By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks – or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had “blood on his hands”.
\n[…]
\nNow, for the first time, the whole story can be told.<\/p>\nIt begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.<\/p>\n
He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.
\n[…]
\nIn late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris – concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.<\/p>\n
The US delegation, left, and North Vietnamese delegation at Paris peace talks The Paris peace talks may have ended years earlier, if it had not been for Nixon’s subterfuge<\/p>\n
Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.<\/p>\n
So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.<\/p>\n
He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador’s phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault’s calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to “just hang on through election”.
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And this was all after<\/em><\/strong> Johnson said he wasn’t running again.<\/p>\nIt was 50 years ago today that the Supreme Court – in a unanimous decision that would, I think, be impossible today – declared that states are obliged to provide defendants with “the guiding hand of counsel” to ensure a fair trial for the accused in Gideon v. Wainwright (in other words, if you’ve got no money, you’re still entitled to legal representation). I’m not a lawyer, so my knowledge of this decision comes from the teevee movie “Gideon’s Trumpet” starring Henry Fonda as Clarence Earl Gideon, Jos\u00c3\u00a9 Ferrer as Abe Fortas, and John Houseman as Earl Warren. <\/p>\n
What has always astounded me was that if you’re not actually destitute and are accused of a crime you didn’t commit, you’re not entitled to a public defender. Maybe you wouldn’t want one (they tend to be so overworked that “see and plea” is their primary strategy), but it still seems unfair that even if you didn’t do anything wrong, you’re still on the hook for what can be a helluva lot of money for a lawyer.<\/p>\n
Oh well, time to get back to work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I hope everybody survived the weekend and St. Patrick’s Day unscathed. No corned beef and cabbage for me (which isn’t actually Irish food anyway). I had leftover Brussels sprouts with hot sauce. Other than that, is was a pretty wasted day. All I did was read (I finished one book, read another, and started a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7830,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7829\/revisions\/7830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}