422

Last night Rachel Maddow documented Nixon’s collusion with South Vietnam to rig the 1968 election by scuttling LBJ’s peace talks.

Yes it was. That’s the irony-we talk about Watergate but it was Nixon’s other ‘win’ that really resembles Trump-Russia 2016. Of course, in fact, Nixon did cheat to win in 1972 as well-just not with a foreign power. Far from being some big anomaly, 2016 was actually the third time in 48 years the ‘winning’ GOP Presidential campaign colluded with a hostile foreign power to rig the election.

But note it was the third time the GOP colluded with a hostile foreign power to win an election not the third time they’ve cheated to win an election. No Nixon also cheated in 1972 though this is not widely understood: after all the break in to the Watergate Hotel surely wasn’t necessary and in no way helped Nixon to blow out McGovern 49 states to 1 right?

The clear fact that the 1972 election was the opposite of close-it was the biggest landslide in American history-and the evident fact that the actual break in the the Watergate Hotel contributed nothing to Nixon’s landslide-had anyone in the media outside Woodward-Bernstein done some actual digging on Watergate before the election maybe it could have hurt Nixon.

Indeed, it’s amazing how much the more things change the more they stay the same. Just like in 1972 in 2016 the media chose to focus very little resources on Russiagate before the election. 

However, regarding the first Watergate-tragic Watergate rather than Watergate 2.0-stupid Watergate-it was more than simply the  bumbling break in to the DNC-amazing how much more beneficial Watergate 2.0’s break in was-just goes to show how much more efficient a cyber break in is compared to a ‘kinetic’ one.

When you talk about Watergate it was also about the many other crimes and outrages of Tricky Dick-the break in to Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office-but especially CREEP.

It was the activities of CREEP that arguably did flip the 1972 election. 

“The repellent ugliness of most of these tactics has been forgotten, and so I’m grateful to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland for recording them. Black protesters suddenly showed up in front of the hotel room of democratic candidate Edmund Muskie, calling him racist for having said that a Democratic ticket with a black running mate couldn’t get elected. An ad suddenly appeared in a Miami Beach Jewish newspaper: “Muskie, Why Won’t You Consider a Jew as a Vice President?” Muskie hadn’t excluded the possibility. Flyers appeared in Jewish neighborhoods: “Remember the Warsaw Ghetto…Vote Right on March 14.” Muskie was of Polish descent15. A letter was sent to a New Hampshire paper, filled with outrage at what happened when Muskie had been asked how he could understand the problems of minorities given the lack of minorities in Maine, Muskie’s home state. A Muskie aide had supposedly replied that they did have minorities in Maine, the very same minority that was there in New Hampshire: “Not blacks, but we have Canucks.” Muskie had supposedly laughed16. The next day, Muskie’s wife was indicted in an editorial in the same paper of telling dirty jokes to reporters, and having two cocktails before dinner. Something in all this broke Muskie, and when the candidate defended his wife in front of television cameras, he began to weep17. Muskie’s tears destroyed his candidacy. Muskie was a target, but all the Democratic candidates were targets. Two hundred dollars was donated to Pete McCloskey by the Young Socialist Alliance, the receipt for the donation helpfully sent to a right-wing news editor. A mole, code named Sedan Chair II, was hired to go inside the Herbert Humphrey campaign and relay strategic information18.

“It would eventually be established with certainty that the man who’d written the “Canucks” letter, the man who’d hired the black protesters in front of Muskie’s hotel room, was Donald Segretti, who handled a secret, separate black ops campaign team for CREEP. The man who’d actually sent the letter to McCloskey, who’d hired the Sedan Chair II mole, was a nineteen year old operative named Roger Stone. It was because of this that he makes a brief appearance in the Watergate testimony.”

As noted in (Chapter C) the trouble with Stone-trouble for him, not his liberal enemies; it’s very helpful for us-is his desperate need for recognition, to spike the ball, to strut. 

By the way, I’d recommend reading the above link in its entirety on Roger Stone sometime-no one can write quite like italkyoubored-honestly I’m never bored as he/she/they can fucking write. Excuse my french but there’s no other way to do it justice.

He’s got into pissing contests with other GOP dirty tricksters on who really set up the Brooks Brothers riots that shutdown the Florida recount in 2000 and he and Chuck Johnson argued in 2016 over who gets the credit for bringing the Clinton accusers to the second Presidential debate 48 hours after the release of the Hollywood Access tape. For me the more interesting question is: how much were these accusers paid? Assuming they were and I do assume they were.

However, he’s done relatively little boasting about the Canucks letter which is odd as he delivered the game winning layup-true Segretti did the real work and fed him the ball. Thanks to Stone’s then young years he didn’t go to prison for the first Watergate; as we see in (Chapter B) that seems likely to change this time.

UPDATE: Stone’s trial is in November.

Fine-you want me to show my work. Remember that Nixon himself believed that Muskie was by far the biggest threat among the Democratic challengers. As we’ve learned during the Mueller investigation what’s really decisive in criminal investigations is somehow being able to prove intent-though Trump himself and his Deplorables like Roger Stone lighten the burden by saying so many things publicly that amount to prima facie evidence of their intent.

So if Nixon were right then taking down Muskie via the Canucks letter very well may have been what won the election for him. Again what matters is intent so in a way wether you agree with Nixon or not about Muskie’s chances, what’s important is he believed it. So this was a clear bid to rig an election. Of course,  this wasn’t the only thing he did to rig 1972-there’s also the extreme pressure tactics he employed to push George Wallace into the Democratic primary where Wallace became the Dem’s embarrassment-as so many Northern and Midwestern ethnic White Democrats voted for Wallace-rather than Nixon’s potential spoiler in 1968. To prevent an encore Nixon both bribed and threatened Wallace to run as a Democrat.

Of course, it’s even worse than that. The GOP also cheated to win the 2000 election-again, Jeb Bush & Friends ran defense. the Brooks Brother’s riots shutdown the recount, then finally  the GOP Supreme Court unilaterally shut down the recount in contradiction to Florida state election rules-when Florida was first called for Gore, Sandra Day O’Conner was overheard exclaiming this is terrible. 

For a long time I was willing to concede that while Bush Sr.s 1988 campaign was very nasty-Willie Horton, et al-it was a legitimate win-though of course, the only reason Bush was even able to run in 1988 was thanks to perhaps the most despicable case of foreign collusion of all-the1980 Reagan campaign’s collision with the Iranian Ayatollah. But just recently it’s emerged-as documented in (Chapter C) that his campaign operative, Lee Atwater, set Gary Hart up-Hart didn’t even know Donna Rice. So that’s 5 GOP rigged Presidential elections since 1968.

And we haven’t even talked about redistricting and gerrymandering and the outrageous tactics the GOP regularly employs at the state and district level.

Regarding 1968 it’s amazing the number of similarities with 2016. One example is the reaction to the sitting-but lame duck-Democratic Administrations.

Obama has rightly been criticized for acceding to Mitch McConnells’ blackmail as documented in (Chapter A). What’s notable is the similar reaction of the LBJ Administration in 1968 after LBJ confirmed Nixon’s treachery.

In the last days before the 1968 election the magnitude of what Nixon had done begun to dawn on LBJ. The NSA had the intercepts that proved conclusively Nixon’s treachery. As LBJ said this is Treason. 

“On October 28 an NSA intercept from Saigon landed at the White House, direct from the agency’s headquarters in Maryland. It quoted President Thieu word for word: “It appears Mr. Nixon will be elected as the next President, and he thinks it would be good to try to solve the important question of the political talks with the next President.” The intercept was unambiguous: Nixon was in contact with Saigon, and he was trying to undermine the peace deal.”

At dawn on October 29, Johnson read a memo from his national security adviser, Walter Whitman Rostow, quoting a Wall Street executive very close to Nixon. His inside information matched the NSA’s intelligence reporting: “Nixon was playing the problem,” trying to “incite Saigon to be difficult,” sending a message to Thieu to hold out for a better deal in the next administration.”

Tim Weiner ‘One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon.’ Pg. 22

This is treason. 

“His fury mounting, the president ordered the FBI to place Anna Chennault under surveillance and to monitor the telephone lines of Ambassador Bui Diem at the embassy of South Vietnam.”

“The FBI immediately picked up their conversations. On October 30, Diem told the Dragon Lady to come see him immediately. The FBI’s deputy director, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, had the report in the president’s hands within hours. After reading it, Johnson conveyed a clear warning to Nixon through the Republican leader of the Senate, Everett Dirksen of Illinois. LBJ advised, “He better keep Mrs. Chennault and all this crowd tied up for a few days.”

Here the similarity to Trump is quite striking. Nixon would later try to turn this around as ‘The real crime is not that I committed treasonous acts in order to undermine a deal that could have brought peace but that LBJ spied on me.’

Nixon always maintained—apparently because J. Edgar Hoover suggested the possibility a few weeks later—that the president had eavesdropped on him personally in the last days of the campaign, with bugs or wiretaps. “We were tapped,” he averred on his own White House tapes. “Johnson tapped us.” Though it was not so, that would have made a far more sordid story, he believed.

Of course, the real question Nixon skirted just as Trump as done post 2016 is explain why betraying his own country is a lesser crime than LBJ spying on him in the act of betraying it. Indeed, with all the furor about Rod Rosentein wearing a wire-considering that Trump had just fired Comey to shutdown the Russia investigation the night before and bragged about it to these very same Russians the next morning in the Oval Office-while handing them Israeli intelligence like candy-maybe wiretapping Trump wasn’t such an unreasonable thought. Of course, Rosenstein had the better thought-appointing the Special Counsel.

UPDATE: I wrote this on November 19. 2018, Andy McCabe recently published his own account of Trump firing Comey, and the immediate after math-and states that Rosenstein did suggest wearing a wire for conversations with ‘President Trump.’

On October 31, LBJ was able to announce a bombing halt. But then…

“On Thursday, October 31, Johnson announced a bombing halt. The national polling networks recorded an immediate and immense shift, measured in millions of votes, away from Nixon and toward Humphrey.”

“But Thieu had balked. He proclaimed that he would not go to the Paris peace conference alongside the Americans. He would not negotiate with the Communists. He would not accept any deal in the name of peace. He would not consider a coalition in pursuit of a cease-fire. Nor would he see the American ambassador or take his urgent phone calls. ‘South Vietnam is not a truck to be attacked to a locomotive which will pull it wherever it likes,” he told reporters in Saigon.

“Peace was on hold.”

Pg. 23

Peace was on hold. Just as in 1980 the release of the Iranian hostages was on hold-so as to secure Ronald Reagan’s victory.

“LBJ’s top aides huddled on Saturday morning, November 2, to assess the situation. “It’s clear as day!” said the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Nitze. “Thieu is scared that Humphrey & Democrats will force a coalition on him & the Republicans won’t,” read the minutes of their meeting. That night, the president had the proof in hand. Rostow sent an urgent teletype from the White House to the president at the LBJ Ranch in Texas. The FBI had overheard Chennault delivering “a message from her boss” to Ambassador Diem. The message was “Hold on. We are going to win.”

Pg. 23

There was no doubt who Chennalut’s-aka the Dragon Lady-boss was.

The president was sure who the boss was: Richard Nixon. “This is treason,” said the president of the United States. “They’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.” If not treason, it was a federal crime for a citizen to conduct private diplomacy with a foreign government against the interests of the United States.

“We know what Thieu is saying to them,” LBJ rasped, his tobacco- and whiskey-cured voice thickened by a cold. “They ought to know that we know what they’re doing. We know who they’re talking to. I know what they’re saying.… If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the conference, well, that’s going to be his responsibility. If they don’t want it on the front pages, they better quit it.”

Pg. 24.

Deja vu all over again:

They better quit it. This reminds you of what President Obama would say to Putin in September 2016: Cut it out.

“In his final press conference of the year, President Barack Obama has said that he had told President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out” following allegations that Russia conducted cyber attacks against the United States.”

“What I was concerned about in particular was making sure [the hack of the Democratic National Convention] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself,” the president said of his September meeting with his Russian counterpart.

“He also said that his conversation prevented any further hacking against his country’s election infrastructure.”

“So in early September when I saw president Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process—but the leaks… had already occurred.”

But back to LBJ and Nixon. This indeed was treason. And it changed the course of history for the worse.

“The Paris peace talks were scuttled. Philip Habib, a senior State Department diplomat at the peace table, thought that the war in Vietnam would have ended if Nixon had not sabotaged the talks. “The deal was cooked. And then something happened. Somebody got to Thieu on behalf of Nixon and said, ‘Don’t agree, don’t come to Paris,’” Habib, who went on to serve loyally under Nixon, recollected years later.

Tim Weiner, Pg. 23

Interesting that Habib had no qualms working for someone who he agrees delayed the peace by five years.

“I’m convinced that if Humphrey had won the election, the war would have been over much sooner.”

This is an assessment shared by many including none other than: Daniel Ellsberg.

So think about that. All the loss of life-25,000 more fallen American soldiers and many more Vietnamese-and the billions of dollars spent over the next give years just to buy Richard Nixon the Presidency.

Years earlier when Nixon was criticized for the despicable tactics he employed against Hellen Gahagan Douglas who he slandered as The Pink Lady, Nixon’s response was ‘But here’s what you don’t understand-you have to win.’

This is the slogan of the modern-post New Deal GOP: you have to win at all costs and by any means necessary.

Ok but then there’s the asymmetry of the parties-what Greg Sargent and Josh Marshall recently called the hardball gap. 

Obama knew what the Russians were doing and wanted to tell the American people but Mitch McConnell was able to get him to back off by threatening to call him partisan(!) Yes, the most partisan hack in America threatened to call Obama a partisan and that was enough to make him back off. 

“Joe Biden said Tuesday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stopped the Obama administration from speaking out about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign by refusing to sign on to a bipartisan statement of condemnation.

That moment, the former Democratic vice president said, made him think “the die had been cast … this was all about the political play.”

He expressed regret, in hindsight, given the intelligence he says came in after Election Day. “Had we known what we knew three weeks later, we may have done something more,” Biden, a potential 2020 presidential candidate, said.

That’s always the way it is for the Democrats-woulda, shoulda, coulda. The GOP wouldn’t have waited to know more. 

“When Sen. Mitch McConnell was told by then–CIA Director John Brennan before the 2016 election that Vladimir Putin and Russia were attempting to interfere with the goal of assisting Donald Trump, McConnell’s response took him aback, according to Greg Miller, a Washington Post reporter who has just released a book about Putin, Trump, and the election. The majority leader said he wouldn’t sign on to any condemnation of Russia’s actions and that if the administration went public with the intelligence, McConnell would in turn call out Brennan as a partisan intervening on behalf of Hillary Clinton, Miller colorfully revealed in a CNN interview Tuesday.”

“While the broad outlines of this story have been known for a long time, Miller’s account adds a new level of detail to McConnell’s political machinations in the run-up to the election. In a Frontline documentary from November, Miller said that the Obama administration was “so concerned about politicizing intelligence” that aides didn’t want Obama himself to publicly denounce the Russians without the support and buy-in of leaders in Congress—including Republicans.”

Again, is there any doubt the GOP wouldn’t have cared a fig about Democratic buy in-remember all the obstruction and treachery of Devin Nunes the last two years none with any Dem buy in or even knowledge? As noted in (Chapter A) it’s arguable that in American politics, the Democratic party is the woman and doesn’t this encapsulate the difference between the parties?

Just as the Obama Administration backed off out for fear of looking partisan the LBJ WH eventually decided not to tell the public what it knew about Nixon’s treachery. Imagine what might have happened had LBJ made a statement about this a few days before the 1968 election!

LBJ did hold Nixon’s feet to the fire in a phone call-sort of reminiscent of Obama’s warning to Putin cut it out in 2016.

But it didn’t have teeth in that there was nothing to enforce it-neither Nixon in 1968 or Putin in 2016 were decent people who would change course simply because it was the right thing.

Back to Tim Weiner:

“That afternoon, the president conferred with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow. The voting booths would open in a matter of hours. The question was whether to reveal Nixon’s treachery. The problem was twofold: the charge was explosive and the evidence secret. Could the nation handle the disclosure that Nixon was playing a double game with the lives of American soldiers? Or that the U.S. government was spying on the president of South Vietnam?”

“I do not believe that any President can make any use of interceptions or telephone taps in any way that would involve politics,” Rusk told the president. “The moment we cross over that divide we are in a different kind of society.”

“Nor could the electorate tolerate a last-minute political bombshell of this magnitude. If Nixon won, the revelation could destroy him before he was sworn into office.”

Apparently that was seen as a bad thing though it could have saved us a lot of future scandal, corruption, abuse of power-and loss of life in Vietnam.

“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would good for the country to disclose the story, ” Clifford said. “It would cast his entire Administration under such doubts that I would think it would be inimical to our nation’s interests.”

So the public would be better off with an illegitimate administration than the truth?

So a Democratic administration decided to keep quite that a Republican campaign had stolen a U.S. election via treasonous means and tactics for the good of the nation.

Talk about history occurring first as tragedy and then as farce.

Indeed, in a sense, you have to give Obama some credit. While he didn’t speak out before the election he at least did so after. LBJ despite what he knew kept the story to the grave-just a few years later and while Nixon’s treachery was long suspected it wasn’t until almost 50 years later that it was confirmed.

If nothing else, the truth of what happened in 2016-Russian interference and federal investigations into possible Trump campaign collusion-has placed an asterisk next to Trump’s ‘win’ that can never be erased regardless of what the Mueller report eventually reveals-and what the House Democrats find.

UPDATE: This morning, April 3, 2019 it’s now been 12 days since Mueller released his report and we’ve yet to see more than a cherrypicked half sentence to convince the gullible that ‘on criminal charges of conspiracy with the Russian government’ proves there was no collusion.

The House Judiciary Dems did just vote on a subpoena for the full, unredacted report.

End of UPDATE:

So while still insufficient, Obama did improve on LBJ-better to tell the truth after the election than not at all. And one reason the media has taken Russiagate seriously after the election if not before-while for many years what Nixon did in 1968 was dismissed as ‘a conspiracy theory’ is that Obama did at least tell the truth after the fact. Had he not done so, had the intel agencies not informed the public, it might well have been buried as Nixon’s Vietnam collusion was for so many years-and as Reagan’s Iran collusion still is today.

UPDATE 2.0: However, the MSM has tried to bury it post Bill Barr’s fraudulent ‘exoneration’ of fraudulent ‘President Trump.’

 

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