Johnson then injected a thinly veiled threat to go public. "I don't want to get this in the campaign," Johnson said, adding: "They oughtn't be doing this. This is treason."
Dirksen responded, "I know."
Johnson continued: "I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter of this importance. I don't want to do that [go public]. They ought to know that we know what they're doing. I know who they're talking to. I know what they're saying."
Dirksen: "I better get in touch with him [Nixon], I think."
"They're contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war," Johnson said. "It's a damn bad mistake. And I don't want to say so. ... You just tell them that their people are messing around in this thing, and if they don't want it on the front pages, they better quit it."
After hearing from Dirksen, Nixon grew concerned that Johnson might just go public with his evidence of the conspiracy. At 1:54 p.m. on Nov. 3, trying to head off that possibility, Nixon spoke directly to Johnson, according to an audiotape released by the LBJ Library.
Nixon: "I just wanted you to know that I got a report from Everett Dirksen with regard to your call. ... I just went on 'Meet the Press' and I said ... 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 ... that anything would be useful that I could do, that I would do it, that I felt Saigon should come to the conference table. ...
"I feel very, very strongly about this. Any rumblings around about somebody trying to sabotage the Saigon government's attitude, there's absolutely no credibility as far as I'm concerned."
Armed with FBI reports and other intelligence, Johnson responded, "I'm very happy to hear that, Dick, because that is taking place. Here's the history of it. I didn't want to call you but I wanted you to know what happened."
Johnson recounted some of the chronology leading up to Oct. 28, 1968, when it appeared that South Vietnam was on-board for the peace talks. He added: "Then the traffic goes out that Nixon will do better by you. Now that goes to Thieu. I didn't say with your knowledge. I hope it wasn't."
"Huh, no," Nixon responded. "My God, I would never do anything to encourage ... Saigon not to come to the table. ... Good God, we want them over to Paris, we got to get them to Paris or you can't have a peace. " The war apparently now is about where it could be brought to an end. The quicker the better. To hell with the political credit, believe me."
Johnson, however, sounded less than convinced. "You just see that your people don't tell the South Vietnamese that they're going to get a better deal out of the United States government than a conference," the President said.
An Almost Scoop
After the conversation with Nixon, Johnson continued to consider whether he should go public with Nixon's "treason." A last-minute opportunity arose when a Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Saigon, Beverly Deepe, got word from South Vietnamese sources about the pressure on Thieu from the Nixon campaign to block the peace talks.
Deepe's story draft read: "Purported political encouragement from the Richard Nixon camp was a significant factor in the last-minute decision of President Thieu's refusal to send a delegation to the Paris peace talks -- at least until the American Presidential election is over."
So, on Nov. 4, journalist Saville Davis from the Monitor's Washington bureau checked out Deepe's story with South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem and with the White House. Bui Diem knocked the story down and the decision by the White House on whether to confirm the story went to President Johnson himself.
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