Declassified LBJ Tapes Accuse Richard Nixon of Treason 536
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."
Time Machine time?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Only Surprising portion of the revelation.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The First October Surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Thom Hartmann has been talking about this for several years already. [youtube.com] I'm not sure why this is suddenly in the news again, but I'm glad it is.
Re:Very interesting article, thanks! (Score:2, Informative)
Dick Cheney dismantled it upon taking office
FTFY. Let's not kid ourselves about who was REALLY President during the Bush years. And it sure as shit wasn't a dumb himbo pretending to be from Texas.
Re:Very interesting article, thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
Cheney was on Nixon's staff. Something many people do not realize.
Re:If this is true... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh JFC! What a ludicrous statement and you obviously have no concept of history. Let's not forget that Johnson through the trumped, made up events that led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was used to begin offensive operations in Vietnam in the first place? You seem to think that only one party is capable of lying and committing these acts? Please what a lame and retarded viewpoint.
The Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the Johnson administration's push and omissions and stupidity were no different than the Bush administration officials saying "There's WMDs in Iraq!"
In 1965, President Johnson commented privately: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."
Humm, so you think only GW Bush was an idiot huh?
So, Johnson's administration escalated the war in Vietnam based on errors, omissions and Johnson's own stupidity. [wikipedia.org] and lies. [fair.org]
In 1965, President Johnson commented privately: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."
He also got a lot of people killed because of his micro-managing style. Battlefield commanders had to wait for permission from DC to take out targets of opportunity. Because of that we lost a lot of planes and a lot of operations were compromised because people's hands were tied up because
“They can't bomb an outhouse without my say-so.” - Lyndon Johnson
So, he produces trumped up events to commit our troops to war, then micro manages how they operate which gets more of them killed. It sounds like the one who should be brought up on Treason charges should be LBJ!
Oh and let's not forget that it was the Kennedy Administration who ramped up involvement in Vietnam to begin with. Including looking the other way when the South Vietnamese President was ousted in a coup. [jfklibrary.org]
So, before you start making big remarks, especially while hiding you should consult your history books a bit more or shit at least Wikipedia.
Re:If this is true... (Score:4, Informative)
Cheney was involved in the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations.
I didn't think It was so much an accusation (Score:5, Informative)
Also, happy to see this story on slashdot. Yeah, it's not tech news and I know that bugs people, but Christ. The way I heard about this was the Mother-lovin' BBC. This is the biggest news since Watergate and the news media is just pretending it didn't happen. Part of me wants to say 'Oh well, that's America' but screw that. I'm sick of saying things could be worse when they could be so much better.
Re:Very interesting article, thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Very interesting article, thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [arstechnica.com]
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/ [developmentseed.org]
https://drupal.org/user/2356044 [drupal.org]
Re:Not exactly treason (Score:3, Informative)
Nice straw-man rebuttal you've got there.
Also:
Bani-Sadr, the former President of Iran, has also stated "that the Reagan campaign struck a deal with Teheran to delay the release of the hostages in 1980," asserting that "by the month before the American Presidential election in November 1980, many in Iran's ruling circles were openly discussing the fact that a deal had been made between the Reagan campaign team and some Iranian religious leaders in which the hostages' release would be delayed until after the election so as to prevent President Carter's re-election"[15] He repeated the charge in "My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution & Secret Deals with the U.S."[16][17]
^ "Bani-Sadr, in U.S., Renews Charges of 1980 Deal". Nytimes.com. 1991-05-07. Retrieved 2010-11-18.
^ http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2621268 [nla.gov.au]
^ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0080405630 [amazon.com]
Re:The First October Surprise (Score:5, Informative)
"Top Stories" from CNN right now (cc's straight from my RSS feed):
Former CNN news leader dies at 51 - 1 hour ago
Meet the Marines killed by that mortar - 2 hours ago
Sinkhole swallows family pond - 2 hours ago
Rattlesnake handler gets 12th bite - 2 hours ago
Pornography pioneer passes - 1 hour ago
As you can see from the list above, Americans don't want NEWS - they want to be entertained.
Re:The Only Surprising portion of the revelation.. (Score:5, Informative)
People are still repeating this trash? It was debunked the day after it was first broadcast by the Venezuelan media conglomerates (such as Univision, which backed the actual coup attempt both financially and politically). The only people shot at that protest were the counter-protesters who backed Chavez, none of them hit by rifle fire, just pistol rounds (probably from the bodyguards of the wealthy protesters). FWIW, Univision (based in Caracas) is the Fox News of Latin America.
Re:If this is true... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The Only Surprising portion of the revelation.. (Score:3, Informative)