When Richard Nixon was a presidential candidate, he deliberately interfered with Vietnam War peace talks that could have ended the war before the 1968 election, recently discovered notes show.
Notes made by then-aide and future chief of staff H.R. Haldeman showed Nixon tried to persuade South Vietnamese leaders to wait until after the election to agree to a deal, according to The New York Times. Nixon thought a successful deal would be seen as a victory for his opponent Hubert H. Humphries, whom then-President Lyndon B. Johnson supported and worked with.
The U.S. remained involved in the Vietnam conflict for five more years after the election, in which Nixon was narrowly elected.
Scholars of the time period had long suspected Nixon tried to interfere with peace talks held by Johnson, who did not seek re-election in 1968, but no hard evidence of interference had presented itself until the notes were discovered at the Nixon Presidential Library during research by John A. Farrell for an upcoming biography on Nixon, the Times reported.
The Paris Peace Talks were underway all through the presidential campaign and were thought to be going well until South Korea walked away from the negotiating table the day before the election, according to the Smithsonian Magazine.
Nixon and his staff denied throughout his presidency that he was ever involved in sabotaging the talks, the Smithsonian reported, but Johnson’s White House had intercepted phone calls by aide Anne Chennault telling the South Vietnamese ambassador to “hang through the election,” and suspected that Nixon was involved.
The notes were released by the Nixon library in 2007, but had not been studied until recently.
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