The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'

The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'
BBC
By David Taylor
March 22, 2014

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations - he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but said nothing.

After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations none of his successors has dared to do it. But Nixon wasn't the first.

He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency.

"They will provide history with the bark off," Johnson told his wife, Lady Bird.

The final batch of tapes released by the LBJ library covers 1968, and allows us to hear Johnson's private conversations as his Democratic Party tore itself apart over the question of Vietnam.

We now know...
After the Viet Cong's Tet offensive, White House doves persuaded Johnson to end the war Johnson loathed Senator Bobby Kennedy but the tapes show he was genuinely devastated by his assassination

He feared vice-president Hubert Humphrey would go soft on Vietnam if elected president The BBC's Charles Wheeler would have been under FBI surveillance when he met administration officials in 1968

In 1971 Nixon made huge efforts to find a file containing everything Johnson knew in 1968 about Nixon's skulduggery

By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks - or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had "blood on his hands".

The BBC's former Washington correspondent Charles Wheeler learned of this in 1994 and conducted a series of interviews with key Johnson staff, such as defence secretary Clark Clifford, and national security adviser Walt Rostow.

But by the time the tapes were declassified in 2008 all the main protagonists had died, including Wheeler.

Now, for the first time, the whole story can be told.

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.

At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.
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Fort Hood Shooter admits to treason?

If Hasan says he was defending Taliban leaders, doesn't that mean he just admitted to committing treason?

Fort Hood Suspect Says Rampage Was to Defend Afghan Taliban Leaders
New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: June 4, 2013

KILLEEN, Tex. — Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people, told a judge on Tuesday that he believed he was defending the lives of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan from American military personnel when he went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood here in November 2009.

Major Hasan’s remarks were the first public explanation about the motive for one of the deadliest mass shootings at an American military base. His comments came a day after the judge granted his request to release his court-appointed military lawyers so that he could represent himself.

On Monday, one of Major Hasan’s first legal maneuvers had been to ask the judge, Col. Tara A. Osborn, for a three-month delay in his trial, scheduled to begin on July 1. His primary reason in asking for the delay was to change his defense to a “defense of others.” At a new hearing on Tuesday, Colonel Osborn asked him pointedly whom he was defending.
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Nixon kept Vietnam War going for his own political gain

He got away with it. How many would still be alive today if he hadn't? Some say it is the number of servicemen and women killed afterwards, but how do you count them? Is it just the number of fallen names recorded on the panels of the Vietnam Wall since that horrible day he made an arrangement to keep the war going on? No, no justice in that number. Do you add in the number of veterans that died of their wounds? Closer but still not there. How about the ones that died of Agent Orange sprayed afterwards? Still not there yet because they are still dying of it. Then you'd have to add in their children born with it in their bodies. How about the ones that committed suicide added in? Still not there yet because they are still committing suicide. How about those that ended up homeless and died on the streets? Still not there yet because they are still dying on the streets and still dying from illnesses caused by being homeless, caused by years of being abandoned to the streets by politicians passing them off from one generation to another. What about adding in the ones that died because they had PTSD and the stress on their hearts was just too much so they passed away at a very young age? Still not there yet because all of that is still happening today. So no, the treason committed by Nixon did not end in taking lives. We just stopped caring.

LBJ Tapes Show Richard Nixon May Have Committed Treason By Sabotaging Vietnam Peace Talks
International Business Times
By Eric Brown
March 17 2013

Newly released tapes recorded during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency have confirmed long-held rumors that in 1968, then-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon worked to sabotage Vietnam War peace talks.

The LBJ tapes were recently declassified and released by the Johnson library in Austin, Texas. According to the BBC’s summary of the tapes, not only did Nixon possibly commit treason, but LBJ knew about it and decided not to expose him in the closing days of an election that Nixon barely won.

While Nixon became infamous for his tendency to record nearly every conversation during his presidency, which proved to be his undoing, he wasn’t the first commander in chief to document everything so thoroughly. In fact, Nixon seems to have gotten the idea to keep an extensive set of recordings from LBJ himself. John F. Kennedy also taped some of his meetings.

In the summer of 1968, the Paris peace talks were under way, working to find a diplomatic solution to the Vietnam War. While the talks seemed to be going well, by October, South Vietnam had dropped out, just as Johnson was about to negotiate an end to all bombings in North Vietnam. The Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, belatedly called for a bombing halt, and closed the gap with Nixon in the final days.
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