"This is treason": Nixon, Vietnam and the "sordid story" of the Chennault Affair
Remember when a Republican nominee colluded with a foreign government to win the presidential election?
KEN HUGHES
09.23.2017•9:00 AM
The Republican nominee colluded with a foreign government to win the presidential election. The nominee was Richard Nixon, the foreign government was South Vietnam, and the election was 1968. This “sordid story,” as then-President Lyndon B. Johnson described it to Nixon (in a telephone conversation LBJ secretly tape-recorded), is one of the many narrative threads masterfully woven by directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick into episode seven of "The Vietnam War," titled “The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968–May 1969).” LBJ did not exaggerate. “Sordid” is a mild way to describe the ruthlessness with which Nixon put his political interests above all else, including the law, the truth and the lives of American soldiers.
For most of 1968, Nixon was the presidential race’s clear front-runner. In a year of violence — the Tet offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the riots in Chicago and so many other American cities — Nixon’s candidacy hearkened back to the tranquil years of the Eisenhower administration, when Nixon had been Vice President. Candidate Nixon promised to restore law and order at home (a theme that played on racist fears as well as a real rise in the crime rate) and to achieve peace with honor abroad. He saddled his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, with all of the baggage of the 1960s — crime, disorder, Vietnam. By September of 1968, Nixon led Humphrey in the Gallup poll by 15 points.
But Nixon ran scared. He realized that President Johnson had it in his power to do one thing that could make Nixon lose. In March, Johnson’s popularity had skyrocketed when he announced that he was placing nearly 90 percent of North Vietnam off limits to aerial and naval bombardment. At that time, Johnson offered to stop the bombing completely if the North agreed to prompt, serious peace talks. This was Nixon’s nightmare: that Johnson would announce the end of the bombing and the start of peace talks before Election Day, causing the president’s standing in the polls to rise — and lifting Vice President Humphrey’s with it. Nixon was not going to let that happen if he could help it.
Publicly, Nixon said the right things. Accepting the Republican nomination, he said, “We all hope in this room that there’s a chance that current negotiations may bring an honorable end to that war, and we will say nothing during this campaign that might destroy that chance.” That was the first presidential promise he would break.
By the time he made it, Nixon had already set up his own private backchannel to the South Vietnamese government. To conceal his hand, he used a cutout, a top Republican fundraiser named Anna C. Chennault. She introduced Nixon to South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem the month before the Republican convention. At that time, Nixon told Diem that Chennault would be his representative to the South Vietnamese government. Secrecy was paramount, so much so that Nixon concealed the fact that the meeting took place from his own Secret Service detail.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/09/23/this-is-treason-nixon-vietnam-and-the-sordid-story-of-the-chennault-affair/
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