A President Who Committed Treason

by

John J. Dunphy

(This column originally appeared in The Telegraph of Alton, IL).

The role of the United States in the Vietnam War ended in 1973. We now know we could have withdrawn from that conflict through a negotiated peace settlement in 1968 if Richard Nixon hadn’t committed treason in order to win the presidential election held that year.

Yes — treason.

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s conversations prove that Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon deliberately sabotaged the peace negotiations that were being conducted in Paris.

Why? Nixon wanted the war to continue because the cornerstone of his campaign was a promise that, if elected president, he would end the conflict.

Nixon recruited Anna Chennault, the widow of General Claire Lee Chennault of “Flying Tigers” fame, to act as his liaison to South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States. According to David Taylor’s article ”The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon’s ‘treason,’ “ a meeting was held in July 1968 at Nixon’s New York apartment and “the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign.” If Nixon needed to pass a message to the president of South Vietnam, “it would come via Chennault.”

In his 1983 book “The Price of Power,” Seymour Hersh wrote that Nixon learned of an impending truce from Henry Kissinger, who at the time served as a foreign policy advisor to Johnson. Fearing that an end to the war would destroy his chance to win the White House, Nixon instructed Chennault to tell the South Vietnamese ambassador that South Vietnam would get a much better deal if he were elected. The FBI, which had bugged the telephone of South Vietnam’s ambassador, heard a conversation during which Chennault urged the ambassador to “just hang on through election.”

There is no question that Nixon committed treason by deliberately sabotaging our nation’s peace negotiations. The Logan Act, passed in 1799 during the administration of President John Adams, clearly states, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Nixon’s strategy was successful. Hoping that South Vietnam would get a better deal when Nixon assumed the presidency, that nation’s negotiators withdrew from the peace talks. Nixon pretended to have no idea why and even offered to fly to Saigon to attempt to persuade the South Vietnamese to return to the peace talks. President Johnson was furious at Nixon. In a conversation with Everett Dirksen, the Republican senate minority leader, Johnson stated, “This is treason. Dirksen replied, “I know.”

Johnson wanted to go public with Nixon’s treason but was persuaded not to do so by Clark Clifford, his secretary of defense. Clifford told Johnson that “some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story.” If Nixon were elected, he told Johnson, a scandal of this magnitude “could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s best interests.” Johnson remained silent, and Nixon won the presidency.

Nixon not only sabotaged the peace talks in 1968. He deliberately prolonged the Vietnam War so that it would be an issue he could again exploit in the 1972 presidential election.

According to the National Archives, 58,200 American military personnel were killed during the Vietnam War. Nixon’s treachery is responsible for all those who were killed or wounded after 1968. An ordinary person would have found it difficult to live with the knowledge that he was responsible for such carnage. Richard Nixon was no ordinary person, however. He was born without a conscience.

John J. Dunphy is a writer and poet. He is the author of “Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois” and owns the Second Reading Book Shop in Alton.