On the thousands of hours of White House tapes Richard Nixon secretly recorded, you can hear him order exactly one burglary. It wasn’t Watergate, but it reveals the real root of the cover-up that toppled a President.

On June 17, 1971, (one year to the date before the Watergate arrests, by impure coincidence) Nixon ordered his inner circle to break into the Brookings Institution. “Blow the safe and get it,” the president said. “It” was a file of secret government documents on the 1968 bombing halt.

“What good will it do you, the bombing halt file?” asked National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger seconds after the president ordered his top aides to commit a felony.

“To blackmail him,” Nixon replied. President Lyndon Johnson had halted the bombing of North Vietnam less than a week before Election Day. Nixon claimed LBJ did it for political reasons, to throw the election to his vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

Kissinger knew better, since he had inside information about the talks. Having worked on an abortive bombing halt deal for Johnson in 1967, Kissinger used his connections with LBJ’s negotiators then to gain access to the Paris talks in 1968 — access he used as a secret informant to the Nixon campaign.

“You remember, I used to give you information about it at the time,” Kissinger reminded the president. “To the best of my knowledge, there was never any conversation in which they said we’ll hold it until the end of October. I wasn’t in on the discussions here. I just saw the instructions to [Ambassador Averell] Harriman,” the chief U.S. negotiator in Paris. (Kissinger’s words on tape contradict his later claim that he didn’t even have access to classified information at the time.)

Nixon had his own reasons to realize that the bombing halt file didn’t contain blackmail material on Johnson. He knew from classified briefings during the campaign that Johnson had remained unwavering in demanding three concessions: If Hanoi wanted a bombing halt, it had to (1) respect the DMZ dividing Vietnam, (2) accept South Vietnamese participation in the Paris peace talks, and (3) stop shelling civilians in Southern cities. Throughout the negotiations, LBJ didn’t budge from these three demands. Hanoi remained equally adamant, insisting on an “unconditional” bombing halt — until October 1968. Then Hanoi suddenly reversed course and accepted all three. Johnson didn’t decide the timing of the bombing halt; Hanoi did.

If the bombing halt file didn’t contain dirt on Johnson, what made Nixon want it desperately enough to risk impeachment and prison? Over the decades, evidence has slowly accumulated that Nixon had a far more compelling motive: the fear that the bombing halt file contained dirt on him.

Throughout the 1968 campaign, the Republican nominee promised not to interfere with the Paris talks. “We all hope in this room that there’s a chance that current negotiations may bring an honorable end to that war,” he told the Republican convention in Miami, “and we will say nothing during this campaign that might destroy that chance.” Publicly, Nixon claimed to put the quest for peace above his own quest for votes, although it was clear that any negotiating breakthrough by Johnson before Election Day would help Vice President Humphrey’s campaign.

One week before Election Day, Johnson got a tip that Nixon was trying to sabotage the negotiations. It came from a highly credible source, the legendary Alexander Sachs.

Sachs entered world history when, clutching a report from Albert Einstein, he warned Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 that Nazi Germany could corner the world uranium market and build an atomic bomb, a warning that led to the Manhattan Project. Sachs was also credited with predicting the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, so he was not someone whose warnings could be safely ignored.

Sachs, chief economist for Lehman Corporation, informed Johnson that he had learned from Wall Street colleagues “closely involved with Nixon” that the Republican nominee “was trying to frustrate the president, by inciting Saigon to step up its demands, and by letting Hanoi know that when he took office ‘he could accept anything and blame it on his predecessor.’”

By that point, North Vietnam had already accepted Johnson’s terms. So had South Vietnam, privately, in meetings with the U.S. ambassador.

But America’s allies in Saigon saw risk and opportunity in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. The risk was the election of Hubert Humphrey, a dove who had urged LBJ not to Americanize the war in the first place and whose supporters hoped he’d withdraw from Vietnam quickly if elected. The opportunity was to elect the premiere anti-Communist politician of the Cold War, Richard Nixon. All Saigon had to do to tip the election to their preferred candidate was refuse to take part in the Paris talks. No talks, no peace — there could be no settlement of the war if one side of it refused to even negotiate. The hopes for peace stirred by the bombing halt would evaporate.

Once LBJ received the warning from Sachs, he took a closer look at diplomatic intelligence collected by the National Security Agency (which intercepted cables from the South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem in Washington, DC, to his home government in Saigon) and Central Intelligence Agency (which bugged South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu’s office). “[I am] still in contact with the Nixon entourage, which continues to be the favorite despite the uncertainty provoked by the news of an imminent bombing halt,” Ambassador Diem cabled President Thieu on Oct. 28, 1968. “I [explained discreetly to our partisan friends our] firm attitude.” The president ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to put a wiretap on the embassy’s phone and tail one of “our partisan friends,” Anna Chennault, the Republican Party’s top female fundraiser.

It didn’t take long for the FBI to strike pay dirt. Three days before the election, the bureau sent the White House this wiretap report: “Mrs. Anna Chennault contacted Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem and advised him that she had received a message from her boss (not further identified) which her boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are gonna win’ and that her boss also said, ‘Hold on, he understands all of it.’” That day, President Thieu had announced that the South would not send a delegation to Paris, rendering any settlement of the war impossible for the time being and stalling Humphrey’s surge in the polls.

A furious president telephoned the highest elected Republican in the land, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, and declared, “This is treason.” He wasn’t exaggerating. The Logan Act of 1799 prohibits private citizens (including presidential candidates) from interfering with negotiations between the U.S. and foreign governments.

Nevertheless, Johnson decided not to go public with what he’d learned. He had many reasons, one of which remained secret until his own White House tapes were released in the twenty-first century. The others trickled out faster: LBJ didn’t want to compromise U.S. diplomatic intelligence sources, didn’t want to cripple Nixon’s presidency before it began, and didn’t have “smoking gun” proof that Nixon himself had broken the law.

Nixon, however, didn’t know that last bit, and J. Edgar Hoover gave him ample reason to fear otherwise. At his first meeting with President-elect Nixon, the 73-year-old FBI director, desperate to be reappointed to the position he’d held since the Roaring Twenties, pretended his bureau had collected more intelligence on the Nixon campaign than it really had. Hoover told Nixon that the FBI had also tapped Chennault’s home phone (in her penthouse apartment in the Watergate complex, for a second impure coincidence) and bugged Nixon’s own campaign plane.

It was a very shrewd bluff. To understand the impact Hoover’s words had on Nixon, you have to read Chennault’s 1980 memoirs. In The Education of Anna,Chennault wrote that Nixon had held a secret meeting in New York with her, Ambassador Diem, and campaign manager John Mitchell, during which the candidate designated Chennault as “the sole representative between the Vietnamese government and the Nixon campaign headquarters.” Chennault wrote that she was on the phone “at least once a day” with Nixon’s campaign manager, including the night of LBJ’s bombing halt announcement, when Mitchell said, “I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position, and I hope you have made that clear to them.”

Thanks to Hoover’s charade, Nixon had reason to fear that the government’s bombing halt file contained FBI wiretap reports on any conversation Chennault had with Nixon’s campaign manager on her home phone as well as anything Nixon said on his campaign plane about sabotaging the peace talks during the final two weeks of the campaign. The FBI director emerged from the meeting with complete job security; the president-elect, with complete job insecurity.

Nixon became understandably obsessed with getting his hands on all the government’s bombing halt files. In January 1969, his first month as president, he ordered White House Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman to “make up a full report with all the documents.”

Haldeman assigned the task to an aide whose name would become notorious during the Watergate hearings, Tom Charles Huston. It was Huston who unwittingly set the President up for his fall. In March 1970, Huston reported that after “a little digging” he’d discovered that the Pentagon had done a report “on all events leading up to the bombing halt.” This report has never surfaced for the simple reason that it never existed. The people Huston named — former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, Paul Warnke and Leslie Gelb of the Pentagon’s International Security Affairs office — had all been involved in an entirely different report, a massive study of Vietnam decision-making that eventually became known as the Pentagon Papers. (The Pentagon Papers do include information about the several bombing pauses LBJ had tried earlier in his administration as well as the partial bombing halt he ordered in March 1968 when he announced his decision not to seek reelection. But the Pentagon Papers end in mid-1968, long before the October bombing halt.) ISA couldn’t have done a report “on all events leading up to the bombing halt” for the simple reason that LBJ held closely all the CIA, NSA and FBI reports regarding the Chennault affair — and then took them all with him in January 1969 when he retired to his Texas ranch. Nevertheless, Huston claimed that this non-existent bombing halt report was locked in “a DOD-approved vault” at the Brookings Institution.

The young aide’s White House career really took off then. The next month, Haldeman instructed him to start meeting with intelligence chiefs about domestic terrorism. The president soon summoned the heads of the CIA, NSA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency to the Oval Office. He secretly established an interagency committee to identify any “restrictions” getting in the way of intelligence collection. The result was the Huston Plan, which recommended lifting restraints on wiretapping, mail opening and, yes, breaking and entering — all in the name of combating domestic terrorism. Nixon approved the plan.

J. Edgar Hoover didn’t. He raised objections with Mitchell, who was by then Nixon’s attorney general, and managed to kill the Huston Plan in 1970. If he hadn’t, his FBI agents would have been the ones ordered to burgle Brookings in 1971.

The leak of the Pentagon Papers revived Nixon’s bombing halt obsession. When the New York Times started publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971, Nixon quickly jumped to the conclusion that the men who oversaw the Pentagon Papers’ creation — Warnke, Gelb, and Morton Halperin — were the ones who had leaked them to the newspapers. He feared that this imaginary “conspiracy” would leak his secrets next.

This was the context in which, four days later, he ordered the Brookings break-in. “Now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” the president said. “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files.”

Nixon wasn’t merely “blowing off steam” as his defenders like to say. It was at this time, Nixon later admitted, that he secretly decided to establish the Special Investigations Unit, commonly (and unfortunately) known as “the Plumbers,” since the only politically palatable explanation for its existence was to plug leaks. The Plumbers operated as a secret police squad, authorized by the president himself to break the law in the name of national security. Nixon repeatedly ordered Brookings burglarized over the next two weeks. “You’re to break into the place, rifle the files and bring them in…I want the Brookings Institute safe cleaned out…Who’s gonna break in the Brookings Institute?”

Two of the Plumbers — former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and ex-FBI man G. Gordon Liddy — devised a plan that involved firebombing the think tank. Cuban-American CIA assets who had worked with Hunt on anti-Castro operations would have been sent the scene dressed as D.C. firemen to “hit the vault,” according to Liddy, who said the plan was rejected the as too expensive: “The White House wouldn’t spring for a fire engine.”

The following year, of course, Hunt and Liddy “masterminded” the Watergate break-in. When five men in business suits and Playtex gloves were arrested at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, Nixon had little choice but to launch a cover-up. An unobstructed investigation of Hunt, Liddy and their crew of Cuban-American CIA assets would have led back to the Plumbers; an unobstructed investigation of the Plumbers would have led back to the President’s order to break into Brookings; and an unobstructed investigation of the Brookings order would have led back to the Chennault affair. Nixon would have lost the presidency a lot faster if he had notorchestrated the Watergate cover-up. That’s why the lesson commonly drawn about Watergate — “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” — is so wrong.

The cover-up succeeded in important ways. Proof that Nixon himself ordered the Brookings break-in didn’t emerge until two years after his death, which was the only thing that ended his battle to keep the American people from hearing his tapes. While the Senate Watergate Committee caught wind of an aborted plan to break into Brookings, when Nixon adviser John D. Ehrlichman was asked if he knew who authorized it, he lied, “No, I don’t.” Ehrlichman, in fact, had been in the Oval Office when the president authorized it personally. The perjury worked. He didn’t get caught (not then, at least). The cover-up held.

Imagine if it hadn’t. If America had learned in 1973 that the President had ordered the Brookings break-in himself. If the Senate had investigated that as thoroughly as it did the Watergate break-in. If investigators had looked into Nixon’s stated reason for ordering the break-in — to “blackmail” Johnson — and found it wanting. If they had investigated the Chennault affair. If Chennault had testified under oath to what she later wrote in her memoirs about candidate Nixon secretly making her his “sole representative” to the Saigon government before the 1968 election. If Americans had seen the FBI wiretap report of her conveying her “message from her boss” to Saigon to “hold on” three days before the election. If Ambassador Diem and Mitchell had been questioned under oath about possible Logan Act violations. The articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon might well have included treason.

And if investigators had gone after Johnson’s tapes as well as Nixon’s, we might have learned then the most tragic reason Johnson had for not revealing the Chennault affair. It can be found in a November 9, 1968, conversation between Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

“If this thing ever got out, this war is over, as far as the American people are concerned,” Rusk said.

“Yes, yes, I think so,” the President replied.

Think they were exaggerating? There was a lot to anger Americans, including (1) interference with a U.S. presidential election (2) by a foreign government (3) that more than 30,000 Americans had died defending (4) and in whose defense hundreds of thousands of other American soldiers were then risking their lives. This interference (5) involved sabotaging peace talks aimed at producing a settlement that would allow those American soldiers to come home. Add to that the evidence that (6) this sabotage had the secret encouragement of the presidential candidate (7) who profited from it politically in an election he won by less than 1 percent of the vote. This was a scandal that could have changed history, had the government not kept it secret.

If Johnson and Rusk were right — if exposing the Chennault affair would have ended American involvement in Vietnam — then one result of LBJ’s silence was that it gave Nixon the chance to add four years to the Vietnam War at the cost of more than 20,000 American lives.

We now know that Nixon prolonged the war because he knew he couldn’t win it. Shortly after he took office, military, diplomatic and intelligence officials informed the president that South Vietnam would never be able to survive without U.S. combat troops. Nixon kept this secret. Publicly, he claimed that his program to train the South Vietnamese to defend themselves without U.S. combat troops was working. Privately, he admitted the South likely wouldn’t survive. That’s why he spread American withdrawal from Vietnam over four years — so Saigon wouldn’t fall before Election Day 1972, thereby denying him a second term. If America had learned in 1968 that Nixon had put politics before peace as a candidate, he might have been denied the chance to do the same thing as president. This is the greatest tragedy of the Nixon administration. While the Watergate cover-up cost the president his job, it turns out to have been his lesser offense.

White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman’s notes indicate the two of them were discussing Watergate.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Nixon testified under oath.

He did have some quotable moments.

“I said [to then-White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig], let’s find out how this damn thing happened. I am sorry, I wasn’t supposed to use profanity. You have enough on the tapes.”

Nixon had recently been hospitalized and had anti-coagulants administered during his testimony. It gave him an opportunity to express some passive aggression (note his last two words).

“I think it should be recorded: I am taking anti-coagulants ordered by the doctors every day at twelve o’clock. That means if I am ever in an accident and start to bleed I will bleed to death unless the doctor is there within ten minutes. Want one?”

Now combing through the rest of the testimony for something more substantive.

Here’s some background on Nixon’s testimony.

Why’s this a big deal?

The former President’s June 23  & 24, 1975, testimony was America’s best shot at getting the truth about Watergate out of him, at least on questions that can’t be answered by listening to his secretly recorded White House tapes.

Nixon couldn’t plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, since Gerald Ford had already pardoned him for all the crimes he committed during his presidency. Ford’s pardon, however, didn’t protect Nixon from prosecution for any crime he might commit after his resignation on August 9, 1974. So Nixon couldn’t lie while being questioned under oath without running the risk of a perjury charge.

That doesn’t mean that Nixon told the truth necessarily while testifying under oath, just that it was riskier for him to lie.

After two days of questioning Nixon looked pale and shaken, according to a contemporary report.

He was asked about:

• The 18 1/2-Minute Gap. The grand jury, like everyone else in America, wanted to know who erased this segment of the June 20, 1972, conversation between the President and White House Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman. Haldeman’s handwritten notes on the meeting show that the two of them discussed Watergate.
  Soon after Nixon testified his lawyer publicly stated that the former president had denied responsibility for the erasure under oath.

• The White House Transcripts. When Nixon still hoped to avoid turning over tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, he released transcripts made by his own staff as a substitute. After the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the President had to turn over tapes to the Watergate Special Prosecutor, discrepancies between the recordings and the White House transcripts emerged. Nixon, again according to that contemporary report, was asked about “alteration” to the transcripts.
• Physical Attacks on Demonstrators. Although in his public statements Nixon said the right things about Americans having the right to peacefully protest, his private response to his most unpopular critics, the anti-war demonstrators, was sometimes violent. He was rather creative about fomenting mayhem, as this April 14, 1971, telephone conversation with White House dirty trickster Chuck Colson makes perfectly clear:

Colson: We have some pretty good tricks in our bag that we’ve been working on this week on the demonstrations. You know, the hard hats [i.e., construction workers] are gonna be here at the same time.

President Nixon: I hope they realize how important this is. Do they?

Colson: Well, we, we kinda thought we’d, uh, pass some leaflets around when they’re here about, uh, “Join the—”

President Nixon: Mm-hmm.

Colson: “ — Demonstration and End the War” and have some long-haired kids, uh —

President Nixon: Well now, the other thing you can do is to attack the hard hats.

Colson: That’s, uh –

President Nixon: You see what I mean?

Colson: Yeah.

President Nixon: Why not have, why not have something that throws off on them? I mean, “The Hard Hats Are Not,”—with an ugly, ugly picture in pamphlets—“The Hard Hats Are Not America,” and then, “We Are.” You know, or something like, you see, a little of that?

Colson: Mmm. That’s the other twist.

President Nixon: You see?

Colson: I hadn’t thought of that. That’s a good one. That’s excellent. I was thinking of trying to get them to join the demonstration. If they come down and watch that guerilla theatre that this group is bringing out next week, uh, God, they’ll go in and clean ‘em out.

The National Archives and Records Administration lists other things Nixon was questioned about under oath in its press release.

Credit for prying the grand jury transcript from the government’s hands goes chiefly to historian Stanley Kutler and Public Citizen. Two of the public interest group’s legal eagles, Allison Zieve and Julian Helisek, deserve special mention. The American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, Organization of American Historians, and Society of American Archivists all joined in petitioning the court to unseal the transcript. I was one of many historians who provided the court with reasons why Nixon’s testimony should be released.

No one died at Watergate (as the old bumper sticker put it) but thousands died because Nixon was unwilling to admit publicly what he recognized in private–that South Vietnam wouldn’t survive without American ground troops fighting and dying in its defense.

His advisers–military, diplomatic and intelligence–told him this in his first year in office, yet he maintained the public pretense that he would withdraw the last American troops only when they had trained the South to stand on its own. “This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.”

Yet he resolved in secrecy to time his withdrawal to the 1972 election, keeping American soldiers in harm’s way long enough to ensure that the South wouldn’t fall before Election Day. Propping up the South for political purposes cost thousands of American lives. Publicly he claimed it took four years before his training program for the host government’s forces worked. Privately he recognized it hadn’t.

“I look at the tide of history out there, South Vietnam probably is never gonna survive anyway,” the President told his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, a few months before his landslide reelection. “I’m just being perfectly candid.” Never with the voters.

Some said that Nixon’s resignation undid the 1972 election. Not unless it raised the dead.

For years Nixon’s defenders said that they hoped his voluminous White House tapes, recorded secretly on a voice-activated system wired to microphones hidden in the Oval Office on the President’s orders, would reveal the statesman. They said that the Watergate tapes, coming out first and getting played in court and printed in the newspapers, showed us Nixon at his worst. The rest, they argued, would correct this distorted portrait.

They did. For one thing, they reveal that Watergate was Nixon’s lesser offense.

If people ask you why Nixon fought until his death to keep the American people from hearing his tapes, show them this.

I was looking through boxes of declassified documents in the vast, sunny research room at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, when I noticed the name “KIMBALL” printed on one of the pieces of cardboard the archives use to keep us researchers from dissolving into an undifferentiated herd.

By then I was very familiar Kimball’s book, Nixon’s Vietnam War, because my first project for the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was to start listening to the Nixon tapes day-by-day, from the beginning, for those playing at home) and identify passages of historical interest. I got to hear Nixon’s presidency in real time and then start transcribing the most historic parts.

It quickly became apparent, as those of you who have watched the Fatal Politics videos know, that Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger had, by the time taping began (Tuesday, February 16, 1971) adopted a “decent interval” exit strategy for Vietnam. While they told the American people they were seeking “peace with honor,” they were really seeking a face-saving period of a year or two between Nixon’s final withdrawal of American troops and North Vietnam’s final takeover of the South. Nixon deliberately, consciously, prolonged the war for four years because he knew he wouldn’t be reelected if South Vietnam collapsed before Election Day 1972. (Click on Videos in the upper right hand corner to hear and see the evidence yourself.)

In other words, Kimball was right. While most writers, stretching back to the Nixon administration, accepted the President’s public proclamations that he would withdraw from Vietnam only when the South Vietnamese were capable of defending themselves, Nixon’s Vietnam War argued that Nixon and Kissinger had a “decent interval” exit strategy. When Kimball published that in 1998, he was a lone voice in the wilderness. Few other writers (I can’t think of one) were willing to admit that they’d been wrong, although everyone had to admire his research, the rigor of his analysis, and his careful and weighing of the evidence.

That was 1998. The following year, the National Archives released the first six months of Nixon tapes (from February through July 1971). Since then, the Archives and, after it became part of the presidential library system, the Richard M. Nixon Library & Museum, have released more than 2,000 hours of Nixon tapes (from February 1971 through March 1973) and the evidence–the best primary source historians have ever had or will ever have–has proved Kimball right.

So when I saw that he was working in the Archives’ research room at the same time as me back in 2001, I went over to shake his hand and tell him about one of the tapes that supported his thesis. He then showed me a new piece of evidence that had emerged since he’d published–Kissinger’s briefing book for Polo I, his secret trip to China 40 years ago this month, in the margins of which the national security adviser had scribbled, “We want a decent interval. You have our assurance.” (The written record of the Nixon administration, as well as the tape-recorded one, has also backed Kimball up. Nixon’s is the best-documented presidency in history. In addition to the tapes generated by Nixon’s secret, voice-activated recording system in the Oval Office and elsewhere, Kissinger’s staff made near-verbatim transcripts of face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders.)

Since then, the tide has turned, and what was once Kimball’s lonely view is now widely acknowledge as the view that the abundant evidence forces on all who face it. Even Jeremi Suri, whose studiously neutral Henry Kissinger and the American Century has won praise from the left, right and middle, wrote: ”Though he would later deny it, the NSC advisor received consistent information that Saigon could not sustain an American troop withdrawal. Kissinger hoped to use his secret talks with North Vietnam to  forestall the collapse of the US-supported regime as American troops withdrew. By 1971 he and Nixon would accept a ‘decent interval’ between US disengagement and a North Vietnamese takeover of the south.”

Kimball’s a model scholar and I’m glad to see his work vindicated.

Here’s the Polo I briefing book. The “We want a decent interval” marginalia is 62 pages in.

I’ll be moderating a panel on Vietnam that features Kimball, the prolific and impressive John Prados, author of many valuable books on Vietnam, and Katherine Scott, a newly minted Ph.D. whose done extraordinary work on the national security state, as part of ”Understanding Richard Nixon: A Symposium,” at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, on July 22-23. C-SPAN plans to cover it.

Links aren’t working for me today, and I refuse to bug my webmaster on one of her few free weekends, so . . .

Find out more about the symposium at the Nixon Library web site:

http://nixon.archives.gov/index.php

Kimball’s follow-up to Nixon’s Vietnam War, 2003′s The Vietnam War Files, includes the evidence that wasn’t available in 1998:

http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-War-Files-Uncovering-Nixon-Era/dp/0700612831/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1310921266&sr=8-2

Find out more about the Miller Center at:

http://millercenter.org/

And more about the PRP at:

http://whitehousetapes.net/

The transcript remained classified for decades after the event, allowing Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon to burnish their legends about the opening to China.

As you can see, in this first face-to-face meeting between top American and Chinese officials since the Communist revolution, Kissinger outlined to Zhou Enlai the terms under which Nixon would accept a North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam.

Nixon would agree to total withdrawal of American troops in return for release of American Prisoners of War (POWs) held by Hanoi and a ceasefire-in-place (pp. 19-20) that would leave North Vietnamese troops occupying and governing parts of the South.

The ceasefire, lasting “say 18 months or some period,” (p. 36) would provide Nixon with a “decent interval” of a year or two between his final withdrawal of American troops and Hanoi’s final takeover of the South.

Kissinger also said, “there should be respect for the Geneva Accords,” (p. 20) the 1954 agreement that divided Vietnam into North and South, but made it clear that the North could resume seeking military conquest without fear of US intervention following a “decent interval.”

“If the agreement breaks down, then it is quite possible that the people in Vietnam will fight it out,” Mr. Kissinger told the premier. “If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we withdraw, we will not intervene.” (pp. 35-36.)

Kissinger outlined to Zhou Enlai the terms under which Nixon would accept a North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam. Nixon would agree to total withdrawal of American troops in return for release of American Prisoners of War (POWs) held by Hanoi and a ceasefire-in-place (pp. 19-20) that would leave North Vietnamese troops occupying and governing parts of the South.

The ceasefire, lasting “say 18 months or some period,” (p. 36) would provide Nixon with a “decent interval” of a year or two between his final withdrawal of American troops and Hanoi’s final takeover of the South.

Kissinger also said, “there should be respect for the Geneva Accords,” (p. 20) the 1954 agreement that divided Vietnam into North and South, but made it clear that the North could resume seeking military conquest without fear of US intervention following a “decent interval.”

“If the agreement breaks down, then it is quite possible that the people in Vietnam will fight it out,” Mr. Kissinger told the premier. “If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we withdraw, we will not intervene.” (pp. 35-36.)

Historian Jussi Hanhimaki first brought these passages to light:
http://www.shafr.org/p…

“I have found, however, that all too frequently, the government claims that publication of certain infonnation will harm national security, when in reality, the government’s real concernis about covering up its own wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment.”

From an affidavit by James Risen of the New York Times on why he should not be forced in court to expose sources. Thanks to Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News.

Nixon was always talking about firing people. Sometimes he actually did it.

But General Alexander Haig, Nixon’s deputy national security adviser, suspected that the leak was the work of people who had left the Pentagon years earlier, during the transition from the Johnson to the Nixon administration.

“They’re all gone now,” Haig said. “Clifford, Halperin, Gelb.”

Haig was just giving Nixon his hunch. He had no evidence. As hunches go, Haig’s was not so good.

The first name on his list, Clark Clifford, was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s last secretary of defense. People that high up in the government don’t have to leak historical documents. They can just ask the government to declassify them, as Don Rumsfeld when he wanted to quote some in his book. Besides, there was no bigger Democrat than Clark Clifford, an adviser to presidents since Harry S Truman, and the Pentagon Papers made two Democratic presidents, John F. Kennedy and Johnson, look pretty bad.

The other two names Haig mentioned weren’t as well known, but they were already on the first draft of Nixon’s enemies list. Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb had both been advisers to Clifford in the Pentagon. (Halperin had been deputy assistant secretary of defense for the International Security Affairs office, Gelb had been ISA’s director of policy planning and arms control.) Gelb had supervised the historical study that became known as the Pentagon Papers, and Halperin had overseen the project. They had also been critics of Nixon’s Vietnam policies.

But that’s not why they were on Nixon’s list. The President feared that Halperin and Gelb knew classified information about him. That’s why he reacted so violently–and illegally, unconstitutionally, and impeach-ably–to the Pentagon Papers. He thought (mistakenly) that the leak was the result of a conspiracy, a conspiracy that, he feared, would later leak his secrets.

(I should mention now that Halperin and Gelb did *not* participate in the leak of the Pentagon Papers. Conspiracy theorists are an excitable lot, and I don’t want to encourage them.)

Nixon’s secret White House taping system captured his first discussion of the Pentagon Papers leak 40 years ago today. Listen to it here: http://bit.ly/kLRits. The federal government is finally declassifying the Pentagon Papers today at noon Eastern time.

CNN’s In the Arena asked me about it and you can find my answers, along with quotes from Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes, here.

On Monday, the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a Top Secret Defense Department history of American involvement in the Vietnam War, the government will (finally) release a declassified version of all 47 volumes of the study.