Watergate, page 6
The 1968 campaign had been one of the most tumultuous in U.S. memory. On the Republican side, Nixon had gotten into the race late, declaring his candidacy only on the final day of filing for the New Hampshire primary. The path to the GOP nomination had unexpectedly cleared for him, as Michigan governor George Romney dropped out and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller said he wouldn’t run. Nixon romped through the primaries, only to see Rockefeller decide to reenter the race and attempt unsuccessfully, along with California governor Ronald Reagan, to deny Nixon the nomination at the Miami Beach convention. Alabama’s George Wallace also staked a claim as a third-party candidate; standing as a proud segregationist, he aimed to block a majority winner in the electoral college and force the House of Representatives to decide the next president. The stalemate, he thought, would give him the chance to pressure the federal government to unwind its decade of efforts to desegregate the South amid the Civil Rights Movement.
As the fall began, the Democratic nominee, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, faced a massive deficit both in polling and enthusiasm—barely ahead of Wallace in national numbers. Yet on September 30, 1968, the vice president broke from Johnson and called for a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam, saying he would take a “risk for peace.” The change in tone and strategy worked, and Humphrey steadily closed the gap with Nixon every week through the end of the season.
Throughout the election year, the Johnson administration had been struggling to inch Vietnam peace talks forward in Paris and knew that it had to involve the president’s possible successors in its efforts. Even before Nixon secured the nomination, Johnson invited him to the White House for a briefing on the conditions he had set for suspending U.S. bombing, including North Vietnam respecting the Demilitarized Zone along its border with the South. The North Vietnamese had resisted LBJ’s position, pushing instead for an unconditional bombing halt. He hoped that the candidate would either agree with his plan or at least respect the process so neither the South Vietnamese nor the North Vietnamese felt that by holding out through the fall, they’d get a better deal from a future Nixon administration.
Nixon, though, knew that a halt to the controversial bombing and the start of peace talks would be to Humphrey’s benefit. Publicly, he deferred to LBJ, releasing an August statement saying the president’s “emissaries in Paris must be able to speak with the full force and authority of the United States.” Behind the scenes, however, he worked to undercut the U.S. negotiating position, keeping track of key developments in the Paris peace talks via Kissinger, who was engaged in his own campaign of subterfuge—advising Johnson’s team even as he slipped details to Nixon’s camp.II Kissinger at that point had established himself as one of the nation’s top experts on the Vietnam War and had spent months in 1967 secretly trading messages with the North Vietnamese government to start the peace process.
In late October, the stalemate in the Paris negotiations began to break, as the North Vietnamese eased their hard line on an unconditional bombing halt, but just as the conversations began to inch forward, strings of intelligence both in the U.S. and abroad warned the Johnson team that Nixon was up to something. The National Security Agency had intercepted communications from South Vietnam’s ambassador back to his government referencing conversations with the “Nixon entourage” and saying that the closer the U.S. got to a Nixon victory, the better the position South Vietnam was in. The intercept appeared to confirm a tip that Johnson’s national security advisor Walt Rostow had received from well-connected sources in New York that the Nixon camp was trying to block the peace talks from moving forward. LBJ and aides began to debate the explosive revelation that a presidential candidate—technically a private citizen—was attempting to influence the U.S. government’s foreign policy by interfering in diplomatic negotiations. “This thing could blow up into the biggest mess we’ve ever had if we’re not careful here,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned.
On October 30, 1968, President Johnson called Georgia senator Richard Russell, a close advisor, to talk through the problem. “I’ve got one this morning that’s pretty rough for you: We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, our allies and the others. He’s been doing it through rather subterranean sources.” Johnson explained to Russell that as far as he’d pieced together, Nixon’s plot had involved a “fellow named [John] Mitchell, who’s running his campaign” and “Mrs. [Anna] Chennault [who] is contacting [South Vietnam’s] ambassador from time to time—seems to be kind of the go-between.”
Chennault, the widow of a dashing World War II general who had led a volunteer air force known as the Flying Tigers against Japan as it invaded China, had become a key player in the “China lobby” in Washington, D.C., where she’d relocated after Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolution. Known as “Little Flower” to her friends and “the Dragon Lady” to nearly everyone else, the petite and beautiful woman had grown into one of the capital’s top socialites, presiding over extravagant gatherings in her $250,000, 4,500-square-foot Watergate penthouse, with its private rooftop garden. She’d grown particularly close to Republican circles, who had spent decades flaying Harry Truman and Democrats for “losing” China. In 1968, she was Nixon’s top female fundraiser.
For much of that year, she’d been carefully dancing between South Vietnamese ambassador Bui Diem and Nixon, arranging two secret meetings between them that remained unknown until the 1980s.III As best as can be reconstructed, Chennault had first brought Diem to New York to meet the candidate in his apartment on a snowy February day—Chennault’s memoir refers to it as a Sunday, but her desk calendar appears to show it was Friday, February 16—and they visited New York again in July, apparently to meet at Nixon’s campaign headquarters. The second meeting was highly clandestine, perhaps secret from everyone but Mitchell; Nixon himself was concerned about the Secret Service finding out. It stretched more than an hour—hardly a perfunctory grip-and-grin.
The agendas of the meetings also remain sketchy; the only accounts that exist, from Diem and Chennault, appear to mix and match the events of the two meetings. According to Chennault, Nixon told Diem during their conversations that she would be his voice to South Vietnam: “Please rely on her from now on as the contact between myself and your government.” Diem remembers Nixon saying something less definitive, but confirmed that he’d be in touch through both Chennault and Mitchell.
This communication channel evidently continued through the fall, though it’s hard to say how frequently, as Chennault’s normal involvement on the campaign fundraising side meant she and Mitchell were in touch regularly (daily, she claims). “Anna Chennault was an ideal intermediary, bright, resourceful, acting from deepest conviction, with only the drawbacks of being a bit too conspicuous and not always discreet in speech and action,” concluded historian William Bundy, in his history of Nixon’s foreign policy. On October 23, Diem cabled home an oblique message that seemed to reference the Nixon team: “Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm.”
In those closing days of October, his suspicions aroused by Rostow’s tip, LBJ ordered the FBI to place a wiretap on the South Vietnamese embassy, to surveil and report on everyone entering and departing the building, and to place a surveillance team on Chennault herself.IV The dragnet immediately raised red flags, catching a conversation where a woman told the ambassador she’d stop by after a luncheon for Spiro Agnew’s wife, followed by Chennault arriving at the embassy for a thirty-minute visit.V
Any attempt to confront Nixon was complicated by both political and security implications; the NSA couldn’t exactly announce it was intercepting its ally’s diplomatic cables. Instead, Johnson tried to warn him off through an intermediary, calling the Republican Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen, and speaking in general terms about the plot. “It’s despicable,” Johnson spat. “If it were made public, it would rock the nation.” He said, “I really think it’s a little dirty pool for Dick’s people to be messing with the South Vietnamese ambassador and carrying messages around to both of them.” The campaign, Johnson declared, “better keep Mrs. Chennault and all this crowd just tied up for a few days.”
That evening, on Thursday, October 31, around 6 p.m. LBJ assembled a private conference call with all three main presidential candidates—Humphrey, Nixon, and Wallace—to update them on the peace talk status. During the call, he made sure to deliver a casual, pointed warning against any domestic political interference, explaining that “some of the old China lobbyists… are going around and implying to some of the embassies and some of the others that they might get a better deal out of somebody not involved in this. Now, that’s made it difficult and it’s held things up a bit.”
That night, Johnson gave a national televised address, trumpeting his peace talk progress—announcing his order “that all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam cease as of 8 a.m. Washington time, Friday morning.” The peace talks would kick off the following Wednesday, the day after the election. It seemed a massive development, a rare sign of hope in a war that had dragged on and only worsened for years. That same night, Nixon hosted his own televised event from Madison Square Garden, a rally where he announced with his running mate Spiro Agnew, “Neither he nor I will destroy the chance of peace. We want peace.” Soon after, though, Mitchell phoned Chennault with a very different message: “Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand the Republican position, and I hope you have made that very clear to them.”
Over the final five days of the presidential race, the Paris peace talks seemed to live and die almost by the hour. On Saturday, South Vietnam’s president announced his country would boycott, refusing to be seated alongside an expected delegation from the Viet Cong. Nixon’s team also spread anonymous—and false—allegations from a “Nixon confidant” that the campaigns had been reassured by Johnson that “all the diplomatic ducks were in a row,” undercutting LBJ’s credibility.
Johnson’s anger only deepened when at 8:34 that Saturday night he got the latest FBI report on Madame Chennault, saying she’d “contacted Vietnamese ambassador Bui Diem and advised him that she received a message from her boss (not further identified) which her boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador… ‘Hold on, we are gonna win.’ ” Chennault had told the ambassador that her boss had just called from New Mexico, setting off a quick scramble by LBJ’s national security advisor to figure out where Nixon was; they discovered that while Nixon hadn’t been in the state that day, Spiro Agnew had, visiting Albuquerque. “The New Mexico reference may indicate Agnew is acting,” Walt Rostow reported back to Johnson.VI
Less than forty-five minutes later, the president was on the phone to the Republican Senate leader Dirksen again, laying out circumspectly the new evidence. “They oughtn’t to be doing this,” Johnson said. “This is treason.”
“I know,” Dirksen replied.
“I can identify them, because I know who’s doing this. I don’t want to identify it. I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important,” he continued.
As intended, Johnson’s message to Dirksen was promptly passed along to the Nixon camp. Campaign aide Bryce Harlow wrote to Haldeman that night: “LBJ called Dirksen—says he knows Repubs through D. Lady are keeping SVN in president position if this proves true—and persists—he will go to nation & blast Reps and RN. Dirksen very concerned.”
Within twenty-four hours, Johnson also confronted Nixon directly by phone. Nixon denied it all; whatever Anna Chennault was doing, he said, it was freelance, unsanctioned, and he had no idea what she was saying.
On Monday morning, the FBI surveillance noted the Christian Science Monitor’s Washington bureau chief leaving the embassy and heading to the White House, where Rostow was told that the paper needed comment on “a sensational dispatch from Saigon… the 1st para of which reads: ‘Purported political encouragement from the Richard Nixon campaign was a significant factor in the last-minute decision of President Thieu’s refusal to send a delegation to the Paris peace talks—at least until the American Presidential election is over.”
Through the afternoon, Johnson debated how to handle the story and whether to confirm it, aware that all their evidence came from secret intelligence and wiretaps. “I do not believe that any president can make any use of interceptions or telephone taps in any way that would involve politics,” Dean Rusk advised. “The moment we cross over that divide, we’re in a different kind of society.”
Johnson agreed, and in the end the Christian Science Monitor story didn’t run. The final polls were too close to call; Gallup had Nixon leading Humphrey 42–40, with Wallace at 14, and Harris had Humphrey up 43–40. Nixon would win by about seven-tenths of a percent in the popular vote. Even at the last minute, the Chennault allegations might well have tipped the election to Humphrey—and the wobbling on Johnson’s Paris peace talks, seemingly the latest in a long series of false hopes and promises from the White House, almost certainly did tip the election to Nixon.
In the days after, intercepted reports from the Chennault back channel continued to come in. After another Friday conversation between her and Diem, seemingly about arranging a visit by now President-elect Nixon to Saigon, Rostow wrote, “I think it’s time to blow the whistle on these folks.”
Again, though, Johnson’s team remained publicly silent. As Defense Secretary Clark Clifford had said during the Monday pre-election debate, it didn’t seem “good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual elected. It could cast his entire administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.” Journalist Jules Witcover later wrote that Humphrey’s decision not to out Nixon’s subterfuge in the final hours of the campaign was “either one of the noblest in American political history or one of the great tactical blunders. Possibly it was both.”
On November 11, Johnson welcomed Nixon to the White House—“No visiting head of state of government has been given a warmer reception than the President gave Richard Nixon today,” NBC News reported that day.
Kissinger, thanks in part to his loyalty and duplicity, was rewarded with his dream job of Nixon’s national security advisor.
Until the day he died, Nixon would deny that he’d done anything wrong or had any improper communications with the South Vietnamese government. A garbled, inaccurate version of the episode was published in Teddy White’s Making of the President 1968 book in July 1969, blaming Chennault for meddling in the peace talks of her own accord—White reported that Nixon’s team was appalled to learn that “she had taken his name and authority in vain” and repudiated the overtures instantly—but the truth, of course, was far from that. In recent years, however, Nixon biographer Jay Farrell found an apparent smoking gun: In Haldeman’s notes of a conversation on October 22, Haldeman scribbled: “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN.” Later, he wrote, “Any other way to monkey wrench it?” Chennault kept her mouth shut—but she wasn’t happy about it. Locked out of the administration despite her prodigious fundraising, she complained directly to President Nixon at an event.VII
The gamble, though, had worked. Nixon won. And his deceit never surfaced. As Nixon’s team began the move to Washington, John Mitchell asked Anna Chennault to connect him with her apartment building’s management. He had come to like the building during his many visits to her penthouse. He and Martha ultimately purchased a $151,880 three-bedroom duplex in the Watergate.VIII
Later, when the burglary cover-up began to break open in the spring of 1973, Walt Rostow recognized exactly what had happened. The Chennault Affair was the scandal’s clear precursor. “They got away with it,” he wrote privately. “As the same men faced the election of 1972 there was nothing in their previous experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn them off; and there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit—or beyond.”
* * *
Now, as the flood of revelations about the Pentagon Papers and the government’s lies in Vietnam spread across the nation’s front pages and provoked a nationwide call for government honesty, Nixon and Kissinger each wondered whether their earlier duplicity would be outed. In fact, in 1970, Haldeman had assigned Tom Charles Huston to collect and study the government’s evidence and assess the political risk of the controversy around the “bombing halt” becoming public. Huston researched and wrote a twelve-page memo—parts of which remain classified to this day—and concluded that while the political calculations by Johnson to help Humphrey with the bombing halt were bad, Nixon’s actions might be worse. “The evidence in the case does not dispel the notion that we were somehow involved in the Chennault affair,” he wrote, “and while release of this information would be most embarrassing to President Johnson, it would not be helpful to us either.”IX
As the Oval Office conversation continued in the wake of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon fretted about one of the rumors that Huston had collected in his research the year before: that there was another secret report—a Pentagon Papers sequel of sorts—about the so-called “bombing halt” and the peace talks. Huston’s research had reported remarkably specific intelligence about the report (remarkable, in part, because there’s no sign the report ever existed) and outlined who had copies, including Johnson’s defense secretary, Clark Clifford, and another Pentagon official, Paul Warnke. Another copy was said to be at the Brookings Institution with a former Warnke aide, Leslie Gelb. “All these documents are top secret and I am amazed that they have been allowed to fall into the hands of such obviously hostile people,” Huston wrote at the time.
