Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President - Softcover

Fulsom, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250036798 ISBN 13: 9781250036797

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2013

Synopsis

A veteran White House reporter reveals our 37th president was even more sinister and haunted than we knew.

While Richard Nixon resigned from the White House as our most disgraced president, the American people never knew the full extent of his demons, paranoia, prejudices, hatreds, and chicanery. Calling on his work in covering Nixon in the White House, as well as scores of interviews and invaluable, newly declassified documents and recordings, reporter Don Fulsom sheds new light on "Tricky Dick" by revealing his violent streaks, paranoia, mob ties, and even treasonous activity in exchange for political gain. Nixon's Darkest Secrets reveals that the Watergate scandal was only half the story, and sheds new light on our most devious president.

About this title

About the Author

DON FULSOM is a longtime White House reporter and former United Press International Washington bureau chief who has covered presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He is an adjunct professor at American University in Washington D.C., where he teaches "Watergate: A Constitutional Crisis."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE
 

TREASON WINS THE WHITE HOUSE

Treason is the highest crime an American can commit against his country. And that’s what one president accused his successor of committing.
Richard Nixon’s secret sabotaging of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 Paris peace talks—much more than Watergate or his longtime ties to the Mafia—should stand as our thirty-seventh president’s greatest sin. There are no better words than “despicable” and “sordid” and “treason” (used by LBJ in this context) to describe Nixon’s betrayal of his country for his own political gain. In a newly released Johnson phone call to Senator Everett Dirksen, just before the November 1968 election, the Senate GOP leader readily agreed with the president’s treason conclusion about Nixon, and pledged to call his party’s presidential candidate on the carpet on it.
Johnson himself—a number of times earlier, and later—scolded Nixon, who repeatedly denied knowing anything about the meddling with the Paris negotiations and pledged to do nothing to hurt President Johnson’s efforts to end the war. (When the phone was hung up after at least one of these lies, Nixon and his cohorts reportedly burst into loud and sustained laughter.)1
The newest LBJ Library tapes tell the dramatic story of how Johnson blew his stack and nearly the whistle on Nixon’s treachery: On November 2, 1968, three days before the election, Johnson let Dirksen peek at Johnson’s self-described “hole cards” in his unbeatable poker hand in a high-stakes showdown against Nixon.2
Alluding to NSA intercepts, FBI wiretaps and CIA bugs, Johnson says on the tape that he knows—because South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu’s offices are bugged—that China Lobby stalwart Anna Chennault went to Thieu on Nixon’s behalf and told Thieu he should hold out on the peace talks until after the election. “They oughtn’t be doing this,” Johnson tells Dirksen. “This is treason.” Dirksen agrees.
Johnson says he doesn’t want to go public with the information, but he wants Nixon to know that he is aware of what Nixon’s doing and to whom he and his emissaries have been talking. “They’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war!” Johnson tells Dirksen on the tape. “It’s a damn bad mistake. You just tell them that their people are messing around in this thing, and if they don’t want it on the front pages, they better quit it.” Dirksen vows on the tape to get in touch with Nixon and call him off.
*   *   *
Later, as president in mid-1971, Nixon got word—apparently from his chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman—that President Johnson’s Vietnam files were being housed at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. These files included not only the decision behind LBJ’s pre-election bombing halt (which Nixon erroneously thought was timed to help Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey), but also evidence of Nixon’s interference with the Paris peace talks. “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff,” Haldeman excitedly asserted about the bombing halt material.3 (Haldeman thought that perhaps Johnson could be blackmailed into supporting Nixon’s Vietnam policies.) Nixon biographer Anthony Summers noted that Nixon had another reason for wanting to get the Vietnam files. “[Nixon] had actively worked to sabotage the 1968 peace talks, and the record in question might actually prove more damaging to him than to President Johnson.”4
So President Richard Nixon endorsed a wild scheme, shockingly wild: the firebombing of, and theft of files from, the Brookings Institution in Washington. The documents were well worth the risk, he figured, if they held evidence of his deliberate subversion. He also thought they might offer proof that his own 1968 campaign plane was bugged; it wasn’t. Without specifically mentioning his Brookings break-in demand in his 1975 memoirs, Nixon did admit he had told his staff he wanted the Vietnam files he believed were in Brookings’ possession delivered to him, “even if it meant having to get it surreptitiously.”5
The Brookings plan was bizarre. “Masterminded” by G. Gordon Liddy of later Watergate infamy, it would have featured an old fire truck repainted with the markings of the District of Columbia’s Fire Department. Operated by a group of pro-Nixon Cubans from Miami, disguised as a fire crew, the fake fire engine would make its way to Brookings. While ostensibly there to battle their own Molotov cocktail–caused blaze, the break-in experts from Miami would enter the building, crack open the vaults, make off with the Vietnam files, and then quickly ditch the slow-moving fire engine—after transferring the files and themselves to a nearby waiting van.
In his autobiography, Liddy surmised that a successful Brookings caper might have prompted some guessing games about the identities of the miscreants “in the liberal press,” but that “because nothing could be proved, the matter would lapse into the unsolved-mystery category.”6
John Dean, President Nixon’s White House lawyer, had a far more sensible take on the contemplated firebombing. Dean claims he was able to shut down the operation (the “joint” had already been “cased”—in Dean’s words—by Nixon agents, who were turned away by an alert security guard). Dean convinced presidential aide John Ehrlichman that if anyone died in the blast, it would be a capital crime that might be traced back to the White House. Ehrlichman later acknowledged calling off the plan—and confirmed that Nixon knew of it in advance.7
Just think: Had Dean not prevailed with Ehrlichman, had this break-in actually occurred, had it involved a death, and had it been botched as badly as Watergate, then murder and domestic terrorism might well have been added to Nixon’s list of impeachable offenses.
In addition, just ordering the Brookings break-in “would be an impeachable offense,” according to Terry Lenzner, who was a top official on the Senate Watergate committee. “It is the President ordering a felony to obtain information.”8
And don’t forget treason—had DC police recovered the 1968 campaign files from the phony firemen or fake DC fire engine.
What would have been found? Piles of evidence of Nixon’s treachery, including this “smoking gun” intercept of a back-door message from Nixon to Thieu: “Hold on. We’re gonna win.” The message was plain, according to Nixon’s go-between Anna Chennault: “Stay away from the peace talks.”9
In 1968, Vietnam was the No. 1 issue in the campaign. Nixon was generally viewed as the dovish candidate because he promised to implement a secret plan to “end the war and win the peace.” Humphrey was viewed as a candidate who would continue President Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular hawkish war policies.
LBJ had dropped out of the presidential race to devote the remainder of his tenure to peace in Vietnam. He’d hoped, since quitting, to bring the fighting to an end through three-way (Hanoi, Saigon and Washington) peace talks in Paris. Nixon feared that if Johnson succeeded, Humphrey would win the November election. It was the kind of “October Surprise” the paranoid GOP nominee feared most.
Shortly before voters went to the polls, to ensure that Hanoi would attend the Paris talks, President Johnson announced a halt in the U.S. bombing of the North. Nixon learned of this important development through Henry Kissinger—an informal LBJ advisor to the peace talks. In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein observes, “The Johnson team trusted [Kissinger] implicitly. They shouldn’t have. Kissinger was a double agent feeding the intelligence to Nixon that let him scotch the peace deal before the election.”10
Johnson’s bombing halt announcement, just days before the election, briefly gave Humphrey a slight lead in public-opinion polls—though he would go on to lose to Nixon by about 500,000 votes.
All during the 1968 campaign, working through a separate secret agent—one even more secret than Kissinger—Nixon had been telling South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu to boycott any LBJ-sponsored talks and hold out for a better deal under a Nixon presidency. Thieu obliged, wrecking the talks and any chance for peace during the final months of Johnson’s presidency.
Nixon’s back channel in his contacts with Thieu was Anna Chennault, aka the Dragon Lady. The gorgeous forty-three-year-old widow of World War II U.S. “Flying Tigers” hero General Claire Chennault had moved from Taiwan to the United States in 1960. Anna was co-chairman of Women for Nixon-Agnew.
At Nixon’s request, Chennault established contacts with the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington, Bui Diem. In July 1968, Chennault introduced the ambassador to the GOP presidential hopeful at a hush-hush meeting at Nixon’s New York apartment. According to Chennault, Nixon told Bui Diem he could “rest assured” that, if elected, “I will have a meeting with [Thieu] and find a solution to winning the war.” He added that Chennault was to be “the only contact between myself and your government.”11
Anna Chennault also had some dealings, face-to-face and on the telephone, with Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell. Unless he was speaking on a secure phone line, however, Mitchell kept most of his thoughts to himself. He strongly suspected that government agents were monitoring the Dragon Lady’s activities.
Mitchell’s suspicions were spot-on. And a furious Johnson didn’t hesitate to let Mitchell’s boss himself know ...

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1250036798
• ISBN 13: 9781250036797
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320