"We've had 24 hours of relative peace," Johnson said. "If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the [peace] conference, well, that's going to be his responsibility. Up to this point, that's why they're not there. I had them signed onboard until this happened."
Dirksen: "I better get in touch with him, I think."
"They're contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war," Johnson said. "It's a damn bad mistake. And I don't want to say so. " You just tell them that their people are messing around in this thing, and if they don't want it on the front pages, they better quit it."
The next day, Nixon spoke directly to Johnson and professed his innocence.
"I didn't say with your knowledge," Johnson responded. "I hope it wasn't."
"Huh, no," Nixon responded. "My God, I would never do anything to encourage " Saigon not to come to the table. " Good God, we want them over to Paris, we got to get them to Paris or you can't have a peace."
Nixon also insisted that he would do whatever President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk wanted.
"I'm not trying to interfere with your conduct of it. I'll only do what you and Rusk want me to do. We've got to get this goddamn war off the plate," Nixon said. "The war apparently now is about where it could be brought to an end. " The quicker the better. To hell with the political credit, believe me."
However, the South Vietnamese boycott of the talks continued and Johnson edged toward publicly exposing Nixon's "treason."
"Good for the Country'
On Nov. 4, Johnson informed Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford that Christian Science Monitor reporter Saville Davis was working on a story about the Republican sabotage. Both Rusk and Clifford opposed going public with LBJ's sensitive evidence.
Clifford reasoned that the disclosure still might not stop Nixon from defeating Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and thus could lead to Nixon as President having little legitimacy in the eyes of many Americans.
"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 stayed silent, unwilling to inform the public that Nixon had put himself in a better position to win the White House by sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks. With LBJ unable to cite any clear progress toward ending the war, a significant number of Americans voted for Nixon because they viewed him as "the peace candidate."
In the end, Nixon narrowly prevailed over Humphrey by about 500,000 votes or less than one percent of the ballots cast.
In the aftermath of the election, Johnson continued to confront Nixon with the evidence of Republican treachery, trying to get him to pressure the South Vietnamese leaders to reverse themselves and join the Paris peace talks.
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