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Related: About this forumLBJ nailing Nixon on the Peace Talks derailment:
Even Tricky-Traitor Dick seems more presidential than Cadet Shitgibbon Bone Spurs...
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LBJ nailing Nixon on the Peace Talks derailment: (Original Post)
Dennis Donovan
May 2018
OP
no_hypocrisy
(46,019 posts)1. But for the fact that Nixon did this BEFORE he was inaugurated,
he could have/should have been impeached for this by itself.
The Wielding Truth
(11,411 posts)2. Wow... Peace is a work in progress and they understood the terms.
Mc Mike
(9,111 posts)3. Kinda treasonous, Nixon. But you are a repug, and all.
Par for the course.
shadowmayor
(1,325 posts)4. Treason
Nixon committed treason by offering the North Vietnamese a better deal if they stalled the peace talks. That is treason. LBJ knew about it, and decided to keep it quiet. Fast forward to 1980 and Reagan's people pulled the same stunt with the Iranian government to undermine Carter's chances for re-election. And the Democrats never bring this up???
Dennis Donovan
(18,770 posts)5. We should, at every turn
Rhiannon12866
(204,695 posts)6. That's an excellent point.
It's clearly a pattern. And there were American lives at stake in both cases.
greenman3610
(3,947 posts)7. the OP call follows previous day's call from LBJ to Sen. Dirkson (R)
LBJ tells Dirkson that someone on Nixon's campaign, (maybe Laird or Mitchell)
is making representations through an intermediary ("the old China crowd", meaning
Chinese govt in exile, Taiwan, Anna Chenault)
Described here in Baltimore Sun.
-----
The Nixon campaign feared that Thieu's presence would result in a deal that would end the war and swing the election to Humphrey. President Lyndon Johnson had ordered a halt in the bombing of Hanoi, also raising those hopes. But when Thieu indeed stayed away, the talks collapsed and Nixon was elected by 0.7 percent of the vote.
At the time, Humphrey had received from LBJ surveillance by the FBI of Chennault visits to the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington to urge Thieu not to go to the Paris meeting. The FBI reported she had gone to the embassy, then to the Nixon campaign headquarters and back to the embassy. But Humphrey declined to make the information public, knowing it was classified, and he incredibly doubted Nixon would be capable of engaging in such a nefarious undertaking.
In Humphrey's later memoir, he wrote: "I wonder if I should have blown the whistle on Anna Chennault and Nixon. He must have known about her call to Thieu. I wish I could have been sure. Damn Thieu. Dragging his feet this past weekend hurt us. I wonder if that call did it. If Nixon knew. Maybe I should have blasted them anyway."
LBJ aide Joe Califano later said Humphrey's failure to use the intelligence on Chennault "became the occasion for a lasting rift" between Johnson and his vice president. "That refusal really tore it," Mr. Califano told me. "Johnson thought Hubert had no balls, no spine, no toughness." LBJ himself told Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen he considered Nixon's actions an act of "treason," as a possible violation of the little-known Logan Act forbidding individual citizens to inject themselves into the conduct of foreign policy.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-op-0410-witcover-chenault-20180406-story.html
geardaddy
(24,926 posts)8. And Kissinger was in on it, too.