As we all know, had Richard Nixon not been pardoned after Watergate, Donald Trump would have never happened. But now it turns out that had Nixon indeed been investigated, we would have discovered that he had engaged in criminal behavior that may have been even worse than Watergate. There is now irrefutable evidence that Nixon deliberately sabotaged Lyndon Johnson’s peace efforts in 1968. Apparently, Nixon feared that any headway toward ending the war would wreck his election chances.
As most of us know, on Halloween 1968, LBJ announced a halt to bombing in North Vietnam in hopes that the Soviets would pressure Hanoi into coming to the table. However, the South Vietnamese balked, in part because Republicans held out the prospect of a better peace deal if Nixon won. The main intermediary between the Nixon campaign and Saigon was Anna Chennault, widow of Flying Tigers leader Claire Lee Chennault. Two days before the election, Chennault called Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, and told him to tell his superiors, “Hold on, we are gonna win.”
LBJ hit the ceiling when he learned about this, and even went as far as to say that Nixon was guilty of treason. While it has long since been proven beyond any doubt that Nixon campaign operatives were involved in this effort to derail the peace effort, Nixon adamantly insisted to the day he died in 1994 that he was not personally involved. However, John A. Farrell, who is working on a new biography of Nixon due out in March, “Richard Nixon: The Life,” recently discovered evidence that proves beyond all doubt that Nixon was lying.
In an op-ed that ran in Sunday’s edition of The Times, Farrell directed us to notes from an October 22 telephone conversation between Nixon and his top aide, H. R. Haldeman–who would later go on to become Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff. Read them here. Nixon apparently hoped that if Saigon stalled the talks, they would look like a ham-handed attempt by LBJ to give Nixon’s Democratic challenger, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a leg up in the campaign.
The money moment comes on the second page of notes. Nixon wanted Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen to denounce the planned bombing respite as a political stunt. According to Haldeman, Nixon then mused, “Any other way to monkey wrench it?”
Plenty, as it turned out. Nixon wanted his personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, to call Louis Kung, a prominent Taiwanese/Nationalist Chinese businessman, and tell him to tell South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to “hold firm.” He also wanted his running mate, Spiro Agnew, to deliver a message to CIA director Richard Helms–unless Helms passed on more inside information on the talks, Nixon would fire him as soon as he took office.
Farrell was unsparing in his assessment of this development. He bluntly stated that this proves Nixon engaged in “apparently criminal behavior” that was potentially “more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.” At the time the peace talks began, 30,000 Americans had died in Vietnam. As it turned out, direct American involvement would drag on for almost six more years, during which tens of thousands of American troops lost their lives.
A number of Nixon scholars believe that Farrell’s discovery confirms what they have long suspected–that Nixon sabotaged the peace talks. For instance, Ken Hughes, the author of “Chasing Shadows,” one of the definitive books on the Chennault affair, called the notes “the missing piece of the puzzle,” and claimed they were proof “Nixon committed a crime to win the presidential election.” Former Nixon presidential library director Timothy Naftali added that the notes not only remove any “plausible deniability” about Nixon’s role, but in hindsight set the tone for “the skulduggery of his presidency.”
How significant is this? Well, Johnson was reluctant to go public with claims that Nixon was sabotaging the peace talks, since at the time there was no direct evidence of Nixon’s direct involvement. According to former CNN CEO Tom Johnson, who took extensive notes of discussions between the president and his aides about this affair, had such evidence come to light, it would have been “explosive and damaging” enough to make Humphrey president. Cliff Notes version–this literally altered the course of history.
Now that evidence has been revealed. And it proves beyond any doubt that Nixon did not win the presidency with the help of the “silent majority.” He won it by engaging in behavior that was unethical at best and treasonous at worst. Somehow, it’s fitting that this comes out soon after we learned that the latest presidential election was also tainted by a criminal conspiracy.
It turns out that even before he took office, Nixon was a crook–and possibly a traitor.
(featured image courtesy National Records and Archives Administration, part of public domain)
