According to Nixon's White House tapes, his aide Charles Colson touched off Nixon's musings by noting that a newspaper column claimed that the Democrats had bugged the telephones of Nixon campaign operative (and right-wing China Lobby figure) Anna Chennault in 1968, when she was serving as Nixon's intermediary to South Vietnamese officials.
"Oh," Nixon responded, "in '68, they bugged our phones too."Colson: "And that this was ordered by Johnson."
Nixon: "That's right"
Colson: "And done through the FBI. My God, if we ever did anything like that you'd have the ..."
Nixon: "Yes. For example, why didn't we bug [the Democrats' 1972 presidential nominee George] McGovern, because after all he's affecting the peace negotiations?"
Colson: "Sure."
Nixon: "That would be exactly the same thing."
Over the next several months, the tale of Johnson's supposed wiretaps of Nixon's campaign was picked up by the Washington Star, Nixon's favorite newspaper for planting stories damaging to his opponents.
Washington Star reporters contacted Walt Rostow on Nov. 2, 1972, and, according to a Rostow memo, they asked whether "President Johnson instructed the FBI to investigate action by members of the Nixon camp to slow down the peace negotiations in Paris before the 1968 election. After the election [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover informed President Nixon of what he had been instructed to do by President Johnson. President Nixon is alleged to have been outraged."
Planting a Story
But Hoover apparently had given Nixon a garbled version of what had happened, leading Nixon to believe that the FBI bugging was more extensive than it was. According to Nixon's White House tapes, he pressed Haldeman on Jan. 8, 1973, to get the story about the 1968 bugging into the Washington Star.
"You don't really have to have hard evidence, Bob," Nixon told Haldeman. "You're not trying to take this to court. All you have to do is to have it out, just put it out as authority, and the press will write the Goddamn story, and the Star will run it now."
Haldeman, however, insisted on checking the facts. In The Haldeman Diaries, published in 1994, Haldeman included an entry dated Jan. 12, 1973, which contains his book's only deletion for national security reasons.
"I talked to [former Attorney General John] Mitchell on the phone," Haldeman wrote, "and he said [FBI official Cartha] DeLoach had told him he was up to date on the thing. ... A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and LBJ got very hot and called Deke [DeLoach's nickname], and said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release [deleted material -- national security], saying that our side was asking that certain things be done. "
"DeLoach took this as a direct threat from Johnson," Haldeman wrote. "As he [DeLoach] recalls it, bugging was requested on the [Nixon campaign] planes, but was turned down, and all they did was check the phone calls, and put a tap on the Dragon Lady [Anna Chennault]."
In other words, Nixon's threat to raise the 1968 bugging was countered by Johnson, who threatened to finally reveal that Nixon's campaign had sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks. The stakes were suddenly raised. However, events went in a different direction.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
