From Editor Robert Parry: CNN is broadcasting a six-part series on controversial U.S. presidential elections, but the network shied away from two of the most significant cases – 1968 and 1980 – in which the evidence shows Republicans disrupted crucial foreign negotiations by Democratic presidents.

In 1968, Richard Nixon’s operatives derailed President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks which could have brought that bloody conflict to an end that year – rather than four years later and saved millions of lives – but peace might have meant Nixon’s defeat. A sordid tale described in declassified U.S. government records.

In 1980, it was Ronald Reagan’s operatives who went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back to disrupt his negotiations to free 52 American hostages held by Iranian radicals and thus doom Carter’s reelection chances, a story described by more than two dozen sources from a range of different perspectives.

But these two well-documented cases apparently touch too raw a nerve, so they are not on CNN’s roster. Still, you can learn about them at Consortiumnews.com by clicking on the “October Surprise Series” tab and reading the stories there.

Or, if you can afford a $125 donation to our tax-exempt non-profit, not only can you support our investigative journalism but we will send you an autographed copy of my book, America’s Stolen Narrative, which includes the latest evidence on the 1968 and 1980 “October surprises,” and a DVD of a PBS documentary that I co-wrote on the 1980 case, called “The Election Held Hostage.”

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Robert Parry is a longtime investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He founded Consortiumnews.com in 1995 to create an outlet for well-reported journalism that was being squeezed out of an increasingly trivialized U.S. news media.