by Nancy Gibbs
Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin gave his assurance that Hanoi was “serious in its intentions” and that U.S. “doubts” were “without foundation.” Ambassador Bunker was dispatched to get Thieu’s blessing: “A burnt child dreads fire,” Johnson observed, so Thieu had to be handled carefully.
But for all the talk of Johnson’s desperation for a peace deal, it was he who kept holding out. Even with a breakthrough at hand, he worried that he’d be putting American soldiers at risk, giving the enemy a military advantage. Clifford even suspected that Johnson was spooked by the criticism that he was just agreeing to a deal to help Humphrey.
“I could not help asking myself, again,” Clifford recalled. “In his heart of hearts, does Lyndon Johnson really want Humphrey to win?”
Ever respectful of his generals, Johnson wanted to hear one last assessment of the costs and benefits from his field commander. “Get him over here as soon as you can,” the president ordered. General Abrams boarded a C-141 Starlifter for an unannounced flight to Washington, arriving at 2:38 A.M. on the morning of October 29, dressed in civilian clothes, to make his way discreetly to the White House.
At that hour, Johnson and his top advisors were waiting in the Cabinet Room. Abrams sat down at the president’s left, and Johnson reviewed the events that had brought them to this point, and the conditions that had been met. The North Vietnamese accepting South Vietnamese participation was a huge deal: “Many experts felt Hanoi would never do this,” Johnson said.
Then he asked Abrams for his assessment: it was he, after all, who had warned of the risks involved with a bombing halt. But the situation in the field had improved vastly in recent months, Abrams said, the enemy was significantly weakened, and a bombing halt might now be militarily tolerable. He did not think the North would violate the DMZ; he was a little more worried about the cities, especially Saigon.
“Can we return to full-scale bombing easily if they attack?” Johnson asked.
“Yes, very easily.”
Johnson asked about supply lines and troop movements and morale. Then came the vital question. “Has it reached the point where we could reduce the bombing without causing casualties?” Abrams looked squarely at the president.
“Yes, we can.”
And if you were in my shoes, Johnson wanted to know . . .
“If you were president, would you do it?”
“I have no reservations about doing it,” Abrams replied. “I know it is stepping into a cesspool of comment. I do think it is the right thing to do. It is the proper thing to do.”
“Will the men accept it?” the president asked.
“Yes, sir.”
That was it. Abrams has carried the ball across the goal line, Clifford thought.
No one had slept; at dawn Johnson went upstairs to the mansion. It’s “tough to be a candidate and peace seeker at the same time,” he told his aides. That thought reminded him that he’d need to brief the actual candidates on what had happened.
“Where will Nixon be at 5:00 pm?” he wanted to know, and Wallace and Humphrey. “Have a phone they can cram right up their butts.”
At 6:04 A.M. the call came from Rusk. He had talked to Ambassador Bunker in Saigon; Thieu was off the reservation. He said three days was too little time to get a delegation to Paris, and he needed to confer with his National Assembly, and he expressed other concerns that appeared to have come out of nowhere.
Suddenly Johnson and his men thought they understood. There was no logic to Thieu’s sudden change of heart—other than what Rusk called “the under-the-table stuff.” A secret CIA report had revealed that Thieu “sees a definite connection between the moves now underway and President Johnson’s wish to see Vice President Humphrey elected. Thieu referred many times to the U.S. elections and suggested to his visitors that the current talks are designed to aid Humphrey’s candidacy.” Johnson also got word through connections on Wall Street that Nixon was working to derail the talks, with the expectation that a new offensive would break out, casualties would mount, the stock market would fall, and thus it would be easier for Nixon to cut his own peace deal once he took office, as Eisenhower had to end the Korean War. “Like Ike in 1953,” read a memo from Rostow’s brother Eugene, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, “he [Nixon] would be able to settle on terms which the President could not accept, blaming the deterioration of the situation between now and January or February on his predecessor.” Nixon, in other words, wasn’t just denying Johnson his bid to be Peacemaker; he would blame him for forcing the United States to settle for a worse deal.
Johnson had ordered the FBI to monitor contacts between Americans and the South Vietnamese embassy, put Chennault under surveillance, and tap her phones. “Follow her wherever she goes,” National Security aide Bromley Smith ordered FBI deputy director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach. This would provide the hard proof: Nixon’s lieutenants, if not Nixon himself, were actively trying to sabotage the peace talks. Johnson was personally watching the traffic; the National Security Agency intercepted a coded message from Diem to Saigon on October 28: “I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage,” he said. If Saigon held out, he predicted, they would get a better deal out of Nixon than Humphrey. “The longer the situation continues, the more [we are] favored,” he advised.
With the election only days away, the implications were staggering. If the Nixon sabotage was known it would “rock the world,” Johnson told his aides after their all-night strategy session. “Can you imagine what people would say if this were to be known; that we have all these conditions met and then Nixon’s conniving with them kept us from getting it?”
Johnson was livid at Nixon; but he also blamed Humphrey’s Salt Lake City speech for spooking the South Vietnamese. “They [Nixon’s allies] made Bui Diem think he could get a better deal from Nixon than us.” NSC advisor Rostow wrote Johnson a confidential memo: “Mr. President, I have been considering the explosive possibilities of the information that we now have on how certain Republicans may have inflamed the South Vietnamese to behave as they have been behaving. There is no hard evidence that Mr. Nixon himself is involved.”
However, “the materials are so explosive that they could gravely damage the country whether Mr. Nixon is elected or not. If they get out in their present form, they could be the subject of one of the most acrimonious debates we have ever witnessed.”
That night the principals met at the White House again. Johnson worried that proceeding without Thieu would look too political. “I think we have to give Thieu some more time.” The next day he pre-taped a speech announcing the bombing halt, because he was losing his voice. The broadcast was set for 8 P.M. on the 31st—Halloween, five days before the election. And Bunker was told to make it clear to Thieu that the United States was moving ahead, with or without him.
At 6 P.M., two hours before the broadcast, Johnson called the three candidates one more time. He told them what he was about to announce, and he issued a barely veiled warning. Some “old China lobbyists” are going around saying Saigon “might get a better deal” later, under a different president. That’s made things harder, Johnson said, but he added, “I know that none of you candidates are aware of it or responsible for it.”
Johnson insisted that he was not concerned with the election.
“I’m praying for you,” George Wallace told him.
“We’ll back you up,” Nixon agreed.
“We’ll back you up, Mr. President,” Humphrey affirmed.
Nixon had every reason to inflate the hopes for peace—the better for Thieu to dash them at the very right moment and make Johnson look dishonest and manipulative. Kissinger, continuing his secret updates, had called to say that Harriman and his team had broken out the champagne. “It took some balls to give us those tips,” national security aide Richard Allen told Sy Hersh years later, because it was “a pretty dangerous thing for him to be screwing around with national security.”
Johnson went on the air that night; the
speech promised to be the high point of his career. The North Vietnamese had backed down on their refusal to negotiate a peace settlement with Saigon. And so, “I have now ordered that all air, naval and artillery bombardment of North Viet Nam cease,” he said, effective twelve hours after he spoke. “What we now expect—what we have a right to expect—are prompt, productive, serious and intensive negotiations.”
When the president had finished, Mitchell tracked down Chennault, who was finishing dinner at legendary hostess Perle Mesta’s apartment at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington. She was called to the phone, and Mitchell told her to call back on a safer line. He picked up on the first ring. “I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon,” he said. “It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position.” Chennault assured him that there was no way Thieu would agree to the peace talks. “Thieu has told me over and over again that going to Paris would be walking into a smoke screen that has nothing to do with reality.”
The day after LBJ’s speech, Thieu was scheduled to address the Vietnamese National Assembly. He had assured Bunker at a diplomatic reception that everything would be okay. But when he rose before the legislature, with Bunker seated right in the front row, he announced that he would not be sending anyone to the Paris talks.
That act of defiance made him a hero at home: his divided government united behind him, the local press cheered, and fifty members of the National Assembly marched in a parade to the presidential palace, cheering him and waving red and yellow national flags. THE PEOPLE ARE UNITED TO KILL THE COMMUNISTS AND SAFEGUARD THE COUNTRY, read the banners in Saigon, rejecting the idea of talks that treated the Vietcong as equals.
It was a catastrophe for Johnson and thus for Humphrey. The polls in the final weekend had shown a dead heat; now it looked as though Johnson had rushed for a deal that was not yet sealed. “S. Vietnam Spurns November 6 Talks” ran the Washington Post headline. Nixon aides began suggesting that Johnson had misled him—and the public—about the prospects for peace. But even as they did so, the FBI reported on November 2 that Chennault had called Bui Diem at the embassy and told him that she had just had a call from her boss, that he had a message he “wanted her to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are going to win. . . .’ She repeated that this is the only message. ‘He said please tell your boss to hold on.’”
Johnson was beside himself: he was now being portrayed as a sneak, a manipulator who put his own agenda ahead of the country’s, even as he concluded that his opponents were doing exactly that. But what could he do? In a secret cable from Saigon, Bunker advised that they shouldn’t even try to do anything until after the election: “Thieu is convinced that Nixon will win and will follow a hawkish policy, and therefore he can afford to wait.” Rostow proposed that Johnson call Nixon directly, tell him the deal really was locked up in mid-October, that they had negotiated the joint communiqué in a hard bargaining session on October 28, and that it only came undone at the last second. Johnson, Rostow added, should “urge Nixon [to] be extremely careful in what he says in the next few days so as not to inflame the situation.”
That still left the question of what to say publicly. They had obtained the evidence against the Nixon campaign through “extremely sensitive intelligence gathering operations of the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency,” Clifford noted, including surveillance of Chennault, a private citizen (who, as it happened, lived in the Watergate), and Diem, a foreign diplomat. Protecting the NSA’s surveillance and code-breaking capabilities was essential. Johnson’s men were divided about whether to use it. “I do not believe that any president can make any use of interceptions or telephone taps in any way that would involve politics,” Rusk warned. “The moment we cross over that divide, we are in a different kind of society.”
Early in the evening of November 2, Rusk advised that they at least brief some key Republicans about Chennault’s interference. So that night, just after nine, Johnson called Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen, his old friend, and put the fear of God in him.
“We’re skirting on dangerous ground,” Johnson said, “and I thought I ought to give you the facts and you ought to pass them on if you choose. If you don’t, why then I will a little later.” He had not jumped the gun, he insisted; Thieu was on board, until Nixon’s henchmen got hold of him.
“Then we got some of our friends involved, some of it your old China crowd, and here’s the latest information we got.” He quoted the FBI report of Chennault telling South Vietnam’s ambassador to hold on.
Tell them to stand down, LBJ said. “I don’t want this to get in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason.”
“I know,” Dirksen conceded.
And then came the threat: “I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to do that. But if they’re going to put this kind of stuff out, they ought to know that we know what they’re doing. I know who they’re talking to and I know what they’re saying.”
“Yeah,” Dirksen said.
“Well, now, what do you think we ought to do about it?”
“Well, I better get in touch with him, I think, and tell him about it.”
The conversation concluded with Johnson repeating the stakes: “I know this—that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.”
“That’s a mistake,” Dirksen agreed.
“And it’s a damn bad mistake . . . and you’re the only man I have confidence in to tell them. . . . If they don’t want it on the front pages, they better quit it.”
Dirksen’s next call, frantic now, was to Nixon’s aide Harlow, who was traveling with Nixon in California and staying at the Century Plaza Hotel. Johnson was “mad as all get out,” Dirksen warned, threatening to unmask the plot if the Nixon camp did not “cease and desist.”
Harlow hung up and ran up to Nixon’s suite on the next floor, where his faithful gatekeeper H. R. Haldeman was basically standing guard outside Nixon’s room.
“I’ve got to talk to the boss.”
“He’s in bed and he’s asleep,” Haldeman said. “You can’t talk to him.”
“Oh, yes I can, and I’m a gonna. I’ve got to talk to the boss. You’ll have to get him up.”
The two men fought it out, but Harlow prevailed and they woke Nixon to break the news.
“You’ve got to talk to LBJ,” Harlow told him. “Someone has told him that you’re dumping all over the South Vietnamese to keep them from doing something about peace and he’s just about to believe it. If you don’t let him know quickly that it’s not so, then he’s going to dump.” He reported that Dirksen was beside himself. “He says that Lyndon is simply enraged and we ought to do something.”
And so Nixon had to embark on one of the more delicate diplomatic missions of his career.
The next morning, Sunday, forty-eight hours before the election, he went on Meet the Press and delivered a full-throated defense of Johnson’s efforts. He even offered, if elected, to go to Saigon himself if that would help.
That afternoon at 1:25, another intermediary, Florida senator George Smathers, called Johnson to soften him up. Nixon is freaking out, Smathers said, worried Johnson is about to charge him with derailing the talks. Nixon swore he had nothing to do with it, Smathers said, and was fully behind the president. “He would offer to go to any place that you might want him to go” to bring about a successful resolution of the impasse at Paris.
“The problem is not his traveling somewhere,” Johnson countered. “The problem is the people on both sides of this fence getting the impression that they can get a little more for the house if they’ll wait a week to sell it.”
Smathers tried to argue that Nixon knew nothing of what was being said on his behalf. Then he better keep his people in line, Johnson retorted. “I’ll pass this word back to him,” Smather
s said, “that, goddamnit, you had it set, and that someone—his people—are screwing it up.”
Then it was Nixon’s turn to call LBJ. Johnson was angry, accusing; Nixon poured it on thick. He’d gotten a report from Dirksen, he said, and in case Johnson had missed it, he went over his message on Meet the Press. “My God, I would never do anything to encourage Saigon not to come to the table, because basically, that was what you got out of your bombing pause. That, good God, we want them over at Paris. We’ve got to get them to Paris, or you can’t have a peace.”
It all seemed to be enough. He hung up—and “Nixon and his friends collapsed with laughter,” reported the Sunday Times of London in an account of the episode months later. “It was partly in sheer relief that their victory had not been taken from them at the eleventh hour.”
Forty-eight hours later, Nixon won the presidency by the narrowest of margins: seven tenths of one percent. Humphrey had been told of the treachery in the final days—and also agreed not to reveal it. Nineteen sixty-eight had brought too much shock, too much pain to add charges of treason into the finale of a tight presidential campaign. “Humphrey had lost to a man of shrewd cunning and inherent dishonesty,” Clifford later argued, “who had outmaneuvered him in the insider game of dealing with Lyndon Johnson.”
Of course wiretapping one’s allies and spying on American citizens not accused of any crime was not exactly playing by the rules either, which limited what Johnson and his aides could do with the knowledge they acquired. In his account of the campaign, Safire wrote that Attorney General Ramsey Clark had never approved the surveillance, though DeLoach suggests otherwise. “The pattern of tapping by several agencies of government, confirmed to Nixon by [J. Edgar] Hoover,” Safire observed, “set up a ‘tolerance’ of this type of activity that had disastrous ramifications later.”
And it was a club secret kept for many years, until the tapes revealed all.