Yoichi Okamoto
Vice President Hubert Humphrey chose not to publicly disclose FBI information on Nixon’s efforts to sabotage peace talks in Vietnam.
In the final days of the 1968 presidential election, retiring President Lyndon B. Johnson secretly gave Vice President Hubert Humphrey classified FBI surveillance that, if made public, might have led to Humphrey’s election. It could have denied Republican nominee Richard Nixon the presidency and all that followed, including the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation in 1974.
As we mark the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s election on Nov. 5, 1968, it is worth revisiting the events that could have secured his defeat and changed the course of history.
The surveillance revealed that Nixon was seeking to sabotage peace negotiations in Paris to end the Vietnam War. Johnson told aides that Nixon’s scheme constituted “treason” by interfering with American foreign policy, which political candidates are not supposed to do; he believed its disclosure would swing the close election to his Vice President.
But Humphrey, after much agonizing, decided not to make it public, to LBJ’s lasting frustration and ire.
According to the FBI report, one of Nixon’s political agents, Anna Chennault, had gone to the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C., and urged that South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu boycott the Paris talks.
Johnson had appeared to open the door to such talks by halting the American bombing of Hanoi, and Thieu had indicated a willingness to join the Paris conference with the North Vietnamese. But then Thieu backed out, the talks collapsed, and Nixon narrowly won the election.
It could have denied Republican nominee Richard Nixon the presidency and all that followed, including the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation in 1974.
Young Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan confessed later that, on the eve of the election, “I thought we were finished. The bombing halt really had women moving to Humphrey.” But when the talks fell through, he said, “it knocked the hell out of the euphoria about a peace breakthrough.”
Humphrey, in a post-election memoir, acknowledged that he had balked at reporting the FBI information because, amazingly, he could not bring himself to believe that the notorious “Tricky Dick” Nixon of that era would do such a thing.
“I wonder if I should have blown the whistle on Anna Chennault and Nixon,” Humphrey mused in his memoir, The Education of a Public Man.“He must have known of her call to Thieu. I wish [his italics] I could have been sure. Damn Thieu. . . . I wonder if that call did it. If Nixon knew. Maybe I should have blasted them anyway.”
Johnson, in his own 1971 memoir, The Vantage Point, wrote later that “people who claimed to speak for the Nixon camp began encouraging Saigon to stay away from Paris and promising that Nixon, if elected, would inaugurate a policy more to Saigon’s likng. . . . That, I am convinced, cost Hubert Humphrey the presidency, especially since a shift of just a few hundred thousand votes would have made him the winner.”
Johnson’s chief domestic policy adviser, Joseph Califano, later said in an interview for my book, The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting America in 1968, that Humphrey’s refusal to use the evidence LBJ provided him on Nixon’s actions “became the occasion for a lasting rift” between Johnson and his Vice President. That failure, Califano said, “really tore it. Johnson thought Hubert had no balls, no spine, no toughness. But he did all he could for him.” LBJ appeared at a massive rally for Humphrey in Texas that final weekend before election day, to no avail.
One who chose to see Humphrey in noble terms was presidential chronicler Theodore H. White, recipient of uncommon access to his subjects for his best-settling The Making of the President books. He wrote in his 1968 version that “The fury and dismay at Nixon’s headquarters when his aides discovered the reports of Republican sabotage in Saigon were so intense that they could not have been feigned simply for the benefit of this reporter.”
Yet White opined that Humphrey had acted “morally” rather than out of fear of backlash over making classified material public. “What could have been made of an open charge that the Nixon leaders were saboteurs of the peace one cannot guess; how quickly it might, if aired, have brought the last 48 hours of the American campaign to squalor is a matter of speculation,” White wrote later. Then he added: “But the good instinct of the small-town town boy Hubert Humphrey prevailed.”
Other presidential historians have questioned whether Nixon’s overture was all that critical. Stephen E. Ambrose wrote that Nixon “could not keep himself from trying to influence Thieu through Chennault, so he was guilty in his motives and his actions, but he was not decisive. It was not Nixon who prevented an outbreak of peace in November 1968. He merely exploited a situation he did not create.”
Historian Herbert Parmet in his book Richard Nixon and His America observed: “It may be argued that Thieu did not need Nixon to tell him to resist going to Paris, but how could Nixon be sure? He wanted to win, and the dynamics of the campaign overwhelmed any other consideration.”
Democratic presidential adviser Clark Clifford weighed in later: “All this raises a critical question: What did Richard Nixon know and when did he know it?,” he asked, reprising a familiar refrain. “No proof, in the terminology of the Watergate era, no ‘smoking gun,’ has ever turned up liking Nixon directly to the secret messages to Thieu. There are no self-incriminating tapes from the campaign, and the whole incident has been relegated to the status of an unsolved mystery.”
White opined that Humphrey had acted “morally” rather than out of fear of backlash over making classified material public.
Yet, Clifford adds, it is undeniable that Nixon personally introduced Anna Chennault to Bui Diem, the South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States, at Nixon’s New York City apartment. Chennault, a Chinese-born, naturalized American citizen and widow of famed World war II commander of the Flying Tigers, General Claire Chennault, was later put under FBI surveillance by LBJ. Also attending this initial meeting was Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell.
According to Mrs. Chennault’s later book, The Education of Anna, Nixon told the ambassador that “Anna is my good friend. She knows all about Asia. I know you also consider her a friend, so please rely on her from now on as the only contact between myself and your government. If you have any message for me, please give it to Anna and she will relay it to me and I will do the same in the future.”
After the election, Mrs. Chennault was again summoned to New York, along with Mitchell. According to her book, he told her the new administration was hoping to get “our friends in Saigon” to go to Paris. She shot back: “You must be joking, Two weeks ago, Nixon and you were worried that they might succumb to pressure to go to Paris. What makes you change your mind all of a sudden?” The Nixon team, now preparing to assume power, seemed to be getting ready to follow the Johnson lead of seeking peace after all.
The same night, again according to Anna’s book, Nixon’s California press and PR adviser Herb Klein called her. ‘‘Anna, I’m not going to beat around the bush,” he told her. “You must promise to say to the press that our friend [Nixon] does not know about our arrangement with President Thieu.” Klein added: “We know you’re a good soldier; we just want to be sure our friend is protected.”
Also after the election, the South Vietnamese minister of information in Saigon, Tôn Thất Thiện, was asked in a news conference whether Nixon had encouraged his government to delay a peace agreement. He replied that while there may have been contacts between Nixon staffers and the Saigon embassy in Washington, D.C., “a person of the caliber of Nixon would not do such a thing.”
Whatever was in Humphrey’s mind at that time, his decision not to “blow the whistle” on Nixon adds a tantalizing “what if” as a coda to that most eventful and tragedy-heavy year.
Shortly afterward, reporter Tom Ottenad of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch interviewed Chennault. She told him only that “You’re going to get me into a lot of trouble. . . . Come back and ask me after the inauguration. . . . I know so much and can say so little.” Asked whether others in the Nixon campaign were in contact with the South Vietnamese, she told him: “I certainly was not alone at that time.”
Years later, I located Chennault at a small office she maintained in Georgetown and pressed her about her contacts with Saigon. She told me: “The only people who knew about the whole operation were Nixon, John Mitchell, and John Tower [then a U.S. senator from Texas and a Nixon supporter], and they’re all dead. But they knew what I was doing. Anyone who knows anything about these things knows that I was getting orders to do these things. I couldn’t do anything without instructions.” Chennault died last year,
Whatever was in Humphrey’s mind at that time, his decision not to “blow the whistle” on Nixon adds a tantalizing “what if” as a coda to that most eventful and tragedy-heavy year, which marked the end of the LBJ era, and the start of the corrupt Nixon years.