5 ms·
Very interesting article. And it's telling why Johnson didn't reveal what Nixon was doing. He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and
by jerrya 14y ago
Very interesting article. And it's telling why Johnson didn't reveal what Nixon was doing.
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.
- jebblue 14y agoJohnson started the Vietnam War through a massive escalation. Nixon ended it.
- scarmig 14y agoJohnson has plenty of blood on his hands. The thing about blood, though, is that there's always more to go around.
- jebblue 14y agoYes, this is true, of the following two references I'm not sure which is more accurate, either way this happened: "Insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite unit as the Navy SEALs who killed former Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden, U.S. officials said Saturday. It was the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war against the Taliban." http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/08/06/afghan-president-31-americans-killed-in-helicopter-crash/ http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/08/06/afghan-president-31-... "U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that they believe that none of the Navy SEALs who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although they were from the same unit that carried out the bin Laden mission." "The sources thought this was the largest single loss of life ever for SEAL Team Six, known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/06/afghanistan-helicopter-crash-sources-navy-seals-killed_n_920147.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/06/afghanistan-helicop...
- youngerdryas 14y agoAbe Lincoln was a republican therefore conservatives freed the slaves, right?
- jebblue 14y agoHis name was Abraham Lincoln. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln To your question, are you suggesting that you think that slavery fell clearly along the lines of liberalism and conservatism?
- 1as 14y agoWhile I'm a massive fan of pedantry, unfortunately the Wikipedia article you link to includes references to him as "Abe".
- youngerdryas 14y agoIs Abe short for something else? I was being facetious about red v. blue silliness but I would love to hear how freeing the slaves was the conservative position, having a hard time seeing how that would work.
- tinco 14y agoWell, it works like this. First republican Abe makes clear he wants to free the slaves, then wins the presidential nomination position in the republican party. Then he gets elected by the republican american people to be president as a republican. Then 7 republican states secede from the US and shortly thereafter they wage war. Then the republican Lincoln wins and a period of slave liberation and movement towards equal rights on a federal level begins. Also, according to wikipedia: "The republican party [..] founded by anti-slavery activists in 1854". Now I'm no republican, as a north european you'll find me to be more of the social/liberal kind (yeah.. those two can be together), but I think the republican party has a pretty swell history.
- camus 14y ago
- hsmyers 14y agoAnd the additional 22,000 dead don't count for anything?
- thyrsus 14y agoThat number appears to count only American dead. Those of us who hold every life sacred also mourn the hundreds of thousands of south Asian dead, without respect to political party of the perpetrator.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- noarchy 14y agoNixon didn't exactly end it overnight. He had thousands of tons of bombs to drop on neighbouring countries like Cambodia, first, killing untold thousands, before things wound down.
- wdr1 14y ago> Nixon didn't exactly end it overnight Wars never end overnight.
- btilly 14y agoNo, but if you look at troop levels, he began the drawdown in his first year. But his strategy was to make the North Vietnamese so scared of him that US troops could leave. Hence the bombing. Of course he could not publicly take credit for this, because that would have interfered with the image he was trying to project to North Vietnam.
- podperson 14y agoNixon pushed for escalation constantly while simultaneously working hard to suppress domestic dissent from his pulpit in the House Unamerican Activities Committee. (He had previously been the puppetmaster behind Joe McCarthy's witch hunts, but neatly avoided being damaged by his fall.)
- cafard 14y agoSorry, but in which war? Nixon was elected to the Senate in 1950.