SINS OF THE FATHER

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 - so far -  could still insist, long after the Watergate scandal brought him down, that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”.  This mantra of self destruction would be repeated by Donald Trump.  But does that also apply to what you do to win the office? 

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 The war had grown so unpopular that in March, Johnson had withdrawn from the election, removing himself as an issue.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, the Democratic candidate, 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 39^th floor suite at the Pierre Hotel, just off Fifth Avenue on East 61^st Street, in Manhattan. Nixon's co-hosts were his closest adviser John Mitchell, and Republican activist and unofficial leader of the Taiwan anti-communist 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 help 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, from 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 and Nixon supporter, Alexander Sachs. Sachs 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 (the stand down in the northern provinces), 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 instead on Nixon's promise of a better deal after his victory in November.

Two days later, on 2 November, 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 a 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. After conversations with his staff he decided not to do so, because it would taint the credibility of whoever won the election.  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 Humphrey,  During November and December, despite pleadings from Johnson to push Thieu to come to Paris, Anna Channaut kept reassuring The South Vietnamese President to hold out until Nixon took the oath of office 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 in the face of a North Vietnamese offensive. What happened in 1973 was Watergate, a scandal which increasingly consumed Nixon's time and political power. And that started with the failed Watergate 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 had ordered the break in of the Democratic headquarters, searching for Lyndon Johnson's copy of Anna Channault and Spiro Agnew's phone calls from the fall of 1968.  Nixon was worried it might be released to defeat that his re-election in  November of 1972.  And 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”, and a logical repository for that tape.  But the tape and Johnson's 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. Rostow knew what was in the file. And when the Watergate scandal 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 of wounded who suffered during the 5 years Richard Nixon kept the war going for his personal benefit.

- 30 -

SINS OF THE FATHER

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, that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”. But does that also apply to what you do to win the office? 

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 get out of  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, the Democratic candidate, 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 39^th floor suite at the Pierre Hotel, just off Fifth Avenue on East 61^st Street, in Manhattan. Nixon's co-hosts were his closest adviser John Mitchell, and Republican activist and unofficial leader of the Taiwan anti-communist 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, that Johnson was planning an “October Surprise” and a “Halloween Peace”, to help 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) had become 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” - meaning the ONE 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 or approve of any deal made in 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, from Florida conservative 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 and Nixon supporter, Alexander Sachs. Sachs 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 the U.S. 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 (the stand down in the northern provinces), 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 instead on Nixon's promise of a better deal after his victory in November.

Two days later, on 2 November, 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 a 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. After conversations with his staff he decided not to do so, because it would taint the credibility of whoever won the election.  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 Humphrey,  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 of office 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 in the face of a North Vietnamese offensive. What happened in 1973 was Watergate, a scandal which increasingly consumed Nixon's time and political power. And that started with the failed Watergate 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 had ordered the break in of the Democratic headquarters, searching for Lyndon Johnson's copy of Anna Channault and Spiro Agnew's phone calls from the fall of 1968. He was worried it might be released to defeat  his re-election in  November of 1972.   And 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”, and a logical repository for that tape . But the tape and Johnson's 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. Rostow knew what was in the file. And when the Watergate scandal 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 of wounded who suffered during the 5 years Richard Nixon kept the war going for his personal benefit.

- 30 -

SINS OF THE FATHER

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, that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”. But does that also apply to what you do to win the office? 

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, the Democratic candidate, 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 39^th floor suite at the Pierre Hotel, just off Fifth Avenue on East 61^st Street, in Manhattan. Nixon's co-hosts were his closest adviser John Mitchell, and Republican activist and unofficial leader of the Taiwan anti-communist 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 help 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, from 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 and Nixon supporter, Alexander Sachs. Sachs 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 (the stand down in the northern provinces), 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 instead on Nixon's promise of a better deal after his victory in November.

Two days later, on 2 November, 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 a 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. After conversations with his staff he decided not to do so, because it would taint the credibility of whoever won the election.  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 Humphrey,  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 of office 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 in the face of a North Vietnamese offensive. What happened in 1973 was Watergate, a scandal which increasingly consumed Nixon's time and political power. And that started with the failed Watergate 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 had ordered the break in of the Democratic headquarters, searching for Lyndon Johnson's copy of Anna Channault and Spiro Agnew's phone calls from the fall of 1968. He was worried it might be released to defeat that his re-election in  November of 1972. And 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”, and a logical repository for that tape . But the tape and Johnson's 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. Rostow knew what was in the file. And when the Watergate scandal 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 of wounded who suffered during the 5 years Richard Nixon kept the war going for his personal benefit.

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IDES OF MARCH AWARD - 2014

I greet you on this The Ides of March 2014, memorializing the day 2,057 years ago when the top one percent of Roman politicians imposed terminal term limits upon Julius Caesar. On this day each year I award some deserving political hack the PUNishment of the odious “Knife-in-the-Back” plaque for his or her ineptitude and arrogance during the preceding 12 months. Recent winners have included New York Democratic Governor Elliot (Ho-No!) Spritzer, Illinois Democratic Governor Rod (The Sleaze) Blagoevich, the Big Giant Republican Head from Dunwoody, Georgia, Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich, and the bumbling cat herder from Ohio, the Republican Tan-Man Crier of the House, John Andrew Boehner.

Since Richard Nixon (Republican winner emeritus, 1973-74) it has been axiomatic that any politician who must assure voters that “I am not a crook”, is, and any forced to insist “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, in fact, did. This year's winner s sought to reassure his state's voters, “I am not a bully”. Our political putz of 2014 is that arrogant bully builder of a political bridge to nowhere, the Jersey lane hog, the donut-tello from Soprano country, the EZ Pass troll, the narcissist from Newark, the Luca Brasi of the weigh station, fifty-one year old Governor Christopher James "Chris" Christie.

“Has there ever been a political reversal of fortune as rapid and as absolute as the one just experienced by Chris Christie?...One minute, he was releasing jokey vanity videos starring Alec Baldwin and assorted celebrity pals; the next, he was being ridiculed by his lifelong idol, Bruce Springsteen...a liar, a bully, a buffoon....”

Alec MaCgillis - 12 February, 2014 “The New Republic”

“In the day we sweat it out on the streets, stuck in traffic on the GWB

They shut down the tollbooths of glory 'cause we didn't endorse Christie

The Irish/Italian Chistie first won the governorship by less than four percentage points, but within weeks of his January 2010 inauguration he assumed the mantle of a mandate, overseeing the unprecedented quashing of a 43 count criminal indictment of two prominent supporters. The three prosecutors who had obtained the indictments were permanently parked. Governor Christie had taken the off ramp to partisan-ville, and there was now something rotund and rotten in the state of Jersey.

"Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

Peter Clemenza

Shortly thereafter, Christie began a four year long argument with the senate that left the state supreme court short one justice Then, on 12 August 2013, Christie announced he had such truss issues he was withdrawing the re-nomination of a conservative justice because he did not want to expose her “to the animals.” At 7:35 the next morning, Christie's deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly emailed David Wildstein, a Christie appointee at the Port Authority for New York and New Jersey. The email read “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Wildstein's email reply simply said, “Got it”.

“Sure he’s a bully. But he’s OUR bully. Yes, his manner and demeanor can be brash, strident, even gloating. But those very traits are also what many of us have come to like about him.”

Fran Wood, columnist Star Ledger, 6 January 2013

The Newark Star Ledger called Christie's half of the Port Authority a “patronage mill”, because he had appointed more supporters than the previous four New Jersey governors combined. Two of those new hires were Chairman David Samson and David Wildstein. According to the Bergen Record, Wildstein's real job was to be Christie's “eyes and ears”, imposing “strict adherence to the Christie agenda”. And as Elizabeth Kolbert noted in the New Yorker, “By September 2013...top-level Christie appointees were barely speaking to their colleagues from across the Hudson.”

“On many occasions I heard (Wildstein) say (he had) only one constituent: Chris Christie, said a former official.”

Steve Strunsky, The Star-Ledger, 5 February 2014

Email Chains, Lanes and Automobiles: The GWB is a one mile long double decked, 14-lane suspension bridge that collects $1 million a day in tolls from 150, 000 vehicles crossing between New Jersey and 177/178 streets in Manhattan. More than 10,000 vehicles an hour use the four toll lanes at Fort Lee alone during the morning rush. On Friday 6 September Wildstein ordered Robert Durando, director of the GWB, to close three of those lanes beginning Monday morning. He also ordered the action remain secret from Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, who had been appointed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Wildstein did update Bridget Kelly in an email that Saturday: “I will call you Monday AM to let you know how Fort Lee goes.”

“I have always said about Governor Chris Christie; if there is one thing he’s good at it is clogging major arteries...There are skeletons in his closet. Of cows.”

Bill Maher Real Time

The cones went up before five Monday morning, 9 September, and almost immediately all of Fort Lee was suffering from carpool funnel syndrome, with 600 vehicle traffic jams on every street. At 8:32 am a 911 call to Fort Lee EMS reported a 91 year old widow, Florence Genova, was in cardiac arrest in her home on Harvard Place. The coordinator of EMS services complained, “Paramedics were delayed due to heavy traffic...and had to meet the ambulance en-route to the hospital instead of on the scene”. Later that day Florence died at Englewood Hospital. Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich began to complain before 9:30 am., and added late in the day that Authority police were “advising commuters... (this) is the result of a decision that I, as the Mayor, recently made.” It was a lie.

“Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this”

Tony Soprano

Word finally filtered up to Executive Director Patrick Foye who, at 7:44 am on Friday, 13 September, ordered the lanes reopened. Foye warned, “"I will get to the bottom of this abusive decision which violates everything this agency stands for...” Foye need not have worried because of the forty three thousand commuters and 35,000 residents of Fort Lee being punished over those four days, were a couple of editors for the Wall Street Journal, who sent reporters to find out why they had been inconvenienced.

“Mr. Christie, a Republican, complained in a private phone call to (NY Governor) Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, that Patrick Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was pressing too hard to get to the bottom of why the number of toll lanes onto the bridge from Fort Lee, N.J. was cut from four to one in early September.”

Wall Street Journal, 12 December 2013

In May of 1972 a Gallup Poll found President Richard Nixon led his probable Democratic opponent by twenty percentage points. The following month, five men working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) were caught inside the Democratic Party National Headquarters. Forty years later, the only remaining unanswered question about Watergate is why, given Nixon's comfortable lead, the risky “plumbers op” was even considered

“Christie did not have sexual relations with that bridge.”

Ann Coulter - tweet

In the monthly Quinpac polls during his 2013 re-election campaign, Christie's popularity never fell below 57% Two months before the October election, on September 9, 2013, traffic cones blocking two of the three access lanes to the George Washington Bridge went up in Fort Lee. The following month, Christie won re-election as Governor by twenty-two percentage points. Seven months later, post his bridge over troubled waters, and with a Rutgers-Eagleton poll showing his popularity down 19 points to just 46%, the central unanswered question is why such an arrogant frat boy prank was even considered.

“I didn’t even know Fort Lee got three dedicated lanes until all this stuff happened, and I think we should review that entire policy ’cause I don’t really know why Fort Lee needs three dedicated lanes, to tell you the truth.”

Governor Christie. Press Conference in Trenton, N.J., 2 December, 2013.

“We do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.”

Emilio Barzini The Godfather

“It is possible that he knew nothing, nothing, nothing. But it does seem a little bit like a coach claiming he never could keep all those players’ numbers straight. And Christie’s political quarterback...turns out to have formerly worked on Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. What kind of resume is that? And the lawyer Christie hired to represent him during the ongoing bridge investigation used to be Giuliani’s mayoral chief of staff. And now that we think of it, the congressman who threatened to throw the reporter over the balcony was a Giuliani favorite. Can we work out a conspiracy theory in which everything terrible that’s happened in New York or New Jersey politics is Rudy Giuliani’s fault?

Let the games begin.”

Gail Collins New York Times 31 January 2013

"If you ask me, Christie is almost dead but too stubborn to lie down."

Rick Wilson, Republican strategist  7 February, 2014 "Politico" 

"Chris Christie has been the front runner—but even before the traffic scandal, he was not far out front. And his response to the scandal is highlighting his most troubling trait, which is not bullying but impulsiveness.

Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor National Review  7 February, 2014  "Politico":

"If this charge proves true, then the governor must resign or be impeached. Because that would leave him so drained of credibility that he could not possibly govern effectively. He would owe it to the people of New Jersey to stop the bleeding and quit. And if he should refuse, then the Legislature should open impeachment hearings...By the governor's own standard, lying is a firing offense."

Newark Star-Ledger Editorial   31 January, 2014 

"The problem with Christie isn’t merely that he is a bully. It’s that his political career is built on a rotten foundation... He wasn’t out to line his own pockets, or build a business empire. He wasn’t even seeking to advance a partisan agenda..Christie used a corrupt system to expand his own power and burnish his own image, and he did it so artfully that he nearly came within striking distance of the White House...It was one of the most effective optical illusions in American politics—until it wasn’t."

Alec MacGillis  12 February, 2014  "The New Republic".

Only time will tell what the Federal Attorney for New Jersey will do with whatever information he uncovers, or how far the Democratic legislature will push their investigation. But as in most scandals, it is the cover up that seems to be falling apart first. We may never have proof that Christie ordered, or even pre-approved the closing of the bridge lanes in Fort Lee. But it is already abundantly clear it was an arrogant, stupid, vulgar and unnecessary act . And that story line fits the new image of Chris Christie. Christie is a bully and a thug. He built that image, he nurtured it himself, and perfected it himself. And he has no one to blame for it, but himself. He has exploded his own political career, plunging the knife into his own back. So bully for you, Governor Christie, would be Republican Presidential candidate in 2016, and deserving winner of  the Ides of March Knife in the Back Plaque for 2014 -   "Veni, Vidi, Verecundia", baby.

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