
The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason' - youngerdryas
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668
======
gruseom
The OP leaves it unclear whether any new information has come out about this
recently, but I don't think it has. Weren't the 1968 tapes released years ago?

Robert Parry has been writing about Nixon's election campaign sabotage of the
Vietnam peace talks for years. He made the rather witty remark that it went
from "conspiracy theory" to "old news" without ever having been widely
reported.

[http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-
nixons-t...](http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-
treason/)

Johnson asked Walt Rostow to personally abscond with the files on Nixon so as
to thwart Nixon's attempts to find them. Rostow eventually sent them to the
LBJ library with a request to keep them sealed for another 50 years. Instead,
the library began declassifying them in the 90s. It might be hard to believe
this stuff, but there it is, all documented.

------
jerrya
Very interesting article. And it's telling why Johnson didn't reveal what
Nixon was doing.

 _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._

 _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._

~~~
jebblue
Johnson started the Vietnam War through a massive escalation. Nixon ended it.

~~~
noarchy
Nixon didn't exactly end it overnight. He had thousands of tons of bombs to
drop on neighbouring countries like Cambodia, first, killing untold thousands,
before things wound down.

~~~
btilly
No, but if you look at troop levels, he began the drawdown in his first year.
But his strategy was to make the North Vietnamese so scared of him that US
troops could leave. Hence the bombing.

Of course he could not publicly take credit for this, because that would have
interfered with the image he was trying to project to North Vietnam.

------
yanowitz
Is the story here that we have new corroborating evidence for what has been
well known for a long-time: Nixon and Kissinger conspired to sabotage the
peace talks?

Hitchens wrote about this in The Case Against Henry Kissinger (in the article,
<[http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/CaseAgainst1_Hit...](http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/CaseAgainst1_Hitchens.html>),
that later became a book).

------
swalsh
It really makes you curious what's going to come out in 45 years about the
iraq war, and afghanistan etc.

~~~
jebblue
Including the stuff that took place in Iraq during the 8 year reign of
Clinton. Oh, his wife was on the legal team that blew Watergate out of
proportion forcing a fine and honorable president to leave office on his own
accord. Bill, her husband didn't leave even after getting caught undermining
the US justice system. He just rode it out.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_and_conservatism_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_and_conservatism_in_Latin_America)

"In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington,
D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate
scandal.[52] Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member
Bernard Nussbaum,[35] Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the
historical grounds and standards for impeachment.[52] The committee's work
culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974."

~~~
pyre

      | honorable president to leave office on his
      | own accord
    

I'm not sure if this is a troll, or some form of satire... Calling Nixon on
"honorable President" in a discussion of an article about hard evidence that
he sabotaged peace talks for his own personal gain?

    
    
      | undermining the US justice system
    

Now who's blowing things out of proportion? He lied about having an affair. He
did so under oath, so it's perjury. Is this wrong? Yes. Is this "undermining
the US justice system?" Not really. Committing a crime is not a undermining
the justice system, no matter how much you might dislike the person.

~~~
podperson
Actually he walked a semantic tightrope in which he chose to define "sexual
relations" as sexual intercourse and the public and congress disagreed. The
larger point was that he was pursued over a personal matter by a special
prosecutor who had spent tens of millions on one or another fishing expedition
and turned up nothing of consequence.

------
podperson
Very interesting article. Nixon was truly a piece of work. But then
considering the behavior of more recent Republican administrations, at least
he seems to have been competent. (George H. w. Bush is perhaps the least
objectionable -- having neither engaged in treason nor fraudulent
warmongering. Oh, except for Panama.)

~~~
mixmastamyk
Perhaps not, he might have been involved in a similar plot:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_theory)

The evidence is not as iron-clad, but certainly in the realm of possibility.

~~~
podperson
I'm aware of this but gave him the benefit of the doubt. I want to respect one
republican president (post Teddy Roosevelt) so I can think of myself as open-
minded.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Though it was before my time, Eisenhower seems to have been pretty good. I
liked Goldwater too, though he didn't make it.

------
drags
If you're interested in learning more, "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein goes into
some depth on these and other shenanigans.

~~~
protomyth
You also get an interesting side view from Donald Rumsfeld's "Known and
Unknown" and his website <http://www.rumsfeld.com> where he is releasing
documents from that era. It's really and odd outsider-insider account. The
parts about the United States Office of Economic Opportunity should give
people pause.

------
mzr
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-
was-a...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-
crook/308699/)

<http://imgur.com/jLP4KEa>

