u/Just_Cause89

Cheney and Gore both destroyed Edwards and Kemp pretty comfortably.

I just finished watching his interview on The Rest is History podcast and at the end he basically says you can make an argument for who comes next in ranking the best President, but Washington is #1.

Do you agree with this? If you don't, who do you have over him and why?

Link to video

The aircraft was shot down during the 1972 Operation Linebacker

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/02/archives/humphrey-reports-rockefeller-rejected-role-as-running-mate.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25290135

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26171801

https://www.politico.com/story/2008/06/calculus-of-choosing-a-running-mate-011046

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chuck-hagel-obamas-vice-p\_n\_115448

https://abcnews.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5390306&page=1

Labor Day Address at Liberty State Park delivered 1 September 1980, Jersey City, New Jersey

The Chennault Affair deserves a much more serious historical treatment than it usually gets. Too often it's reduced to "Nixon sabotaged peace and prevented the Vietnam War from ending in 1968," which isn't really how the evidence looks once you dig into the primary sources. That simplified interpretation is often what gets passed around in general discourse, including on this sub and most history forums. It's a difficult case because the core facts are largely undisputed, but it's one of those historical rabbit holes where the evidence doesn't point to a simple cause-and-effect conclusion.

If you're interested in the subject, I'd recommend reading Walt Rostow's "X Envelope" (now fully released online), Garrett Graff's chapter on the Chennault Affair in Watergate, and especially Luke Nichter's "Dragon Lady" chapter and appendix in The Year That Broke Politics. Some may disagree with Nichter's conclusions, but he does the crucial job of restoring the diplomatic context and, just as importantly, the South Vietnamese perspective that often disappears from discussions of the affair.

The Chennault Affair itself has been a matter of discussion by historians for decades, with it already having suspicions after the 68 election into the early 70s. Rick Perlstein’s  Nixonland from 2008 is one of the earlier works I remember reading where it is generally accepted that Nixon's campaign maintained back-channel contacts with South Vietnam through Anna Chennault. Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam from the early 90s mentions the event, but it is vague, using what was known at the time. Earlier interpretations were that Chennault was acting alone on her own accord as a Republican fundraiser to try and influence the foreign policy decision.

 The big change was in 2017 with John Farrell's publication of Richard Nixon: The Life, in which he highlighted H. R. Haldeman's campaign notes as a potential "smoking gun." The most frequently quoted entries are "Keep AC working on SVN" and "Any other way to monkey wrench it?" Combined with Johnson's taped phone calls, FBI surveillance, and other intelligence reporting, Farrell argues they establish Nixon's direct involvement in an effort to influence South Vietnam's participation in the Paris peace talks.

In 2023, however, historian Luke Nichter revisited the evidence in The Year That Broke Politics: Chaos and Collusion in the 1968 Presidential Election. Interestingly, Nichter reveals that Farrell had previously told him through email correspondence during the research process that he hoped to find something "worse than Watergate." Nichter does not dispute that Nixon's campaign had improper contacts with South Vietnam. Rather, he argues that some of Farrell's interpretations of Haldeman's notes may go beyond what the documents themselves establish.

His most notable observation is that the famous "Keep AC working on SVN" entry is immediately followed by another instruction: "Insist publicly on 3 Johnson conditions." Nichter argues that historians have tended to overlook this line.

Those three conditions were Johnson's own publicly stated requirements for meaningful negotiations:

• Respect for the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
• No military exploitation of the bombing halt.
• Participation by the Government of South Vietnam in the negotiations.

The third condition was especially contentious. Hanoi refused to recognize Saigon as the legitimate government of South Vietnam and instead insisted that the National Liberation Front be treated as an independent negotiating party. Saigon, in turn, regarded any such recognition as a direct threat to its own legitimacy. This was not a minor procedural disagreement—it became one of the central obstacles to launching meaningful negotiations.

None of this exonerates Nixon. The evidence that members of his campaign maintained back-channel contacts with South Vietnam through Anna Chennault is substantial, and I think it's reasonable to conclude that the campaign was attempting to influence the timing of South Vietnam's participation in the Paris talks. Whether that crossed legal lines is a separate discussion, but calling it "treason" as though that is an uncontested historical conclusion is a stretch. Even Lyndon Johnson's own use of that word appears to have been an expression of private anger rather than a considered legal judgment. As Nichter notes, Johnson never repeated the accusation in his memoirs or later interviews.

The other point that's almost always missing from popular discussions is South Vietnam's own position. What peace agreement was President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu actually supposed to accept in October 1968?

At that stage of the negotiations, Hanoi had not abandoned its core political objectives. It continued demanding political arrangements that Saigon believed would undermine or ultimately replace the South Vietnamese government, while also insisting that the National Liberation Front participate as an independent political actor. The diplomatic landscape in late 1968 was very different from the one that eventually produced the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. It's therefore misleading to assume Johnson was only weeks away from obtaining essentially the same agreement that Nixon later signed. Hanoi had skirted around the wording of possible conditions for peace talks to begin, mainly that “if a bombing halt was ordered, Hanoi could start talks with Washington”, rather than would. Throughout the summer of 1968 when LBJ tried pauses on bombing, Hanoi used the pause as an opportunity to launch rocket attacks on Saigon from the DMZ. Hanoi was firm on using a “fight and talk strategy” where they kept the US ambiguous on negotiation while also increasing their strength on the battlefield. The likely goal of this was to see what concessions they could get from the US without having to concede anything of their own in return”.

LBJ and his foreign policy team were aware of this fact. LBJ’s bombing halt was intended to create diplomatic momentum, but Washington and Saigon remained concerned that Hanoi would use the pause to improve its military position while offering few reciprocal concessions, which Hanoi obviously demonstrated with their rocket attacks from the DMZ. Johnson repeatedly sought assurances regarding the DMZ and infiltration before agreeing to halt the bombing, but those issues remained unresolved well into the negotiations.

Another major obstacle was simply getting everyone to the table. Hanoi wanted the National Liberation Front represented independently. The United States insisted that if the NLF participated, then the Government of South Vietnam had to participate as well. Even after that issue was nominally resolved, procedural disputes—including the famous arguments over the shape of the conference table—consumed months before substantive negotiations could even begin.

Meanwhile, Thiệu himself was never enthusiastic about Johnson's timetable. He distrusted Washington's diplomacy, believed the United States was moving too quickly toward negotiations, and complained that his government was not being fully informed as discussions progressed. After Johnson announced the bombing halt, Thiệu publicly declared that "the conditions do not exist for serious talks with Hanoi" and that South Vietnam would not attend the planned November meeting in Paris. Those reservations clearly predated the Nixon campaign's contacts through Anna Chennault. I have seen some claim that the terms Nixon got in 1973 were the same as LBJ could have had in 1968. This is not backed up however. Hanoi remained firm in their demand that Thieu be ousted and replaced with a coalition government containing the NLF. They did not withdraw this demand until late 1972. This above all else, was the big concession that the US needed to get out of South Vietnam without appearing to give away the country to the communists.

That's why I think the historical debate is more nuanced than it's usually presented. Farrell argues that Nixon's campaign materially reinforced Saigon's resistance and delayed Johnson's diplomatic initiative. Nichter argues that historians have underestimated South Vietnamese agency and overstated what Johnson realistically could have achieved in October 1968. Those positions aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

The documentary evidence supports the conclusion that Nixon's campaign engaged in an improper back channel with South Vietnam. What it does not clearly establish is the much broader claim that Nixon single-handedly prevented Johnson from ending the Vietnam War. That conclusion requires assuming that the negotiations were on the verge of resolving issues that, in reality, remained deadlocked for another four years.

Whatever one thinks of Nixon, reducing one of the most complicated diplomatic episodes of the Vietnam War to "he stopped peace and kept Americans fighting" overlooks the positions of Hanoi, Saigon, and even Johnson's own negotiators. The historical record is considerably more complicated than that.