My life

“October surprise” breakthrough in the Paris peace talks with a bombing halt. We now know that the Nixon campaign was being fed inside information about the talks by Henry Kissinger, who, as a consultant to Averell Harriman, was involved enough with the Paris talks to know what was going on. We also know that Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, lobbied South Vietnam’s president, Thieu, through Nixon’s friend Anna Chennault, not to give in to LBJ’s pressure to join the peace talks along with the government’s South Vietnamese opposition, the National Liberation Front. Johnson knew about the Nixon team’s efforts because of Justice Department–approved wiretaps on Anna Chennault and the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington. Finally, on the last day of October, President Johnson announced a full bombing halt, Hanoi’s agreement to South Vietnam’s participation in the talks, and U.S. approval of a role for the National Liberation Front. November opened with high hopes for Humphrey and his supporters. He was moving up fast in the polls and clearly thought the peace initiative would put him over the top. On November 2, the Saturday before the election, President Thieu announced that he wouldn’t go to Paris because the NLF was included. He said that would force him into a coalition government with the Communists, and he would deal only with North Vietnam. The Nixon camp was quick to imply that LBJ had jumped the gun on his peace initiative, acting to help Humphrey without having all his diplomatic ducks in a row. Johnson was furious, and gave Humphrey the information on Anna Chennault’s efforts to sabotage the initiative on Nixon’s behalf. There was no longer a need to keep it from the public to avoid undermining President Thieu, but amazingly, Humphrey refused to use it. Because the polls showed him in a virtual dead heat with Nixon, he thought he might win without it, and apparently he was afraid of a possible backlash because the facts didn’t prove that Nixon himself knew what others, including John Mitchell, were doing on his behalf. Still, the implication was strong that Nixon had engaged in activity that was virtually treasonous. Johnson was furious at Humphrey. I believe LBJ would have leaked the bombshell if he had been running, and that if the roles had been reversed, Nixon would have used it in a heartbeat. Humphrey paid for his scruples, or his squeamishness. He lost the election by 500,000 votes, 43.4

percent to 42.7 percent to 13.5 percent for Wallace. Nixon won 301 electoral votes, 31 over a majority, with close victories in Illinois and Ohio. Nixon got away with the Kissinger-Mitchell-Chennault gambit, but as Jules Witcover speculates in his book on 1968, The Year the Dream Died, it may have been a more costly escape than it appeared. Its success may have contributed to the Nixon crowd’s belief that they could get away with anything, including all the shenanigans that surfaced in Watergate. On November 1, I began to keep a diary in one of two leather-bound volumes Denise Hyland had given me when I left the United States. When Archie woke me with the good news about the bombing halt, I wrote: “I wish I could have seen Senator Fulbright today—one more instance of vindication for his tireless and tenacious battle.” The next day I speculated that a cease-fire might lead to a troop reduction and my not being drafted, or at least “allow many of my friends already in the service to escape Vietnam. And maybe some now in those jungles can be saved from early death.” Little did I know that half our deaths were still to come. I closed my first two installments by “extolling the same virtue: hope, the fiber of my being, which stays with me even on nights like tonight when I have lost all power of analysis and articulation.” Yes, I was young and melodramatic, but I already believed in what I was to term “a place called Hope” in my 1992 Democratic convention speech. It’s kept me going through a lifetime.