Dispatches from Trump's America: The Vietnam Era Roots of the Current Madness

Photo Credit: Pixabay

What's wrong with the Republican Party in the 21st Century?

I mean, seriously, people. I've been around long enough to see the GOP, the supposedly grown up and sober party that allegedly promotes civilized behavior and "upholding the rule of law" that elected Richard M. Nixon to the Presidency 51 years ago morph into the "winning at all costs" wild bunch that supports Donald J. Trump in 2019.

Well, if one cares to examine the historical record, the Party of Lincoln has been taking the nation to oblivion for a long time, even though pinpointing the exact era of American history in which Republicanism lost its way is difficult.

In my lifetime, though, I'd say that the madness that has led us to Trumpism and its bizarre, MAGA cap-wearing cult of personality began in the mid-1960s with the aforementioned 1968 Presidential race. That campaign season, which took place during a tumultuous year that included the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the murders of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the violence-marred Democratic Party convention in Chicago, was when Republican operatives had their first successful experience at colluding with a foreign government to gain an advantage over the opposition in a Presidential election.

Now, most Americans over the age of 40 know that Richard Nixon's Presidential career ended infamously as a result of the Watergate scandal that broke in June of 1972 after a team of operatives working secretly for the Nixon White House was arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee's offices in Washington's Watergate apartment/office complex.  Nixon was nearly impeached in 1974 after two years' worth of investigations by both the press and Congress - helped by the existence of tapes from a secret recording system in the White House itself - proved conclusively that Nixon knew of the break-in (he had denied such knowledge), that the Watergate operation had been just one of many such dirty-tricks jobs ordered by Nixon's team, and that Nixon had participated in a cover-up.

What most of us didn't know until recently was that Nixon wasn't just looking for dirt on the Kennedys or any other Democratic candidates that might oppose him in 1972; he was also trying to find out if anyone knew about his 1968 campaign's successful sabotage of the Paris Peace Talks that sought a negotiated end to the Vietnam War.

For the sake of brevity, I'm not going to delve too deeply into what historians call "the Chennault Affair." All you need to know is that Nixon, acting through intermediaries, worked with Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of Gen. Claire L. Chennault, a famous Army Air Force officer best known for commanding the American Volunteer Group (the "Flying Tigers") in China during World War II. Mrs. Chennault was wealthy, powerful, and a member of the conservative "China Lobby," and thus wanted then-candidate Nixon to win the '68 election rather than see Democrat Hubert Humphrey become the nation's 37th President.

Basically, Chennault was the chair of the Republican Women for Nixon Committee, and in that capacity arranged for a meeting between then-candidate Nixon (who was at the time a private citizen) and South Vietnamese ambassador Bui Diem on July 18, 1968.

In brief, the Nixon team wanted South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to pull out of the negotiations in Paris, preferably before the November elections. Apparently, the outgoing Johnson Administration was making progress in its talks with North Vietnam on how to resolve the conflict; if the peace talks succeeded, Vice President Humphrey's standing with voters would go up, and Nixon's second Presidential bid would fail. If that happened, Nixon told the ambassador, Humphrey would withdraw U.S. forces from South Vietnam, leaving that country at the mercy of the Communist North.

Nixon's message to the South Vietnamese government was clear: sticking with the Democrats, who were allegedly soft on Communism and were under pressure from the anti-war movement and radical leftists, was suicide for Saigon. Far better, he suggested, to walk out of the negotiations before the American elections. This would hobble Humphrey's chances of victory at the polls in November and help Nixon - who promised to get a better deal from the North if he won - defeat the Democrats and secure a peace with honor in Southeast Asia.

Now, the intelligence community got wind of this deal as it was being concluded; the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the CIA had wiretapped several of the participants' phones, both in the U.S. and in Saigon. Tapes were made, and President Johnson was aware of their existence. LBJ even asked Nixon if he was carrying out any covert actions to undermine the peace talks; the Republican nominee denied it.

In the end, everything went Nixon's way, Thieu pulled his negotiators out of the peace talks. Humphrey, whose poll ratings had resurged after the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago, saw his popularity go down as the news of Thieu's withdrawal from the peace talks reached America. Voters who believed the war would drag on for years either refused to vote or voted for Nixon, thinking that he would be tougher on North Vietnam due to his strong anti-Communist stance as a Cold Warrior.

But even after Nixon became President, he knew that what he had done ever came to light, he could be accused of treason under the Logan Act. As a result, he and his aides, including Charles Colson, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and others, sought to find any files, tapes, or other documents that might be in the hands of the Democratic Party leadership. This led to the creation of the "White House plumbers," the teams of operatives hired to carry out various illicit operations, including the break-in at the office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, as well as a covert investigation into Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's accident at Chappaquiddick in 1968. The White House Plumbers' final mission: the Watergate break-in in June of 1972.

The Watergate fiasco was the genesis of the modern GOP's "take no prisoners, win at every cost" style. Nixon's resignation in August of 1974 spared him - and the party - from the embarrassment of an impeachment that was almost certainly going to end with a humiliating conviction by the Senate. Since then, Republicans have been working tirelessly to make themselves "impeachment-proof," taking all kinds of steps to ensure that no matter how badly a Republican President behaves, as Donald Trump does every day, impeaching and removing him from office is virtually impossible.