Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

by Lawrence O'Donnell

While the Democrats were trying to write a peace plank, Nixon’s message to South Vietnam was: Hold on, don’t agree to anything in Paris, you’ll get a better deal with me. That message had to be kept secret because it was a crime. Since 1799, the Logan Act has prohibited private citizens from negotiating with a foreign country on behalf of the United States. As Richard Nixon saw it in the summer of 1968, for him to win the presidency more American soldiers were going to have to die.

Nixon avoided specific policy positions to the point where he was reported to have a “secret plan to end the war.” Many voters and much of the press believed Nixon actually said those words: “secret plan to end the war.” It was actually a UPI reporter who summarized Nixon’s Vietnam policy with those words after covering Nixon speeches. Many other reporters subsequently made the mistake of attributing the words to Nixon. The Nixon campaign didn’t fight with the press over the misquote because the underlying message was that Nixon had a plan to end the war. That false quote became the most memorable quote of the Nixon campaign.

In an effort to strengthen his credentials on foreign policy, defense policy, and the Vietnam War, Wallace persuaded retired air force major general Curtis LeMay to join him on the ticket and introduced him as his running mate on October 3 in a ballroom at the Hilton in Pittsburgh. General Curtis LeMay was known to some in the news media but unknown to most voters. He commanded a bomber division in World War II and always flew the lead bomber himself in combat. Under President Eisenhower, he was the commander of the Strategic Air Command and a firm believer in bombs. His nickname was “Bombs Away LeMay.” During the Cuban missile crisis, General LeMay urged JFK to bomb the Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. He said that the United States should tell North Vietnam to stop their attacks in the South, “or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” It took only seven minutes for Curtis LeMay to bomb the Wallace campaign back to the Stone Age.

The first question for LeMay came from Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson: “What would be your policy in the employment of nuclear weapons?” “Well, we seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons,” said LeMay. “I don’t believe the world will end if we explode a nuclear weapon.” LeMay used the rats at nuclear test sites as evidence of life after a nuclear blast: “The rats are supposed to be vaporized inside the firewall but the rats out there are bigger, fatter and healthier than they ever were before.”

And that was the end of the Wallace for president campaign.

Enough of Humphrey’s speech had leaked that Nixon wanted to know whether Humphrey was, in effect, announcing a change in Johnson’s policy. LBJ assured Nixon that Humphrey was on his own. Then Johnson suggested a line of attack for Nixon to use against Humphrey’s call for a bombing halt: any bombing halt would cost American lives.

Diplomats had said President Thieu could get a South Vietnamese negotiating team to Paris right away. Johnson planned to go on TV the next night to announce the news to the American people. Talks could begin within three days. An end to the war in Vietnam was in sight. A few hours after he made his decision and scheduled the speech, Johnson received some disturbing news. The veteran Democratic foreign policy strategist Alexander Sachs had an unimpeachable source saying that Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, was trying to scuttle the peace talks. Johnson didn’t know John Mitchell. He didn’t know what to make of this. Then Dean Rusk called. President Thieu had just balked. The South Vietnamese president was suddenly saying that three days weren’t enough to get a delegation to Paris. Because Thieu had said earlier that one day would be plenty of time, Johnson sat up straight. The president looked again at the message from Alexander Sachs and what Sachs’s source said about John Mitchell. Things started making horrible sense. Johnson went into a frenzy of activity trying to keep the peace process on track, beginning with finding out what Nixon was up to. The CIA and the NSA had listening devices in the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and in President Thieu’s office in Saigon. Johnson started reading those surveillance reports and quickly saw the outline of what the Nixon campaign was up to. Johnson knew Anna Chennault. It instantly made sense to him that Nixon wou...

The FBI reported that Anna Chennault had spent half an hour with Ambassador Diem at the embassy. The next day, Johnson called Senator Dirksen and gave him fragments of what he knew. LBJ wanted to give Dirksen just enough to scare Nixon. Johnson hoped that once Dirksen told Nixon what the president knew, Nixon would back off and stop interfering with the peace talks. Johnson specifically mentioned Anna Chennault’s involvement to Dirksen and suggested that the Nixon campaign would be destroyed if any news like this got out. Johnson refrained from accusing Nixon personally. He put it to Dirksen that some of Nixon’s people had gone way too far, and they’d better bottle up Anna Chennault if they knew what was good for them.

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.” Next, Johnson held his regular briefing conference call with the three presidential candidates. Johnson wanted to use the call to scare Nixon. The president wanted Nixon to imagine what might happen if he revealed what he knew. In the call, the president informed the candidates that he would be going on TV that night to announce a permanent bombing halt and an immediate start to negotiations in Paris with all parties at the table. Johnson then complained that there had been some partisan interference with his negotiations. He said some people had started to tell the South Vietnamese to wait for a new political party to take power in Washington. Johnson thought that this was enough for Nixon to figure out how much of his plans had been discovered by Johnson. After the conference call, LBJ call...

On Halloween night, October 31, the president interrupted regular television programming and made a surprise announcement: “Good evening, my fellow Americans. I speak to you this evening about very important developments in our search for peace in Vietnam. We have been engaged in discussions with the North Vietnamese in Paris since last May. . . . Last Sunday evening, and throughout Monday, we began to get confirmation of the essential understanding that we had been seeking with the North Vietnamese on the critical issues between us for some time. I spent most of all day Tuesday reviewing every single detail of this matter with our field commander, General Abrams, whom I had ordered home, and who arrived here at the White House at 2:30 in the morning and went into immediate conference with the President and the appropriate members of his Cabinet. We received General Abrams’ judgment and we heard his recommendations at some length. Now, as a result of all of these developments, I have now ordered that all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam cease as of 8:00 a.m., Washington time, Friday morning. I have reached this decision on the basis of the developments in the Paris talks. . . . The Joint Chiefs of Staff, all military men, have assured me—and General Abrams very firmly asserted to me on Tuesday in that early, 2:30 a.m. meeting—that in their military judgment this action should be taken now, and this action would not result in any increase in American c...

The news so shocked the White House that the only reaction the press could report at first was “No comment.” On the same day that Thieu broke with LBJ, Anna Chennault again called Ambassador Diem at the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington. The FBI was listening to the call. The FBI report said Chennault told the ambassador that “she had received a message from her boss . . . to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was . . . ‘Hold on. We are gonna win . . . Please tell your boss to hold on.’” The report was sent to the president.

Johnson called Everett Dirksen. He explained to Senator Dirksen exactly what President Thieu had agreed to. He said General Abrams “reached an explicit agreement with Thieu that the gap between the bombing and the talks would be two or three days.” Johnson strongly hinted that Anna Chennault interfered without actually mentioning her name. He said the message she delivered was “just hold on until after the election.” Johnson didn’t specify how he knew this. He simply said, “We’re pretty well informed on both ends.” He left it to Dirksen to conclude that the CIA and FBI were on the case with wiretaps and surveillance. “Now I’m reading their hand, Everett,” said Johnson. “I don’t want to get this in the campaign.” “That’s right,” said Dirksen.

“And they oughtn’t to be doing this,” said Johnson. “This is treason.” “I know.” Having convinced Senator Dirksen that he had information that could destroy Nixon and convict him of a crime, the president made one more attempt to save the peace talks. “I know who’s doing this,” said Johnson. “I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.” “Yeah.” “They ought to know that we know what they’re doing. I know who they’re talking to and I know what they’re saying.” “Yeah.” “Well, now, what do you think we ought to do about it?” asked Johnson.

And so, through a Republican senator he trusted, the Democratic president was reaching out to a Republican presidential candidate who he thought was capable of treason in the hope that the candidate would go against his own interests and save the president’s peace talks and help the Democratic candidate for president. This moment was the darkest presidential secret of a very dark year. The next day Nixon called Johnson. “Mr. President, this is Dick Nixon.” “Yes, Dick.” “I just want you to know that I got a report from Everett Dirksen with regard to your call and I, uh, just went on Meet the Press and I, uh, I said that, uh, on Meet the Press that I had given you my personal assurance that I would do everything possible to cooperate both before the election and, if elected, after the election. And if you felt, or the Secretary of State felt that anything would be useful that I could do, that I would do it. That I felt Saigon should come to the conference table. That I would, if you felt it was necessary, go there, go to Paris, anything you wanted. I just wanted you to know that I feel very, very strongly about this and any rumblings around about somebody trying to sabotage the Saigon government’s attitude they certainly have no, absolutely no credibility as far as I’m concerned.” “I’m very happy to hear that, Dick, because that is taking place.”

assumed Dirksen had told Nixon that Johnson thought Nixon’s back-channel communication to President Thieu was treason. Johnson thought his conversations with Dirksen and Nixon should be enough to scare Nixon. He was wrong. When Nixon hung up the phone, he thought the call went much easier than expected and he and his team burst into relieved laughter.

National Security Adviser Walt Rostow urged Johnson to expose the whole story and “destroy” Nixon. Then the president conferred with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. They pointed out that making this story public would expose some highly sensitive American intelligence-gathering techniques in Washington and Saigon. They were very worried about having to reveal that the best evidence was picked up on a wiretap of an embassy in Washington. They had important wiretaps at embassies all over town that would be compromised. And the Anna Chennault phone call was not a smoking gun. She never said the word Nixon.

One definition of the perfect crime is a crime the authorities are afraid to prosecute. Richard Nixon knew he had committed the worst crime in American political history—a crime that arguably cost more than twenty thousand American soldiers their lives by extending the war. And he also knew it was the perfect crime. Richard Nixon knew what Lyndon Johnson, Clark Clifford, and Dean Rusk would decide to do when faced with no good choice. Nothing. For the good of the country.

Years later, pieces of the story leaked, as LBJ had anticipated. It became known as the Chennault affair. Anna Chennault denied that she was trying to influence the South Vietnamese. The real smoking gun showing Nixon’s direct involvement was revealed in 2017 by John A. Farrell in a New York Times article and in his biography of Nixon. In researching his book, Jack Farrell read Bob Haldeman’s handwritten notes of the 1968 campaign. Haldeman’s notes of Nixon’s direct verbal orders to him quote Nixon saying, “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN [South Vietnam].” As the prospect of a bombing halt and peace talks loomed, Haldeman quotes Nixon asking, “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN [Richard Nixon] can do.” Haldeman’s notes also reveal the reaction inside the Nixon campaign when LBJ discovered the Chennault affair. In these notes, Haldeman uses Chennault’s nickname “Dragon Lady,” abbreviated to D. Lady: “LBJ called Dirksen—says he knows Repubs through D. Lady are keeping SVN in present position if this proves true—and persists—he will go to nation & blast Reps & RN. Dirksen very concerned.” Nine years later, when asked about the Chennault affair in an interview, Nixon denied “having any contact with the South Vietnamese.” He said, “I couldn’t have done that in conscience.”

President Richard Nixon did not bring America together. His inauguration was the first one in history to attract protesters. Eight thousand antiwar protesters came to Washington on Inauguration Day in 1969. Four years later, Nixon won a landslide reelection victory over Senator George McGovern, who ran as an antiwar Democratic nominee with the Vietnam War still raging. Nixon’s second inauguration drew a hundred thousand protesters to Washington. The next inauguration protest was in 2017, when Donald Trump’s inauguration was followed by at least half a million protesters in Washington and millions more in all fifty states and around the world.

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 Haldeman 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.”

President Ford signed a pardon granting “a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” Nixon knew that, under the law, acceptance of a pardon is an admission of guilt. Less than ten minutes after Ford issued the pardon, Nixon accepted. Nixon staff released a written statement saying “I have been informed that President Ford has granted me a full and absolute pardon for any charges which may be brought against me for actions taken during the time I was the President of the United States. In accepting this pardon, I hope that his compassionate act will contribute to lifting the burden of Watergate from our country.” For the rest of his life President Ford carried in his wallet a quote from a 1915 Supreme Court decision saying a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.” The last line of Nixon’s statement accepting the pardon said, “That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.” Every day of the life that was left to him, Richard Nixon also had to bear the burden of the knowledge that his pardon did not protect him from anything he did before the presidency, and that what he did to win the presidency was his greatest crime.

Richard Nixon made John Mitchell the sixty-seventh attorney general of the United States and the first one convicted of a crime. Mitchell served nineteen months of a four-year sentence for the Watergate conspiracy. The second attorney general convicted of a crime was Mitchell’s successor, Richard Kleindienst, who served only a month for not testifying truthfully to a Senate committee. Bob Haldeman became Nixon’s White House chief of staff. He was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Haldeman served eighteen months in prison. John Ehrlichman, chief domestic policy adviser to the president, was convicted of the same charges and also served eighteen months in prison. John Dean was Nixon’s White House counsel. As the top lawyer in the White House, Dean was deeply involved in the cover-up of the Watergate conspiracy. He delivered the most memorable quote in the Senate investigation when he testified that he told Nixon “there was a cancer growing on the presidency.” John Dean cooperated with the investigators and testified for the prosecution in some of the Watergate trials. He served only four months in custody on a military base in Maryland. Maurice Stans became Nixon’s secretary of commerce. Investigators tried and failed to trace the cash used to pay the Watergate burglars to Stans’s fund-raising activities for the Nixon campaign. Stans was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. He was acquitted. Then he pleaded guilty to lesser charges of ...

candidate. Because of a flaw in the design of the Florida ballot in Palm Beach County, it was easy to make the mistake of voting for Buchanan when the voter tried to vote for the Democrat Al Gore. With liberal Palm Beach County’s large Jewish population, Buchanan could have realistically expected to get a few hundred votes there, 400 tops. He got 3,407 votes. Al Gore lost the state to George W. Bush by 537 votes, which gave Bush the electoral college win. Buchanan got more votes in liberal Palm Beach County than he did in any other county, including Florida’s most conservative counties. Buchanan himself admitted that it was probably a mistake. “When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night,” said Buchanan, “it’s very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore.”

The Nixon administration spent five years negotiating the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. During those five years, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos and ordered a Christmas bombing of Hanoi that was the heaviest bombing of the war. Nixon’s erratic war tactics and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s conduct of the Paris peace talks accomplished nothing that LBJ couldn’t have accomplished at any time during the war. Two years after the United States signed the 1973 Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, the war ended in complete victory for North Vietnam.

On April 29, 1975, eight days after President Thieu fled the country, two U.S. Marines were killed in a rocket attack. Charles McMahon was eleven days away from his twenty-second birthday. Darwin Lee Judge was nineteen years old. They were both one day away from leaving Vietnam when they became the answer to John Kerry’s question. They were the last two men to die for a mistake.

The day after marines McMahon and Judge were killed, the last American helicopter left Saigon at 5:27 a.m. on April 30, 1975. North Vietnam immediately took complete control of South Vietnam. America had been fighting for nothing in Vietnam every day of the Nixon administration. During the Nixon years, 21,195 Americans were killed in Vietnam, bringing the total to 58,315.

Twenty years later, in 1995, the United States and Vietnam established full diplomatic relations. They established full trade relations in 2001. Glossy American travel magazines feature alluring photo spreads of Vietnam’s beaches and lists of the best restaurants in Saigon and Hanoi. Close to half a million American tourists visit Vietnam every year—almost the troop strength the United States had in Vietnam in 1968. Those American tourists are welcomed by a country where at least 1.3 million of their soldiers and citizens in the North and South were killed in a war that was prolonged and made more lethal by two American presidents who were determined not to be the first American president to lose a war. And so America lost a war, but the president did not admit it.

There are many what-ifs about the 1968 presidential campaign that could have changed the outcome. What if President Thieu had not broken his promise to LBJ to send a delegation to the Paris peace talks? What if Hubert Humphrey had had one more day to campaign? What if Humphrey’s campaign had not been outspent two to one in TV advertising? What if there had been no rioting during the Democratic convention? In an election decided by less than 1 percent of the vote, any one of those things could have made the difference. What if Nelson Rockefeller had called Spiro Agnew to tell him he’d decided not to run for president? What if Rockefeller had committed to a serious campaign early and stuck with it? What if Ronald Reagan did that? What if Richard Nixon hadn’t appeared on The Mike Douglas Show and never met Roger Ailes?

Less than 1 percent . . . What if Bobby Kennedy had left the stage on the other side of the room and walked away from his assassin instead of toward him on that last night of his life in Los Angeles? What if presidential candidates had received Secret Service protection before Bobby Kennedy was assassinated? What if Martin Luther King Jr. had not stepped out onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel? What if rioting had not broken out all over the country after the King assassination? What if Lyndon Johnson had not dropped out of the campaign? What if Bobby Kennedy had not run? What if Gene McCarthy did throw his support to Ted Kennedy at the convention? Who would have been the Democratic nominee? The biggest what-if of all is what if Eugene McCarthy had not run? What if Nicholas Katzenbach had not provoked Senator McCarthy with his testimony about the president’s unlimited power to wage war in Southeast Asia without a declaration of war? What if Al Lowenstein had not urged McCarthy to run?

If Gene McCarthy hadn’t run, Bobby Kennedy would not have run and would not have been assassinated on the night of the California primary. President Johnson would have run for reelection. Election night would have come down to Johnson versus Nixon. No matter what the outcome, Bobby Kennedy surely would have run for president as the antiwar candidate in 1972. And then . . . and then . . . and then . . . But Gene McCarthy did run. He made the bravest decision of any candidate in 1968, a decision that changed his party, changed the campaign, changed the antiwar movement into an important faction of the Democratic Party, and changed the course of history. The most important thing Gene McCarthy did in 1968 was save lives. We have no idea when the Vietnam War would have ended if Gene McCarthy hadn’t made ending the war a presidential campaign issue in 1968. The war ended seven years after McCarthy ran. If the first antiwar presidential candidate did not run until 1972, would the war have ended seven years later, in 1979? We don’t know. The peace movement won. The peace movement drove U.S. forces out of Vietnam, not the North Vietnamese army. American politics responds slowly to protes...

If Gene McCarthy had not run for president in 1968, the draft would not have ended in 1973. None of the young men I saw at the induction center that day were killed in Vietnam because the political pressure of the antiwar movement forced Nixon to end the draft. Many of the young men I saw at the induction center went on to have children and grandchildren who don’t know that they owe their lives to the people who stopped the draft and the war. There are thousands of families living in Vietnam today who wouldn’t be there if the war had continued for another year or two or three.