This Day in Diplomatic History (LBJ Announces Vietnam Bombing Halt)

October 31, 1968—In what Republicans undoubtedly regarded as scarier than any Halloween vampire novel, the Democrats appeared to be coming back from the politically undead when President Lyndon Johnson announced, that in return for an American bombing halt, the North Vietnamese Communist government had agreed to come to peace talks in Paris. The announcement came at a point when the man chosen to carry Johnson’s record into the election, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, had nearly erased a 30-point disadvantage in the polls.

The term “October Surprise” was popularized in the 1980 Presidential election, when Ronald Reagan’s advisers floated the idea that Jimmy Carter might pull off a last-minute deal with Iranian radicals to release American hostages after nearly a year in captivity. But the one they had most experience with came during twelve years earlier.

In retrospect, we now know, the “surprise” in that earlier race was not engineered by Johnson, the retiring incumbent, but by the Republican nominee for President, Richard Nixon—unbearably hungry for victory after losing a razor-thin contest to John F. Kennedy eight years before and a positively embarrassing loss to Edmund G. Brown for the California governor’s race two years later.

The pact, worked out after months of painstaking negotiations, came apart before the election. The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose has taken issue with the conventional narrative of these events, noting that the man who sabotaged it, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, didn’t need much encouragement from Nixon on this point to know when he was getting a bad deal.

I don’t think that Ambrose’s argument holds water, however. In any case, it doesn’t erase Nixon’s culpability in undercutting not merely Humphrey’s electoral chances, but also the foreign policy of his government.

Here is what Nixon did:

* He transmitted a message through a friend of Thieu’s, Anna Chennault, that if the South Vietnamese President refused to negotiate, he would get better terms under the incoming Republican administration.
* Nixon thus reneged on his support for a deal in a phone conversation that LBJ had on October 16 with the three Presidential contenders (the other was third-party candidate George Wallace).
* He charged, in an Election Eve nationwide broadcast, that the bombing halt was a political decision made at the expense of American troops.
* He lied point-blank on the same broadcast in stating that he’d heard “a very disturbing report” that North Vietnamese troops were now moving supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and American bombers couldn’t stop them.

Before American voters cast their ballots—even before Nixon made his broadcast—LBJ had in his hands evidence of Nixon’s shenanigans. Yet neither he nor Hubert H. Humphrey chose to publicize it. Why not?

Because the proof had come by way of the administration’s own subterfuge. Through intercepted South Vietnam Embassy cables, LBJ got wind of the October 27 message to Thieu from Chennault (who, as the Chinese-born widow of Gen. Claire Chennault, founder of the legendary “Flying Tigers” WWII unit, became a kind of Washington grande dame for the GOP) promising GOP support. The President approached the FBI about conducting surveillance of Chennault and the embassy.

What was J. Edgar Hoover to do? His own deeply conservative instincts would normally lead him to side with the Republicans. But he was a Washington player for five decades now, and, old man that he was, he still wanted to retain his power. So he acceded to the President’s wish, justifying the investigation on the grounds that Madame Chennault’s action possibly violated the Neutrality Act and the Foreign Agents Registration Act, both concerning dealings by United States private citizens with the governments of other countries. Before long, LBJ had his proof.

LBJ confronted Nixon about what he had learned. Of course, Nixon, being Nixon, did what came naturally to him: deny, deny, deny. The President also called Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirksen, telling him, in no uncertain terms, that he would go public, with the result that America would be shocked “if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.”

Ultimately, Johnson sat on the evidence. Disclosure would have revealed intelligence-gathering methods he wanted kept secret, particularly the ones by the National Security Agency that brought the cables to light. He’d also have to explain why he was tapping the phone of Ms. Chennault. The woman was not only an American ally but also a high-placed member of the opposition party. Finally, though he clearly had Chennault dead to rights, LBJ couldn’t specifically tie Nixon to it. There was a cloud of smoke, but, to use a phrase that gained currency six years later during the Nixon impeachment hearings, no “smoking gun.”

So Nixon won the election, and the war dragged on for four more years. In the next election, Nixon would try his own hand at a late-October announcement with the famous statement from Henry Kissinger that “Peace is at hand.” Of course it wasn’t. Another three months would elapse before that occurred. In the meantime, more soldiers had died.

Nixon resigned in disgrace over his Watergate coverup. But his actions on the brink of the 1968 election were equally disgraceful, perhaps more so. As Ambrose noted, no American political figure except for LBJ had pushed harder for deeper American involvement in Vietnam, dating all the way back to when he had urged use of the atomic bomb to deal with the Communist insurgency in the Eisenhower administration.

But this time, Nixon had not only advocated a misguided policy but, as a private citizen, had undermined American diplomatic efforts and helped drag out a remorseless conflict, for terms that he could not improve on. Ambrose contends that it’s part of the liberal indictment of Nixon. But you don’t have to be liberal to abominate playing with service personnel’s lives for the sake of electoral roulette.