I’m gonna have to up my blood pressure medication again. Warning, Politico link:
Did Richard Nixon’s campaign conspire to scuttle the Vietnam War peace talks on the eve of the 1968 election to capture him the presidency?
Absolutely, says Tom Charles Huston, the author of a comprehensive, still-secret report he prepared as a White House aide to Nixon. In one of 10 oral histories conducted by the National Archives and opened last week, Huston says “there is no question” that Nixon campaign aides sent a message to the South Vietnamese government, promising better terms if it obstructed the talks, and helped Nixon get elected.
Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, “was directly involved,” Huston tells interviewer Timothy Naftali. And while “there is no evidence that I found” that Nixon participated, it is “inconceivable to me,” says Huston, that Mitchell “acted on his own initiative.”
Huston’s comments—transcribed and published on the web site of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California on Wednesday—are the latest twist in a longstanding tale of political skullduggery involving Nixon…
Of course, when I googled Tom Huston, this is the first thing that came up. So the argument hinges on whether we assume Huston believes the worst because he himself is (was) a fascist thug whose plans for “domestic security and control” went a little too far even for J. Edgar… or because thugs like Tom Huston are exactly the kind of people Richard Nixon, and his heirs for the last forty-odd years, have been encouraging.
Either way, I’m not sure future historians won’t consider Gerry Ford the worst president of the twentieth century, for letting Nixon’s CREEPster minions scuttle away without a full accounting of all the high crimes and misdemeanors to which ‘Watergate’ was only the tip of the iceberg.
pseudonymous in nc
Because every story about Nixon should have a link to HST’s obit of the man:
David Koch
It’s well known that Nixon used Anna Chennault as a go-between with South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen van Thieu, to sabotage of the 1968 Paris peace talks
Here’s LBJ on the phone calling it “treason” and Everett Dirksen saying, “I know”.
youtube.com/watch?v=qbEPI_9Ju0k&feature=player_detailpage#t=116
Plus LBJ discussing it with George Smathers.
youtube.com/watch?v=4Lq3i1Wm7WM
ulee
Well, Obama let Bush and his war criminal pals scurry away without holding them to account, so he could certainly be nominated for the worst president of all time. What’s good for the gander is good for the other gander.
Anthony
Beyond Watergate, I was always amazed at how big a pass Ford seemed to have gotten from historians for his complete bungling of the Mayaguez rescue attempt.
AnotherBruce
@David Koch: Thanks, this was a turning point in our history. Why LBJ did not shout this from the rooftops and expose this treasonous crap? Perhaps we’ll never know, but it was the beginning of democratic obsequiousness towards republican calumny which continues to this day. Why are our politicians so afraid of republicans? Part of it may be the money that the GOP are able to muster but I think it’s more than that.
Right now I’m wondering why Obama or really any leader of the democratic party is not making a major speech that condemns what the right wing is doing to the Bergdahl family. They do a lot of shameful things, but to me this is the worst since Terri Shiavo, in that it entails incredible cruelty for people that are suffering a trauma. These thugs (I’m looking at you Chris Wallace) need to be called out for what they are. Because the hacks at Fox are killing our nation, and we need to stop them.
So yes, LBJ set the stage for what is still happening today. He didn’t draw a line in the sand, and now there is no line that republicans are afraid to cross.
WaterGirl
Anne Laurie, if you’re up…
MSNBC has borked the old link that used to work for Steve Benen – http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com
It stopped working for me about a week ago. Now we have to use: msnbc.com/maddowblog
I really kind of hate MSNBC. Their site totally sucks and they didn’t even do the courtesy of redirecting or landing you on a page that tells you to use a different URL. They do not deserve Steve Benen.
Anne Laurie
@WaterGirl: Okay, I just tried my very first blogroll update — does the new link work for you?
NotMax
@WaterGirl
RSS feed doesn’t work for you?
msnbc.com/feeds/rss/byline/steve-benen
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
New link works for me.
Chris
@AnotherBruce:
My guess – McCarthyism. The second Red Scare pretty effectively purged the hard left from political life, while demonstrating for all the power of the hard right. The resulting imbalance has been with us pretty much ever since, as politicians live in fear of being seen as not hard right and therefore, not American enough. It wasn’t always as all-encompassing as it is now, but on foreign policy, been that way for a long time.
Fred
@AnotherBruce: Why LBJ didn’t shout it from the roof tops? In the recorded conversation with Dirksen, LBJ states that he can’t publicize this treason by a major presidential candidate because the American people would lose faith in their political system.He felt it could bring the country down.
Was LBJ rationalizing? I don’t think so. I think he believed that and I think he may have been right. Such a revelation today would probably not have disastrous effects but back in 1968 the myth of the high minded purity of political leaders was common wisdom. And LBJ’s willingness to let such an act by Nixon be buried to his own detriment shows that maybe that myth had some substance. It raises my admiration for Johnson’s integrity. I still think he should have brought the shitty little thug to justice, official and electoral but Johnson was a wiser man than I so maybe he made the right call. We would certainly live in a different world today if he had pulled the trigger.
raven
You didn’t know this???
tybee
johnson and dirksen should have said something.
if nothing more than to threaten tricky into dropping out, they should have said something.
but to let that kind of treason just go by….
tybee
@raven:
i’ve heard it before. it still boggles that they’d just let tricky get away with it.
Anne Laurie
@raven: Oh, I believed Nixon had done it — it’s just reading the cheerful Politico okay, maybe illegal probably ‘immoral’ — whatever that means — but WINNING!!! report that irks me. We got called paranoids and conspiracy theorists for forty years, and now it’s just… one more historical fact.
ElyLake
Further evidence that the last legitimately elected Republican president was Eisenhower.
– Nixon sabotaged Vietnamese peace talks
– Ford was appointed, not elected
– Reagan: October surprise deal with Iranian hostages
– Bush I wouldn’t have been president without Reagan’s presidency
– Bush II: Supreme court intervened incorrectly stopping the recount in FL
Shameful that for the last 45 years the only way for Republicans to win the White House has been by subterfuge. They know they don’t legitimately have the numbers on their side, so all these new voter-id laws are an attempt to disenfranchise enough black, brown, and poor voters so they can win again.
WaterGirl
@Anne Laurie: Yep, that works, thanks!
I can never get my RSS feed for benen to work in Leaf, so I finally gave up on it. If anyone has any tips, I would be grateful.
Sherparick
@David Koch: Yes, as one of the resident ol’farts here at Balloon Juice, this story was reported the first time during the Watergate crisis and aftermath. I recall even during Nixon’s first term there were stories that Claire Chennault had gone to the South Vietnamese and told them to stonewall as they would get a better deal with Nixon (later, they found out that Nixon would double cross them to when it served his purpose), but Nixon and Kissinger stated that she had done so without their knowledge or authority (a/k/a lied about it.). Apparently, no one at Politico knows how to “Google.” truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/13994-how-richard-nixon-sabotaged-1968-vietnam-peace-talks-to-ge…
P.S. Rick Perlstein goes into this in great detail in “Nixonland.” Essential reading. Nixon basically cause the war to last 5 more years, 25,000 more American Dead and 500,000 Vietnamese. Definitely earned his place in Dante’s ninth circle don’t you think?
C.V. Danes
If that’s the case, then what will future historians have say about Obama and the banksters?
another Holocene human
@C.V. Danes: It’s hard to prosecute something your predecessors made legal. Holder absolutely made attempts to prosecute but they really only succeeded in getting ponzi schemes. A lot, I mean a lot of little grifter fish have been prosecuted. Have you seen cnbc at night? DOJ has been busy since 2007.
J
@AnotherBruce: Couldn’t agree more. Their willingness to sacrifice the Bergdahl family on the altar of their hatred for Obama has shocked even me.
lol
@another Holocene human:
I saw it on the blogs that Obummer has done absolutely nothing and hasn’t prosecuted a single banker! (Banker being narrowly defined to exclude anyone who’s been prosecuted.)
WaterGirl
@AnotherBruce:
I thought for sure that Obama would make that speech as soon as he returned to the US.
He needs to put on his “dad” hat and scold this country for its shameful behavior.
Rex Everything
Renata Adler figured all this out in the mid-70s. books.google.com/books?id=uUoN_i0FF4QC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=renata+adler+nixon+scandal…
The Pale Scot
When you consider Veitnam ratfucking, Reagan did the same thing with Iran, then again with Iran contra, and I’m sure that someone can come up with others. How about using RICO to charge the GOP as an ongoing criminal enterprise and confiscate the holdings of its members and throw them in jail.
smintheus
Someone who worked closely with Clark Clifford on his memoirs told me back in the early ’90s that Clifford said Johnson had told him at the time that he had proof that Nixon was scuttling the peace talks.
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
Is he back in the US? I thought Bergdahl was still hospitalized in Italy.
ffredpalakon
@AnotherBruce: “Why LBJ did not shout this from the rooftops and expose this treasonous crap?” The explanation for this is multi-fold: the United States was in the middle of a war, and if this became a public issue, it would most certainly have led to hearings if not impeachment of the current president, Nixon, all while the U.S. was in a hot war. The other point is that Johnson and his aides felt that what they had was damning, but it was not necessarily sufficient – there was the possibility of doubt, and that you had to be very careful with such accusations. Note the caution in this approach with the way the current president is treated.
I am grateful to David Koch for linking to some videos I worked on, which were part of a lengthy blog post devoted to this issue, “The Treason of Richard Nixon: From Possibility To Certainty Part One”. There, the issue is looked at from the perspective of various places, including the memoirs of Nixon and Clark Clifford, as well as the possibility that Nixon’s obsession with breaking into the Brookings Institute had to do with his belief that they had proof on his sabotage of the peace talks. It also includes former national security adviser Walt Rostow’s documents giving the definitive proof of what took place. I should say that I, along with others, began looking into this expecting to end up at a point of ambivalence, he said he said stuff. Instead, the conclusion arrived was that this sabotage definitely took place, without question.
I, along with everyone else, remain indebted to Robert Parry’s work on this issue, which can be found in such posts as “LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason’” (from where I got the Rostow documents) and “Admissions on Nixon’s ‘Treason’”.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: Sorry, pronoun failure on my part. … as soon as OBAMA returned to the US.