What the Johnson tapes reveal about Nixon and LBJ

Richard Nixon may have been even worse of a human being than we thought! David Taylor writes at BBC.com about the Johnson tapes. Yes, Richard Nixon was not the first to have tapes of White House conversations. LBJ originated the idea.

One of the tapes reveals that LBJ found out that Nixon talked the South Vietnamese into withdrawing from peace talks in 1968, promising them that if he got elected, they would get a better deal. North Viet Nam was on the verge of getting an end to the war, and LBJ was about to call a halt to the bombing. However,

LBJ had the The FBI bug the phone of Nixon's liasion to Viet Nam, Ambassador Anna Chennault, and the transcripts of Anna Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the South Vietnamese ambassador to "just hang on through election."

In a series of remarkable White House recordings we can hear Johnson's reaction to the news.

In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: "We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move."

He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.

When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.

The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.

Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

So, why didn't LBJ make all this public?

Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.

So they decided to say nothing.

The president did let Humphrey know and gave him enough information to sink his opponent. But by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency. So Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway.

Nixon ended his campaign by suggesting the administration war policy was in shambles. They couldn't even get the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table.

He won by less than 1% of the popular vote.

Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives - quite apart from the lives of the Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese caught up in the new offensives - before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.

The White House tapes, combined with Wheeler's interviews with key White House personnel, provide an unprecedented insight into how Johnson handled a series of crises that rocked his presidency. Sadly, we will never have that sort of insight again.

Read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668

P.S. I wonder if something similar to what happened to Humphrey also happened to Romney. Did you notice how he backed off confronting Obama on Benghazi in the last two debates?

Hat tip here: http://idontknowbut.blogspot.com/2013/03/nixon-again.html