1968年、リチャード・ニクソンは、北ベトナムと南ベトナム間のパリ和平会談が打開し、戦争終結につながり、自身の選挙戦に悪影響を及ぼすことを恐れていました。そこでニクソンは、側近を南ベトナムに派遣し、会談から手を引き、戦争を長引かせるよう指示しました。
【衝撃】ニクソン、和平交渉を妨害してベトナム戦争を長引かせ選挙勝利
挿話
挿話
挿話1968年、リチャード・ニクソンは、北ベトナムと南ベトナム間のパリ和平会談が打開し、戦争終結につながり、自身の選挙戦に悪影響を及ぼすことを恐れていました。そこでニクソンは、側近を南ベトナムに派遣し、会談から手を引き、戦争を長引かせるよう指示しました。
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This is because Nixon was a Dick.. well know for it, it was even frequently acknowledged publically.
Actual treason but the next president refused to expose him for fear of damaging the integrity of the office. Iirc Trump has also done something like this.
I mean, it’s fucking Nixon. What do you expect? Decency?
Back in the early 2000, Nixon was always portrayed in Futurama as the worst president ever – even if seen from 1000 years in the future.
Of course, they didn’t know back then that Trump would later become president.
He’s a war criminal who should have died in jail.
Kissinger had a lot to do with extending the war as well.
Treason. Intentionally killing US troops as surely as if he pulled the trigger.
The bit about the breakthrough is false.
South Vietnam and North Vietnam did not recognize each other and believed the opposing government was illegitimate. So there was no reason to believe there was any kind of breakthrough. Neither side could agree to peace if neither side believed there was any legitimate party to talk to.
Lyndon Johnson also suspended his bombing raids hoping that North Vietnam would join the talks. Instead North Vietnam refused. Johnson later resumed the bombings because there wasn’t any attempt to reach a deal by either side. Johnson abandoned his potential reelection campaign to get them to start peace talks but both sides refused.
When Nixon reached out to South Vietnam, they decided to play and use Nixon. They led him to believe they had given up talks in his favor. When Nixon later won, they used this to try to blackmail Nixon and force him to commit to total military support. Nixon refused and continued trying to get North Vietnam to settle for peace (by bombing them day and night).
What actually ended the US involvement was Detente. Nixon won support from the USSR and China and they started the detente process. China and the USSR gradually started cutting support to Vietnam which caused North Vietnam to realize that Nixon was able to bomb them forever without the threat of the Soviets or China stepping in. This forced North Vietnam to settle for peace. South Vietnam refused but Nixon told them flatly that this was the end of US military involvement. If the South wanted to keep fighting, they wouldn’t have US troops to lean on. South Vietnam then reluctantly agreed to peace.
we think Reagan did it as well
[1980 October Surprise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_October_Surprise_theory)
bro if true that’s literally next level ruthless politics like damn
> After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations none of his successors has dared to do it. But Nixon wasn’t the first.
> He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency.
> “They will provide history with the bark off,” Johnson told his wife, Lady Bird.
Imagine this understanding that the office means far more than any single person that temporarily occupies it, to what is being done with the power of the office today.
Just imagine this change…
Wait until you hear about Reagan and the Iranian hostages.
If you watch Ken Burns’ excellent documentary on Vietnam you can see the roots of what is currently happening in US politics.
Just like Trump sabotaging the bipartisan border bill because he was campaigning on anti-immigration
This is similar in a sense to Trump telling the GOP to murder its own Bipartisan Border and Immigration Reform bill in early 2024, because he based his entire campaign around vilifying brown people.
When Trump talks about fentanyl or rapists and murderers coming across the border know that he beckoned more of it to happen for a year plus longer so he could campaign on it. And he still hasn’t gotten a deal in Congress for it, just ICE shooting and killing Americans.
He should’ve gone to jail for treason.
Don’t forget noted war criminal Henry Kissinger has a giant role in this
Kinda like when tRump killed the immigration bill?
Yeah, and Bush fabricated evidence to start a war, but he is the good guy now because he once gave a candy to Michelle Obama or something, it was ao cute!
[sigh] No, he didn’t. And no there was never ever going to be any peace in those talks.
What is particularly bad about this inane conspiracy theory is not merely that it is reliant entirely on ignorance of the historical record, and on evidence provided by the exact people who stood to gain most by the claims – but that it is one more of a battery of examples of perspectives about the Vietnam war that exist only by cutting out the agency of the Vietnamese people themselves. I doubt OP or anyone in this thread could even name a single South or North Vietnamese diplomat or negotiator at these peace talks – even though they naturally would have had heavy influence in how they went.
Let’s explore a few key points that comprise how this conspiracy theory functions:
**”Nixon sabotaged Vietnam peace talks to get elected.”**
According to Kissinger’s account of his time in the Nixon admin: “Nixon himself believed that concluding an agreement before the 1972 election would be a liability, not an asset. His lead in the polls was considered “unassailable,” and a debate about peace terms could only have jeopardised it … His motive for proceeding with an agreement was the opposite of what critics alleged: he did not want electoral considerations to stand in the way of an agreement he had repeatedly promised.”
So the implication is thus: If Nixon was hesitant to secure peace before the 1972 election – when his re-election was all but assured – it’s implausible he was desperate enough in 1968 to sabotage Johnson’s negotiations just to squeak into office.
**He used Henry Kissinger to do some dark back channel shit to scupper the whole deal.**
This part of the assertion is fishy from the start since it relies on you being ignorant about the fact that Kissinger had been working on peace talks between the various sides for years beforehand. He literally worked for the Johnson administration as an intermediary to get the negotiations started in the first place? Why then, would he betray them in order to bring the whole thing down on behalf of Nixon?
>>In this, McNamara in the end had become an example of a larger reality. This same ambivalence had come to affect that Administration’s conduct of the war, compelling its tentative character, its oscillation between periods of violence and escapism. McNamara from the beginning urged—nay, pleaded for—a negotiated and not an imposed peace. His door was open to those anguished by America’s frustrations. In the councils of the government he supported the search for diplomatic initiatives more vigorously and consistently than the agencies conventionally charged with the mandate for solutions. In 1967 he had been the principal impetus behind the attempt to negotiate a bombing halt through two French intermediaries. He had been so anxious that he called me on the telephone after every contact with the North Vietnamese, using a cover name so transparent that it must have fooled the intelligence services listening in for all of ten seconds.
Kissinger’s direct experience in these earlier efforts would have given him first hand insight into Hanoi’s “intransigence” and consistent demand for “total victory” rather than a negotiated compromise. This understanding informed his later view that a peace agreement in 1968 was not “the slightest possibility” due to the irreconcilable positions of the warring parties, regardless of any external political interference. Which leads us nicely to:
**Ignoring the actual fucking Vietnamese**
South Vietnam had its own deep-seated concerns and strategic objectives that often diverged from, and sometimes actively resisted, those of the United States, which is something that is never mentioned in this not-infrequent repost.
From the outset, South Vietnamese leaders, like Thieu, viewed negotiations with deep suspicion. They believed that for North Vietnam, talks were merely “another method of fighting” or an “instrument of political warfare” aimed at psychological exhaustion, splitting the US from South Vietnam, and dividing American public opinion.
>>It is no exaggeration to say that every South Vietnamese with a work-
ing knowledge of Communist tactics and strategy was convinced there
was not a single chance for serious negotiations at this stage of the war.
We understood that for the North Viemamese politburo, these talks would
simply constitute another method of fighting, that the war had now en-
tered what Communist theoreticians called ^’danh va dam, dam va danh” the phase of “fighting and talking, talking and fighting.”
>>Basically, “fighting and talking” was a strategy to be used against a
stronger opponent once the opponent had begun to show signs of fatigue
and internal stress— that is, when time was clearly on your side. At that
point talking becomes desirable not in order to reach a compromise res-
olution (the American concept of negotiations) but to feed the enemy
with hope and consequently heighten divisions within the enemy camp.
Thieu often felt that American peace initiatives were designed to serve US interests without sufficient regard for South Vietnam’s desires or needs, despite its very existence being at stake. A characterisation of US negotiating style during the ramp up to the US elections in 1968 was “naivite”. This can be borne out by the fact of the US bombing halt being a strategic gain for Hanoi, coming as it did, not as a condition for talks to start, but unilaterally, “leaving no doubt that the United States would pay a significant unreciprocated entrance price just to get the negotiations started”.
Hanoi naturally decided to negotiate before the 1968 American presidential election, if only to commit both candidates to a bombing halt. They shrewdly calculated that the “optimum time to settle that limited issue was just before the elections”. The bombing halt indeed occurred just before the 1968 election “in order to commit both Presidential candidates to it”.
On the South Vietnamese part, President Thieu hated the bombing halt announcement. He “needed no incentive to stonewall” the talks, as he considered negotiating with the NLF a step toward a coalition government and the end of democracy in South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese, who all along regarded their final objective as complete control of ALL of Vietnam under communist rule. They had no desire to compromise at all:
>>To the tough, dedicated leaders in Hanoi, the concept of stability had no operational meaning. They had spent their adult lives fighting for victory, first against France, now against a superpower. In the name of Communism, they had brought incredible suffering to their people. “Leaving their neighbor alone” was the one thing Hanoi’s leaders were inherently unable to do.
Hanoi’s one immutable objective was the unconditional, unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam and the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government. Put together with South Vietnam’s total awareness of this fact, it strains credulity to assert that the failure of these talks could be put down merely to Nixonian sabotage efforts. In fact, any such efforts would have been meaningless in light of how Hanoi and Saigon’s mutual intransigence continually cancelled each other out.
TLDR summary:
– There was never going to be any peace in 1968.
– North Vietnam viewed the US as weak and never seriously negotiated with them at all.
– Nixon knew the Democrat efforts were bullshit and doomed to fail, and would not have needed to “sabotage” them anyway.
– South Vietnamese, knowing what it would take to conclude a “peace” viewed all talks with suspicion from the outset. They were frustrated with the Johnson admin’s prosecution of the run-up, and felt excluded from the process in general. The US on their part viewed them as obstructive and inimical to US aims. Therefore it was very easy to imagine they would take Nixon at his word when he said he would give them “a better deal”.
SOURCES
– Henry A. Kissinger – The White House Years, 1968-72
– Bui Diem, David Chanoff, Diem Bui – In the Jaws of History
– Nguyen Tien Hung, Jerrold L. Schecter – The Palace File
What kind of President would do something like that?
Oh.
Same thing Reagan did when they colluded with the Iranian revolutionaries holding US citizens hostage from the embassy. Republicans colluding with the enemies of this country for political gain is nothing new, nor rare.
This is a gross oversimplification and not entirely true.
The “aide” or socialite, Anna Chenault, pumped up her part of the story but the main reason the talks fell through is the leader of South Vietnam knew it was likely that Nixon was going to win and wanted to take his chances with a more pro-war President.
No “Dragon Lady” shenanigans kept Nguyễn Văn Thiệu from attending the peace summit. He was never going to attend a summit either way because Johnson and everyone involved expected concessions on both sides.
Anna Chenault was a socialite who said she knew everybody but didn’t speak for authority and, besides, had nothing to offer that wasn’t implied to happen shortly anyway. It would make more sense if the Democrats at the time weren’t so divided and LBJ wasn’t so unpopular.
tl;dr Vietnam president would rather take his chances with a pro-war president in US so was going to wait until after election either way because he didn’t want peace that didn’t involve blowing up and taking more of the North’s territory.
Classic Republican behavior there, wonder if he banged kids like Trump?
Fucking treasonous act that killed thousands of American servicemen.
There’s also audio of Nixon and Kissinger discussing the bombing of Cambodia where Nixon says he doesn’t give a fuck about the civilians being killed
A classic Republican move.
Were there other Republican presidents who told huge lies? You bet!
Such as Reagan, who asked Iranians to continue to hold the American captives until after he was made president.
And Bush, with his lies about WMD in Iraq.
And now spewing lie after lie, trump has been truly dangerous in how he has mishandled our politics, how we interact with each other, in harming us with tariffs, stopping global warming mitigation, etc.
Any other lies come to mind?
Evil is as evil does.
Yup… truly evil shit.
When you own stock in construction companies and can profit endlessly, war crimes dont seem that bad.
Fun fact, every single one moon landing happened during his term.
Humphrey and Wallace were two of the weakest candidates ever. What authority would Nixon have under an LBJ administration to negotiate?
Sounds similar to Boris Johnson stopping Ukraine peace talks
A decade later, Reagan would do the same to sabotage talks for releasing the Iranian hostages to help him win the election.
This is what Republicans are.
And Reagan had Iran keep hostages longer before he was elected because he didn’t want Carter to have a win. Republicans have a history extending or inventing crises to help themselves politically.
The Rest is History (podcast) did an episode on Nixon in 68. They reckon this is false and a conspiracy theory.
The crux of their argument is that it is irrelevant what Nixon or LBJ tried to do with the Paris Peace Talks. The South Vietnamese Government were never going to agree to them
Republicans haven’t changed. Reagan did the same bs with the American hostages. Made a deal so the Americans wouldn’t be released during the election campaign so it wouldn’t help the incumbent, Carter.
Naturally the Republican investigation found no wrong doing.
And now we have, well, trump
Johnson really believed Vietnam was a crusade against communism. Nixon knew it was really about cutting off the flow of Southeast Asian opium into the global markets as it was driving down prices and costing wealthy elites money.
“You suck, Dick!” – “Dick” (1999)
This dude better be in hell.
Murica.