Nixon wanted to use his 1968 bugging complaint to create a backfire against the Watergate investigation, even though possible disclosure of the fact that Nixon's campaign had blocked a peace settlement to the bloody Vietnam War would presumably have carried considerable political risk for him.
On Jan. 8, 1973, Nixon urged Haldeman to plant a story about the 1968 bugging in the Washington Star. "You don't really have to have hard evidence, Bob," Nixon told Haldeman. "You're not trying to take this to court. All you have to do is to have it out, just put it out as authority, and the press will write the Goddamn story, and the Star will run it now."
Haldeman, however, insisted on checking the facts. In The Haldeman Diaries, published in 1994, Haldeman included an entry dated Jan. 12, 1973, which contains his book's only deletion for national security reasons...
"I talked to [former Attorney General John] Mitchell on the phone," Haldeman wrote, "and he said [FBI official Cartha] DeLoach had told him he was up to date on the thing. ... A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and LBJ got very hot and called Deke [DeLoach's nickname], and said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release [deleted material -- national security], saying that our side was asking that certain things be done. ...
"DeLoach took this as a direct threat from Johnson," Haldeman wrote. "As he [DeLoach] recalls it, bugging was requested on the [Nixon campaign] planes, but was turned down, and all they did was check the phone calls, and put a tap on the Dragon Lady [Anna Chennault]."
In other words, Nixon's threat to raise the 1968 bugging was countered by Johnson, who threatened to reveal that Nixon's campaign had sabotaged a peace settlement to the Vietnam War when a half million U.S. soldiers were in the combat zone.
However, the two retaliatory disclosures never occurred. On Jan. 22, 1973, 10 days after Haldeman's diary entry, Johnson died of a heart attack. Haldeman also apparently thought better of publicizing Nixon's 1968 bugging complaint. [For more details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Turning a Blind Eye
Over the past several decades, the Nixon's sabotage story has spilled out in bits and pieces, but the shocking story never was played up by the major U.S. news media, perhaps because it risked devastating public faith in the political system.
The news media's pattern of looking the other way continued in December 2008 when the National Archives released audiotapes of President Johnson's official phone conversations from 1968. Though the conversations revealed Johnson talking about Nixon's Vietnam machinations, the American press corps again ignored this sordid story.
Beginning in late October 1968, as Nixon was running neck-and-neck with Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey and the Paris peace talks appeared on the verge of achieving a settlement of the Vietnam conflict, Johnson can be heard on the tapes complaining about the Republican gambit to sabotage negotiations.
Johnson's frustration builds as he learns more from intercepts about the back-channel contacts between Nixon's operatives and South Vietnamese officials who had tentatively agreed to take part in the Paris meetings. The apparent Republican goal was to sink Johnson's peace deal and thus deny Humphrey a last-minute bump that could have cost Nixon the election.
On Nov. 2, 1968 -- just three days before the election -- Thieu recanted on meeting with the Viet Cong in Paris, pushing the peace talks toward collapse. On the same day, an angry Johnson telephoned Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen to lay out the evidence of sabotage and get Dirksen to intervene with Nixon.
"The agent [Chennault] says she's just talked to the boss in New Mexico and that he said that you must hold out, just hold on until after the election," Johnson said in an apparent reference to a Nixon campaign plane that carried some of his top aides, including Agnew, to New Mexico. "We know what Thieu is saying to them out there. We're pretty well informed at both ends."
Johnson then made a thinly veiled threat about going public with the information. "I don't want to get this in the campaign," Johnson said, adding: "They oughtn't be doing this. This is treason."
Dirksen responded, "I know."
Johnson continued: "I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter of this importance. I don't want to do that [go public]. They ought to know that we know what they're doing. I know who they're talking to. I know what they're saying."
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