The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason' | Hacker News Reader

The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'

bbc.co.uk

89 pointsyoungerdryas55 comments

The OP leaves it unclear whether any new information has come out about this recently, but I don't think it has. Weren't the 1968 tapes released years ago?

Robert Parry has been writing about Nixon's election campaign sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks for years. He made the rather witty remark that it went from "conspiracy theory" to "old news" without ever having been widely reported.

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-t...

Johnson asked Walt Rostow to personally abscond with the files on Nixon so as to thwart Nixon's attempts to find them. Rostow eventually sent them to the LBJ library with a request to keep them sealed for another 50 years. Instead, the library began declassifying them in the 90s. It might be hard to believe this stuff, but there it is, all documented.

Very interesting article. And it's telling why Johnson didn't reveal what Nixon was doing.

He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.

When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.

The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.

Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.

So they decided to say nothing.

Johnson started the Vietnam War through a massive escalation. Nixon ended it.

Abe Lincoln was a republican therefore conservatives freed the slaves, right?

His name was Abraham Lincoln.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

To your question, are you suggesting that you think that slavery fell clearly along the lines of liberalism and conservatism?

While I'm a massive fan of pedantry, unfortunately the Wikipedia article you link to includes references to him as "Abe".

Is Abe short for something else? I was being facetious about red v. blue silliness but I would love to hear how freeing the slaves was the conservative position, having a hard time seeing how that would work.

Well, it works like this. First republican Abe makes clear he wants to free the slaves, then wins the presidential nomination position in the republican party. Then he gets elected by the republican american people to be president as a republican. Then 7 republican states secede from the US and shortly thereafter they wage war. Then the republican Lincoln wins and a period of slave liberation and movement towards equal rights on a federal level begins.

Also, according to wikipedia: "The republican party [..] founded by anti-slavery activists in 1854".

Now I'm no republican, as a north european you'll find me to be more of the social/liberal kind (yeah.. those two can be together), but I think the republican party has a pretty swell history.

The democratic party used to be full of bigoted racists before and during the 60's, let's not forget that.

Both parties have nothing to do with the parties they used to be even 50 years ago.

The republican party became evangelical/right wing in the end of the 70's. But it is not sustainable because of demographics.

A funny fact is most Latinos and Blacks are culturaly more conservative than liberal ( christians / anti-gay ...) , but given the hate on the right they are not going to vote for republicans. And Obama is certainly not a communist. He is not even a progressive.

>>A funny fact is most Latinos and Blacks are culturaly more conservative than liberal ( christians / anti-gay ...)...

I was looking for some sources to support that claim when I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia_in_the_Latino_commun...

and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia_in_the_Black_communi...

It's true! Wikipedia says so.

> Then 7 republican states secede from the US and shortly thereafter they wage war.

Uhh. Those states may be Republican now, but none of them went for Lincoln: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

> Then the republican Lincoln wins and a period of slave liberation and movement towards equal rights on a federal level begins.

Right, but during the 20th century there was a pole shift in US political parties. To oversimplify a bit: FDR made the Dems the party of economic liberalism and Lyndon Johnson made them the party of civil rights (on which Johnson famously stated: "We've lost the South for a generation").

Agreed, and I'd add that the other biggest issue pushed Abe and Thaddeus McCotter was the issuance of Greenbacks (United States Notes). Today, this and similar reforms aren't a Red/Blue issues either, they're the establishment vs. the anti-establishment of both parties.

And the additional 22,000 dead don't count for anything?

That number appears to count only American dead. Those of us who hold every life sacred also mourn the hundreds of thousands of south Asian dead, without respect to political party of the perpetrator.

Johnson has plenty of blood on his hands.

The thing about blood, though, is that there's always more to go around.

Yes, this is true, of the following two references I'm not sure which is more accurate, either way this happened:

"Insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite unit as the Navy SEALs who killed former Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden, U.S. officials said Saturday. It was the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war against the Taliban."

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/08/06/afghan-president-31-...

"U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that they believe that none of the Navy SEALs who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although they were from the same unit that carried out the bin Laden mission."

"The sources thought this was the largest single loss of life ever for SEAL Team Six, known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/06/afghanistan-helicop...

Nixon didn't exactly end it overnight. He had thousands of tons of bombs to drop on neighbouring countries like Cambodia, first, killing untold thousands, before things wound down.

> Nixon didn't exactly end it overnight

Wars never end overnight.

No, but if you look at troop levels, he began the drawdown in his first year. But his strategy was to make the North Vietnamese so scared of him that US troops could leave. Hence the bombing.

Of course he could not publicly take credit for this, because that would have interfered with the image he was trying to project to North Vietnam.

Nixon pushed for escalation constantly while simultaneously working hard to suppress domestic dissent from his pulpit in the House Unamerican Activities Committee. (He had previously been the puppetmaster behind Joe McCarthy's witch hunts, but neatly avoided being damaged by his fall.)

Sorry, but in which war? Nixon was elected to the Senate in 1950.

Is the story here that we have new corroborating evidence for what has been well known for a long-time: Nixon and Kissinger conspired to sabotage the peace talks?

Hitchens wrote about this in The Case Against Henry Kissinger (in the article, <http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/CaseAgainst1_Hit..., that later became a book).

It really makes you curious what's going to come out in 45 years about the iraq war, and afghanistan etc.

Plenty has come out already at people don't seem to care. Airliners filled with pallets of shrink-wrapped cash which is then handed out with no accounting? Go freedom fighters!

"The World Trade Center bombing occurred on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, NY."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing

"On June 26, 1993, Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on the Iraqi Intelligence Service's (IIS) principal command and control complex in Baghdad, publicly announced as retaliation for the assassination attempt by the IIS on former President George H. W. Bush while he was visiting Kuwait in April of that year to commemorate a coalition victory over Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. "

"In Clinton's 1998 State of the Union Address, he warned Congress of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's possible pursuit of nuclear weapons: Together we must also confront the new hazards of chemical and biological weapons, and the outlaw states, terrorists and organized criminals seeking to acquire them. Saddam Hussein has spent the better part of this decade, and much of his nation's wealth, not on providing for the Iraqi people, but on developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_the_Bill_Clin...

what does what Clinton did have to do with the post you replied to?

It is more information about the years that led up to the Iraq war, the long one, addressing the poster's comment on what else might come out. My post was to show that there's a lot out there now that happened in the 90's that seems to sometimes be lost.

Exactly his point. Read the history...

Including the stuff that took place in Iraq during the 8 year reign of Clinton. Oh, his wife was on the legal team that blew Watergate out of proportion forcing a fine and honorable president to leave office on his own accord. Bill, her husband didn't leave even after getting caught undermining the US justice system. He just rode it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_and_conservatism_in_...

"In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.[52] Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum,[35] Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment.[52] The committee's work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974."

You're comparing Monicagate to Watergate? Nice.

I'm comparing undermining the US justice system, one president stepped down, the other just hung around. Or do you think that doing the right thing after doing the wrong thing is only something that Republicans should do?

The US justice system is pretty weak if it relies on the President to step down. Is this what you are suggesting?

Lying about having an affair (even while under oath) is hardly "undermining the US justice system".

Nixon committed treason, for crying out loud. Before he was elected, even.

I think your missing the point that was being made. There are different rights for democrats, they have it so easy. /s

No, I got the point he was trying to make. His point is incorrect.

False equivalency is a major logical fallacy. If you aren't trolling you have some damage to repair in your brain.

So you feel you're justified in attacking me personally because you disagree with me?

Go back to /r/politics and leave HN to grownups.

Do you disagree or agree with me? Your comment sounds more like flamebait rather that substantive commentary.

  | honorable president to leave office on his
  | own accord

I'm not sure if this is a troll, or some form of satire... Calling Nixon on "honorable President" in a discussion of an article about hard evidence that he sabotaged peace talks for his own personal gain?

  | undermining the US justice system

Now who's blowing things out of proportion? He lied about having an affair. He did so under oath, so it's perjury. Is this wrong? Yes. Is this "undermining the US justice system?" Not really. Committing a crime is not a undermining the justice system, no matter how much you might dislike the person.

Actually he walked a semantic tightrope in which he chose to define "sexual relations" as sexual intercourse and the public and congress disagreed. The larger point was that he was pursued over a personal matter by a special prosecutor who had spent tens of millions on one or another fishing expedition and turned up nothing of consequence.

I can't believe you made it from Nixon to Hillary Clinton in a mere three or so steps. We could call it the reductio ad hilarium.

It's a tangent, but, one of the things apparent sometimes when politics is discussed is that reductio ad absurdum is absolutely not guaranteed to work as an argument technique. It depends on everyone involved being able to recognize the absurd.

If changing the reason for going to war three times a week (nuclear weapons, complicity with bin laden, uranium yellow cakes, etc), outing CIA agents with contrary evidence, and lying to the public on just about every other fact in the lead-up to the invasion isn't enough to be interesting to the american public, I doubt any revelations forthcoming in their 70s and 80s will be.

Not to mention torture, outsourced, contracted out or otherwise, and Guantanamo Bay. It's an unfortunate fact that however inalienable human rights are supposed to be, democratic government are only interested in their citizens'.

Lip service to their citizens' rights only. They've already determined it is 'ok' to kill a US citizen with a drone purely on the presidential whim, and hold you indefinitely without trial.

As a non-US citizen I see this as progress - at least we have similar rights now.

What makes you think that the Iraq & Afghanistan wars will be over in 45 years ?

Very interesting article. Nixon was truly a piece of work. But then considering the behavior of more recent Republican administrations, at least he seems to have been competent. (George H. w. Bush is perhaps the least objectionable -- having neither engaged in treason nor fraudulent warmongering. Oh, except for Panama.)

Perhaps not, he might have been involved in a similar plot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_the...

The evidence is not as iron-clad, but certainly in the realm of possibility.

I'm aware of this but gave him the benefit of the doubt. I want to respect one republican president (post Teddy Roosevelt) so I can think of myself as open-minded.

Though it was before my time, Eisenhower seems to have been pretty good. I liked Goldwater too, though he didn't make it.

If you're interested in learning more, "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein goes into some depth on these and other shenanigans.

You also get an interesting side view from Donald Rumsfeld's "Known and Unknown" and his website http://www.rumsfeld.com where he is releasing documents from that era. It's really and odd outsider-insider account. The parts about the United States Office of Economic Opportunity should give people pause.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a...

http://imgur.com/jLP4KEa

Reply on news.ycombinator.com