Richard Nixon has been accused of sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks
during his 1968 run for U.S. President. Did Richard Nixon, using Anna
Chennault as a go-between, try to convince South Vietnamese president
Nguyen Van Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks, thereby depriving
the Democrats of an opportunity to take credit for a peaceful
resolution of the Vietnam War? Did Chennault, speaking for Nixon, claim
to Thieu that he could get a better deal from Nixon were Nixon to
become President?
Overall, Jonathan Aitken in Nixon: A Life,
appears to be skeptical about this. Aitken acknowledges that prominent
Nixon campaign adviser John Mitchell spoke once with Chennault about
the peace talks, but he doubts that Nixon was personally involved in
Chennault's activities. Aitken says that Nixon regarded Chennault as a
"self-promoting chatterbox" (Aitken's words), and he seems to be saying
that Chennault acted on her own initiative, since she opposed Lyndon
Johnson's proposed deal with North Vietnam. Aitken on page 366 states
that "The telephone intercepts had...specifically recorded Mrs Chennault
telling the South Vietnamese embassy that Nixon did not know what she
was up to", yet Aitken goes on to say that "She may well have taken
Nixon's name in vain during her conversations with her friends in
Saigon..."
On the preceding page, Aitken says that "even if Nixon,
through Mitchell, was something more than an innocent bystander in the
contact with Mrs Chennault, he was certainly not a guilty party to the
breakdown of the peace talks." According to Aitken, Thieu had his own
reasons not to participate in the Paris Peace Talks, and he did not need
prompting from Chennault or the Nixon campaign to act as he did.
Regarding Lyndon Johnson's belief that Nixon was sabotaging the peace
talks, Aitken says that LBJ was paranoid, and he contends that neither
the wiretaps on the phones of Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell, nor the
bugging of Nixon's plane, uncovered "any evidence of collusion" (page
465). (NOTE: I have read in a couple of places that the allegation that
Nixon's campaign plane was bugged was false.) Moreover, according to
Aitken, the reason that Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert
Humphrey did not go public with the accusation that Nixon sought to
sabotage the Paris Peace Talks was that he did not believe that Nixon
would do such a thing.
Aitken's narration of this appears to be
rather contradictory, but he still offers perhaps the best defense of
Nixon that I have read so far. Was there solid evidence that Nixon was
working through Chennault to sabotage the peace talks? Or were Mitchell
and Chennault acting on their own initiative? Aitken does well to cast
doubt on Chennault's claim that she was speaking for Nixon to the South
Vietnamese, as she herself claimed on a few occasions that such was not
the case. But, as I say here,
using Stephen Ambrose's biography of Nixon as my source, "Lyndon
Johnson apparently had evidence that Nixon adviser John Mitchell,
claiming to speak for Nixon, had asked Chennault to try to persuade
Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks." Would Mitchell claim to
speak for Nixon, without that being the case?
The answer to the
question of whether Nixon knew about the activities of Mitchell and
Chennault may revolve around how involved Nixon was in the details of
his campaign. There were times when Nixon was supposedly obsessed with
the details of his campaign and intimately involved in what his campaign
did. But there were also arguably times when he had a more hands-off
approach when it came to what his underlings did. Watergate, in my
opinion, is a good example of that.