The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics
The president called the FBI and put Anna Chennault under surveilance. He ordered the South Vietnamese embassy to be put under additional surveilance. The president wanted to know everyone who came and went. Johnson sent direct word to Saigon that if it came out that President Thieu had avoided his best chance for peace, the American people would never support further warfare on his behalf. Johnson also passed the word to President Thieu that trusting Nixon about anything was a mistake.
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The president mentioned only the political danger that Nixon was risking with this interference with the peace talks. He didn’t mention the criminal risk. Since 1799, it has been a federal crime to intervene “without authority of the United States to try to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government … in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States.”
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Throughout his presidency, Nixon remained obsessed with what the records of the Johnson administration might reveal about the Chennault affair and who had those records. In 1971, when Bob Halderman reported the rumor that the left-leaning Brookings Institute might have a stash of Johnson administration records of the Chennault affair, President Nixon said, “Goddamn it, go in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” That caper was planned on Nixon’s order, then canceled at the last minute. Another break-in was carried out at Larry O’Brien’s office in the Watergate office building. That break-in led to the unraveling of a web of criminal conduct in the Nixon administration, and seventeen months after Nixon’s second inauguration, when the House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of impeachment, Richard Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office at 9:01 p.m. on August 8, 1974, and said something no president before or since has said:”I shall resign the Presidency at noon tomorrow.”
--Lawrence O’Donnell
