Presidential Conspiracy Theories: Johnson, Nixon and the Paris Peace Talks
In early 1968, Lyndon Johnson finally realized that the Vietnam War would not be won without a tremendous loss of American lives. As casualties mounted and success seemed further away than ever, Johnson's popularity plummeted. College students and others protested, burned draft cards, and chanted, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Johnson was a virtual prisoner in the White House. He could scarcely travel anywhere without facing protests. The Secret Service would not allow him to attend the 1968 Democratic National Convention, aware of the tremendous protests that he would be met with. By early 1968, the public was polarized between the "hawks", who wanted Johnson to continue the war and increase the bombing, and the "doves" who wanted the nation out of the war. It soon became apparent to Johnson that his middle position lacked support and it was time to seek a peace settlement.
On January 30 the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnam's five largest cities, including Saigon, where the US embassy there and other government installations were attacked. While the Tet offensive failed militarily, it gave the enemy a psychological victory, turning American public opinion against the war effort. When the respected CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, voted the nation's "most trusted person", visited Vietnam and concluded that the conflict was deadlocked and that additional fighting would change nothing, Johnson became demoralized. He said to an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America".
Johnson was probably right. Polls showed that only 26% of those polled approved of Johnson's handling of Vietnam, while 63% disapproved. Johnson agreed to increase the troop level by 22,000, despite a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs that ten times that number was required. By March 1968 Johnson was looking for an honorable way out of the war. His new Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, had once been a "hawk", but now Clifford was advising Johnson to "cut losses and get out".
Earlier in March, Johnson was shocked by the success of anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. On March 31 Johnson spoke to the nation in a speech he called "Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam". He announced an immediate unilateral halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and then announced his intention to seek out peace talks anywhere at any time. At the close of his speech he also announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President".
The bombing halt was really a restriction in which 90 percent of North Vietnam's population and 75 percent of its territory was off-limits to bombing. Shortly after Johnson's announcement, Hanoi agreed to discuss a complete halt of the bombing, and a date was set for representatives of both parties to meet in Paris, France. In April Johnson succeeded in opening discussions of peace talks. After extensive negotiations over the site, Paris was agreed as the location. Talks began in May. The sides first met on May 10, with the delegations headed by Xuân Thuỷ, who would remain the official leader of the North Vietnamese delegation throughout the process, and U.S. ambassador-at-large W. Averell Harriman.
Initially, the talks failed to yield any results. US and North Vietnamese negotiators held private discussions in Paris, but two months later it was apparent that private discussions weren't getting much accomplished either. Despite recommendations in August from Chief Negotiator Averill Harriman to halt bombing as an incentive for Hanoi to seriously engage in substantive peace talks, Johnson refused.
For five months, the negotiations stalled as North Vietnam demanded that all bombing of North Vietnam be stopped, while the U.S. side demanded that North Vietnam agree to a reciprocal de-escalation in South Vietnam. By late summer, as the election campaign was in progress at home, it became apparent to Johnson that Republican candidate Richard Nixon was closer to his position than Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Johnson continued to support Humphrey publicly in the election. He personally despised Nixon and told a friend, "the Democratic party at its worst, is still better than the Republican party at its best".
One of the largest hurdles to effective negotiation was the fact that North Vietnam and its ally in South Vietnam, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (known as NLF, or more commonly as the Viet Cong) refused to recognize the government of South Vietnam. Just as vehemently, the government in Saigon refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the NLF. Harriman resolved this dispute by developing a system by which North Vietnam and U.S. would be the named parties. NLF officials could join the North Vietnam team without being recognized by South Vietnam, while Saigon's representatives joined their U.S. allies.
The negotiations sometimes became stalled over ridiculous issues such as the shape of the table to be used at the conference. The North favored a circular table, in which all parties, including NLF representatives, would appear to be "equal"' in importance. The South Vietnamese argued that only a rectangular table was acceptable, for only a rectangle could show two distinct sides to the conflict. Eventually a compromise was reached, in which representatives of the northern and southern governments would sit at a circular table, with members representing all other parties sitting at individual square tables around them.
In October the parties came close to an agreement on a bombing halt. The prospect of successful peace talks was of benefit to the Humphrey campaign and detrimental to Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon. Allegations persist that the Nixon campaign sabotaged the peace talks by persuading the South Vietnamese to stall the talks until after the election, on the promise that they would get a better deal from Nixon.
Bryce Harlow, a former White House staff member in the Eisenhower administration, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House" and said that he kept Nixon informed about what was taking place in Paris. Harlow and Henry Kissinger had connections to the Nixon campaign, though it us unclear to what extent Kissinger gained knowledge and passed it on to the Nixon campaign. According to CIA intelligence analyst William Bundy, Kissinger did not obtain any useful inside information on the talks.
But Nixon had a channel to President Thieu of South Vietnam. Nixon asked the prominent Asian-American politician Anna Chennault to be his "channel to Mr. Thieu". She agreed and reported to Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell that Thieu had no intention of attending the peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." When he got wind of Nixon's back channel into the negotiations, President Johnson ordered the wire-tapping of members of the Nixon campaign. Some historians believe that Nixon's efforts probably made no difference in the result of the talks because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election. Nevertheless, Nixon's use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable. But for some reason Vice President Hubert Humphrey decided not to make Nixon's actions public, perhaps because he did not want to expose Johnson's surveillance of the Nixon campaign.
After winning the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon became president of the U.S. in January 1969. He replaced U.S. ambassador Harriman with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who was later replaced by David Bruce. Also that year, the NLF set up a Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) to gain government status at the talks. However, the primary negotiations that led to the agreement did not occur at the Peace Conference at all, but were carried out during secret negotiations between Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ, which began on August 4, 1969.
The only suspicious piece of evidence implicating Nixon in sabotaging the peace talks until after the election was the FBI recorded a call from Chennault to South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem in which she told hum that her "boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador” a message to “hold on, we are gonna win.” Chennault claimed that the "boss" she was referring to was campaign chairman John Mitchell, but Lyndon Johnson believed that she meant Nixon. When Thieu suddenly refused to send representatives to attend the talks, Johnson and many others assumed that Nixon was responsible.
Author George J. Veith, in his 2021 book Drawn Swords in a Distant Land: South Vietnam’s Shattered Dreams doubts that Nixon was behind Chennault's actions. Firstly, he argues that Chennault did not pass Mitchell’s message to the ambassador for two days, whereas if the direction came from Nixon, one would assume a communication of this importance would have been delivered immediately. He also notes that the transcript of the FBI recorded call does not indicate any response by Bui Diem. Ambassador Bui Diem repeatedly denied making any deals with the Nixon campaign to sabotage the peace talks. Bui Diem said that he did not report Chennault's message because “it did not mean anything or change the situation.” Chennault herself also rejected the allegations. Veith argues that the South Vietnamese did not attend the Paris talks because of the political issues, not because of any request from Nixon. He adds:
"The writers who describe a Nixon plot have the conspiracy backwards. According to my interviews with former South Vietnamese officials, and focused solely on US evidence and Nixon’s later Watergate crimes, believers of the Chennault conspiracy missed the possibility that Thieu and his Asian allies may have tried to manipulate the US election for their own advantage."
In an interview with journalist Neil Sheehan in June 1975, Bui Diem told Sheehan there was no reason to “weave a complicated plot” because the “dynamics of the situation were so obvious” based upon “Saigon’s assessment of the positions of the candidates on Vietnam." He added that Saigon favored Nixon” because they believed that “Nixon was ‘firm against the Communists’ while ‘Humphrey was wavering.’”
Veith concludes:
"Ultimately, the 'Anna Chennault Affair' is an example of how partisanship and political intrigue, combined with conjecture, result in broad acceptance of wrongful narratives. Anna Chennault was the go-between for Chiang and Thieu, but evidence suggests that she was only a messenger. Political historians would do well to embrace the facts as they stand and do away with one of the Vietnam War's great conspiracy theories.
Following is a YouTube video containing a recording of a conversation that Johnson and Nixon had on November 8, 1968, following the election in which Johnson discusses the allegations of Nixon's interference in the peace talks.
On January 30 the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnam's five largest cities, including Saigon, where the US embassy there and other government installations were attacked. While the Tet offensive failed militarily, it gave the enemy a psychological victory, turning American public opinion against the war effort. When the respected CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, voted the nation's "most trusted person", visited Vietnam and concluded that the conflict was deadlocked and that additional fighting would change nothing, Johnson became demoralized. He said to an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America".
Johnson was probably right. Polls showed that only 26% of those polled approved of Johnson's handling of Vietnam, while 63% disapproved. Johnson agreed to increase the troop level by 22,000, despite a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs that ten times that number was required. By March 1968 Johnson was looking for an honorable way out of the war. His new Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, had once been a "hawk", but now Clifford was advising Johnson to "cut losses and get out".
Earlier in March, Johnson was shocked by the success of anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. On March 31 Johnson spoke to the nation in a speech he called "Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam". He announced an immediate unilateral halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and then announced his intention to seek out peace talks anywhere at any time. At the close of his speech he also announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President".
The bombing halt was really a restriction in which 90 percent of North Vietnam's population and 75 percent of its territory was off-limits to bombing. Shortly after Johnson's announcement, Hanoi agreed to discuss a complete halt of the bombing, and a date was set for representatives of both parties to meet in Paris, France. In April Johnson succeeded in opening discussions of peace talks. After extensive negotiations over the site, Paris was agreed as the location. Talks began in May. The sides first met on May 10, with the delegations headed by Xuân Thuỷ, who would remain the official leader of the North Vietnamese delegation throughout the process, and U.S. ambassador-at-large W. Averell Harriman.
Initially, the talks failed to yield any results. US and North Vietnamese negotiators held private discussions in Paris, but two months later it was apparent that private discussions weren't getting much accomplished either. Despite recommendations in August from Chief Negotiator Averill Harriman to halt bombing as an incentive for Hanoi to seriously engage in substantive peace talks, Johnson refused.
For five months, the negotiations stalled as North Vietnam demanded that all bombing of North Vietnam be stopped, while the U.S. side demanded that North Vietnam agree to a reciprocal de-escalation in South Vietnam. By late summer, as the election campaign was in progress at home, it became apparent to Johnson that Republican candidate Richard Nixon was closer to his position than Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Johnson continued to support Humphrey publicly in the election. He personally despised Nixon and told a friend, "the Democratic party at its worst, is still better than the Republican party at its best".
One of the largest hurdles to effective negotiation was the fact that North Vietnam and its ally in South Vietnam, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (known as NLF, or more commonly as the Viet Cong) refused to recognize the government of South Vietnam. Just as vehemently, the government in Saigon refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the NLF. Harriman resolved this dispute by developing a system by which North Vietnam and U.S. would be the named parties. NLF officials could join the North Vietnam team without being recognized by South Vietnam, while Saigon's representatives joined their U.S. allies.
The negotiations sometimes became stalled over ridiculous issues such as the shape of the table to be used at the conference. The North favored a circular table, in which all parties, including NLF representatives, would appear to be "equal"' in importance. The South Vietnamese argued that only a rectangular table was acceptable, for only a rectangle could show two distinct sides to the conflict. Eventually a compromise was reached, in which representatives of the northern and southern governments would sit at a circular table, with members representing all other parties sitting at individual square tables around them.
In October the parties came close to an agreement on a bombing halt. The prospect of successful peace talks was of benefit to the Humphrey campaign and detrimental to Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon. Allegations persist that the Nixon campaign sabotaged the peace talks by persuading the South Vietnamese to stall the talks until after the election, on the promise that they would get a better deal from Nixon.
Bryce Harlow, a former White House staff member in the Eisenhower administration, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House" and said that he kept Nixon informed about what was taking place in Paris. Harlow and Henry Kissinger had connections to the Nixon campaign, though it us unclear to what extent Kissinger gained knowledge and passed it on to the Nixon campaign. According to CIA intelligence analyst William Bundy, Kissinger did not obtain any useful inside information on the talks.
But Nixon had a channel to President Thieu of South Vietnam. Nixon asked the prominent Asian-American politician Anna Chennault to be his "channel to Mr. Thieu". She agreed and reported to Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell that Thieu had no intention of attending the peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." When he got wind of Nixon's back channel into the negotiations, President Johnson ordered the wire-tapping of members of the Nixon campaign. Some historians believe that Nixon's efforts probably made no difference in the result of the talks because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election. Nevertheless, Nixon's use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable. But for some reason Vice President Hubert Humphrey decided not to make Nixon's actions public, perhaps because he did not want to expose Johnson's surveillance of the Nixon campaign.
After winning the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon became president of the U.S. in January 1969. He replaced U.S. ambassador Harriman with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who was later replaced by David Bruce. Also that year, the NLF set up a Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) to gain government status at the talks. However, the primary negotiations that led to the agreement did not occur at the Peace Conference at all, but were carried out during secret negotiations between Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ, which began on August 4, 1969.
The only suspicious piece of evidence implicating Nixon in sabotaging the peace talks until after the election was the FBI recorded a call from Chennault to South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem in which she told hum that her "boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador” a message to “hold on, we are gonna win.” Chennault claimed that the "boss" she was referring to was campaign chairman John Mitchell, but Lyndon Johnson believed that she meant Nixon. When Thieu suddenly refused to send representatives to attend the talks, Johnson and many others assumed that Nixon was responsible.
Author George J. Veith, in his 2021 book Drawn Swords in a Distant Land: South Vietnam’s Shattered Dreams doubts that Nixon was behind Chennault's actions. Firstly, he argues that Chennault did not pass Mitchell’s message to the ambassador for two days, whereas if the direction came from Nixon, one would assume a communication of this importance would have been delivered immediately. He also notes that the transcript of the FBI recorded call does not indicate any response by Bui Diem. Ambassador Bui Diem repeatedly denied making any deals with the Nixon campaign to sabotage the peace talks. Bui Diem said that he did not report Chennault's message because “it did not mean anything or change the situation.” Chennault herself also rejected the allegations. Veith argues that the South Vietnamese did not attend the Paris talks because of the political issues, not because of any request from Nixon. He adds:
"The writers who describe a Nixon plot have the conspiracy backwards. According to my interviews with former South Vietnamese officials, and focused solely on US evidence and Nixon’s later Watergate crimes, believers of the Chennault conspiracy missed the possibility that Thieu and his Asian allies may have tried to manipulate the US election for their own advantage."
In an interview with journalist Neil Sheehan in June 1975, Bui Diem told Sheehan there was no reason to “weave a complicated plot” because the “dynamics of the situation were so obvious” based upon “Saigon’s assessment of the positions of the candidates on Vietnam." He added that Saigon favored Nixon” because they believed that “Nixon was ‘firm against the Communists’ while ‘Humphrey was wavering.’”
Veith concludes:
"Ultimately, the 'Anna Chennault Affair' is an example of how partisanship and political intrigue, combined with conjecture, result in broad acceptance of wrongful narratives. Anna Chennault was the go-between for Chiang and Thieu, but evidence suggests that she was only a messenger. Political historians would do well to embrace the facts as they stand and do away with one of the Vietnam War's great conspiracy theories.
Following is a YouTube video containing a recording of a conversation that Johnson and Nixon had on November 8, 1968, following the election in which Johnson discusses the allegations of Nixon's interference in the peace talks.
Click to view