Politics It turns out that Nixon was worse than anyone thought

A bit of history got released to the world recently.

BBC Article: BBC News - The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'

Nixon wasn't the only president to record the calls on the white house phone. LBJ did it before him. Among the events captured in these recordings is a scandal about Nixon that was never brought to light. While he was running for president, Nixon sabotaged the 1968 Vietnam peace talks.

According to the tapes (of the LBJ white house talking about this), Nixon sent his senor campaign advisor Anna Chennault to convince the South Vietnamese to back out of the talks. The line was that they would get a much better deal if Nixon was elected.

Naturally, the US was bugging the South Vietnamese ambassador's phone. When this information reached the white house, LBJ had the Nixon campaign put under surveillance and found that Nixon himself was behind it

The South Vietnamese withdrew from talks after Chennault asked them to "just hang on through the election." Afterwards, Nixon won the election after claiming that the Democrats' Vietnam policy was a shambles because they couldn't even get the South to stay at the negotiating table.

Nixon escalated the war, continuing for 5 years and resulting in the losses of 22,000 American lives and probably in the neighborhood of 200,000 - 350,000 Vietnamese lives.

I suppose that makes this the most expensive election in US history.

The tape recorders of modern technology are email and text message servers. I wonder if any administration has set fire to the servers on the way out the door.

 

Think that's bad??? Just wait till all the truth about the Bush boys gets out!

 

The article also mentions that Johnson almost stormed the 68 convention to announce his re-entry and run for a second term. It would have been a massive game change.

 

Actually, there is something that can be done. We can strike down the attempts by many to rehabilitate Nixon through the rose-coloured glasses of history.

And yes, we can also take a much harder look at Cheney and his shenanigans (and perhaps even Obama's curious actions with drone strikes).

 

There's a story out that Nixon's paranoia about evidence of this eventually led to the Watergate break ins. The same report claims that Reagan's campaign did the same thing to subvert negotiations during the Iran hostage episode In 1980 and it started the train of events that we call the Iran/Contra scandal.

I haven't located the link yet. When I do, I'll post it.