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The recent retraversal by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of their Watergate reportage is a welcome, albeit flawed, corrective to the decades of efforts by Nixon and his cheerleaders to rewrite history.
I say “flawed” because it is not entirely correct. For example, there is this passage:
On June 17, 1971 — exactly one year before the Watergate break-in — Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.
“You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting.
“Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions.
“Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said.
“Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
[...]
For reasons that have never been made clear, the break-in apparently was not carried out.
Now, Nixon did order — repeatedly — that the safe at the Brookings Institute be blown and the file stolen. The file, however, a) wasn’t there anymore, and b) didn’t just contain what Woodward and Bernstein says it did, but something much more dangerous as far as Nixon was concerned. As Robert Parry reports:
In the article, Woodward and Bernstein take note of the Oval Office discussion on June 17, 1971, regarding Nixon’s eagerness to break into Brookings in search of the elusive file, but they miss its significance referring to it as a file about Johnson’s “handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.”
That bombing halt – ordered by Johnson on Oct. 31, 1968 – was part of a larger initiative to achieve a breakthrough with North Vietnam to end the war, which had already claimed more than 30,000 American lives and countless Vietnamese. To thwart the peace talks, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott those talks and thus deny Democrat Hubert Humphrey a last-minute surge in support, which likely would have cost Nixon the election.
Rostow’s “The ‘X’ Envelope,” which was finally opened in 1994 and is now largely declassified, reveals that Johnson had come to know a great deal about Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage from FBI wiretaps. In addition, tapes of presidential phone conversations, which were released in 2008, show Johnson complaining to key Republicans about the gambit and even confronting Nixon personally.
In other words, the file that Nixon so desperately wanted to find was not primarily about how Johnson handled the 1968 bombing halt but rather how Nixon’s campaign obstructed the peace talks by giving assurances to South Vietnamese leaders that Nixon would get them a better result.
Let me repeat that last part, so it sinks in:
In other words, the file that Nixon so desperately wanted to find was not primarily about how Johnson handled the 1968 bombing halt but rather how Nixon’s campaign obstructed the peace talks by giving assurances to South Vietnamese leaders that Nixon would get them a better result.
That’s right, folks: Richard Milhous Nixon, our thirty-seventh president, ordered and committed high treason. His henchmen: Anna Chan Chennault and Henry Kissinger.
Ironically, Nixon would — much as South Vietnamese leaders wished but the American public did not — escalate and expand the war, illegally bombing Cambodia as well as North Vietnam, before finally, in 1972, agreeing to a peace settlement that was in essence the same as the one Johnson had been on the verge of working out in 1968 — four years, 22,000 American lives, and over a million Vietnamese lives earlier.
If the contents of the “X” Envelope had been released in 1971 as Nixon had feared, not only would his presidency have been put in jeopardy, but — if the full letter of the law had been pursued against him as vigorously as Republicans pursued Bill Clinton for the non-scandals of Whitewater and Lewinsky — his life might have been as well. Article Three, Section Three of the United States Constitution states the following:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
And what is the penalty for persons found guilty of treason? This:
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
No wonder Nixon was so anxious to find that file.
Now, note well — this is not something that was invented out of thin air by a conspiracy theorist. It is all quite well documented. On May 14, 1973, Rostow typed a three-page “memorandum for the record” summarizing the secret file that Johnson had amassed on the Nixon campaign’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks in Paris, sabotage done to secure for Nixon the 1968 election victory; you can read Rostow’s memo here, here, and here, courtesy of Consortium News. The opening and first paragraph of the memo, shown in the picture above, reads as follows: “The attached file contains the information available to me and (I believe) the bulk of the information available to President Johnson on the activities of Mrs. Chennault and other Republicans just before the presidential election of 1968.”
Yet there has been not a breath of this news in any US establishment paper, radio or TV network — and yet the establishment media goes out of its way to transmit bogus GOP-launched smears against Democrats, such as the “Chinagate/Buddhist Temple” affair whose most legitimately scandalous (and thus relatively underreported) part is the fact that James Smith, the Republican FBI agent at the heart of it, was having an affair with Katrina “Parlor Maid” Leung, longtime California Republican Party activist and even-longer-time spy for China.
Something to show to your FOX-watching friends and neighbors who still think the rest of the media is somehow “liberal”.
41 Comments
And Kissinger has been awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Medal of Freedom.
Ford’s pardon of Nixon was the worst thing he did and truly set in motion the whole ‘imperial presidency’ routine. Just completely fracked up the idea of being ‘a nation of laws, not men’.
Exactly.
Of course, one of the excuses used to justify this is “the Democrats were punished for Watergate and lost big in the 1974 and 1976 elections”, which is a lie. They cleaned up in both ’74 and ’76, and lost the White House in 1980 mainly because of Teddy’s ill-advised primary challenge and because of the Reagan campaign’s dealings with the Iranian mullahs to keep the hostages under lock and key so Jimmy Carter would lose the election.
Nixon was once nominated for the Nobel War Prize – during the bombing of Cambodia!
When, at the height of the Vietnam War, days before the 1968 Presidential Election, Johnson halted the bombing, though I was only 12-years-old, I could see that timing showed it to be an electioneering stunt rather than a sincere move.
How did that shenanigan work out for General Thieu?
Which is yet another example of conservative/Republican treason.
In most things, you can predict what the Right in the US is doing by the accusations they hurl at liberals. Stealing elections at the ballot box, “treason”, seeking political hegemony by public policy, strict ideological allegiance and affinity, secret conspiracies, and strains of totalitarianism are all the things the Glenn Blecks of the world hurl at the left, but they are all veritably what the Right does routinely.
-stewartm
That Kissinger sabotaged the talks has been known for years, and the assumption that it was on Nixon’s behalf was understood. This just verifies what has been presumed to be not only fact but common knowledge. Sadly, if an American President or his advisers commit treason or war crimes, he generally gets…a Nobel prize…Medal of Freedom…and while we’re on about republicans sabotaging the United States, Reagan and Iran, Iran/Contra, let’s all have a look at the republicans intentionally crashing the American economy. I’m all for giving them all Nobel prizes and Medal of Freedom, and hanging them…before or after, doesn’t matter.
PW, you are so 2007. We all should “look forward, not back.” All that does is dredge up all of the rotten things that were done in the PAST. We are now in 2012, and have not looked back to see any thing that was done in the last four or five years. Our leaders are on top of things now as they were in the past. I can’t see anything but the fluffy clouds ahead.
Ford looked forward. Obama looked forward. Any illegal blow jobs go down, however…
While Nixon’s people did certainly help convince the South Vietnamese government to scuttle the peace talks I think it is fair to say that it didn’t take much convincing. For the plan then, as in the 73 final agreement, was the death knell of South Vietnam. Both plans allowed the NVA, the North Vietnamese army, to maintain a presence in the South, as the Americans withdrew. It was assumed in both cases, by us, the North would then press on with the war, ignoring elections and other niceties, and unify the country by force. After a “decent interval” mind you.
Adding to the complexity was that Johnson hated Humphrey so much he in no discernible way did anything to help his election chances so it is doubtful the election was on Johnson’s mind by pushing for the deal. One can guess, or I can anyway, Johnson was thinking about what became of the 20+K dead Americans that ensued with the wars continuation. Which come to think about it is the most important point.
The first October Surprise.
But not the last.
Funny how the GOP operatives so love Paris for their treason.
What is most interesting about this is the Rostow “X” Memorandum. It essentially says that J. Edgar Hoover wiretapped a candidate for President of the United States.
There were some things that we knew back then and took for granted. One of those was the J. Edgar Hoover played politics with the FBI to increase its and his power. He despised the Kennedy family; did not attend the funeral of either John or Robert. But he got along well with both Johnson and Nixon.
Wonder what he was passing to Nixon.
I believe the Democrats share the blame on this one, at least a measure of it. They could have used their control of Congress to investigate and publicize Nixon’s treason, but felt “the poor man had suffered enough.” The Republicans never observe that principle when the shoe is on the other foot, but that’s what makes the Republicans Republicans and the Democrats Democrats.
Technically, neither of these cases is “treason” per se: Nixon/Kissinger were giving assurances to our *allies* (the S. Vietnam govt), not our enemies, and neither the U.S. or Iran had declared a state of hostilities during the embassy hostage crisis. (Remember, the hostage-takers were allegedly “students” and not part of the Iranian government/military.)
If you could prove that Reagan’s people spoke directly to the “students”, you could charge them as accessories to (dozens of counts of) kidnapping. And you might be able to claim that Nixon/Kissinger were acting as agents of the “Republic of Viet Nam” and charge them with espionage, but since they weren’t giving actual information, just promises, that’s a little dicey.
Make no mistake, scummy disloyal behavior in both cases. But perhaps not enough to earn a firing squad.
I also think that the “imperial presidency” was an issue before Ford’s Pardon, given how often the term was used while Nixon was in power. It might date to the debate over the passing of the War Powers Act, or perhaps about Nixon’s impounding of funds voted by Congress for programs he didn’t support. (Perhaps it even goes back to the Johnson days.) But the Pardon was the height of authoritarian arrogance, absolutely.
You forget that it took Republicans like Howard Baker signing on to the investigation to even get Watergate investigated. The Republican Party was much different in its leadership in the 1960s and the 1970s than it is today. Most of the hard-nosed Republicanism we see today came out of the folks who were in the Nixon White House or executive agencies.
The other thing to note is the the Nixon White House invented the POW-MIA issue to turn the public around on the Vietnam War, and it worked. It worked so well that there are conspiracy theory folks still making money selling books about how the US sold out the POW-MIAs. And the POW-MIA organization flag still flies at public events.
In truth, the imperial Presidency was created by the legislation passed in the Truman administration when the Republicans held the Congress. Truman’s refusal to get a declaration of war for the Korean War was probably the first assertion of unitary executive powers. But Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy used the imperial Presidency so skillfully that the public went along with it, in part out of fear. That fell apart with Johnson’s overreach on Vietnam, completely ignoring warnings about a land war in Asia. Nixon then brought the imperial Presidency home in terms of stifling dissent, a position that he won office with 1946. Nixon was all about the Red Scare.
Exactly. “Chinagate” was the perfect example of that.
A-yep. The Republican Party has been ruled for the past four decades by either the Nixon clique or the Tea Partiers, both of which hate relatively decent Republicans like, for instance, Lowell Weicker, who they never forgave for being one of the strongest GOP voices calling for Nixon’s accountability. It took them until 1988, but they finally got rid of him in favor of a corporatist Democrat named (wait for it) Joe Lieberman.
I’d forgot about that. Didn’t it turn out that most POW-MIAs were actually troops known to have been killed in action but who were listed as POW-MIA by sympathetic COs so their widows and families (who were often quite poor) could keep getting their spouses’ paychecks?
One wonders how Watergate would have panned out had Hoover managed to live another year or two.
Thanks for this peace. I love it for its clarity and laying out more the extent of dirty tricks.
I wish any of the PTB would be outraged enough to want to look around, even look back,to address some of the dirty tricks that have been going on and continue. Wouldn’t you think there is someone in Congress with enough conscience to say these things are wrong and illegal…even worse than Clinton having sex with that woman. How liberating to hear a call for truth & investigation and accountability. Here we are looking at the Nixon years: still shocking, illegal, and important.
Treason is an especially difficult charge to prove, and I’m not sure the facts here would fully support it. It seems like Nixon violated the Logan Act, a law created specifically to address this situation. Unauthorized persons are barred by this law from conducting foreign policy on behalf of the United States. Going after Nixon would would have been an appropriate use of this law, as opposed to using it to intimidate NGO’s and intellectuals who don’t support your views.
Read the memo. They were a lot closer than has been publicly stated.
Hmm, so Johnson knew that Nixon was violating the Logan Act (a private citizen conducting their own foreign policy) because of illegal wiretaps? Now that’s kind of interesting.
As noted above, it wasn’t treason because Nixon was giving aid and comfort to our allies and not our enemies. That Johnson knew about this and didn’t denounce Nixon over it during the campaign does add credence to the view that he preferred Nixon over Humphrey. Indeed, Johnson’s right hand man, the phenomenally talented John Connally, later became Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury and then chairman of Democrats for Nixon in 1972.
Everyone liked Connally. EVERYONE. Nixon wanted to appoint Connally VP to replace Spiro Agnew. What got in the way was a DC bribery indictment by the Watergate prosecutors (he’d been Johnson’s right hand man, of course he did it). At trial, Connally’s character witnesses were… Lady Bird Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, Barbara Jordan and Billy Graham. Naturally he was acquitted (“What is your work at the present time, sir?” asked [defense lawyer Edward Bennett] Williams. “I am an evangelist, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ all over the world,” replied Graham. From the jury box came a distinctly audible “A-a-men.” It was the elderly black lady who had come to the jury voir dire carrying a Bible. Williams had to turn away from the jury to hide his smile.). EVERYONE. :o)
Nixon’s Asian counterparts have been far more willing to admit the truth of what he did:
Interestingly, George Herbert Walker Bush was one of Ambassador Diem’s Republican contacts — which as Parry notes is quite provocative in view of Bush’s later connection to the Reagan camp’s reported negotiations with the Iranians to keep the American hostages held until Jimmy Carter, who had put his re-election campaign on hold precisely so he could try to free these hostages, was defeated in the 1980 election:
The idea, planted by Republicans trying to explain away Nixon’s actions, that LBJ somehow preferred Nixon to Humphrey and thus let Nixon get away with it is, to put it mildly, untrue — Johnson in fact tried frantically to undo Nixon’s sabotage once he found out about it:
Why didn’t Johnson go public? At the time it was happening, he thought it would do serious harm to the country, and shatter faith in democracy. As he told Everett Dirksen: “I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter of this importance. I don’t want to do that [go public].”
As Parry says:
The Democrats, for good or ill, have never fought anywhere near as dirtily as have the Republicans. Republicans treat decency as weakness and act accordingly. Nixon, emboldened by getting away with the Paris Peace Talks sabotage that let him win the 1968 election, went on to dirty-tricks Ed Muskie out of the 1972 presidential race, which meant he got to face, and handily defeat, George McGovern.
Now we know how he got rewarded by heading the CIA, which set him up to help Reagan and gave him a huge Rolodex–an asset that he no doubt used to help Junior.
By the way, the story was nearly broken by a Christian Science Monitor reporter, Beverly Deepe, back in late October/early November of 1968:
What happened? Her editors at the Monitor took her scoop and squashed it:
I truly wonder how history is going to really treat this nation. We confiscated this nation from the native inhabitants, maintained religious quotas, and subjugated a whole race of human beings.
We fought wars and created a unique document of governance, yet we commit atrocities as bad as the most contemptible leaders of other countries.
One day a good historical book will be written and those who are revered will be seen as truly contemptible as leaders.
If you look at the films and stills from the McCarthy hearings, there was Nixon passing papers up to Hoover as he advised “tail gunner Joe”.
Bingo!
Great post
And very true about POW-MIA
In the late 70′s I was the actuary in the room in discussions with the Pentagon on POW-MIA death benefits – The Pentagon did not want USAA (not my company) and USLICO (now part ING and at the time my company) (the two major insurers of military personnel at the time outside of the Pru and MET) to declare them dead and pay off the benefit, so we went into negotiations as to “interest to date from time taken/missing” that would be paid on the death benefit when the Pentagon finally declared a MIA-POW dead. Meanwhile the Pentagon paid salary and provided family benefits.
Doesn’t make MIA’s an invented issue, but does explain why it lasted so long.
You are referring to Reagan’s team reaching a deal with Iran to not release the embassy hostages till after the 1980 election. I was going to note that also.
And when one of the faithful bring up the subject (suggesting that there are still some US servicemen alive being held in Vietnam) I tell them, “You know, there are MIAs from the *Civil War* still unaccounted for. Think we should search Illinois for Confederate prisoners or Georgia for Union ones?”
(Though I think it’s possible that some US servicemen might have taken a Vietnamese bride and decided to stay. Isolated cases of that always happen too.
That’s analogous to the 50-year old missing “kids” that you see posted at WalMarts (I shit you not, they do have “kids” listed in their 40s and 50s. Doesn’t it ever occur to them that these either are dead, or left home never wanting to return as adults, and we should just leave it be??)
-stewartm
Great post and thread!
Precisely why can’t woodward and bernstein say this outloud?? I know woodward just wouldn’t he’s been conned by the repugs. But Bernstein has been far more critical of the bush ad. It seems that he would at least have some motivation to set the record straight. Why don’t they say anything about this? What would happen to them at this point in their careers? What the hell is going on to censor our press.
The comprador’s tune.
Of course, because they are the lesser of evil.
Good cop, bad cop, comrade.
Intellectual authoritarians love this move and somehow Amerikkan culture is supposed to be so dim-witted that they can’t agree that it’s a problem. When you go for empire, dear dumb fucks, the worst rise to the top (and that includes the tribe that must be master).
Is all of this a big surprise? Nixon’s administration was a criminal enterprise. His set the example which both the Regan and Bush II administrations followed. Reagan was dealing with the Iran to undermine Carter. He too should have been convicted of treason and I don’t know why the DOJ refused to pursue the matter. Now the Republicans think the senile old bastard’s image belongs on money or Mount Rushmore. Dubya lied us into a war and made all kinds of backroom deals that undermined the average American.
The Republicans now are trying to rewrite history. Joe McCarthy was misunderstood and was really an American hero. Texas is already attempting to rewrite history books. I thought only Nazi’s used this tatic. Pretty soon they’ll brain wash the public into believing that Dubya was a courageous hero and genius. It was the “black” guy who came after him that was the dope and caused the mess this country is in.
I did not know all of the details of Nixonian meddling with the Paris peace talks in 1968. As a historian, I thank you for posting them, PW, though I can’t say I’m at all surprised.
My dad knew LBJ, you see. He said LBJ told him that he knew “Nixon’s bunch” sabotaged the peace talks, but didn’t want to go public with it because it was, well, 1968. MLK and RFK gunned down, riots, the Chicago convention, all of that had convinced LBJ that anything that might actually trigger a real revolution had to be avoided, even if that avoidance contributed to the election of a man he really despised to the Presidency.
So thanks for confirming my dad’s story. Recc’d for that.
Wow, OB!
I love anecdotes like this.
Just a few things I didn’t see mentioned in this excellent post and thread.
Kissinger was Johnson’s lead negotiator in the Paris peace talks. It’s pretty much common knowledge that his appointment as Nixon’s Secretary of state was a quid pro quo for his work to sabotage them. True story: I actually woke up in a cold sweat, sitting bolt upright in my bed, sometime in the late 70′s – after dreaming that Kissinger the traitor had been appointed SOS for life.
If you look at the personnel from W’s administration, from Cheney to Rumsfeld, to Greenspan, even down to Fred Fielding, Nixon’s Watergate lawyer, many, if not most, of the key individuals, were retreads from the Nixon administration.