The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon’s ‘treason’
“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.”
LBJ on the phone to Senator Richard Russell.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.
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.
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Nixon went on to become president and eventually signed a Vietnam peace deal in 1973Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations – he planned to fly into the 1968 Democratic Convention and win the presidential nomination. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks… but said nothing.
The 1968 convention, held in Chicago, was a complete shambles. Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters clashed with Mayor Richard Daley’s police, determined to force the party to reject Johnson’s Vietnam war strategy.
As they taunted the police with cries of “The whole world is watching!” one man in particular was watching very closely. Lyndon Baines Johnson was at his ranch in Texas, having announced five months earlier that he wouldn’t seek a second term.
The president was appalled at the violence and although many of his staff sided with the students, and told the president the police were responsible for “disgusting abuse of police power,” Johnson picked up the phone, ordered the dictabelt machine to start recording and congratulated Mayor Daley for his handling of the protest.
The president feared the convention delegates were about to reject his war policy and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey. So he placed a series of calls to his staff at the convention to outline an astonishing plan. He planned to leave Texas and fly into Chicago.
Tricky Dicky: The White House Tapes and Nixon’s Treason
