[xerxes]

From the BBC. This is truly staggering. Yes, it's common knowledge that Nixon was a slimy POS, but this really is beyond the pale IMO.

$1:

The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'
By David Taylor

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations - he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but said nothing.

After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations none of his successors has dared to do it. But Nixon wasn't the first.

He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency.
"They will provide history with the bark off," Johnson told his wife, Lady Bird.
The final batch of tapes released by the LBJ library covers 1968, and allows us to hear Johnson's private conversations as his Democratic Party tore itself apart over the question of Vietnam.

The 1968 convention, held in Chicago, was a complete shambles.
Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters clashed with Mayor Richard Daley's police, determined to force the party to reject Johnson's Vietnam war strategy.
As they taunted the police with cries of "The whole world is watching!" one man in particular was watching very closely.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was at his ranch in Texas, having announced five months earlier that he wouldn't seek a second term.
The president was appalled at the violence and although many of his staff sided with the students, and told the president the police were responsible for "disgusting abuse of police power," Johnson picked up the phone, ordered the dictabelt machine to start recording and congratulated Mayor Daley for his handling of the protest.

The president feared the convention delegates were about to reject his war policy and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey.
So he placed a series of calls to his staff at the convention to outline an astonishing plan. He planned to leave Texas and fly into Chicago.

He would then enter the convention and announce he was putting his name forward as a candidate for a second term.
It would have transformed the 1968 election. His advisers were sworn to secrecy and even Lady Bird did not know what her husband was considering.
On the White House tapes we learn that Johnson wanted to know from Daley how many delegates would support his candidacy. LBJ only wanted to get back into the race if Daley could guarantee the party would fall in line behind him.
They also discussed whether the president's helicopter, Marine One, could land on top of the Hilton Hotel to avoid the anti-war protesters.
Daley assured him enough delegates would support his nomination but the plan was shelved after the Secret Service warned the president they could not guarantee his safety.
The idea that Johnson might have been the candidate, and not Hubert Humphrey, is just one of the many secrets contained on the White House tapes.

They also shed light on a scandal that, if it had been known at the time, would have sunk the candidacy of Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon.
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".

The BBC's former Washington correspondent Charles Wheeler learned of this in 1994 and conducted a series of interviews with key Johnson staff, such as defence secretary Clark Clifford, and national security adviser Walt Rostow.
But by the time the tapes were declassified in 2008 all the main protagonists had died, including Wheeler.

Now, for the first time, the whole story can be told.
It 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.
He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.
At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.

In 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.
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.
So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.

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".
Johnson was told by Defence Secretary Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace.
In a series of remarkable White House recordings we can hear Johnson's reaction to the news.

In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: "We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move."
He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.
When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.
The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.

Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.
Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.
So they decided to say nothing.

The president did let Humphrey know and gave him enough information to sink his opponent. But by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency. So Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway.
Nixon ended his campaign by suggesting the administration war policy was in shambles. They couldn't even get the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table.
He won by less than 1% of the popular vote.

Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.
The White House tapes, combined with Wheeler's interviews with key White House personnel, provide an unprecedented insight into how Johnson handled a series of crises that rocked his presidency. Sadly, we will never have that sort of insight again.

Just think about it. Nixon sabotages the prospect of peace in Vietnam to win an election all the while promising to end the war himself. Instead the war will go on for another 5 years costing tens of thousands of more lives.

[matwilson]

His biggest crime was the assassination of John Lennon.


His failure, the survival of Ted Kennedy:


http://mdatoz.com/nixon/


Perhaps Ted Kennedy was ultimately spared because he became a lame duck presidential candidate.

[Thanos]

Nixon, who was out of office in disgrace in 1974, was responsible for killing John Lennon in 1980? That's a new one in existential wackyness, even by the standards of the tin-hat crowd. And perhaps Ted Kennedy survived because for some reason the Democrats didn't want a married man who had killed his secret mistress in a drunk driving accident to be running for President.

Woo, woo, looks like we got a live one here!
- Jack Nicholson as The Joker, 1989

[matwilson]

The Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign and most Americans thought they had heard the last of Nixon. The fact is, he continued to carry a big stick, but he prudently kept a low profile and the media did not expose his secret operations.

As Nixon biographer Sam Anson has uncovered, Nixon had an almost uninterrupted capacity to influence White House decision making. Code-named the Wizard, Richard Nixon had direct access to the Ford White House through an elaborate secret communication set up. Nixon's unbroken link to the White House was briefly interrupted by the Carter administration, but he had full years to pull Reagan’s strings as he saw fit.

When Reagan won the election, Nixon's white House power was omnipotent because Reagan was a hands-off President who gave Nixon and CIA Director, Bill Casey the opportunity to direct American foreign policy. Historian, Sam Anson described the incredible degree of influence that Nixon exercised over the Reagan White House when he said:

“Nixon gets into his office every morning about 7:30. By noon he will have made and taken 40 calls, most of them to Washington. First he calls the White House and talks to (presidential counselor) Ed Meese, (national security adviser) Bud McEarlane, and President Reagan. Then he starts working the State Department. Everyone from (Secretary of State) George Schultz on down. He not only gives advice on foreign policy, but on politics in general. What he says is taken very seriously.”

The tone of the Reagan era was set during the election campaign, when Ronald Reagan offered Casey the opportunity to be his campaign manager. Reagan was in awe of the intelligence spook who organized intelligence missions behind enemy lines for Eisenhower during World War II and as soon as Casey joined the campaign, Reagan said: "You're the expert Bill. Just point me in the right direction and I'll go".

Richard Nixon, Casey's ideological twin, was the senior partner of the foreign policy that was shaped in the 1980's. Ronald Reagan was a trusting subject who enthusiastically embraced the path that Nixon and Casey paved. Officially, he was the President of the United States.

Bill Casey and Richard Nixon were in charge and absolute loyalty defined their relationship. In 1970, when anti-war demonstrators disturbed President Nixon, Bill Casey let it be known that anyone who opposed the war was misinformed and irresponsible. With Ronald Reagan in the White House, Bill Casey and Richard Nixon claimed the right to define the course of American foreign policy, and Casey's unswerving support for Nixon made it possible.

[xerxes]

Wow. The rantings of one retard have derailed my interesting thread. Bravo.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

Just think about it. Nixon sabotages the prospect of peace in Vietnam to win an election all the while promising to end the war himself. Instead the war will go on for another 5 years costing tens of thousands of more lives.

Ronald Reagan used the same play on Carter with the Iran hostages.

[DanSC]

Ain't no President committed treason like Andrew Jackson committed treason

[Freakinoldguy]

xerxes xerxes:

Wow. The rantings of one retard have derailed my interesting thread. Bravo.

If Nixon was so bad Alex P. Keaton would never have had him as his role model.

[matwilson]

Casey had even supported Nixon through the Watergate crisis when he wrote:

“All of your friends, all of us who view you as a national asset with a historic mission, and the general public, want to pull all the political shenanigans behind us and get on with the vital things to be done.”

The dirty tricks that these like-minded fanatics deployed to get Ronald Reagan elected are astounding, as betrayed in the book, “October Surprise”. The book exposes the plot to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran until after the election, to sabotage Jimmy Carter's prospect of winning. Vigorously denied, the allegation appears to be true, as suggested by an obscure New York Times story which exposed the fact that Reagan's campaign manager, who was presumably supposed to be planning Reagan's election strategy in America, was actually abroad. A brief item in the New York Times dated July, 30 1980, the absence of Reagan's campaign manager in the following terms; "William Casey plans to open negotiations with the Right to Life group when he returns from a trip abroad."

The Casey/Nixon agenda defined the Reagan years, and the so-called Reagan revolution was merely a re-visitation of the lawless Nixon years. Accomplished in the art of plotting clandestine schemes, Nixon and Casey ushered in an unprecedented reign of terror with a vengeance. Carter had briefly interrupted the unfinished agenda of the Nixon White House and the first order of producing the dissent-free environment ideologues demanded was the prompt "liquidation" of priority target, John Lennon.

On 2 December 1980, Richard Nixon betrayed the pre-planned agenda of the Reagan White House in his book, “The Real War”, wherein he claimed confidence in "the background of those new policies that will now begin to emerge as the new administration takes office." Nixon's book paints a portrait of a paranoid nation waging an obsessive battle to win World War III, and he had made himself the hero of his delusional mythology.

The home front of Nixon's so-called “Real War” was the realm of ideals and ideas, and according to the perversity he actively promoted "we will have to compromise some of our cherished ideals" as long as the battle is waged "in the name of that supreme priority."

Having extolled the virtue of waging a covert, unethical war to support friends and destroy enemies, Nixon essentially justified his absolute commitment to do whatever was necessary, including the need to murder a "peacenik" John Lennon, because, in the words of Nixon's manifest delusion, "in World War III there is no substitute for victory” and, he boldly asserted, "senseless terrorism is often not as senseless as it may seem. To the Soviets and their allies [and to those who deploy their tactics] it is a calculated instrument of national policy."

It was Nixon’s determination that the only way to contain communism was to deploy the methods and means of the totalitarian state, and that is why he justified the terrorist tactics he routinely deployed to secure his will. It is the same logic which made Richard Nixon believe that the Kent State massacre was legitimate because it was merely a means to an end.

Nixon and his cohorts were relentless terrorists and that is not a speculation or a conspiracy theory. It is the rules that Nixon publicly defined to describe how he intended to control his enemies, and he did. The so-called trendy, John Lennon, was simply a target of his multi-fronted effort to win World War III, and his murder was entirely justifiable because, in the words of Richard Nixon;

“If America loses World War III, it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the ‘trendies’ -those overglamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, mount the fashionable protests and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given to them and their causes romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip. Whatever the latest cause they embrace -whether antiwar, antinuclear, antimilitary, antibusiness -it is almost invariably one that works against the interest of the United States in the context of World War III.”

Richard Nixon was not about to let a “trendy” like John Lennon destroy his capacity to wage World War III because, in his own words, "in a less hazardous age we could afford to indulge the prancing of the trendies on the stage of public debate. But now our national survival depends on learning to distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless."

As always, whenever he had a problem, he resorted to his plumber-capacity to fix it, and the murder of John Lennon was Nixon’s biggest, post-Watergate crime.

It is consequently no surprise that Richard Nixon used Jose Perdomo, the doorman at the Dakota on December 8, 1980, to murder John Lennon. The world thinks that John Lennon's true assassin was Mark David Chapman, but he was merely the patsy who confessed under the spell of relentless mind control techniques. People like Chapman are instructed to confess for the purpose of closing an investigation, they are not exclusively obsessed with the elimination of a "trendy" like John Lennon.

Tormented souls like Mark David Chapman are extremely dangerous but they are not reliable assassins. They can be instructed to fire a gun at a specific target, but the ultimate responsibility for the professional, targeted murder was in the hands of Jose Perdomo. Mark David Chapman was just a means to an end.

Jose Perdomo asked accused assassin Mark David Chapman, immediately after the shooting, if he knew what he had just done. Chapman replied that he had just shot John Lennon. Jose Perdomo told police Chapman was Lennon's assailant. One of the arresting officers, Peter Cullen, did not believe Chapman shot Lennon. Cullen believed the shooter was a handyman at the Dakota, but Perdomo convinced Cullen it was Chapman. Cullen thought Chapman "looked like a guy who worked in a bank."

[matwilson]

And this is for those who still believe the Warren Report:

Jose Perdomo's full name was Jose Joaquin Sanjenis Perdomo, a Cuban spy and professional assassin who had been the Operation 40 commander of the CIA's covert plans to assassinate Castro. Frank Sturgis, Perdomo's cohort of ultrasecret operations that included the Bay of Pigs invasion, claimed that Perdomo died in 1974. Frank Sturgis routinely promoted disinformation to conceal assassinations, and he was evidently promoting yet another deception which enabled the opportunity to conceal yet another assassination.

Nixon, Perdomo and Sturgis lived in an alternate universe, they were not exactly stable people. Since Joaquin Sanjenis Perdomo had worked closely with convicted Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis for over ten years, Nixon was supremely confident that the plot to murder Lennon would never be exposed because Jose Perdomo was officially dead when he murdered John Lennon.

By 1980, Richard Nixon was not just an assassin. He was a master assassin, and instead of using somebody like Jack Ruby to kill somebody like Oswald as was done in 1963, he used Mark David Chapman to take the blame for the handiwork of assassin Joaquin Sanjenis Perdomo, who was officially dead.

Now that's what you call a cover up.

In the meantime, Nixon tried to convince the world that the death of “trendies” like John Lennon was meaningful. Did he succeed?

The road to the murder of John Lennon had a long history of intrusive, illegal surveillance and harassment. In particular, the Nixon White House sought to "neutralize" Lennon's capacity to organize an antiwar movement and Hoover's FBI "policed" Lennon while the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport him because of a 1968 conviction for possession of cannabis in London. The FBI surveillance of Lennon produced a stack of papers twenty-six pounds in weight, not to mention documents which remain classified or are "withheld in the interest of the national defense or foreign policy." In 1969, John Lennon protested the Vietnam War by organizing bed-ins for peace. In his own words:

“The point of the bed-in, in a nutshell, was a commercial for peace as opposed to war, which was on the news everyday in those days. Everyday there was dismembered bodies, napalm, and we thought, ‘Why don't they have something nice in the papers?’

A proposed bed-in in New York did not materialize, because, as Lennon recounted:

“We tried to do it in New York but the American government wouldn't let us in. They didn't want any peaceniks, so we ended up doing it in Montreal and broadcasting back across the border.”

The effort to politically silence Lennon was somewhat successful, and that was quite evident when his lawyer said, "if he did anything more along the lines of this anti-war rock and roll campaign he would almost certainly be immediately deported, but if he cooled it, through various legal maneuvers, he might be able to stay."

John Lennon did what he had to do to avoid being deported. He was politically silenced and FBI harassment persisted. He suspected that he was being followed by the FBI and that his phones were being tapped and he jokingly mocked skepticism to the contrary through comments like; "Lennon, oh you big-headed maniac, who's going to follow you around?"

Most people were not aware of the fact that Hoover's FBI did not have anything better to do with their time. It was not until after the resignation of Richard Nixon that Lennon's immigration case was thrown out of court and in 1976, his Green Card finally came through.

For the next four years, Lennon retired from all forms of public life, and in 1980, the self-styled peace advocate came out of retirement and prepared to mount a crusade to "turn the world on to peace." At the same time, Richard Nixon and Bill Casey were setting the stage for a reinvigorated declaration of war against Communism in Central America, and peaceniks like John Lennon were caught in the crossfire.

The men who controlled Reagan's foreign policy in the 1980’s were "time warp patriots" who were motivated by the obsession to complete the unfinished agenda of the Nixon White House.

It is a spectacular insight to note that 1980 was not in fact Ronald Reagan’s 1st term as President of the United States. In practice, it was Richard Nixon’s third term and that made John Lennon’s green card one of the issues that had to be dealt with through the unofficial channels that dictated American foreign policy in the 1980’s.

The men who shaped American foreign policy in the 1980’s were motivated by what they perceived to be the lessons of the 1960’s. They were patriots who blamed the loss of the Vietnam War on the antiwar movement and they fiercely resented the influence of peace activists like John Lennon to the point of paranoia.

In their minds, there was absolutely no question In short, Reagan's upcoming, anti-Communist crusade could simply not tolerate an invigorated John Lennon and "he had to be cut down before the reasons for his death became obvious: before Reagan took the oath of office on 20 January 1981, before the world realized that Lennon was coming back to being the old Lennon, the man who sang Give Peace A Chance.”

[BartSimpson]

The assessment of Nixon's actions are a matter of perspective. I suppose the liberals will see his attempts to stop the 'peace process' as interference (it does not meet the definition of 'treason' and calling it that is pure propaganda) but it can also be seen as a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior not wanting the USA to sell out an ally and just walk away.

Which is precisely what Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, did when North Vietnam violated the peace accords and invaded South Vietnam. Given that the communists ended up proving that they couldn't be trusted to keep their word Nixon's alleged actions in 1968 appear to me to have been prudent. It was the people who thought that you could negotiate with a terrorist state who were proven to be fools.

With regards to Reagan and Carter there was no direct communication between the US and Iran at any level, let alone between a candidate the Iranians hated and the mullahs.

What ended the hostage crisis was that the Iranians released the hostages minutes after Reagan was inaugurated, thus denying any claim of victory to Jimmy Carter, the man who instigated the crisis by giving shelter to the Shah.

[martin14]

xerxes xerxes:

Wow. The rantings of one retard have derailed my interesting thread. Bravo.

A pity +5

[BartSimpson]

x2

[matwilson]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The assessment of Nixon's actions are a matter of perspective. I suppose the liberals will see his attempts to stop the 'peace process' as interference (it does not meet the definition of 'treason' and calling it that is pure propaganda) but it can also be seen as a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior not wanting the USA to sell out an ally and just walk away.

Which is precisely what Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, did when North Vietnam violated the peace accords and invaded South Vietnam. Given that the communists ended up proving that they couldn't be trusted to keep their word Nixon's alleged actions in 1968 appear to me to have been prudent. It was the people who thought that you could negotiate with a terrorist state who were proven to be fools.

With regards to Reagan and Carter there was no direct communication between the US and Iran at any level, let alone between a candidate the Iranians hated and the mullahs.

What ended the hostage crisis was that the Iranians released the hostages minutes after Reagan was inaugurated, thus denying any claim of victory to Jimmy Carter, the man who instigated the crisis by giving shelter to the Shah.

Nixon would never have become President if RFK had not been murdered, not to mention JFK before him.

He was just an ignorant psychotic who managed to get away with murder -crafty, yes, but prudent? I think not.

[BartSimpson]

matwilson matwilson:

Nixon would never have become President if RFK had not been murdered, not to mention JFK before him.

The 1968 Democrat Convention and the resulting police riot had far more influence on the election than any candidate did. Even if RFK had been the Donk nominee that year Nixon still would've won because the electorate that year voted against the Democrats far more than they supported Nixon. Nixon had to wait for the 1972 election to secure a mandate.

matwilson matwilson:

He was just an ignorant psychotic who managed to get away with murder -crafty, yes, but prudent? I think not.

The only ignorance in this sentence is exhibited by yourself.