Skulduggery found in highest of places
Despite opening diplomatic relations with China and creating the Environmental Protection Agency, Richard Nixon is destined to always be rubbing shoulders with the likes of Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and James Buchanan on lists of our worst presidents as a result of the Watergate scandal. Once Nixon was caught and he had no plausible way to deny his involvement, he became our first – and, so far, only – president to resign.
More than just a 40-year-old chapter in our history books, Watergate helped deepen public cynicism about our leaders and institutions.
Despite the passage of time, the disenchantment and mistrust has only worsened since Nixon stepped onto the helicopter and left the White House one step ahead of impeachment.
It turns out, though, that Nixon could well have engaged in skulduggery in his quest for the presidency that was at least on the same par as Watergate.
Biographer John Farrell, the author of the upcoming “Richard Nixon: The Life,” unearthed notes from Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman during his research strongly indicating that Nixon was in the know about and actively involved in a plot to derail peace talks between North Vietnam and South Vietnam in the fall of 1968.
Nixon believed that, if a breakthrough occurred, it would give a boost to his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had been lagging far behind Nixon in the polls at the start of the campaign, but had been rapidly gaining on Nixon in the contest’s final laps.
According to Farrell, when Nixon caught wind of a plan by President Lyndon Johnson to stop bombing communist-controlled North Vietnam in exchange for peace talks with South Vietnam, whose regime was being propped up by the United States, he wanted to undercut it. With just a couple of weeks left before voters went to the polls, Nixon seems to have told Haldeman to find some way to “monkey wrench” the plan.
It’s long been suspected that Nixon had go-betweens inform the government in South Vietnam that they would get a better deal from him if he became president and hold off on taking the offer. They did, and Nixon won the presidency in November with a popular-vote margin of 512,000 votes out of 63 million cast (his Electoral College margin was a much healthier 301 votes to Humphrey’s 191).
Farrell believes the “monkey wrench” comment in Haldeman’s notes provides smoking-gun evidence of Nixon’s efforts to sabotage the peace talks.
“His actions appear to violate federal law, which prohibits private citizens from trying to ‘defeat the measures of the United States,'” Farrell wrote in The New York Times.
Amid reconsiderations of Nixon, he pointed out, “we must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia, may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.”
Sure, Nixon has been dead for more than 20 years, and some of the other principals in this saga have been gone even longer.
But, as Farrell points out, it’s not something the friends and families of the 20,000 U.S. troops killed in Vietnam after the aborted peace talks can just shrug off as ancient history. Nor should we.