I have a theory about politics, and it
goes like this: each generation fights its father's battles. The
prime example of this turns out to be conspiracy’s step-child,
Richard Milhouse Nixon. After his two brothers died of tuberculosis,
“Tricky Dick” became an over achiever riddled by survivor's guilt
who inherited his father's inferiority complex and explosive temper
along with his mother's stoic martyrdom in the face of her husband's
violence. I shall now pause for a round of applause from all amateur psychologists reading this blog. But to go a step further - this oversimplification explains how the only President forced to
resign could still insist, long after the Watergate scandal brought
him down, “when the President does it, that means that it is not
illegal”. Worse, Nixon's driving ambition, combined with his sense
of persecution and his faith in his own entitlement would get 21,257 Americans killed.
In 1968 there were half a million
Americans draftees fighting in South Vietnam. The 12 year war had
already killed 30,000 Americans, almost as many as died in the Korean War. Three hundred more Americans were
dying every week. And every week the Pentagon was spending $1.5
billion on a war President Lyndon Johnson was belatedly trying to
end. The complication was that 1968 was also a Presidential election
year. The war had grown so unpopular that in March, Johnson had
withdrawn from the election, removing himself as an issue. And
despite the blood and treasure spent in Vietnam by their party,
almost any other Democrat, either New York Senator Robert Kennedy,
Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, or Vice President Hubert Humphrey,
still held a slim lead in the polls over the likely Republican
challenger, one time Vice-President Richard Nixon.
On Friday, 10 May, 1968
North Vietnam and the United States began secret talks in a
Paris hotel on the Avenue Kleber (pronounced clay-bear). The first
difficult issue to be decided was the shape of the table, because it
really should have been three party talks. South Vietnamese
President, Nguyen Van Thieu (above), had gambled his life, and the lives of
everyone he loved, on defeating the communist Viet Minh guerrillas, controlled by North Vietnam. That struggle had so far cost
South Vietnam over 100,000 military, and close to 200,000 civilian
deaths. Thieu and his supporters had earned a place at the table in
Paris. President Johnson wanted them there. But North Vietnam
stubbornly refused to recognize Thieu's government, or even sit down
at any shaped negotiating table with them. And Thieu agreed. He was
worried the Americans might compromise him into a corner, allowing
the communists to easily take power once the Americans left.
On Sunday, 12 July, 1968 another secret meeting took place, this one in Richard Nixon's
39th floor suite at the Pierre Hotel, just off Fifth
Avenue on East 61st Street, in Manhattan. Nixon's co-hosts
were his closest adviser John Mitchell, and Republican activist and
unofficial leader of the Taiwan lobby, Anna Chennault . The single
guest, brought there by Mrs. Chennault, was the South Vietnamese
ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem. Both Chennault and Diem
have left accounts of the meeting, at which Nixon assured Diem the
South Vietnamese would get “better treatment from me than under the
Democrats,” and that “his staff would be in touch with (Diem)
through...Anna Chennault.”
Anna was the widow of American
Lieutenant General Claire Chennault, commander of the “volunteer”
Flying Tigers, American flyers who battled Japanese bombers over China before Pearl
Harbor. After the war the general had set up the Flying Tiger Line,
an air transport service based in Taiwan, and bankrolled by the CIA.
When the 65 year old general died of lung cancer in 1958, he left
his 33 year old widow a multimillionaire. She was brilliant in her
own right, and a constant supporter of the man who had actually
“lost” China to the communists, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Under Eisenhower, “The Dragon Lady” had become a powerful
Republican fundraiser. Her sole drawback, in Nixon's own words, was
that, “she's a chatterbox.”
After the secret meeting in the Pierre,
Diem became a regular at parties Anna hosted in her Penthouse in the
Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. And she became a regular in
Saigon, capital of South Vietnam. There she talked directly with
President Thieu. What they talked about is not recorded, but Thieu
began to take a harder line regarding the now weekly secret Paris
talks. Nixon was aware of the lack of progress in Paris, thanks to
Bryce Harklow, an Eisenhower aide and self described “double
agent”, who had stayed on through the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations. And as the election approached. Harlow told Nixon,
Johnson was planning an “October Surprise” and a “Halloween
Peace”, to make Humphrey President. Nixon had no doubt it was true,
thanks to his other mole, Professor Henry Kissinger.
Since he was very smart, as far back as 1966 Harvard Professor
Henry Kissinger (right, above) became convinced any military victory in South
Vietnam would prove useless, unless it also produced “a political
reality that could survive our ultimate withdrawal” Because of
this he helped start the two party Paris talks. But he was also
intensely ambitious, and in August, when the North Vietnamese ordered
their troops in the two northern provinces of South Vietnam to stand
down, Kissinger warned Nixon (left, above) that the war might be coming to an
abrupt end, thus invalidating Nixon's twin campaign ads of “Peace
With Honor”, and “Nixon's The One” - the who would end the war.
John Mitchel immediately called Anna Channault (center, above).
Anna said latter that Mitchell called her “almost
every day” that summer,, always with the same message – don't let
Thieu go to Paris. In her autobiography Anna explained, “My job was
to hold him back..” Negotiations with North Vietnam might be part
of Kissinger's “political reality”, but Anna assured the “Little
Dictator” (above), that Nixon would secure a better peace for South
Vietnam. She later wrote “Throughout October 1968 Thieu tried to
delay... as long as possible to buy time for Nixon.” Thieu would
later tell Ambassador Diem that “a Humphrey victory would mean a
coalition government in six months.” And, of course, an end to the
war.
But Johnson (above) had heard hints of Nixon's
back channel, first by Florida Democratic Senator George Smathers,
who was friends with both Johnson and Nixon. And the President was
also warned about a stock tip being offered by Wall Street money man
Alexander Sachs. The Nixon supporter was quoted by Walt Rostow as
saying a quick peace was unlikely because Nixon would, “ incite
Saigon to be difficult and Hanoi to wait.” In response Johnson
ordered the National Security Agency and legendary director of the
F.B.I, J. Edgar Hoover, to bug his own government, including ambassador to South Vietnam,
Ellsworth Bunker, and the Nixon campaign's leadership. Hoover won the
race for the dirt, quickly producing a call on Bunker's private phone
from Anna Channault, who urged the ambassador to tell Thieu to “Just
hang on through the election.”
Finally, on 31 October, 1968, Johnson announced on national television that because of recent
conciliatory moves by North Vietnam, he was halting American bombing.
Johnson also went public about the Paris peace talks, next to be held
the day after the American election. But he was able to announce
only that South Vietnam was “free to participate” in the talks as
well. Two days earlier, President Thieu had informed Johnson that he
would absolutely not be attending the Paris talks, relying on Nixon's promise of a better deal after his victory in November.
Two days later, on 2 Novemb, Johnson
called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, gravel voiced Everett
Dirkson. The recording of that call is in the L.B.J. Presidential
Library. On the tape Johnson quoted from Anna Channault's call to
Bunker, so Dirkson would have no doubt he had the evidence. He then
told the Republican, “They oughtn’t be doing this. This is
treason.” Dirkson replied, “I know,.” and promised to call
Nixon. Johnson then brutally drove his point home. “They’re
contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war...and if they don’t
want it on the front pages, they better quit it.”
A day later, Nixon called Johnson and
smoothly lied. He assured Johnson, concerning sabotage of the Paris peace talks, “There’s absolutely no credibility as far as I’m concerned.” But unknown to Nixon it was caught on tape by the National Security Agency. The NSA also had recording of a phone call
between Republican Vice Presidential candidate Spiro Agnew and Ann
Channaut discussing her lobbying of Thieu. With still 2 days before the election,, Johnson might have released some or all of those recordings. He decided not to only because, so close to the election, it would taint the credibility of whoever won. For the good of the nation, Johnson kept his mouth shut.
Nixon won the Tuesday, 5 November, 1968 popular vote by just over 500,000 – about 0.7%,, but he took the
electoral college decisively, with 31 votes to spare, 301 to 191 for Humphry.
During November and December, despite pleadings from Johnson to push
Thieu to come to Paris, Anna Channaut kept up reassuring The South Vietnamese
President to hold out until Nixon took the oath in January. Once
elected, President Richard Nixon did begin withdrawing American troops, but
he also funded an increase in the South Vietnamese Army, from 800,000
in 1968, to a high of 110,000 in 1973 – just before their
collapse. What happened in 1973 was Watergate, a scandal which
increasingly consumed Nixon's time and political power. And that
started with the failed break in on 17 June, 1971
On that day the White House recording
system heard President Richard Nixon ask his chief-of-staff “Bob”
Halderman a simple question:”Do we have it?” He was searching for
Lyndon Johnson's copy of Anna Channault and Spiro Agnew's phone calls
from the fall of 1968. When Halderman hinted there might be a copy
at the Brookings Institute on Long Island, Nixon ordered, “Goddammit,
get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Two weeks
later, still demanding action from his wary staff, Nixon told
Halderman, “Talk to Hunt. I want the break-in.” And thus began a
two year search, largely conducted by ex-CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and
his “Plumbers” unit, to find the record of Richard Nixon's
duplicity on the Vietnam War, and failing that, to collect dirt on
anyone who might have the file, such as Daniel Ellsberg, the source
of the “Pentagon Papers”. But the files were no longer in any of
the places Nixon was looking.
Just before he left the White House,
Lyndon Johnson had entrusted the file to Walt Rostow, who kept it
with his personal papers. As Watergate took flame over the summer of
1973, he wrote a memorandum (above) to be included in the file, and then
wrote on the cover, “Top Secret. To be opened by the Director,
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, not earlier than fifty (50) years from
this date, June 26, 1973.” But the library waited only twenty
years, and then began the protracted process of declassifying the
contents. That took another twenty years, before the great question
of the Watergate scandal was finally answered - why did Nixon send a
collection of ex-CIA Cuban-Americans into the DNC headquarters on 17 June, 1972? And the answer was; the 27,257 Americans who died
in Vietnam, the tens of thousands wounded and the hundreds of
prisoner of war who suffered during the years Richard Nixon kept the
war going for his personal benefit.
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