the planet.

Economically Nixon was caught in the beginning of the decline of US super dominance, the country no longer was an independent nation in terms of natural resources and the rise in the price of oil by itself was quite inflationary.

I'd be curious what your thoughts are about the Volker impact on the overall performance of the US economy in the 80's and what you believe the legacy of Greenspan is?

[hippifried]

Nothing circular on this end. I'm not confused at all. The Nixon Shock (Not me. That's the historical term for what happened on 08/15/1971.) was a reactionary policy move. Irrespective of the rhetorical nonsense, told then & now, the shock was never an attempt at benevolence. I watched it all unfold in real time. Labor was the bogey man. Wages were blamed for inflation. Manufacturing & resellers were handed an inflated price target, while wages were frozen or cut by executive decree. That's not "liberal policy" then, now, or ever, & no attempt to rewrite the dictionary can change that. You're working off a false premise.

The bad move wasn't ending the gold peg. It was crashing the world's monetary system to do it & handing the power to valuate currencies over to anonymous money changers around the world. There was no reason to scrap a stable system just to get gold out of a position it shouldn't have been in. Gold isn't money, & money isn't a commodity. There's no reason currencies can't be pegged.

I don't for one instant buy the idea that the US was in decline pre shock. We had plenty of resources, & the price of oil didn't really spike until the Arab embargo 2 years later. That could create a whole new topic easily.

I'm not a big Paul Volker fan. He over promised what could be delivered under Humphrey-Hawkins. Because money isn't a commodity, the radical supply side intervention of the Federal Reserve just made things worse in the long run, even though it put brakes on the hyperinflation that had gripped the country since the shock. But then again, that's really the only tool the central bank has. Using the Fed as an economic cure-all is dangerous at best. Alan Greenspan's legacy is one of errors, by his own admission. He was principle author of the wage interventions in '72, & despite all his mea culpas, I find myself hard pressed to forgive.

[Cuchulain]

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on the death of Richard Nixon:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."...

'
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.'
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/


Goddamn I miss HST.

[Cuchulain]

More from HST on Nixon:

'At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn … pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness…toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah…nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season.'
http://raincoaster.com/2006/05/01/hunter-s-thompson-on-richard-nixon-the-greatest-obituary-ever-written/