Haldeman: "They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need to --"
Kissinger: "I wouldn't be surprised if Brookings had the files."
Haldeman: "My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn't know for sure that we don't have them around."
"The X Envelope"
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he had ordered Walt Rostow to remove the documents in the final days of his own presidency. According to those documents and audiotapes of phone conversations, Johnson left office embittered over the Nixon campaign's interference, which he privately called "treason," but he still decided not to disclose what he knew.
In a conference call on Nov. 4, 1968, the day before the election, Johnson considered confirming a story about Nixon's interference that a Saigon-based reporter had written for the Christian Science Monitor, but Johnson was dissuaded by Rostow, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford.
"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. "It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests."
Three years later as Nixon headed toward his re-election campaign, he worried about what evidence Johnson or the Democrats might possess that could be disclosed to the American people. According to Nixon's taped White House conversations, he remained obsessed with getting the file.
On June 30, 1971, he again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and "take it [the file] out." Nixon even suggested using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt (who later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and June of 1972) to conduct the Brookings break-in.
"You talk to Hunt," Nixon told Haldeman. "I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You're to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. ... Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o'clock."
Haldeman: "Make an inspection of the safe."
Nixon: "That's right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up." (For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the planned Brookings break-in never took place.)
Offense or Defense
In the Outlook piece, Woodward and Bernstein interpret Nixon's interest in the file as mostly offensive, that his White House team was looking for material that could be used to "blackmail Johnson" -- in Haldeman's words -- presumably over Nixon's belief that Johnson had engaged in illegal wiretaps of Nixon's campaign in 1968 regarding its contacts with South Vietnamese officials.
Nixon revived this LBJ-bugged-us-too complaint after the botched Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972. And, Johnson's silence about the peace-talk sabotage may have convinced Nixon that Johnson was more worried about disclosures of his wiretaps than Nixon was about revelations of his campaign's Vietnam treachery.
As early as July 1, 1972, Nixon cited the 1968 events as a possible blackmail card to play against Johnson to get his help squelching the expanding Watergate probe.
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