WI: Nixon's sabotage of Vietnam peace talks 1968 is leaked?

RousseauX

Donor
In 1968 the Johnson administration attempted to neogitiate a peace deal to end the Vietnam war after the shock of the tet offensive. Richard Nixon secretly contacted the South Vietnamese president Thieu, telling him that if he held out and refused a peace deal Nixon would continue to back him up militarically once he is elected. Nixon did so in order to destroy the possibility that the democrats might negotiate a peace in Vietnam before the election.

US intelligence knew about this deal through wiretaps of South Vietnamese embassy officials, LBJ was told this and considered it to be treason, though he did not release the information.

What if someone within the Johnson administration or FBI leaked it?
 
In 1968 the Johnson administration attempted to neogitiate a peace deal to end the Vietnam war after the shock of the tet offensive.

Tet was a resounding military defeat for the communists - it wasn't a direct instigator for a "peace deal" in 1968. 1968 was only when negotiations began, the preamble had been going on for a while beforehand. The North was also not negotiating in good faith, so any effect of sabotage by Nixon was likely negligible.
 
Apparently, when Johnson got word of Nixon’s meddling, he ordered the FBI to track the movements of Anna Chennault, Claire Chennault's widow and Nixon's conduit to South Vietnam's President Thieu. She “contacted Vietnam Ambassador Bui Diem,” one report from the surveillance noted, “and advised him that she had received a message from her boss … to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was … ‘Hold on. We are gonna win. … Please tell your boss to hold on.’

In a conversation with Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, Johnson lashed out at Nixon. “I’m reading their hand, Everett,” Johnson told his old friend. “This is treason.

I know,” Dirksen said mournfully.

Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the “absolute proof,” as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement. When asked by LBJ whether he wanted Nixon's actions regarding the peace talks to be blown wide open, Humphrey said no.

Incidentally, in the US Campaign Trail Game, the player can choose to reveal Nixon's sabotage to the media when playing as HHH.
 

bguy

Donor
Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the “absolute proof,” as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement.

Yeah, that's the thing. Unless Chennault herself points the finger at Nixon there's no proof of anything other than an overzealous Nixon supporter urging the South Vietnamese to do what they were going to do anyway, and why would Chennault implicate Nixon? She knows that if Nixon wins she's in the clear, and even if Humphrey wins it is very unlikely she will ever be prosecuted. (The Logan Act not having been used to prosecute someone in over a hundred years, and it being pretty much impossible for the U.S. government to prosecute the case without exposing CIA activity.)

Most likely what happens if the tape gets leaked is that Chennault simply denies that is her voice on the tape, and the Nixon Campaign then claims the tape is a fake that LBJ created to try and salvage the election for the Democrats. Unless the South Vietnamese ambassador himself confirms the substance of the taped conversation (which seems unlikely as I don't see the South Vietnamese wanting to be seen as intervening in the American presidential election, and they especially won't want to intervene against Nixon), Chennault's denial will muddy the waters.
 


https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H.R._Haldeman's_Notes_from_Oct._22,_1968.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/haldeman-notes.html

These are Haldeman's notes. Look three-quarters of the way down, the —> ! and the double underline. where it says, "keep Chennault [Anna] working on SVN."

This is a smoking gun.

Of course, LBJ would have had to go for a flyer. He would have probably had to order the arrest of Nixon and his top aides hoping that something like this would have been found. And yes, of course it would have been majorly disruptive to American politics, even in some ways if it would have been the lesser of two evils, and even though it probably would have embarrassed South Vietnam President Thieu into agree to pretty much any halfway decent deal. And probably 50-50 at that point whether the North Vietnamese try to overplay their hand.
 
One thing which makes this whole thing less terrible is that South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu wasn't crazy about the 1968 peace talks anyway. And things probably would have turned out largely the same even if Nixon hadn't communicate to Thieu that he should wait for him to become president.
 

Philip

Donor
I'm not saying Johnson announces it, but what if someone inside the FBI leaks a smoking gun to the Washington post or New York Times

Both Nixon and Johnson will have a great many questions to answer. There is probably inadmissible evidence that the Nixon campaign may have done something illegal. There is good evidence that the Johnson administration did do something illegal.
 
I believe it's still true that you can go to YouTube and, thanks to the LBJ Library, listen to the actual party-line phone call in which Johnson had the conversation about whether to go public with Clifford, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, and a couple of other usual suspects. The conclusion was indeed that they needed a smoking gun that they did not have. And Johnson understood that the material was still powerful, perhaps most powerful, if he kept it close (the whole file was collected for Johnson and then put into safe keeping with Walt Rostow at the end of the administration when he left for the University of Texas.) Then Nixon would never know exactly what Johnson had and it would drive him (Nixon) crazy with paranoia. This is, in practice, exactly what it did. Alongside some more run-of-the-mill campaign sabotage activities of the old school, the real thrust of Nixon's illegal activities in the party-political realm (towards Democratic candidates and the institutional Democratic Party) were driven by fear of what might be in the Chennault file. In late spring or early summer of 1971, after he had Alexander Butterfield install the White House taping system, in one of his near-fugue states Nixon growled through a conversation about institutions of the Democratic establishment and what they might have hidden in them -- this was tied to the release of the Pentagon Papers. Nixon was sure that more PP-like documents and quite possibly the Chennault file itself were hidden away at Brookings and as he rolled through options like an actual mob boss at one point he said, "Someone needs to get in there, blow the safe." This was the single most criminal statement ever recorded on the White House Tapes -- this was conspiracy to commit burglary, not mere obstruction or vague intimations of insider dealing or bribery or campaign dirty tricks. It took until roughly the turn of the century to find because the Nixon Library, until the great Tim Naftali took over, was pretty committed to not cataloging the tapes properly and researches had also looked in the wrong place, in 1972 chasing Watergate instead of 1971. This was because, at that point, they still thought Watergate was the big thing, rather than one of several circles gobbled up whole by a much larger Venn diagram circle that encompassed everything to do with the Chennault Affair.

And of course Haldeman kept the notes. First because they all figured they could stonewall forever and no one would either ask the right question or get through various legal barriers to obtain discovery. Second because they lived every hour with the chance of legal investigation of their actions and figured (1) they needed the stuff handy in case it exculpated them from something else or could be used to blackmail their confederates and (2) so they knew just where it was in case they needed to destroy it. There were people who knew, it was a matter where you had to be smart enough to piece together the networks of people who likely knew and find the weak links, either (to compare to Watergate) feral self-interest like John Dean's or come-to-Jesus confessionals like Chuck Colson's. Madame Chennault made G. Gordon Liddy look like a scrawny little hippie, she'd have lied to the Supreme Court's face if necessary. But there were paper trails and those were problematic.

1968 was the wrong time to release for two reasons. One was the moment itself. Hubert Humphrey had made one of the great political comebacks of the 20th century in the presidential race where he had almost been trailing George Wallace on the way out of Chicago. Indeed political scientists who've read the numbers think if the election had been held the following Tuesday Humphrey would have won, both the popular vote and key marginal states. Also, with that kind of motive in the air there was no one perhaps in the history of the American republic who was better at facing the near-treasonous accusations in the Chennault file and saying, "it's all a liberal witch hunt! This is a conspiracy by that war-monger and law-breaker Lyndon Johnson to deny ordinary Americans the solutions they crave, law and order at home and peace in Vietnam!!" And he could possibly have gotten away with it. The evidence of surveillance, before you've had those crucial extra few years to learn about COINTELPRO and the intimations in the Pentagon Papers, and Sam Ervin investigating the Army spying on US civilians inside domestic borders, would look pretty damning. LBJ -- who had killed how many kids today? -- was running a secret state to ruin his political enemies just like the goddamn KGB. You really need that handful of years from '68 to Watergate, to show that Nixon himself was an even more enthusiastic and ruthless patron of a secret state designed to crush political opponents.

As a legal matter it is problematic because of the Logan Act -- Logan is frankly bad law, it's vague and circuitous and hadn't been used in so long it had practically rusted away. If you could get key documents through discovery you could certainly prosecute under Logan's terms, but there's a fair chance that either the Circuit Court of Appeals for DC or SCOTUS would toss the case because Logan is bad law, not because Nixon wasn't guilty. And then if you write a new law you get into another snarl over double jeopardy. So the actual "proper" prosecution will only ever get you limited outcomes.

But Dick Nixon himself, more than anyone else maybe even Lyndon Johnson, understood that anything to do with the Chennault Affair would never be a purely legal drama. It was the most fundamental kind of political theatre. U.S. Code, echoed in either statute or rules of evidence throughout the states, has a specific exclusion (a rule by which evidence cannot be admitted) based on "prior bad acts." Its exceptions are lethally narrow. It is intended to focus the work of trial and proving a cause of criminal action on the terms of the case itself, not questions about the defendant's character. But politics works just the opposite way. You bring this up too late -- as OTL has done, really -- and people can learn to loathe Nixon for centuries as they ought but it comes to late to do anything about him. You come at the king too early, in '68 or just after he's inaugurated, and it blows back in your face. Really the ideal time (*cough*TLplug*cough*) was if Watergate (or something very like it; there was so much the Nixon machine did that was illegal the law of large numbers alone meant they would get caught at something) blew up more fully during the '72 campaign. Then, with the Pentagon Papers and the Enemies List and rumblings of COINTELPRO and the ITT Affair (telecom giant ITT wanted a merger that made antitrust lawyers wince and paid the Nixon campaign $400K to get the Republican National Convention in San Diego where Nixon wanted it and get the AG's office to look the other way on the merger) and now Watergate-or-a-cognate, even the circumstantial evidence of LBJ's "X File" will, as the lawyers like to say, speak to a pattern of deceit. It will also bring the fire and the fury of 1970 over the Cambodia intervention and other wartime dirty tricks back into the frame, where they had been carefully tamped down by the administration in the interval.

Bring it up once the White House Tapes are out and the like and you risk Chennault's absorption in scandal fatigue. The perfect time is the '72 campaign. Probably the next-best time is right after Saigon fell, when there's a chance to write a truthful epitaph about the war, in which Vietnam was Nixon's demon lover, the driver behind nearly all the criminal malfeasance and paranoid crazy of his administration, torn between the desire to get the hell out and the soul-stalking fear that to get out and have the RVN collapse would do fatal political damage. So he lengthened the war in order to have a war he could take credit for ending, and lengthened it again to make sure Saigon didn't fall before he was re-elected. It was the prime mover. Find a prime mover and you can properly explain the universe of actions and consequences it creates. This was really the missing piece for decades, now we have it, and things sure make a more holistic kind of sense now that we have it in view. They might have then as well, but you have to time it right.
 
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bguy

Donor
GeographyDude said:
These are Haldeman's notes. Look three-quarters of the way down, the —> ! and the double underline. where it says, "keep Chennault [Anna] working on SVN."

This is a smoking gun.

Did Johnson have this note in 1968 though? And even if he did what prevents the Nixon campaign from claiming the note is another LBJ sponsored forgery? Especially since if LBJ has the note in 1968 then he must have gotten it through illegal means which will make it very difficult for him to authenticate the note. (Did LBJ have anyone loyal enough to him that they would be willing to confess to committing a burglary just to try and bring down Nixon?)
 


Evan Thomas says Nixon perceived President Johnson as cheating in trying to get a last minute peace treaty, and that Nixon may have cheated in what he considered to be self-defense.

But . . .
 
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I'm not saying Johnson announces it, but what if someone inside the FBI leaks a smoking gun to the Washington post or New York Times
It puts additional pressure on Nixon to get a peace treaty, as well as putting additional pressure on South Vietnam President Thieu.
 
Did Johnson have this note in 1968 though? . . .
No, of course LBJ didn't have Haldeman's notes in '68. What he did have was based on illegal recordings, although countries spy on each other all the time and I don't think it was all at surprising that we were taping the South Vietnamese Embassy.

Yes, it would have been massive political disruption. But all the same, I tend to think it would have been worth it.

The proxy war in Vietnam wasn't helping relations between the U.S. and USSR and to the extent that it involved brinkmanship, that distinctly was not good. And 20,000 more U.S. soldiers died between '69 and '73, a lot more people died in Vietnam. Nixon's previously secret bombing and then 1970 invasion of Cambodia was a destabilizing factor and contributing factor to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who between 1975 and '78 killed approximately two million persons, with the big numbers due to starvation. As a result of a number of Cambodian border crossings in which they attacked Vietnamese villages, Vietnam launched a full-fledged invasion of Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978 and drove all the way to the capital city of Phnom Penh. But instead of getting credit for stopping the genocide . . .

Western powers froze out Vietnam and occupied Cambodia from trade and international development all through the 1980s. This is an extremely important part of the story.

So, yes, preventing all this, I think it's worth accepting some political disruption in our own country. And then I ask, haven't countries we think of as good stable democracies such as France and (?) Australia had significant political disruption at times? (may be mistaken about Australia)
 
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if there's a higher trajectory for both the U.S. and southeast Asia . . .


youtube: Animation Khmer Rock Band (Too Late )

we'll have more rock music from Cambodia! :) and less killing and starvation

and the "Too Late" in the song title will probably refer to lost love

---------------------------------------------------------

LATER EDITS: The ideology was a big part of it in that the Khmer Rouge believed they could simply will a three-fold increase in rice production, and if this wasn't happening, it was taken as automatic evidence of sabotage. And although a lot of the numbers are lost, it looks like they continued to export rice to China as if they were hitting this three-fold increase.

http://cambodialpj.org/article/justice-and-starvation-in-cambodia-the-khmer-rouge-famine/
' . . Khmer Rouge survivors typically use the verb “bong-ot,” meaning “to starve” or “to withhold food”[8] . . '
Meaning that it was deliberative, or at the very least that the thugs and ideologues who were leading this revolution damn well ought to have known better.
 
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Nixon's previously secret bombing and then 1970 invasion of Cambodia was a destabilizing factor and contributing factor to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who between 1975 and '78 killed approximately two million persons, with the big numbers due to starvation. As a result of a number of Cambodian border crossings in which they attacked Vietnamese villages, Vietnam launched a full-fledged invasion of Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978 and drove all the way to the capital city of Phnom Penh. But instead of getting credit for stopping the genocide . . .

The (North) Vietnamese were the only reason the US got involved in Cambodia in the first place. . .
 

bguy

Donor
No, of course LBJ didn't have Haldeman's notes in '68. What he did have was based on illegal recordings, although countries spy on each other all the time and I don't think it was all at surprising that we were taping the South Vietnamese Embassy.

Yes, it would have been massive political disruption. But all the same, I tend to think it would have been worth it.

You're assuming that releasing the recordings will actually cost Nixon the election. That's far from a certain result since the Nixon campaign is bound to claim the recording is a fake, and Johnson has no quick way to prove the recording is authentic unless either Ms. Chennault or the South Vietnamese ambassador authenticate the recording (which neither would have any incentive to do.) The whole thing could easily backfire on Humphrey, and lead to Nixon winning a larger victory than he did IOTL.

The proxy war in Vietnam wasn't helping relations between the U.S. and USSR and to the extent that it involved brinkmanship, that distinctly was not good. And 20,000 more U.S. soldiers died between '69 and '73, a lot more people died in Vietnam.

Even if Humphrey wins the election it is very unlikely that peace is going to come to Vietnam anytime soon. The South Vietnamese government hardly needed Nixon to tell them to oppose the Paris Peace Conference, and it would be very difficult for President Humphrey to quickly force the South Vietnamese to the table. 1969 isn't 1973. The American people still wanted a honorable peace in Vietnam in 1969 (opinion polls in March of 1969 showed only 19% of the country favored ending the war as soon as possible), so there are limits to how hard Humphrey could pressure the South Vietnamese. Furthermore, I don't think Humphrey even ever advocated an immediate withdraw of U.S. troops from Vietnam, so you probably still get something akin to Vietnamization with a gradual draw down of U.S. troops. (Though President Humphrey presumably won't attack Cambodia or Laos.)

Nixon's previously secret bombing and then 1970 invasion of Cambodia was a destabilizing factor and contributing factor to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who between 1975 and '78 killed approximately two million persons.

Maybe, but wasn't the Khmer Rouge already becoming increasingly powerful in Cambodia even before the 1970 invasion? I think they would have a pretty good chance of taking over Cambodia in any timeline where South Vietnam falls.
 
The (North) Vietnamese were the only reason the US got involved in Cambodia in the first place. . .
Although I do believe in a mixed economic system, I'm not a great fan of the communists, more so for how they believe by making a religion out of the whole thing.

I do disagree with the old cold war days where we seemingly believed that communism was an uniquely bad ideology, and thus it was worthwhile to prop up any old dictator no matter how bad.
 
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