Richard Nixon and ‘monkey wrenched’ Peace talks in Vietnam

In the lead up to the 1968 US Presidential election, it was too close to call to say who would be the next occupant of the White House. As it was, Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by a relatively small margin, and took up office shortly after.

By this time, American involvement in Vietnam had increased under the leadership of Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. However, something which was revealed in recent years was that Nixon wanted to keep the war going as he felt it would improve his election chances.

In documents unearthed in 2017 by historian John Farrell in the New York Times, it was shown that President Nixon intentionally stalled peace talks with the North Vietnamese in the months leading up to the 1968 election, a move which cost thousands more lives on both sides as the war would rage on for another seven years, two more years after America withdrew from the conflict in 1973.

LBJ was fully aware of the intervention. He confronted an aide of Nixon, point blank accusing him of treason. He could have brought down the whole campaign; but he never went public. The evidence needed to personally tie Nixon to the scandal couldn’t be found.

For LBJ, the Vietnam War had occupied almost his whole term as President. He was sworn in just hours after the assassination of John F Kennedy, on 22 November 1963. At that point, the USA had an advisory role in the war, supporting the democratic South Vietnamese. Less than two years later, the first US Marines landed on the beaches at Da Nang.

In March 1965, LBJ signed off on widespread carpet bombing of North Vietnam. ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ commenced, partly in response to a Vietcong attack on a US airbase in Pleiku.

It is perhaps this intensifying of American action in Vietnam that had left LBJ more determined for peace than ever by the autumn of 1968, especially with rising anti-war sentiment throughout the USA. The deaths of American troops for little or no gain in a land, so foreign to some members of the public it may as well have been on another planet, was turning millions against the war.

It was Nixon’s belief that LBJ pressed for stronger, ‘politically charged’ peace talks in the autumn of 1968 to sabotage his own campaign, whilst boosting that of the Democratic candidate Humphrey. During the campaign, Nixon had an aide contact the South Vietnamese to convince them not to accept peace terms of any kind until after the election. If this information was leaked before the election, it would surely have seen the whole campaign crumble; with the potential of Nixon himself being up on trial for treason.

Political and historical experts have since claimed that this is a far bigger scandal than Watergate. It was one which put many thousands of lives in danger and helped to prolong the conflict for much longer.

Approximately 400,000 soldiers died during the war, along with well over 1 million wounded. The civilian casualties were much higher, with an estimated 2 million on either side. A step towards ending the brutal war far earlier than it finally did in 1975 could have had a very different story, but it was something which President Nixon was willing to prevent to get himself into the White House.

His administration would crumble less than four years after the 1968 election victory, as the Watergate scandal broke and forced Nixon to resign.

However, had this attempt to thwart peace talks for his own political gain been leaked to the press and consequently the American public, he would would have been finished before he had even started as a Presidential candidate.