The Significance of Nixon's Treason

After all, this hardball Republican approach to politics did not begin in 2010. The pattern can be traced back to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign of 1968 when his political team, in essence, took the half-million American soldiers in Vietnam hostage.
According to documents and audio recordings that have surfaced over the intervening decades, it is clear that Nixon’s campaign sabotaged President Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks by getting the South Vietnamese leadership to boycott the negotiations in exchange for Nixon’s promises of a better deal once he was in the White House.
In October 1968, the peace talks were on the verge of ending the conflict which had already claimed more than 30,000 U.S. lives and a million or so Vietnamese. However, Nixon feared that a last-minute settlement of the war would likely give Vice President Hubert Humphrey the boost he needed to win the election. So, Nixon’s operatives made sure that didn’t happen.
Johnson learned of Nixon’s gambit, which the President called “treason” in one phone conversation. Johnson even confronted Nixon over the phone about the sabotage, but Nixon simply denied the accusations, leaving Johnson with the choice of whether to release the evidence before the 1968 election.
Johnson consulted with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford on Nov. 4, 1968. Both advised against going public out of fear that the evidence of Nixon’s treachery might reflect badly on the United States.
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said in a conference call. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
So, Johnson relented, agreeing to stay silent for the “good of the country,” while Nixon exploited the stalemated peace talks for the edge that ensured his narrow victory.
However, since Nixon’s side had promised South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal than Johnson was offering, Nixon had little choice but to continue the war – for four more years, with the deaths of 20,000 more U.S. soldiers and a million or so more Vietnamese. [See “The Significance of Nixon’s ‘Treason’.”] AlterNet