If you were uncertain about whether or not Richard Nixon committed treason in 1968 by telling the South Vietnamese government to pull out of peace negotiations until after the election, there is no longer any doubt about it. Declassified recordings of LBJ’s phone calls make it clear that that is exactly what happened, and Johnson didn’t do anything about it because it would have required him to disclose that the NSA was bugging the South Vietnamese ambassador.
More newsworthy is the discovery that Johnson seriously considered flying to Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention and entering his name for the nomination. Mayor Daley assured him that he would have the votes, but the Secret Service couldn’t guarantee the president’s safety, so the whole thing was called off. At least, that’s what the BBC’s reporting says, although that all seems implausible to me.
It seems to me that proof Nixon sabotaged peace talks, at least indirectly causing the deaths of 22K more American soldiers and how many countless Southeast Asians is a lot more newsworthy that Johnson’s machinations about the Democratic candidacy. Is it newsworthy just because the information is new?
yes, it’s not more important, but it is previously unknown information.
Unfortunately, it’s irrelevant new information.
Nixon is long dead– we must “move forward” as our current POTUS recommended when we voiced our disgust regarding a more recent POTUS war criminal.
Anna Chennault and Henry Kissinger are still alive.
on Kissinger – he would have had the NSC job if Humphrey would have won as well.
No dummy that guy.
Maybe not if LBJ had disclosed to HHH Kissinger’s subversive activities for Nixon.
Nixon’s interference in the peace talks has been known for at least 40 years (Theodore White mentions it in the Making of the President 1968).
But then White also mentions that LBJ thought about trying to win the nomination in the summer of ’68 as well – that isn’t new.
one thing that prompted LBJ to re-evaluate the nomination was a Gallup poll that showed him running better against Nixon than Humphrey.
That’s news to me about the White book, published in 1969 (presumably) and if he made those allegations in print, LBJ was still alive. There likely would have been an official response from him at the Ranch. Maybe that happened, but I just don’t recall it making the news that far back.
I’m more familiar with the 1968 sabotage of the elections from the Rbt Dallek bio in the 1990s, then the release a few years ago of the WH tapes with Johnson talking to Dirksen about treason by the Nixon campaign — and to tell him to knock it off!
Dallek also was the one, iirc, who mentioned LBJ had it in mind at some point — perhaps after RFK’s assassination? — to get back into the race for the nom at the convention. But when convention time came, his people on the ground — not just Daley but Connally and the other Johnson loyalists — told him flat out the votes weren’t there for him, so he dropped his idea of sweeping into the convention and taking it away from Hubert.
As for this whole story, I must be missing something. None of this I see as new — and Rbt Parry at consortiumnews.com has been reporting on both aspects for years.
according to White wanted Teddy, and tried like hell to get him to run when McCarthy imploded. The Nixon attempt to influence the Paris Peace talks was something LBJ would have known about – and was discussed at the time – though the details were murky. White suggests at the end of the book that LBJ was clearly trying to negotiate a bombing halt in the closing days of ’68 – and White accuses LBJ of deliberately trying to influence the outcome of the election as a result. White also suggests that the Friday before the election Humphrey may have actually taken the lead, and the LBJ attempt to negotiate a bombing halt he thought may have backfired and cost Humphrey the election.
Ahh – 1968 – when pollsters went door to door and had response rates of 90%.
The Making of the President 1968 is the single best book on an election ever written. No one will ever have the kind of access to the candidates White had, and ’68 was the most important election in the last 75 years. Modern reporters really talk to the campaign consultants : White sat by the pool while RFK swam with his kids the day of the California primary and listened to him slam McCarthy without a handler within 100 yards.
1968 was such an incredibly sad year in American history. Politically, anyway. Must have been so dispiriting to live through it.
Did any Presidents other than LBJ and Nixon record their White House conversations? Or did all that end with Watergate?
Ended with Watergate, which was basically tied to this information in the first place:
Very interesting. So Nixon must have been panicked about the whereabouts of that “X File” throughout his Presidency. And it came to a head with Watergate.
If all this is true, and Nixon more or less singlehandly extended the Vietnam War for 5 years via subterfuge, which then led to Watergate… it’s hard to think of a more evil series of actions by a major American political figure. Except maybe the traitors of the Confederacy.
Well and of course Cheney felt it appropriate to carry on that legacy.
The end of the story:
Everybody always said Nixon was paranoid….if they only knew!!!
with the goal of getting the South Vietnamese a better outcome than they would have received from Johnson in 1968
Wow. Not so much.
right, they basically got the same deal plus thousands more dead
I bet they’re sure glad they waited for Nixon.
Yes, it was. I was 23 and remember it clearly. More clearly than I remember 2004!
Well, how could you forget times like those. I can’t imagine what it was like just to live through MLK and RFK’s assassinations. Too much.
1968 was also the year that Tommie Smith and John Carlos were trashed and the heads of anti-war activists in Chicago were bashed. It was all more of the ugly the young had been living through as they were growing up –beginning with the Cuban Missile Crisis and continuing on through the assassinations of JFK, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, classmates drafted and killed in Vietnam, Chicago DEM convention. And women were second class citizens — no control over our bodies and no access to credit or equal pay. But the music was good.
his conversations – I have listened to some of them at the Kennedy Library. I do not know if they have put them online.
Yes, they’re online at the jfklibrary website. Hours and hours of them, presumably all which have been publicly released.
Btw, the history of presidential taping systems goes back all the way to FDR.
JFK supposedly wanted one after the BoP when several of his advisers who’d been for it later claimed they were against it.
He also had a hand-operated taping system set up in the Cabinet Room, where he was able to record ExComm discussions during the missile crisis. Came in real handy for historians to know exactly (more or less) who said what and when — except that a couple of historians out of the Miller Center, the first to publish on these tapes, apparently made a number of errors in the transcribing.
It’s nice to see the word ‘traitor’ on a blog finally used accurately:
Of course, if you’re a Republican, the state is the Party, and the Party is the state.
Which is why Democratic administrations lack the legitimacy needed to govern and no measure to defeat or replace them is too extreme — any measure you would take against a hostile state, you can take against a hostile party.
On those occasions where the interests of the state and the interests of the Party clash, the state must yield because the Party, not the state, is the vanguard of the Revolution, a revolution whose success will see the withering away of the state, and the triumph of the Party.
For sixty years, one of America’s two major political parties is and has been essentially a Leninist party, and it ain’t the Democrats.
Just to be pedantic, which of those three acts does it fall under? Remember that “Aid and Comfort” refers to material aid and quartering of troops. If you shelter a spy, that could be considered Comfort. Passing documents or facsimiles falls under Aid. But counseling an allied government to not accept a peace treaty doesn’t seem to fit any Constitutional definition. What Nixon did is reprehensible but the phrase “shall consist only of” is there for a reason. That reason is that English Kings called opposing government policy, treason.
It’s a good question. What Nixon did was not envisioned by the Founders. Rather than aiding and comforting our enemies, he technically aided and comforted our allies, but the effect was the same.
Now Reagan persuading Iran to keep holding the hostages is closer to the mark in my view. Little doubt that Iran was an enemy, having violated an embassy (traditional casus belli) and holding civilian hostages.
And John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, was clearly “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies”. Not an “enemy combatant” but a traitor.
This gets to a problem with consequentialism. Arguably, what Nixon did ultimately helped the North Vietnamese and other communist powers in the region. Had the war not been extended, possibly a peace could have been negotiated that would not have led to the end of South Vietnam, and certainly Cambodia would not have gone communist. So, arguably Nixon did abet the “enemy”. Even here there are problems: we actually took the KR as an ally to oppose Vietnam. But, more fundamentally, Nixon had no way to foresee that prolonging the war would end with the US in a worse position than otherwise, but, OTOH, he had no way to foresee the consequences of what he was doing anyway, so if he does something self-serving without knowing the consequences, should he be judged by the actual, if presumably unintended, consequences? Given that his actual intention was just a roll of the dice?
I think the thread between Nixon advising the South Vietnamese government to wait for his election to get a better deal and the ultimate North Vietnamese victory is too nebulous to be prosecutable. Again, I’m not condoning his action. I just think it does not constitute legal treason.
Robert Parry (who has been on this story for years) beautifully lays it all out in his latest piece. Nothing nebulous at all.
Well, if we’re sticking to direct consequences, Nixon certainly knew that what he was doing would result in many more American soldiers getting killed. A President has the authority to make that choice, of course (any decision to go to war at least risks American deaths), but Nixon was not yet President. These are just questions for me. I don’t know if it was prosecutable either, but I do think it was morally treason: it was deliberately undermining the country in a grave manner for personal gain.
Just to be a little more concrete, if I arranged for a bunch of American soldiers to be killed by hostile forces – betraying their location for an ambush, for example – I do think I would be guilty of treason, morally, and probably legally, though I don’t know that for a fact.
Oh yes, you certainly would be.
It’s not like it was an October Surprise.
It’s a violation of the Logan Act – but then that Act is violated in every election.
I don’t think it is treason, though.
Yes, but when it comes to war mongering, war-profiteering, the “democrats” are totally in the same boat as the GOP.
the bogus AUMF’s passed by congress? did these pass without the support of “democratic” congress people??
Would you care to spell out what a “bogus” force authorization is, and how it differs from a non-bogus force authorization?
The AUMF’s are the total antithesis of what is laid out in our Constitution, re: they gave war making powers to the Executive.
second, the intentional blurring of or outright abrogation of our Constitution by congress in this manner obviously destroys the intended checks and balances.
Now we wring our hands regarding the POTUS having a drone “kill list”?
it’s all downhill now.
The AUMF’s are the total antithesis of what is laid out in our Constitution, re: they gave war making powers to the Executive.
By that reasoning, so is the Clean Air Act, and any of the zillion other regulatory bills that authorize an executive agency to issue regulations. By that reasoning, the EPA’s regulation of carbon dioxide is a Constitutional monstrosity, because it came entirely from the executive branch, based on the delegation of the regulatory power that the Constitution gives to Congress.
Now we wring our hands regarding the POTUS having a drone “kill list”?
You don’t think there would be such a program if Congress had outright declared war on al Qaeda? I think you are misidentifying the source of your disagreement.
Jesus. All those people between 1969 and 1975…Jesus.
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.
Hey, Democrats? Don’t do this. “Oh, it would be disruptive.” How disruptive was a Nixon presidency?
And the Vietnam syndrome will be the “reason” for the next war. Because probably half of the Vietnam Vets have put forth the view that had there not been the peace talks, they would have won it. And try to tell them otherwise. Louis Goehmert trotted out this garbage this weekend.
So Richard Nixon and Anna Cheanault (spouse of “Truman lost China” Claire Chennault) scuttled the peace talks. Since it was Nixon and a desperate GOP in 1946 that stampeded Truman into the Cold War, that is perfectly consistent. As is the Nixonian lineage to Cheney through Rumsfeld.
But Richard Nixon has more to answer for than 22,000 American deaths and probably a million Vietnamese deaths. It was Nixon that saw Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia deposed in favor of a junta led by Lon Nol. Nixon did this in order to bomb Vietnamese supply lines in Cambodia. Sihanouk was neutral and well-liked by Cambodians, essentially preventing the Khmer Rouge from coming to power. Nixon’s action set the stage for the collapse of Lon Nol’s regime when Vietnam collapsed, bring the Khmer Rouge to power under Pol Pot. Another 2.2 million deaths.
All to result in Vietnam what could have happened in 1945 had it been FDR and not Harry Truman who was President. US policymakers just could not figure out that a regime that collaborated with Vichy France and with the Japanese might not have a large base of popularity. And with Ngo Dinh Diem, there was the added problem of Catholic bigotry and discrimination against the other religions in Vietnam.
Where were the falling dominoes? Essentially only Cambodia.
I might be naive, but I believe Nixon did what he thought was best for the USA in VietNam. Remember, the US had never lost a war before and Korea was the only stalemate (OK War of 1812, but we refused to see that as stalemate).
Nixon was an ugly unlikeable man, but I really don’t think he was a Benedict Arnold type traitor. What Reagan did with the hostages was much closer to treason, and I wouldn’t quarrel if you want to call that treason.
I remember the night earlier in 1968, when Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. (I just looked it up, it was on March 31st.) I heard it live on the radio. “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President.” My immediate reaction was, I could not believe he’d actually said what I thought I’d just heard him say.
I think it is true that Johnson would have had the votes at the convention. But especially in light of his announcement not to run, all hell would have broken loose across the country and the Democratic party would have emerged even more fractured than it was. And he certainly would not have won the election.
As you may know if you remember that year or have learned about it, all hell DID break loose in 1968, but if Johnson had run it would have been even worse. As it was, Humphrey was seen by the very disaffected youth of that day as a stand-in for Johnson, which is truer than a lot of people today like to admit.
Let me just add this. Of late it has become fashionable to compare the emo-progs of today to the antiwar Democrats of 1968. That is a falsification of history. Emo-progs are not dealing with being drafted to fight an idiotic, destructive war, razing of entire neighborhoods by riots, or the assassination of their greatest leaders. Emo-progs are dealing with hurt fee-fees and not getting their ponies.
LBJ would have relied on Daley for running the convention generally along Johnson’s terms and of course for a reliable vote count in the IL delegation, but he would have gone to a true Johnson loyalist, like Connally or similar, for an overall and true count of his convention support. Johnson, knowing probably of Daley’s antipathy towards Humphrey bec of electability issues, likely would have considered it a political rather than factual assessment by Daley.
And LBJ, from his majority leader days, was famous for insisting on actual firm votes whenever something big was on the line such as his own candidacy, not inflated counts through the prism of fall electoral matchups.
Though when it suited him and he liked the results, he did have a habit of taking Gallup polls very much to heart, and would clip them out and carry them around to show any reluctant or skeptical congressman who doubted the wisdom of his policies. But when his own hide was on the line, he didn’t dare rely just on Gallup.