Fatal Politics by Hughes Ken

Fatal Politics by Hughes Ken

Author:Hughes, Ken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press


The Chennault Affair

Why did Thieu’s blowup in 1972 have so little impact when his blowup in 1968 had decided the presidential election? In both cases, Nixon controlled the narrative. He carefully prepared (or spun) the voters in advance to view the bombing halt as a gimmick. On October 25, 1968, the Republican nominee had issued a masterful misstatement of the facts:

In the last 36 hours I have been advised of a flurry of meetings in the White House and elsewhere on Vietnam. I am told that officials in the administration have been driving very hard for an agreement on a bombing halt, accompanied possibly by a ceasefire, in the immediate future. I have since learned these reports are true.

I am also told that this spurt of activity is a cynical, last-minute attempt by President Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr. Humphrey. This I do not believe.1

While casting himself as the defender of Johnson’s honor, Nixon did all he could to destroy the president’s credibility. The fact was that Johnson had set three conditions for a bombing halt back in June and stuck with them until Hanoi accepted them all. It was only in October that the North finally accepted Johnson’s demands that it (1) respect the DMZ, (2) sit down with the South in Paris, and (3) stop shelling South Vietnamese civilians. Nixon knew about these conditions because Johnson had briefed him throughout the negotiations. LBJ wasn’t driving hard for a bombing halt. He knew how bad it would look to have one right before the election, and he fretted about how history would treat him. But even the hawks among his advisers told him they couldn’t defend a decision not to halt the bombing after Hanoi accepted his demands.

Once Thieu “blew up,” boycotting the Paris talks and tarring them as a step in the direction of a coalition government, it looked like Nixon’s “cynical, last-minute” charge was true. What the voters didn’t see was the behind-the-scenes effort Nixon had made to get Thieu to boycott the Paris talks in the first place. Using a prominent Republican fund-raiser named Anna Chennault as his go-between, Nixon secretly encouraged Saigon’s refusal. Publicly, Nixon said he would do nothing to interfere with the peace negotiations; behind closed doors, he interfered. In 1968, Thieu’s blowup perfectly fit the story the Nixon campaign was telling the voters about Johnsonian political manipulation. It was a deceptive story, but Nixon, through his own political manipulation, made it look true.

In 1972, Thieu’s blowup didn’t fit the story told by either nominee. That was the difference.



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