The Arrogance of Power (53 page)

With the release of the FBI file in 1999, however, the situation changes, for two key new documents bring fact and context to old rumor—and culpability much closer to Nixon and Agnew.

On November 2, the wiretapping of Ambassador Bui Diem's phone finally paid off. Chennault, the FBI's Washington field office reported (see p. 303):

Spiro Agnew had made a campaign stop at Albuquerque, New Mexico, that day—and within the time frame that corresponded to Anna Chennault's movements.
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Days later, when things quieted down, Johnson would order the FBI to check all calls made by the Agnew party. He was unfortunately ill served. Director Hoover, a long-term Nixon supporter on cordial terms with Chennault, had already warned her she was being surveilled. As much as possible, he told her, the bureau was merely “making a show” of obeying Johnson's orders.

When it came to the Albuquerque calls, Hoover and his aide Cartha DeLoach ensured investigation was cursory and incomplete. Eventually, realizing he was being stalled, the president himself called to tell DeLoach: “Get me the information, and make it damned fast.”

Out of the mess, and the still partially censored files, come two salient facts. The first is that phone records show that an Agnew aide in Albuquerque,
the very aide responsible for briefing Agnew on Vietnam, had made a call during the stopover to a “Mr. Hitt” at Nixon-Agnew headquarters.

Robert Hitt, an official of the Republican National Committee, was paymaster to the wireman Nixon used during the campaign to sweep for bugs and who conducted offensive bugging during the presidency. Hitt would also be named during the Watergate probe in connection with questionable cash transactions. His wife Patricia, cochairman of the campaign committee and a trusted Nixon friend from Whittier days, was as noted earlier one of the people Chennault earlier named as a potential go-between should Nixon wish to pass her messages.

The most important discovery, though, was relayed to the president by National Security Assistant Rostow when all the facts were in, ten days after the Albuquerque stopover. In a brief memo, referring to Chennault as “the Lady” and to Agnew as “the gentleman in Albuquerque,” Rostow reported that there had been a call placed to Chennault.
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Moreover, contrary to an earlier analysis, Agnew himself had had ample time to make the call.

The new information suggests a logical sequence to the events of those days. Following Thieu's announcement that he would not join the peace talks, as the Nixon side had hoped, he faced renewed pressure from the outraged Johnson administration. In the wake of the announcement, word came to Chennault from Agnew in Albuquerque that she should urge the South Vietnamese to remain resolute.

As revealed by the wiretap on the South Vietnamese Embassy, she duly relayed the message to President Thieu that he should “Hold on,” because “we're gonna win”: Nixon was going to win the election and would, as promised, give the South Vietnamese a better deal.

With whom did the message originate? Early on Rostow surmised in a report to the president that Agnew was “acting” on behalf of another party. While the report is still partially censored, the security assistant's supposition is clear enough. Agnew and Chennault barely knew each other; Nixon's running mate acted for no one but Nixon.
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Finally, wiretaps previously unknown to the public do connect Nixon himself to Chennault. On November 7, after the election, Chennault was overhead on the FBI's taps in a conversation with the South Vietnamese Embassy. She called initially the ambassador to say she had “made contact already” and would phone later. Then, speaking with the ambassador's secretary, she passed word that she had talked to “him,” had been “talking to ‘Florida,' and has to make a few other calls before she can move.”

Chennault and the ambassador apparently lunched together that day at Washington's Le Provençal restaurant and then talked on the phone again in the evening. She now told Bui Diem the message from President Thieu to “our boss” was “alright” [
sic
]. Then, the FBI report noted, she said:

Chennault had not named her “boss,” but his identity is clear. The message from Thieu was a message of congratulation for the president-elect, who had indeed left for Florida to relax after the rigors of the campaign. Chennault's boss was Nixon himself.

_____

Three days before the election, not all this damning evidence had been uncovered. What President Johnson did have in hand, however, was enough to make him furious.
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Learning of his rage, Nixon phoned late at night with adamant denials. Anna Chennault, he insisted, had been acting on her own. At the end of the conversation, it was later reported, “Nixon and his friends collapsed with laughter. . . .”

The laughter was premature. “Johnson was certain in his own mind,” recalled his aide Joe Califano, “that Nixon had betrayed his country. . . . Nixon's denials did nothing to undermine the President's conviction. . . . It was horrendous. . . . At last now, in the final hours, Johnson desperately wanted Humphrey to win the election.”

To help Humphrey sustain his last-minute surge in the polls, Johnson now gave him the chance to expose the Chennault affair by personally briefing a Humphrey aide on the Nixon side's activity. When Humphrey was in turn informed by the aide aboard a campaign flight, he became uncharacteristically enraged. “By God,” he roared, “when we land I'm going to denounce Thieu. I'll denounce Nixon. I'll tell about the whole thing.” “What kind of a guy,” he growled to a colleague, “could engage in something like this?”

As things turned out, however, neither he nor Johnson revealed what they knew. Humphrey worried that the raw intelligence was not sufficiently clear—at the time he got it—to make a convincing case. Aides also warned him that to go public with the information might look like an electoral ploy and backfire. Humphrey accordingly deferred to Johnson, telling him he might “want to consider that you have an obligation to disclose this to the American people.”

As late as election eve the word from the White House was that the Chennault matter might “very well blow the roof off the political race yet.” In the end, though, Johnson's advisers decided it was too late and too potentially damaging to U.S. interests to uncover what had been going on. If Nixon should emerge as the victor, what would the Chennault outrage do to his viability as
an incoming president? And what effect would it have on American opinion about the war? “You couldn't surface it,” recalled Johnson's assistant Harry McPherson. “The country would be in terrible trouble.”

There was another reason the lid stayed on. Three days after the election Johnson was still considering whether to “blow the whistle” on Nixon. Instead, Rostow recalled, the president “actively sought and obtained Nixon's cooperation . . . in delivering the word that the President-elect wished the South Vietnamese to proceed in moving towards a negotiation with Hanoi.”

As so often in his career, Nixon's desperate need was to avoid exposure. Therefore, as both Johnson and Humphrey had predicted he would, Nixon now double-crossed President Thieu. He sent “strong word” to Saigon that it should reverse course and attend peace talks after all.

Anna Chennault was “flabbergasted” to find herself asked to accept Nixon's new line. “What makes you change your mind all of a sudden?” she asked John Mitchell.

“Anna, you're no newcomer to politics,” Mitchell responded. “This, whether you like it or not, is politics.”

Chennault stormed out in disgust, only to be harried with phone calls from other Nixon aides. At first she was urged again to send the changed signal to Saigon. When it became clear she would never agree, Nixon's people began to fear that she might disclose the true story.
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A string of emissaries was sent to beg her not to talk to the press.

Chennault fended off reporters' inquiries for a long time thereafter, in part, she claimed, because she feared for her safety.
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Later, at a White House function, Nixon thanked her effusively for her help in the election. “I've certainly paid dearly for it,” she replied curtly. “Yes, I appreciate that,” he responded. “I know you're a good soldier.”

In Vietnam meanwhile, the real soldiers fought on. In the final five weeks leading up to the election 960 Americans had died. Vietnamese casualties, though less well documented, as always far exceeded U.S. losses.

Nixon cannot be held responsible for the collapse of the Johnson peace initiative. President Thieu would very probably have balked at attending talks anyway, even without the Republican pressure. The fact that Nixon covertly intervened, though, deliberately flouting the efforts of the American authorities, was indefensible. The way in which he involved himself remains to this day undefended.
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Richard Holbrooke, today U.S. representative to the United Nations, was in 1968 a young diplomat with Washington's Vietnam negotiating team in Paris. More recently, he investigated the Chennault episode while coauthoring former defense secretary Clifford's memoirs. “What the Nixon people did,” he said in 2000, was “perhaps even a violation of the law. They massively, directly and covertly, interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation . . . probably one of the most important negotiations in American diplomatic history. There was no excuse for it. . . .”

According to his aide Califano, Johnson concluded from the experience that Nixon was “a man so consumed with power that he would betray the country's national security interests, undermine its foreign policy, and endanger the lives of its young soldiers to win office.”

In Saigon, President Thieu sat hunched in front of a television watching the election returns. Nixon's victory was reportedly toasted in South Vietnamese government circles in French champagne. “We did it,” one official bragged. “We helped elect an American president.”
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The intrigues of the previous weeks, though, had a tragically insidious consequence: Thieu felt that Nixon was now in his debt and there had to be a pay-back. Ironically, moreover, South Vietnam's president would later defy Nixon, much as he defied Johnson in 1968. He would stall at the critical moment, denying Nixon a peace agreement in advance of the 1972 presidential election.

According to a former close aide, Thieu attended his first meeting with Nixon as president seeking “some acknowledgment of his role in helping Nixon win.” He got it, even though Nixon was already talking publicly about troop withdrawals. The man who had spoken of ending the war within six months to a year privately offered reassurance. “He promised me eight years of strong support,” Thieu recalled, “four years of military support during his first term in office and four years of economic support during his second term.”