Slashdot Mirror
Declassified LBJ Tapes Accuse Richard Nixon of Treason
Hugh Pickens writes writes "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. Now David Taylor reports on BBC that the latest set of declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls show that by the time of the Presidential election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence that 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'. 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 that he knew would derail his campaign. Nixon therefore set up a clandestine back-channel to the South Vietnamese involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris. This was exactly what Nixon feared. Chennault was dispatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal. Meanwhile the FBI had bugged the ambassador's phone and transcripts of Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. Johnson was told by Defense Secretary Clark Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace. The president gave Humphrey enough information to sink his opponent but by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency so Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway. In the end Nixon won by less than 1% of the popular vote, escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, and finally settled for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968."
What am I missing these items came out years ago. See http://hnn.us/articles/60446.html for a better indication on what happened then this poor summary.
But was it for the better? The country might be better off if the criminals are exposed, and the battles fought, instead of festering as conspiracy theories.
Cheney was on Nixon's staff. Something many people do not realize.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Yeah the great email system: 100,000 emails were mysteriously never backed up and are irretrievable. Where are Gore's, and about 500 other top officials', email??? I guess this went down the memory hole. Revisionists want history to (mis)remember how "fairly good" the archiving was.
http://articles.cnn.com/2000-08-23/politics/white.house.e.mails_1_e-mail-problem-betty-lambuth-computer-problem?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS
Clinton was using IBM/Lotus Notes and it was working well. G.W. Bush switched to Microsoft Exchange, arguably so emails would get lost.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/04/bush-lost-e-mails/
Obama's office is now using free open-source Drupal-based groupware, called OpenAtrium.
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/feb/14/white-house-using-open-atrium/
https://drupal.org/user/2356044
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
This Only Nixon could go to China stuff was bullshit then, and it's still Bullshit. And it wasn't what Spock meant to boot.
Not only that, it was done illegally by bypassing the cabinet. Even then that wasn't why he got to China. The Russian/China border clashes and China's more limited military weaponry had China looking for an ally. His belief that we should leave a billion people to stew in isolation is correct, but he wasn't the only one to believe it.
Who else were the Chinese going to reach out to in order to give the Russians pause about attacking China?
Nixon was against the EPA, but the nation wanted it. He grudgingly created it.
He created a food shortage.
He only endorsed the ERA AFTER it passed both houses.
"no indication that they were ever close to a settlement in that time. a"
that's just wrong.
Some of us were alive and remember these events.
He did nothing that wasn't available to any other president. Would a different president done it differently? enough to matter? we will never know.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on