And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason.
Sen. Dirksen: I know.
Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that's Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.
But by then -- Nixon's plan had worked.
South Vietnam boycotted the peace talks -- the war continued -- and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, died as a result of Nixon's treason.
And Nixon was never held to account for it.
Gerald Ford was the next Republican.
After Nixon left office the same way he entered it -- by virtue of breaking the law -- Gerald Ford took over.
Ford was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon's treason.
The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.
He won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise -- when his people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter's negotiations to release American hostages in Iran.
According to Iran's then-president, Reagan's people promised the Iranians that if they held off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election -- then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.
In 1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the 52 hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, had successfully run for President on the popular position of releasing the hostages:
"I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking]."
Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980 Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to win an election.
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