by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up on MS-NBC for a
show called Betrayal: The Plot to Steal the White House, a special hosted by Rachel Maddow that was not about the allegations of the Trump campaign
colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election in his favor and make sure he
won. Instead it’s about the long-rumored intervention of Richard Nixon’s
Presidential campaign to sabotage the Paris peace talks to end the Viet Nam war
in 1968 so Lyndon Johnson couldn’t have his “October surprise” and be able to
declare an end to the war and enable his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, to
succeed him. The alleged go-between was Anna Chennault, widow of General Claire
Chennault (who had led the “Flying Tigers” using U.S. planes and equipment to
bomb the Japanese positions in China in World War II well before the U.S.
formally entered the war) and a major activist in the so-called “China Lobby”
that for decades kept the U.S. from recognizing or having normal relations with
the Communist government that took over China in 1949. Chennault apparently had
enough “pull” with both the South Viet Namese ambassador in Washington, Bao Diem,
and with South Viet Namese president Nguyen Van Thieu to get South Viet Nam to
stay out of the Paris peace talks (which had actually begun in February 1968
but with only the U.S. and the North Viet Namese government as parties — the
U.S. was demanding that South Viet Nam be included and the North Viet Namese
were demanding that the Viet Cong, which depending on which sources you believe
was either a guerrilla army financed and supported by the North or an
independent resistance movement — most likely it was a little bit of both —
also be included) until after the election on the ground that they could get a
better deal from Nixon than they could from Johnson or Humphrey.
Maddow
blessedly left the parallels between the allegations against Nixon and those against
Trump unstated until the very end of the program, and she doesn’t get into the
irony that by helping Nixon get elected President Anna Chennault ended up with
the policy outcome she least wanted: Nixon and his Realpolitik national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, successfully arranged an
overture to the Communist Chinese government in Beijing that led to U.S.
recognition, normal trade relations and the ultimate outsourcing of much of
America’s industrial production to China (one of the big issues on which Donald
Trump would campaign for and win the presidency 50 years later). The reason
this is coming out now is that, even though there have been rumors that this
happened since 1968, Lyndon Johnson sealed all the documents about it in an
envelope and deposited it in the Johnson Presidential Library with instructions
that it not be opened until 50 years later … which is now. Maddow also claims
that it was to get that sealed envelope that Nixon’s “Plumbers” planned their
raid on the Brookings Institution in the mistaken belief that the envelope
resided there — they didn’t and the Brookings Institution was never the subject
of a Plumbers burglary, but famously the Watergate offices of the Democratic
National Committee were — and to add irony on top of irony, Anna Chennault held
her famous lobbying parties from her own home in the residential wing of
Watergate!
