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

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 quite claim . . .
That it's a cheap political trick on the part of outgoing President Johnson! In fact, the pro-Nixon, pro-Republican sectors of the public will do much of the work for Nixon in this regard. Just like voters in Georgia recently made all kinds of excuses for the behavior of Roy Moore. He lost to Doug Jones in the Senate election, but just barely.

I do, however, think it would be risky for Anna Chennault or for Louis Kung (another Nixon emissary to S. Vietnam) to claim that it wasn't their voice. That's exactly the kind of specific detail the public can really bite down on, and find not very believable.

I like the timeline the OP sets up: Nixon still wins, claims of sabotage are leaked afterwards, pressure is increased on Nixon and on the South Vietnamese government to put together a peace treaty, 50-50 odds North Vietnam then overplays its hand.
 
. . . 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.
love to have a re-roll none the less
 
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.

I was meaning more that Cambodia was being used as a sanctuary and supply route by the North Vietnamese.
 
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:H.R._Haldeman's_Notes_from_Oct._22,_1968.pdf&page=2
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Harlow - Have Dirksen & Tower blast this
Dirksen call LBJ & brace him w/this
- Any other way to monkey wrench it ?
Anything RN can do.

Rose - get her (?) Louie Kung-
going on the SVN - tell him hold firm
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Haldeman's notes from Oct. 22, 1968

Yes, this is a smoking gun.

(Haldeman used a more casual sign for 'and' which I can't duplicate. Rose presumably is Rose Mary Woods who was Nixon's longtime secretary, and Louis Kung was a Chinese businessman.)

And it's fine for Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois) or Senator John Tower (R-Texas) to say a proposed peace treaty gives up too much or anything else they wish to publicly say. It is not cool for candidate Nixon to use Anna Chennault or Louis Kung to secretly communicate with the government of South Vietnam. And notice how Nixon and Haldeman morphed from one to the other.
 

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Purges, Gulags and Party created Famines say 'Hi'
If you're going to preach on Cambodia, please give me a chance to say "Amen." And I will say "Amen, Brother or Sister."

Collectivizing farming was tied to the specifics of communist ideology and that was a major contributing factor to the starvation.

Then the Khmer Rouge had the crazy idea that they could automatically triple agricultural production if they merely willed it or if they tried hard enough. They exported rice because no one wanted to admit lower numbers. When there was lower production, somehow it automatically meant sabotage somewhere. All this I attribute to the fanatical way the ideas were believed. That is, the context rather than the content.
 
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