The Atlantic has picked up an article from the BBC who released audio tapes of President Johnson regarding GOP candidate Richard Nixon’s sabotage of the October 1968 Peace talks in Paris regarding Johnson’s bid to end the US involvement in the Vietnam war.
Johnson ordered FBI wiretaps on the GOP’s candidate that actually caught Nixon manipulating the South Vietnamese Government to boost his own Presidential aspirations in coming the November Presidential election. Those wiretaps caught Nixon dispatching a GOP supporter Anna Chennault to meet with South Vietnamese President Thieu to promise Nixon would offer the South a better deal if he rejected Johnson’s invite to Paris.
The LBJ tapes were initially released in November 2008. History shows us (again) that Nixon was committing treason against the United States. This release was even picked up by Slate’s Political Gabfest, but gained no real traction in the media. Simply put – Nixon is dead.
Yet the Atlantic also revealed why Johnson did nothing about it. Clearly Johnson wanted fellow Democrat and friend Hubert Humphrey to win the 1968 Presidential election however LBJ and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford agreed the tapes would reveal FBI wiretaps that would raise a number of concerns even today. The NSA was monitoring phone calls in Saigon of US and South Vietnamese Government officials.
Remember Nixon was Eisenhower’s Vice President — stretching two terms from 1953 to 1961. The 2010 release of The Pentagon Papers document Eisenhower’s ramp-up of US intervention in Vietnam and Laos and how US intelligence was monitoring a South Vietnamese government led by Ngo Dinh Diem who gladly took millions of dollars of US aid to fight the communists but ignored our military advice.
Nixon was deeply involved with Vietnam. He was Vice President at the beginning of the US commitment of troops in 1953, he won the Presidential election in 1968 and escalated the war by secretly invading Cambodia in 1970.
Nixon extended the Vietnam war by four additional years at the cost of 20,763 American lives. He clearly understood his risk of the war ending before the election. So he manipulated a ‘better deal’ as a candidate. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Will this be Nixon’s final act of treason or will history reveal more?