Nixon's Treason, Media Silence--The Dirtiest Tricks Of All

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Dec 14, 2008 at 10:30

And for quality journalism, it's "Context! Context! Context!"

But you'd never know it, for the simple reason that we don't have good journalism.  We have the other kind.

Case in point: the recently released tapes of LBJ talking about Nixon's treason in sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks in October and early November of 1968, so he could win the election. AP ran a story on it, and it's just about all the media notice there was.  Context has it none.

Oh, sure, it was possible to pick up coverage from the NY Times or Washington Post--they both ran the AP piece themselves.  There was a time when they'd be embarrassed to do such a thing.  But after the last two or three decades they are utterly beyond embarrassment.  Actual journalist Robert Parry, who broke the first story about the Iran/Contra scandal six months before the rest of the DC press corps caught on (working for AP at the time), wrote this about AP's story:

In line with how the mainstream U.S. press corps has treated this controversy for decades, the AP article ignores the substantial body of evidence that Nixon and his presidential campaign did sabotage the peace talks, out of concern that a last-minute agreement would hurt Nixon and help his rival, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

But instead of citing any of this evidence--which first surfaced in Symour Hersh's Kissinger biography, The Price of Power, in 1983--AP makes it seem like LBJ was just ranting against a political enemy, in a baseless Nixonian manner.

"Context! Context! Context!"

New tapes show LBJ worried about Vietnam, Nixon
By KELLEY SHANNON - Dec 4, 2008

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - In the last months of his administration, President Lyndon Johnson voiced worry over the Vietnam peace talks and stridently suggested that associates of Richard Nixon were attempting to keep South Vietnam away from the table until after the 1968 election, recordings of telephone conversations released Thursday show.

"This is treason," Johnson said, referring to people close to Nixon, during a conversation with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen. The Democratic president never accused the Republican who would succeed him of treason, but said, "If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the (peace) conference table, that's going to be his responsibility."

Nixon spoke with Johnson in another recorded phone conversation in November 1968 and tried to assure him that he supported Johnson's efforts to bring South Vietnam to a Paris peace conference with North Vietnam. He said he would do whatever Johnson wanted him to do to help before or after the election.

"I just wanted you to know that I feel very, very strongly about this," Nixon said. "We've got to get them to Paris, or we can't have a peace."

Johnson agreed. Johnson had cited news articles and private information he'd been given that he said made him think Nixon's associates were trying to persuade the South Vietnamese government not to join the peace talks until after the election. Progress on peace in Vietnam before the November election presumably would have given Hubert Humphrey - the Democratic presidential nominee and Johnson's vice president - a boost with voters.

Allegations of Nixon's influence in the peace conference have been reported before, but the tapes provide a look at how Johnson handled the issue behind the scenes, said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor and expert on the presidency at the University of Texas in Austin.

That's it, "Allegations of Nixon's influence in the peace conference have been reported before," following quotes from another tape of Nixon professing his innocence, as if Nixon never told a lie in his life.  That's the AP version of context.

In sharp contrast, here's what Parry himself wrote about that body of evidence:

According to that evidence, the Nixon campaign countered Johnson's peace initiative by dispatching Anna Chennault, an anti-communist Chinese leader, to carry messages to the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen van Thieu. Chennault's messages advised Thieu that a Nixon presidency would give him a more favorable result than he would get from Johnson.

Journalist Seymour Hersh described the initiative sketchily in his 1983 biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power. Hersh reported that U.S. intelligence "agencies had caught on that Chennault was the go-between between Nixon and his people and President Thieu in Saigon. ... The idea was to bring things to a stop in Paris and prevent any show of progress."

'On Behalf of Mr. Nixon'

In her own autobiography, The Education of Anna, Chennault acknowledged that she was the courier. She quoted Nixon aide John Mitchell as calling her a few days before the 1968 election and telling her: "I'm speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It's very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you made that clear to them."

In 1995, reporter Daniel Schorr uncovered more evidence, decoded cables that U.S. intelligence had intercepted from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington. According to that information:
On Oct. 23, 1968, Ambassador Bui Dhien cabled Saigon with the message that "many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged me to stand firm." On Oct. 27, he wrote, "The longer the present situation continues, the more favorable for us. ... I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage."

On Nov. 2, Thieu withdrew from his tentative agreement to sit down with the Vietcong at the Paris peace talks, destroying Johnson's last hope for a settlement. Though Johnson and his top advisers knew of Nixon's gambit, they kept it secret from the public.

Anthony Summers's 2000 book, The Arrogance of Power, provided the fullest account of the Chennault initiative, including the debate within Democratic circles about what to do with the evidence.

Both Johnson and Humphrey believed the information - if released to the public - could assure Nixon's defeat.

"In the end, though, Johnson's advisers decided it was too late and too potentially damaging to U.S. interests to uncover what had been going on," Summers wrote. "If Nixon should emerge as the victor, what would the Chennault outrage do to his viability as an incoming President? And what effect would it have on American opinion about the war?"

Not only is there no reasonable doubt about this act of treason, there's a vital point of American political history here as well.  Note how the pattern of Democrats covering for GOP lawlessness "for the good of the country"--all the way up to the point of treason--was already firmly entrenched lo those four long decades ago.  It was, in fact, key to Nixon's electoral success, and all that followed from it.  It goes without saying that it could well be again.

"Context! Context! Context!"

This is also, of course, the deep back background for all the lawlessness of the Bush Regime, both through the example it set, and through the people who grew up politically in the environment created out of this campaign and the administration that followed.

Cheney and Rumsfeld joined the Nixon Administration in its first year, 1969.  In 1975. they became top Ford aides, embittered by Nixon's fall from power, and opposed to Kissinger's realpolitik.  At 44, Rumsfeld became the youngest secretary of defense in U.S. history. Cheney became White House chief of staff.

In 1980, another GOP challenger, Ronald Reagan, came to power via similar subtrefuge, later dubbed, "The October Surprise".  Emissaries of his campaign sabatoged talks between the Carter Administration and the Iranian revolutionary regime, aimed at obtaining the release of the hostages at the Tehran embassy.  They ensured that the hostages would not be released, dooming Carter at the polls.

The first tell about this treasonous plot came on January 20, 1981, when the Iranians released the hostages almost simultaneously with Reagan's swearing in.  But no one batter an eye.  Throughout the 1980s, bits and pieces started leaking out, but it was never seriously investigated.  Finally, in 1992, Congress decided to investigate.

The man chosen to head the investigation was Indiana Democrat Lee Hamilton, who had already shown he could be trusted by the way he held back the Iran/Contra investigations, even as he rushed forward to get quick, immunized testimony from Oliver North, which then made it impossible for the Iran/Contra special prosecutor, life-long Republican Lawrence Walsh, to successfully prosecute North.  (North was convicted at trial, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.  Representing North in this appeal was the ACLU.)

By Janury 1993, the Hamilton investigation into the October Surprise was wrapping up without any firm conclusion.  The final report was ready for the printers.  Then a bombshell hit: Russian intelligence sent a report confirming the central allegations.  Parry has written about this extensively, as he discovered the buried Russian report a couple of years later, in a bathroom that had been converted into a storage room.  (See his October Surprise X-Files Archive.)

Once again, the Democrats choose to bury the evidence of GOP treason.  Bill Clinton was just about to be sworn in, and they didn't want to stir up a controversy that would distract from getting things done.

We all know how well that turned out.

In short, there is nothing distant and irrelevant about the LBJ tapes just released.  They should be front page news.  But the NY Times and Washington Post can't even be bothered to write their own stories about the tapes, much less place them in historical context.

They don't do context.

We do.

In our basements.

In our PJs.