Nixon’s Theft of the 1968 Election Makes Trump’s Electoral Deceit Seem Amateurish and Almost Trite
In 1968, Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks to Get Elected, and his prolongation of the Vietnam War killed another 25,000 GI’s
By
David Gottfried
Trump’s attempt to slaughter the remains of American Democracy by voiding the 2020 election was so heinous that ordinary adverbs and adjectives can’t begin to communicate the depths of his depravity. Until, of course, we pause to consider the crimes of Richard Nixon in stealing the 1968 election.
In September of 1968, Republican Richard Nixon stood at between 40 and 45 percent in the polls, Democrat Hubert Humphrey stagnated at 29 to 33 percent in the polls, and segregationist George Wallace of Alabama hovered at around 20 percent.
The Democratic candidate was so weak because liberal Democrats were livid at Humphrey’s support of the Vietnam War (which Richard Nixon and George Wallace also supported; we liberal Democrats had largely been behind those Democratic candidates opposed to the War, Robert Kennedy and Eugene Mc Carthy) and because the widespread feeling that the country was teetering toward revolution or mayhem (Vietnam, racial discord, riots, the gold crisis, campus upheavals) made President Lyndon Johnson very unpopular and this naturally made Humphrey unpopular as Vice President Humphry had spent the past 4 years bowing and scraping to Johnson. (Johnson said, in regard to men like Humphrey, that he kept his “pecker” in his pocket.)
In October of 1968, Humphrey started to rise. In a speech in Salt Lake City, Humphrey distanced himself from Johnson on Vietnam. and liberal Democrats flocked back to the party. Then labor got into the act, reminding poor whites, who had often been roused and wowed by Wallace’s racism, that working people had much lower standards of living in the South and that although Wallace promised law and order, the murder rate in Alabama was higher than it was in New York and most Northern, liberal states.
And then we were on the verge of a geopolitical miracle: It appeared that the Paris Peace Talks, between the United States, her South Vietnamese allies and the Communists, were poised to bear fruit.
Richard Nixon knew that if peace were achieved, people would hate Lyndon Johnson less (Instead of being seen as our war President he would be hailed as the President who gave us Medicare, model cities, and Medicaid – and that’s only one letter of the alphabet), hate Humphrey less and Humphrey would win.
Richard Nixon, with all the elegant guile of Benjamin Disraeli and all the garbage-stenched morals of Jimmy Hoffa, knew exactly what he needed to do. He needed to make certain that the Paris Peace Talks failed. If the war continued, the people would hate Lyndon Johnson more and that hate would be projected onto Humphrey.
Therefore, Richard Nixon convinced the wife of General Chennault, a woman with strong ties to the South Vietnamese Government, to tell the South Vietnamese that Nixon, as a staunch Republican anti-communist, could be counted on to be more sympathetic to South Vietnam and would give more aid to South Vietnam. (And more loot to their fabulously corrupt officials) Because Nixon would mean a better deal for the corrupt South Vietnamese government, the South Vietnamese should bolt from the Paris Peace talks. If the headlines in American newspapers screamed that the Democrats had fucked up again (because the South Vietnamese bolted from the talks), Nixon would win.
Everything proceeded as planned. General Chenault’s widow, under instructions from Richard Nixon, persuaded the South Vietnamese to bust up the Paris Peace Conference. All the plans for peace went down the tubes. The American papers screeched that Johnson had failed yet again.
On the Saturday immediately before the election, the Harris Poll said that Humphry was 3 points ahead. On or around that Saturday, the media was flush with reports of the failure of the Paris Peace talks. According to tracking polls, Humphrey lost about 2 million votes from that fateful Saturday to election day. The final election tally was Nixon, 43.4 percent, and Humphrey 42.7 percent, and Nixon’s margin in the popular vote was about 700,000. (These numbers are taken from the appendix of Theodore White’s “The Making of the President, 1968”).
The war continued until January 1973. More than 20,000 additional young Americans were killed. Close to one million additional Indochinese people were killed.
Interestingly enough, although Nixon persuaded the South Vietnamese to bust up the peace talks on the grounds that South Vietnam would get a better deal from him, the deal he gave them in 1973 wasn’t exactly top of the line. In the final peace deal, it was agreed that all United States forces would leave, and all fighting would stop, but it was also agreed that North Vietnamese troops were permitted to continue to occupy positions in South Vietnam which they controlled. It was a peace deal which simply postponed North Vietnam’s envelopment of the South.
In the Spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese began an offensive to take South Vietnam. The entire country collapsed in a few weeks and the billions of dollars of ubiquitous American military hardware strewn about the sickly country (sick from our crop defoliants, agent orange, etc.) suddenly seemed as evanescent as the droning, drivel of Republican pols commending the fight against communism.
We know that Nixon sabotaged the peace talks because Lyndon Johnson had bugged not only Nixon’s office but also the offices of our South Vietnamese allies. He never told us what Nixon had done because his bugging was illegal. I have attached a tape of Lyndon Johnson advising Everett Dirksen (Republican, Illinois) of Nixon’s electoral machinations.
I always thought the Watergate hearings and trials were analogous to a process often identified in disease. When physical or psychological pain is too great to feel in the organ which is actually affected, the pain is often referred or displaced to some other organ. For example, patients with acute appendicitis will sometimes feel pain approximating gastritis, are often misdiagnosed and sometimes die of rupt7ured appendixes. A Victorian child who is mortified by seeing her parents have sex may develop hysterical blindness (Freud, Three Studies in Hysteria, 1899). Since America did not have the guts to withstand the pain of admitting that Nixon was a truly evil criminal who killed Americans soldiers to get elected, it decided to get mad at him for Watergate, a matter chock full of garish, grotesque wrongdoing but still relatively tepid next to Vietnam.
Until recently, Nixon’s crime in 1968 was so great that it was unmentionable.