John Aloysius Farrell is the author of biographies of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and attorney Clarence Darrow, as well as a forthcoming book on the life of Richard Nixon.

Did Richard Nixon’s campaign conspire to scuttle the Vietnam War peace talks on the eve of the 1968 election to capture him the presidency?

Absolutely, says Tom Charles Huston, the author of a comprehensive, still-secret report he prepared as a White House aide to Nixon. In one of 10 oral histories conducted by the National Archives and opened last week, Huston says “there is no question” that Nixon campaign aides sent a message to the South Vietnamese government, promising better terms if it obstructed the talks, and helped Nixon get elected.


Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, “was directly involved,” Huston tells interviewer Timothy Naftali. And while “there is no evidence that I found” that Nixon participated, it is “inconceivable to me,” says Huston, that Mitchell “acted on his own initiative.”

Huston’s comments—transcribed and publishedon the web site of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California on Wednesday—are the latest twist in a longstanding tale of political skullduggery involving Nixon and his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. It is a tale that features a secret “X-file,” a mysterious “Dragon Lady” and reports of wiretaps and bugging that has captured the imagination of scholars and conspiracy theorists for half a century.

Like many of Nixon’s actions, this particular transgression was born of paranoia. As the 1968 election approached, Nixon and his aides feared that Johnson would try to help the Democratic nominee—Vice President Hubert Humphrey—by staging an October surprise. When LBJ announced to the nation, just days before the balloting, that he was calling a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam to help fuel progress in ongoing peace talks, the Republicans thought their fears were realized.

Anna Chennault, a Republican activist with ties to the South Vietnamese government, sent word to Saigon that it would get better terms if Humphrey lost and Nixon took office, the FBI would discover. The South Vietnamese dragged their feet, infuriating LBJ who, in a taped conversation released by the Johnson presidential library several years ago, can be heard denouncing Nixon for “treason.”

LBJ ordered the FBI to put Chennault under surveillance and, according to documents at the Johnson library, tracked the machinations of the “Dragon Lady”(as Nixon called her) via intercepted communications at the South Vietnamese embassy. After Nixon won, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told the new president that Johnson had ordered Nixon’s campaign planes bugged as well.

Once in office, Nixon ordered his staff to investigate the bombing halt and the allegation his campaign had been bugged. Huston, a dedicated and resourceful young conservative who had worked on the 1968 campaign before joining the White House as a presidential aide, was given the job. But his investigation, and the report he delivered to White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman in 1970, found that both presidents had cause for embarrassment: LBJ for the surveillance of a presidential candidate from the other party, and Nixon for the role that his campaign played in derailing the peace talks.

Neither side wanted to push the issue. “I think there was an implicit understanding between two very politically sophisticated people, who had been in the arena for a very long time, to say ‘Hey, look, this thing is over, you know, neither one of us are going to gain anything by stirring up this pot,’” Huston says.

Rumors about the high-level intrigue surfaced in Washington and, over the years, bits and pieces of the tale have showed up in books and media accounts.

But there was never any official confirmation The Huston report on the bombing halt has still not been released by the National Archives—though we now can guess, from his oral history, what he discovered. The Johnson White House papers alleging Nixon’s involvement—contained in a so-called “X” file at the Johnson library—have dribbled out since 1995, when the first declassified documents on the topic were released. (The White House tape in which Johnson brands Nixon’s actions as treasonous was opened by the Johnson library in 2008.)

Questions remain, says Huston: Did Nixon direct the strategy? Did the FBI actually bug the Nixon campaign? Wouldn’t the South Vietnamese have dragged their feet anyway, guessing that the more conservative Nixon would give them a better deal than Humphrey?Did the machinations spoil an opportunity for peace, dooming the United States to four more years of war?

The last question, of course, is the most painful. Johnson’s aides, over the years, had claimed there was a genuine opportunity for peace in the fall of 1968, which Nixon foiled for political gain.

Huston disagrees. “The bigger question was, did it make any difference, and I think the answer to that was no,” he says. The South Vietnamese didn’t need Nixon’s people to tell them they would do better by waiting, he says, or that the terms of the deal were unfavorable. “But there is no doubt that in typical Nixonian fashion, he wasn’t going to leave anything to chance.”

The timing of the opening of the oral histories, which have been kept under wraps for years as they underwent security reviews, is at least serendipitous. Among those interviewed, in addition to Huston, are controversial figures like Nixon White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig; Nixon counsel John Dean; former Nixon Defense Secretary James Schlesinger; and Daniel Ellsberg, the think tank analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the origins of the Vietnam War.

The Nixon presidential library and museum, like those honoring other chief executives, is run as a public-private partnership between the National Archives and the Nixon Foundation, a private group whose mission is to honor the former president. It was always an awkward marriage. In recent weeks, the Archives has been criticized for allowing the Nixon library to drift, without a director, for two years. Naftali, the previous director, was a founder and champion of the oral history project, and angered some prominent Nixon loyalists with his forceful approach toward opening the oral histories and other revealing records.

“I am so pleased this material is finally out, Naftali told me last week. “These are some of the best in the collection, especially for the light they shed on the Chennault affair, Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War and Watergate.” Huston’s comments are particularly noteworthy, he said, in revealing “the shadow that this operation cast on Richard Nixon’s presidency.”

With the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation coming up in August, new books on his presidency being published and public forums planned, the oral histories and the tidbits they contain will add to the summer’s debate over one of America’s most controversial presidencies.

Schlesinger, for example, puts meat on the bones of another intriguing tale, this one from the final days of the Nixon presidency.Schlesinger says that, as secretary of defense, he instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to run any White House orders past him, to prevent any desperate, 11th-hour actions. He wasn’t challenging Nixon’s authority as commander in chief, says Schlesinger, but was worried “about the possibility of hotheaded freelancers at the White House” using the military to stay in power by intimidating Nixon’s critics with a manufactured crisis. “We were not going to allow that to happen without my knowing about it.”

“This was a very sensitive period,” says Schlesinger, and “you might have somebody or other in the White House deciding that this was a time to have something of a show of force.”