Nixon doesn't sabotage 1968 Vietnam peace talks?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vietnam-treachery.html?_r=0
New evidence pretty conclusively demonstrates that Nixon actively worked to sabotage the 1968 Vietnam peace talks to win the election. What if he had a modicum of honor and decided not to get involved for political gain? Could the peace talks have worked and the war ended in 1968-69? Would Nixon then have lost? What would a post-68 Democratic administration looked like?
 
. . . it was a chance to level the Vietcong (as happened) and sell it as the North's Battle of the Bulge that they decisively lost. . .
I have long heard that Tet was a military defeat for North Vietnamese, but a PR victory or an organizational victory?

And the communists were popular in the South Vietnanese countryside, they just were. Maybe because South Vietnamese rural persons were long used to a corrupt centralized government which periodically imposed itself, and the communists seemed new and fresh (and ideological issues weren't a primary focus).
 
I have long heard that Tet was a military defeat for North Vietnamese, but a PR victory or an organizational victory?

You heard correctly it basically ended the Vietcong as an effective full scale insurgent force in the South.

But, it was clear to the public that LBJ thought the war was lost and then the media followed and when you are negotiating you don't want to negotiate from a position of that much weakness. If LBJ better understood what happened and acted accordingly he would have both run and won reelection and gotten a peace treaty from the North.
 
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Looking at the Oct 22 date the article says as the go-ahead date for Nixon to throw in the monkey wrench, it would have been a hell of a Hail Mary Pass for Johnson to count on getting a treaty agreed to before the election day in early November. Maybe doable, maybe not.

But Johnson's motives were not limited to trying to get Hubert Humphrey elected. His major concern was to save Great Society and I think he believed if he could deliver peace in Vietnam to whoever would succeed him, even Nixon with a strong Republican bump would not want to scupper LBJ's social programs. Without the fiscal and political albatross around its neck the US government would have no excuses but ideological ones not to continue and extend the programs, and with Democratic majorities in House and Senate, the war over and GS programs designed to be beneficial to the public, Nixon would not look good scrapping them. So, from that point of view, getting HH in instead would just be an added bonus (one leaving LBJ with mixed feelings since a Humphrey victory might mean that he could have won it himself).

Another thing Johnson wanted of course was to vindicate his Vietnam policy, which had done his Administration and indeed the nation so much apparent harm--delivering peace would not allow him to keep office but it would go far to reverse the judgement of history on his efforts. This surely would also be good for the Democratic party and I am sure Johnson counted the good of the party very highly indeed. Again these would be gains that a Nixon victory would not spoil. Removing Vietnam as an issue would also remove Nixon's opportunities to grandstand on the subject.

As for the substance of the treaty, it was no better than the agreement Nixon himself would have negotiated more than four years later, after his re-election, which in context ultimately left South Vietnam vulnerable to military conquest. But on the other hand the treaty was no worse either; it was in fact essentially the same agreement!

@jmc247, it may be that Johnson should have perceived things differently and handled them differently, but is it not strange then that Nixon, after a 5 year delay, wound up backing essentially the same treaty with the same terms as Johnson got the enemy powers to agree to (only to have the South Vietnamese refuse it?) And that Nixon got the Southern leaders to back the same treaty that was unacceptable to them in 1968 in 1973?

The other argument is that it was in fact the agency of the South Vietnamese leadership that determined the outcomes--they didn't need assurance from Nixon through the back channel of Anna Chenault to refuse to back the treaty, and that five years later the then-current leadership had changed their minds and decided to fall in line behind Nixon pushing exactly the same treaty. In that case, of course history would roll on on the same tracks as OTL, except that this incredible scandal would not be sitting in the closet to come out decades later. Perhaps, had Nixon taken the high road and kept quiet, he would still have been accused by the same people at the time of the same crime, because OTL they were just guessing (correctly, OTL, but they would not know that). But objectively everything goes as OTL because the Southern leaders simply would not accept the treaty in 1968.

A lot can happen in 5 years of course. What looks unacceptable in '68 might indeed come to seem preferable to something even worse five years later. But ironically, I think if the Southern leaders had accepted the treaty under Johnson, that South Vietnam might still exist to this day. Maybe, maybe not--but the 5 year running out the clock Nixon did was what surely did kill them, because dragging the war on as a basically US project (while "Vietnamization" may have removed Americans from most front line combat, it was perfectly plain that the Saigon government and ARVN were a glove of dubious fabric over our iron fist) caused the whole Vietnam cause to rot and stink in the American nostrils, and so it was that when the North invaded the South in 1975, by conventional military means, the USA had no will to come to Saigon's aid.

But if the same sort of thing happened in the wake of an identical 1968 treaty, say in early 1971, I think either a Nixon or a Humphrey administration would call for US intervention in support of the South, and Congress would authorize it, and it would be effective. Because conventional war is exactly what the US military was set up to win. Had the US had the political will in 1975 there is no doubt in my mind that we could rush in sufficient force to enable the South Vietnamese forces to check the Northern assault, then roll it back. Southern morale would be improved with the knowledge Uncle Sam had their back, Northern morale would suffer knowing that having committed an act of conventional war, not some dubious scrap like Gulf of Tonkin but launching an all-on invasion of a sovereign state (as the USA defined it anyway) the Americans might not stop at the DMZ this time, and not just send bombers, but ground troops and naval landings on Northern soil, the gloves having come off thanks to their hitting first.

A conventional war is a different thing than the civil war/insurgency the North had hitherto been aiding, you see. Where the US military was ill suited to fighting such a political insurgency, and the revolving door of Saigon governments had scarcely any legitimacy to fight it themselves, and American political operations gurus, whatever credit they might give themselves for brilliance in places like the Philippines, clearly were out of their depth in Vietnam...conventional war was something else entirely. It was what the Americans wanted to fight, and tried to make political war into as much as they could. It was behind the logic of "if only we could invade the North and shut down Hanoi in Hanoi!" and the logic of the bombing campaigns, as a partial conventional war. And as long as the USA stood ready to defend the Saigon governments, conventional war is exactly what the North would not engage in except strictly defensively. The Northern leaders fully understood that it did not matter if they could defeat Saigon's army in the field, if the Americans stood beside them. Therefore, if the scandal of US involvement in Vietnam had been allowed to cool down I think there would have been enough support left for conventional US Cold War policy to intervene against a conventional invasion, the North and Soviets and Chinese would know this, and Hanoi would not launch the attack.

Whereas OTL, Nixon did act to minimize the risk of US forces intervening on the battlefields--but did not act to end the war. It went on and on, and the issue remained polarizing, and when his administration became mired in scandal (and surely the OTL fact of this entirely political intervention against the clear immediate national interest, justified if at all only by the premise that the Democrats had to be cleared out of the White House and Nixon take their place, demonstrates exactly the sort of mentality that people recoiled against when seen at Watergate--Nixon was a scandal waiting to be exposed) all his Southeast Asia policy was taken as part of the rotting package of Nixonian policy--this is what paralyzed US policy against being willing to aid SV against a plain and open act of military invasion. Only when the USA was sunk that deep did Hanoi dare launch their overt attack.
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OTL the Paris accords that were ultimately signed by Nixon (and the South Vietnamese leaders also accepted) came in the same form, but 5 years later. And they were Nixon's baby and he perforce pushed for their acceptance by Congress. If instead we have a lame duck LBJ achieving the same accords (assuming Nixon's OTL encouragement of Southern resistance was in fact necessary, and Thieu et al would grudgingly go along with the will of their POTUS protector) then politically it is rather different. Either a Humphrey or Nixon administration would have strong reasons to back them and adopt them as their own--but they would both have a choice in the matter too. Humphrey I think would surely take Johnson's work as binding and go with it. Nixon could either adopt it--or repudiate it. But if he did the latter, then he had better have the secret "Peace With Honor" victory plan he claimed to have during his campaign ready to pull out from his sleeves as he promised in the campaign to do. Rejecting what he might call a bad peace and trumping it with a better peace, which I think was pretty important in the minds of crucial numbers of swing voters to his victory, would work. Trashing Johnson's work and replacing it with 5 more years of war, however "Vietnamified," would look pretty villainous. Since it seems clear enough in hindsight that his talk of a secret victory plan was so much film-flam, and that he intended instead to use the war as an issue to guarantee his re-election in 1972, which is exactly what he did OTL, and boasted of later too, clearly if Johnson had managed to get a treaty together before Nixon's inauguration it would have put Nixon off balance. Possibly in a better place by far than OTL in fact, since with Johnson getting some credit for ending the war he was after all blamed with starting in the first place, but the war truly ended (not really, not entirely, surely some US involvement to secure SV would be necessary indefinitely--but the massive bloodbath Americans worried about would be stopped) then Nixon could move on to other issues, find something else to be re-elected on, and possibly avoid Watergate and serve out until 1977. Or he might have found another way to implode, who knows? But it would mess up Nixon's game plan to be handed a Vietnam peace--either he must accept it and work to make it work, or repudiate it and make Vietnam his own mess rather than being able to pose as the clean-up man.

It does not seem so clear to me that even if Johnson had been able to present the world with a signed treaty no later than say October 29, just the right time for maximum impact on the election, that Humphrey would therefore have won. I think a lot of people by that point were alienated and skeptical and would smell a rat with such an October surprise lying on their doorsteps wrapped up in the newspaper. After all I think that very few people whose top priority was peace voted for either Nixon or Wallace that year; they were all voting for HH anyway with their fingers crossed in faint hope. Hawks would be as much alienated as charmed by the treaty. Had Johnson been able to do it some months before, perhaps support would swing over to Humphrey gradually as the treaty sank in, if Johnson could show solid results. What LBJ originally wanted of course was to offer it up early enough that the Democratic Convention would be moved to draft him for the Presidency again despite his early remarks that he would not run. The slow process of negotiations took that hope away, and the fact that OTL he was still not done by October 22 suggests to me that Nixon was probably going to win no matter what by then. So I would not pin too much on this thread's POD as making the difference between a Humphrey and Nixon presidency.

The major effects of Nixon holding off then are punted to the question of whether the Saigon leaders would have come around and signed the treaty before Nixon's inauguration or not. If not, history is as OTL pretty much. If they would, then we are looking at what an alternate Nixon administration, one not burdened by the running sore of Vietnam, might have been.

And the heirs of those silly billies in Saigon who listened to Anna Chenault OTL might still be running South Vietnam to this day, had they not held out for a total victory that could only be a gift of an American sugar daddy, and probably had it been pushed for in reality, would have caused nuclear armageddon--and was therefore a fantasy.
 
@jmc247, it may be that Johnson should have perceived things differently and handled them differently, but is it not strange then that Nixon, after a 5 year delay, wound up backing essentially the same treaty with the same terms as Johnson got the enemy powers to agree to (only to have the South Vietnamese refuse it?) And that Nixon got the Southern leaders to back the same treaty that was unacceptable to them in 1968 in 1973?

Between Linebacker 2 which won him credibility in the South and winning the actual election by a uber landslide he was able to do it in 1973 as the South saw him as a strong horse with the US behind him, but its not 1973 and U.S. public opinion hadn't completely collapsed on the war yet, but it was buckling.

OTL, if Nixon and Congress backed up their end South Vietnam would have survived. We know Nixon imploded not long after the peace treaty from bestriding Washington like a colossus to being drunk looking at paintings talking to himself and facing possible Impeachment, but South Vietnam didn't at the time.

When Thiệu, who had not even been informed of the secret negotiations, was presented with the draft of the new agreement, he was furious with Kissinger and Nixon (who were perfectly aware of South Vietnam's negotiating position) and refused to accept it without significant changes. He then made several public radio addresses, claiming that the proposed agreement was worse than it actually was. Hanoi was flabbergasted, believing that it had been duped into a propaganda ploy by Kissinger. On October 26, Radio Hanoi broadcast key details of the draft agreement.

However, as U.S. casualties mounted throughout the conflict, American domestic support for the war had deteriorated, and by 1972 there was major pressure on the Nixon administration to withdraw from the war. Consequently, the U.S. brought great diplomatic pressure upon their South Vietnamese ally to sign the peace treaty even if the concessions Thiệu wanted could not be achieved. Nixon pledged to provide continued substantial aid to South Vietnam, and given his recent landslide victory in the presidential election, it seemed possible that he would be able to follow through on that pledge. To demonstrate his seriousness to Thiệu, Nixon ordered the heavy Operation Linebacker II bombings of North Vietnam in December 1972.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords

Either way LBJ played a good hand while Tet was going on incredibly poorly, to the extent he announced he would be resigning at the end of his term and the whole world saw it as him viewing the Vietnam War as lost.

The North and the South didn't have much interest in listening to LBJ anyway after he announced he was leaving office in January 1969 as the second he announced that he was a lame duck and both nations were looking more to who replaced him.
 
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I have long heard that Tet was a military defeat for North Vietnamese, but a PR victory or an organizational victory?

And the communists were popular in the South Vietnanese countryside, they just were. Maybe because South Vietnamese rural persons were long used to a corrupt centralized government which periodically imposed itself, and the communists seemed new and fresh (and ideological issues weren't a primary focus).

New and fresh in using outright terror, that is.
 
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