That the convention gravely wounded Humphrey’s election hopes is indisputable. But is there a chance it could have turned out otherwise? What if Humphrey had selected Shriver as his running mate on the final day of the convention, instead of Maine senator Edmund Muskie? Harris Wofford, for one, believes that “if Humphrey had picked Shriver, that week and the ensuing campaign might have ended differently.” Listening to radio reports and getting telephone updates in Paris, Shriver was appalled by what Daley’s police were doing. He told Wofford that whoever won the nomination should speak out forcefully against the police violence—even at the risk of offending Dick Daley, which any Democratic presidential hopeful would clearly be reluctant to do. “The test is what Humphrey does now,” Shriver told Wofford over the phone. “He has about eighteen hours until his acceptance speech to show where he stands on all this.”
At the time he spoke to Wofford on Wednesday, Shriver had reason to believe he might be in a position to influence Humphrey significantly. Despite resistance to his nomination from certain quarters, Shriver knew that he was still very close to being named to the ticket. When Dick Daley had decided that there was no chance Kennedy would join Humphrey, he decided that Shriver would give the Democrats the best chance of winning. At breakfast with Humphrey on Wednesday morning, Daley strongly urged that he pick Shriver. The Chicago papers reported that Shriver’s selection was imminent.
In Paris, Shriver met with Cy Vance and Averell Harriman to discuss what sort of Vietnam peace plan he would urge on Humphrey if the vice president called to offer him a place on the ticket. Shriver also began preparing an acceptance speech, in which he would attempt to reach out both to the peace movement generally and to the protestors who had been beaten and jailed that week in Chicago in particular. “From 4,000 miles away,” Wofford wrote, “Shriver was able to see more clearly the significance of what was happening than Humphrey in his busy suite on the twenty-fifth floor of the Hilton.” Shriver’s selection to the ticket would have helped defuse the tension and would have controlled the damage the convention caused to the Democratic Party. Humphrey, in contrast, attacked the protestors and publicly supported Dick Daley.
At midnight on Wednesday, Walter Mondale called Wofford from Humphrey’s suite to tell him that “Kennedy family opposition to Shriver’s nomination was weighing heavily against his selection.” Wofford’s suspicion was that someone like Larry O’Brien or Kenny O’Donnell was speaking in the family name, “perhaps without prior authority.” Wofford told Mondale that this “former palace guard” had “no monopoly on the Kennedy legacy.” Besides, Wofford said, you don’t really think that a man as decent as Ted Kennedy would impede the aspirations of his own brother-in-law?
In fact, Kennedy already had. Earlier in the day, according to Humphrey’s aides, Ted had called and promised him his support. But according to Max Kampelman, Humphrey’s words after getting off the phone with Kennedy were, “I sensed Teddy was not adamant [in his opposition to Shriver], but led me to believe better not.” On Thursday morning, August 29, Humphrey’s people let Shriver’s people know that he was out. The VP nomination was down to Edmund Muskie and Fred Harris.
Reflecting on the events some forty years later, Kennedy did not clearly recollect his conversation with Humphrey, but he will never forget his state of mind at the time. His brother Bobby’s death had been as devastating to him as John Kennedy’s had been to Bobby. Having seen two of his brothers assassinated while campaigning, Ted wanted nothing more than to get as far away from politics as possible until his wounds could heal. He deliberately absented himself from the convention, sending word repeatedly through Steve Smith and others that he would not accept the nomination either for the presidency or the vice presidency. He even left Hyannis Port and went to a hideaway in Maine to avoid political pressures.
Kennedy had been disappointed when Shriver resisted coming back from Paris to participate in Bobby’s campaign. In addition, he had been in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion for much of the time since Bobby’s funeral. All of this, Kennedy now believes, accounts for the negative vibrations Humphrey may have received when they spoke. Nevertheless, he is adamant that he did not veto his brother-in-law in his talk with Humphrey, and maintains that he has always had genuine affection for Shriver, as well as respect for his abilities and accomplishments.
Shriver, having spilled his bile in his letter of August 20, was philosophical. He recognized that the Kennedys had their own political priorities, which placed blood relatives above in-laws. “In politics, when men are playing for such stakes,” he told Wofford, “you can’t count on personal ties and shouldn’t take these things personally.” By the end of the convention—with McCarthy’s peace plank defeated, Humphrey defending Daley’s police tactics, and the Democrats plummeting in the polls—it seemed that maybe he was best off not getting the nomination anyway.
“We needed the goodwill of the Kennedys more than we needed Sarge,” said one of Humphrey’s advisers. “His name was effectively vetoed.” “For the second time,” as Wofford would write in his memoir, “a brother-in-law had put his future political interests above Shriver’s immediate opportunity.”
Two years later Max Kampelman had lunch with Shriver in Washington. As Kampelman wrote in a letter afterward, “We … talked about 1968 and the convention. I again made it clear to [Shriver] that he was knifed and I believe he knows that. I believe he also knows who did it.”
THE PEACE TALKS AND THE 1968 ELECTION
Within a day of Shriver’s being denied the vice presidential nomination, rumors started circulating about his being considered for the Maryland governor’s position that would be abandoned by Spiro Agnew if he and Nixon won the general election. Shriver’s political supporters began writing to him about that possibility as well as others in Illinois and New York. “We are ready to attack another hill as soon as the trumpet blares, the whistle blows or even a little finger is raised,” Edgar May wrote to him.
Although Shriver felt frustrated to be thousands of miles away from the presidential race, he was in some ways quite near the center of what determined its outcome: the Paris peace talks. As William Bundy later wrote, “Even the slightest movement toward peace might unite the Democratic Party and bring back those of its liberal wing who had opposed the Chicago platform.… So it was natural for Nixon to feel that only a breakthrough in the Paris talks could wrest (in his eyes, steal) the election from him at the last minute.” After the Chicago convention, Humphrey had plummeted in the polls; at one point in October he had fallen so far that he found himself running practically even with third-party candidate George Wallace. Everywhere Humphrey went, he was heckled by demonstrators protesting the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, GOP nominee Richard Nixon had discovered that his best applause line was, “We will end the war on an honorable basis,” and he used it over and over again.
In Paris, meanwhile, Shriver was meeting regularly with Vance and Harriman to discuss progress on the Vietnam peace negotiations. Over the summer, the negotiations had stalled over who exactly should be allowed to participate. The North Vietnamese believed the South Vietnamese government in Saigon had no legitimacy and therefore insisted on negotiating directly with the United States. Also, the North Vietnamese were insisting on bringing the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Vietcong guerrillas who had infiltrated the south, to the negotiating table. The United States, in contrast, wanted the Saigon government at the table but not the NLF. All sides were refusing to budge.
In September, however, in the fifth month of negotiations, Vance and Harriman had constructed what they thought was at least the framework for a peace agreement: The Americans would agree to stop the bombing of North Vietnam if Hanoi, in turn, agreed to allow Saigon a role in any governing arrangement. On September 30 Humphrey gave a long-anticipated speech in Salt Lake City in which in announced he would support a bombing halt if it would lead to peace. From that point forward, protestors mostly stopped heckling him; he
began to gain on Nixon in the polls.
On October 11 Harriman reported to LBJ that there seemed to have been a breakthrough: The North Vietnamese said that they would permit the South Vietnamese government to join the negotiations, in exchange for the cessation of US bombing runs.
Over the next several weeks, negotiators worked around the clock in Paris and Saigon and Washington, edging closer to an agreement, all the while trying to keep the progress secret so as not to jeopardize the positive momentum. But journalists began to ferret out what was going on. The State Department briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of bringing Shriver back to the United States for a press conference. Harriman and Vance felt a real urgency in the work they were doing now; in their conversations with Shriver, they discussed their fear that if Nixon won the election he would blow the chance for peace by replacing them as negotiators. They wondered whether they should leak news about their progress, as a means of bringing credit to the Johnson-Humphrey administration and thereby helping the Humphrey-Muskie ticket. (“I simply can’t stand Nixon,” Harriman told Cy Sulzberger. “I was all ready to quit under Johnson but I won’t stay one second under Nixon. I just don’t trust him.”) Mainly, the negotiators hoped that an agreement could be reached before the election.
On October 16, LBJ held a conference call with Humphrey and Nixon and told them that Harriman was close to securing a deal with the North Vietnamese delegates: a bombing halt in exchange for the South Vietnamese at the table and the possibility of a coalition government in South Vietnam. To the presidential candidates, the implication was clear: If LBJ pulled this off, Humphrey would surely win the election. If something went awry, the election would go to Nixon.
By October 29, a week before the election, newspapers all over the world reported the rumor that the end of the Vietnam War might finally be at hand. Polls showed that the gap between Nixon and Humphrey was now closing rapidly. Two days later, on Thursday night, President Johnson savored his final moment in the limelight, announcing on television to the American people that “I have now ordered that all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam cease as of eight a.m. Washington time, Friday morning. I have reached this decision in the belief that this action can lead to progress towards a peaceful settlement of the Vietnamese war. What we now expect are prompt, productive serious and intensive negotiations in an atmosphere that is conducive to progress.” Hanoi would respect the DMZ [demilitarized zone] and stop attacking cities in the south. Expanded peace talks—with both the government of South Vietnam and the NLF at the table—would begin after the election on November 5. Polls taken after Johnson’s television appearance showed Humphrey moving even with, and then ahead of, Nixon. With the two major-party candidates now running neck and neck, Nixon announced that “people”—not him, of course—were saying that Johnson’s announcement was nothing but a political ploy to give Humphrey the election.
Within thirty-six hours the hope of peace abruptly faded. The South Vietnamese government in Saigon announced that it would not, after all, be joining the Paris peace talks the following week. Threatened by a revolt within his own cabinet, which objected to any official recognition of the NLF, the South Vietnamese president, Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, had had to back away from the negotiating table.
Or so it appeared. But was there another force at work? Had Richard Nixon, or his operatives, somehow sabotaged the peace agreement? Lyndon Johnson believed that to be the case.
Indeed, it turned out that a prominent Nixon supporter named Anna Chennault had made contact with the South Vietnamese and urged them to back out of the peace agreement, implying that Saigon could win a more favorable peace settlement—if not an outright military victory—after Nixon was elected. The Nixon campaign affected shock and horror when they learned that these overtures had been made in Nixon’s name, and it seemed at the time that the saboteurs had carried out their actions without Nixon’s knowledge. Estimable journalists such as White and Tom Wicker, for instance, were convinced that Nixon himself had played no part in trying to influence the South Vietnamese government to back out of the talks. Shriver, however, watching from close up in Paris, wasn’t so sure; he knew from Vance and Harriman that something very fishy had prompted Thieu’s backing away from the negotiations.
In 1972, while campaigning as George McGovern’s running mate against Nixon, Shriver would publicly accuse Nixon of having purposely destroyed the chance for peace in 1968. Nixon and the Republicans attacked Shriver mercilessly in response, saying not only that his charge was baseless but that he couldn’t possibly have known anything about the status of the negotiations in 1968, because LBJ hadn’t trusted him enough to make him privy to anything that important.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that historians, journalists, and Anna Chennault herself would reveal that Shriver’s charge had been well founded. Chinese-born Chennault had in 1947 married Gen. Claire Chennault, an American who had left the US Air Force to lead a group of volunteers, the Flying Tigers, in defense of the Chinese against the Japanese early in the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s, Anna Chennault established herself as a prominent Republican activist and socialite, with well-known ties to Nationalist Chinese leaders in Taiwan and elsewhere in East Asia. She made regular visits to South Vietnam—her sister was married to a Chinese Nationalist diplomat in Saigon—and developed a close personal friendship with Nguyen Van Thieu, who became president of the South Vietnamese government in October of 1967. Through this and other friendships in Vietnam, Chennault had become an ardent supporter of South Vietnam and of US involvement in the war. She, like many Nationalist Chinese, blamed the United States for having lost China to the Communists in 1947, and she greatly feared that Lyndon Johnson or another Democratic US president would similarly abandon South Vietnam to the Vietcong.
By the late 1960s, Nixon and Chennault had known each other for a long time through GOP circles. In the summer of 1968 their interests became naturally allied. Chennault greatly feared a negotiated peace in Vietnam that gave the Communists any power in the government of South Vietnam. Nixon feared a peace settlement in Vietnam, but for a different reason: It would likely give victory to the Democrats. On July 12, apparently at Chennault’s instigation, Nixon summoned three people to his apartment in New York City for a meeting: Chennault; Nixon’s aide and future attorney general John Mitchell; and Bui Diem, a good friend of Chennault’s who happened also to be South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States. The meeting was secret; no one else on Nixon’s campaign staff was informed of it. According to both Chennault and Diem, Nixon and his three guests talked for at least half an hour about the upcoming election, and about the need to establish close communication between Nixon and President Thieu. Anna Chennault, Nixon told Bui Diem, “would be the sole representative between the Vietnamese government and the Nixon campaign headquarters.” According to William Bundy, in his history of Nixon’s foreign policy, “The relationship thus established was hardly a normal or customary one, and may have been unique. The opposition party’s candidate for President was setting up a special two-way private channel to the head of state of a government with whom the incumbent President was conducting critically important and secret negotiations!”
Chennault traveled to Saigon, where she told Thieu that she would be the conduit for communications between him and Nixon. She was also in daily contact with John Mitchell, relaying to him the latest information on the negotiations as reported by Saigon.
On October 15 Thieu told Bui Diem that a breakthrough in the Paris talks was imminent. Diem immediately reported this to Chennault, who in turn called Nixon and demanded that he do something to call off the bombing halt. Over the next two weeks, she was in regular contact with Saigon, making clear that Nixon opposed a deal. Thieu, for his part, said that he was reluctant to make a deal, too, and that he “would much prefer to have peace talks after your election.” Is this a message to “my party”? Chennault asked. Thieu’s reply: “Convey this message to your ca
ndidate.”
When LBJ announced the bombing halt on October 31, Chennault was watching the speech on television at a private party. Mitchell, who evidently knew how to reach her at all times, called her there and asked her to call him back from a private location. When she did so, a nervous-sounding Mitchell said: “Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that very clear to them.” (Chennault had her friend Thomas Corcoran, a lawyer, eavesdrop on the conversation and take notes.) Chennault says that she responded by saying she was reluctant to exert “direct influence” on the South Vietnamese; she was, she told Mitchell, only a conduit for information.
Chennault’s claim that she never tried to exert “direct influence” was hair splitting. As William Bundy has observed, “repeated inquiries, coming from an authorized Nixon agent like herself, surely conveyed Nixon’s fervent desire that Thieu should not go along with the Johnson plan. She may have avoided direct appeals, but her message was hardly subtle or obscure.” Ambassador Bui Diem later reported that during the last week of the election he was “regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage”—Chennault, Mitchell, and Texas senator John Tower—who were encouraging him to convey to Saigon the GOP’s fervent desire that South Vietnam not agree to join the United States at the negotiating table in Paris.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 67