On Nov. 8, 1968, Johnson recounted the evidence to Nixon and even described the Republican motivation to disrupt the talks, speaking of himself in the third person in describing the GOP message to the South Vietnamese.
"Johnson was going to have a bombing pause to try to elect Humphrey. They [the South Vietnamese] ought to hold out because Nixon will not sell you out like the Democrats sold out China," Johnson said.
"I think they [the South Vietnamese] have been talking to [Vice President-elect Spiro] Agnew," Johnson continued. "They've been quoting you [Nixon] indirectly, that the thing they ought to do is to just not show up at any [peace] conference and wait until you come into office.
"Now they've started that [boycott] and that's bad. They're killing Americans every day. I have that [story of the sabotage] documented. There's not any question but that's happening. " That's the story, Dick, and it's a sordid story. " I don't want to say that to the country, because that's not good."
Faced with Johnson's implied threat, Nixon promised to tell the South Vietnamese officials to reverse themselves and join the peace talks. However, there's no evidence that Nixon pressed Thieu to accept LBJ's peace deal. In any event, Johnson failed to achieve his hoped-for breakthrough.
More Dead
Then, instead of finishing up the peace talks and bringing the war to a swift conclusion along the lines of Johnson's plan, Nixon escalated the war. He authorized secret aerial bombings of Cambodia and in 1970 sent U.S. troops into Cambodian border areas.
The invasion, in turn, touched off widespread anti-war student protests across the country, including the fateful confrontation at Kent State in Ohio.
As the anti-war disruptions spread, Americans moved into polarized and hostile camps. The images of slaughter from Vietnam provoked more resistance, such as a momentous 1971 decision by former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers secret history of the Vietnam War.
That, in turn, led to more abuses by an increasingly paranoid Nixon, who cited national security to justify a massive political spying operation against his enemies. That pattern of behavior led Republican operatives to plant bugs on phones of the Democratic National Committee at Washington's Watergate building in 1972.
Then, after the Watergate operation was exposed on June 17, 1972, with the arrest of five White House burglars inside DNC offices, Nixon began citing Johnson's eavesdropping on the Republican messages to the South Vietnamese as justification for his own activities.
As Nixon took charge of the Watergate cover-up issuing orders, brainstorming P.R. strategies and trying to blackmail Democrats with threats of embarrassing disclosures one of Nixon's ploys was to reveal that Johnson had ordered the bugging of the Nixon campaign in 1968.
Nixon referred back to the Vietnam peace
talk gambit, claiming that he was told by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
that Johnson had ordered the bugging of a Nixon campaign plane to
ascertain who was undermining the Paris talks, according to Nixon's own
White House tapes.
On July 1, 1972, White House aide Charles Colson touched off Nixon's
musings by noting that a newspaper column claimed that the Democrats
had bugged Chennault's telephones in 1968. Nixon pounced on Colson's
remark.
"Oh," Nixon responded, "in '68, they bugged our phones too."
Colson: "And that this was ordered by Johnson."
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