Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate

By Ken Hughes and Marc J. Selverstone

The break-in at Watergate and the cover-up that followed brought about the resignation of Richard Nixon, creating a political shockwave that reverberates to this day. But as Ken Hughes reveals in his powerful new book, in all the thousands of hours of declassified White House tapes, the president orders a single break-in--and it is not at the Watergate complex. Hughes’s examination of this earlier break-in, plans for which the White House ultimately scrapped, provides a shocking new perspective on a long history of illegal activity that prolonged the Vietnam War and was only partly exposed by the Watergate scandal.

As a key player in the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program, Hughes has spent more than a decade developing and mining the largest extant collection of transcribed tapes from the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. Hughes’s unparalleled investigation has allowed him to unearth a pattern of actions by Nixon going back long before 1972, to the final months of the Johnson administration. Hughes identified a clear narrative line that begins during the 1968 campaign, when Nixon, concerned about the impact on his presidential bid of the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese, secretly undermined the negotiations through a Republican fundraiser named Anna Chennault. Three years after the election, in an atmosphere of paranoia brought on by the explosive appearance of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon feared that his treasonous--and politically damaging--manipulation of the Vietnam talks would be exposed. Hughes shows how this fear led to the creation of the Secret Investigations Unit, the "White House Plumbers," and Nixon’s initiation of illegal covert operations guided by the Oval Office. Hughes’s unrivaled command of the White House tapes has allowed him to build an argument about Nixon that goes far beyond what we think we know about Watergate.

Chasing Shadows is also available as a special e-book that links to the massive collection of White House tapes published by the Miller Center through Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press. This unique edition allows the reader to move seamlessly from the book to the recordings’ expertly rendered transcripts and to listen to audio files of the remarkable--and occasionally shocking--conversations on which this dark chapter in American history would ultimately turn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813936642

Ken Hughes

Ken Hughes has been living for storytelling since his father first read him The Wind in the Willows, and everything from Stephen King’s edge to Hayao Miyazaki’s sense of wonder has only fed that fire. He has worked as a technical writer in Los Angeles at positions from medical research to online gaming to mission proposals for a flight to Mars. For more about his stories, his songs, and his Unified Writing Field Theory:

Book preview

CHASING

SHADOWS

University of Virginia Press

© 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, Miller Center

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2014

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hughes, Ken, 1964–

   Chasing shadows : the Nixon tapes, the Chennault affair, and the origins of Watergate / Ken Hughes.

      pages       cm

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3663-5 (cloth : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-8139-3664-2 (e-book)

  1.  United States—Politics and government—1969–1974.   2.  Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913–1994—Political and social views.   3.  Audiotapes.   4.  Chennault, Anna.   5.  Watergate Affair, 1972–1974.   6.  United States—Politics and government—1961–1963.   7.  United States—Politics and government—1963–1969.   I.  Title.

E855.H83 2014

   973.924092—dc23

2014013429

To Alison

of the greatest gifts

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chasing Shadows

The Chennault Affair

Johnson v. Humphrey

Nixon v. Nixon

On the Case

Hold On

Election Eve

I Let You Down

Time to Blow the Whistle

The United Front

Candid and Forthright

The Man Who Knew Too Little

All the Documents

The Huston Plan

Nixon Tapes

Tricia’s Wedding

The Pentagon Papers

The Secret Bombing of Cambodia

Leaks

The Wrong Men

Charge Gelb

LBJ Cracks the Case

Ellsberg’s Decision

Fear of a Damaging Disclosure

Legal Action

The Diem Chapter

"Destroy the Times"

Illegal Action

A Natural Enemy

Lord High Executioner

Supreme Court Rules

1969 Documents

Break In and Take It Out

Rumors and Reports of a Conspiracy

Imitation of the Enemy

Special Investigations Unit

All These Harvard People

The Economic Conspiracy Theory

Are They All Jews?

They’re All Over

Somebody Sits on High

Counting Ivy Leaguers

Counting Jews

Above the Law

Pretty Much Carte Blanche

One Little Operation

The CIA Bluff

The Smoking Gun

I Don’t Kiss and Tell

Dean Testifies

The X Envelope

The White House Tapes

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

---

A Note on the Links in This Ebook

INTRODUCTION

What more could we possibly need to know about Watergate? Four decades have passed since Richard Nixon left the White House looking like a man whose worst fears were being realized. But he had not yet hit bottom. President Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon soon relieved him of the fear of prosecution and imprisonment, but that was not the ultimate threat Nixon faced. His presidency had been ended by a handful of tapes, secretly recorded on his own orders via microphones hidden in the Oval Office and other locations where he conducted the people’s business. Public exposure of the full collection of Nixon tapes could destroy much of what remained of his reputation. The 3,432 hours of recordings captured a pivotal time in his presidency and American history. During the time of his secret taping, February 16, 1971, to July 12, 1973, Nixon negotiated the diplomatic opening to China, the first nuclear arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, and a settlement of what was then America’s longest war, while winning a landslide reelection that realigned American politics and (not coincidentally) committing the wide-ranging abuses of power known collectively as Watergate. Until his dying day, the former president waged a legal battle to keep the public from learning what was on the rest of his tapes. The reasons became clear after his death, as the federal government gradually released most of the Nixon tapes (while withholding material on policy, privacy, and national security grounds) over the next two decades, a process completed only in August of 2013. At the same time, the National Archives made public many of the 50 million pages of Nixon administration documents in its collection.

In an article reflecting on the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two investigative journalists whose trailblazing articles in the days and months following the burglary started to expose the pervasive abuses of power behind it, marveled at the wealth of documentation now available: "Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. From this record, Woodward and Bernstein concluded that Watergate consisted of five wars waged by Nixon: against the anti–Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself."

The Chennault Affair played an unacknowledged, largely unseen, role in all five of these Watergate wars, driving some of Nixon’s most outrageous assaults on war critics, journalism, the opposition, justice, and history. The affair is a thread running through the Huston Plan, the Enemies List, and the Special Investigations Unit (the Plumbers), and it provides clearer answers to questions about some of the more outlandish decisions Nixon made. Why was his reaction to the leak of the Pentagon Papers so extreme? Why was he obsessed with getting his hands on all government documents related to his predecessor’s decision to stop bombing North Vietnam in 1968? Why did he order the Watergate cover-up?

The Chennault Affair is not, however, the magical key to all of Watergate; it’s part of a much bigger, complicated story. Many factors contributed to Nixon’s fall, far more than I can fit in these pages. Wand-waving accounts that reduce the complexity of Nixon’s downfall to a single cause are the preserve of Watergate revisionists. From time to time a new theory emerges placing the blame for Nixon’s undoing on the scheming of a scapegoat (or, more marketably, a shadowy conspiracy of scapegoats). John W. Dean plays a recurring, featured role in these fantasies. Ever since Dean went from White House counsel to witness for the prosecution in the spring of 1973, Nixon and his defenders have tried to shift responsibility for Watergate onto his shoulders. Dean was a key figure in the cover-up, but not the central one. That was Nixon. The notion that the president was the victim of a criminal conspiracy rather than the perpetrator of one cannot survive the tape-recorded sounds of him calling the shots from the Oval Office.

His secret tapes—and what they reveal—will probably be his most lasting legacy, Woodward and Bernstein wrote in 2012. The authors of two enduring classics on Watergate, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, found that there was even more to the story than investigators uncovered at the time: "The Watergate that we wrote about in the Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse."

Since 2000 I have studied the White House tapes as part of the Presidential Recordings Program founded by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. These years of research have convinced me that the origins of Watergate extend deeper than we previously knew to encompass a crime committed to elect Nixon president in the first place. Chasing Shadows tells the story of that crime and its role in the unmaking of the president.

CHASING

SHADOWS

ON ALL 2,658 hours of secretly recorded Nixon White House tapes that the government has declassified to date, you can hear the president of the United States order precisely one break-in. It wasn’t Watergate, but it does expose the roots of the cover-up that ultimately brought down Richard Milhous Nixon. Investigation of its origin reveals almost as much about the president’s rise as his fall.

June 17, 1971, 5:15 p.m., the Oval Office. None of the president’s men knew what to do when he ordered them to burglarize the Brookings Institution, a venerable Washington think tank. Richard Nixon had gathered his inner circle to talk about something entirely different—the recent leak of the Pentagon Papers, at that point the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in US history. The seven-thousand-page Defense Department history of Vietnam decision making during the administrations of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson had nothing on President Nixon. The study stopped well before his election, climaxing with LBJ’s surprise March 31, 1968, announcement that he would not seek a second full term.

In that same speech, Johnson created the issue that nearly sank Nixon’s presidential campaign. LBJ announced that he was limiting American bombing of North Vietnam—and would stop it completely if Hanoi could convince him that this would lead to prompt, productive peace talks.¹ Throughout the fall campaign, Nixon worried that LBJ would announce a bombing halt before Election Day, a move that would boost the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Johnson did, and it did. The president announced the bombing halt on Halloween, less than a week before the voting. The Republican nominee, who had begun the campaign 16 points ahead in the polls, watched his lead disappear. Nixon still won, but it was too close—at that point the second-closest race of the twentieth century, right behind the one he had lost in 1960 to JFK.²

You could blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing, said White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, a California public relations executive with blue eyes and a brush cut who spent years polishing Walt Disney’s image before taking on the greater challenge of managing Nixon’s.

How? the president asked.

The bombing halt stuff is all in the same file, Bob Haldeman said. Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings. Haldeman was working with some bad information. Tom Charles Huston, author of the secret Huston Plan to expand government break-ins, wiretaps, and mail opening in the name of fighting domestic terror, claimed Brookings had a top secret report on the bombing halt, written under the direction of some of the same people who oversaw the Pentagon Papers project.

Bob, now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it, the president said.

An aide began to object.

[ audio link ] President Nixon: I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it. ³

This wasn’t what Haldeman had in mind. He wanted government officials to visit Brookings on the pretext of inspecting how it stored classified material and to confiscate the bombing halt file in the process.⁴ No one in the Oval Office pointed out that the president’s idea was illegal. National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger, a former Harvard government professor with a profound German accent, asked the obvious question: But what good will it do you, the bombing halt file?

To blackmail him, the president said. Because he used the bombing halt for political purposes.

The bombing halt file would really kill Johnson, Haldeman said.

Why, why do you think that? Kissinger asked.

The timing, Haldeman said. Johnson stopped the bombing less than a week before the election.

You remember, I used to give you information about it at the time, Kissinger said, reminding them of the secret role he had played as an informant to the 1968 Nixon campaign on Johnson’s bombing halt negotiations.⁵ Kissinger had worked as a consultant on a 1967 bombing halt initiative for LBJ, so when he visited the American negotiating team in Paris during the 1968 talks, members confided in him. He gained Nixon’s trust by betraying theirs. To the best of my knowledge, there was never any conversation in which they said we’ll hold it until the end of October, Kissinger said. I wasn’t in on the discussions here. I just saw the instructions to [Ambassador W. Averell] Harriman.⁶ (Years later, Kissinger denied having had access to information about the negotiations at the time; the instructions to Ambassador Harriman, LBJ’s lead negotiator with the North Vietnamese, were, of course, highly classified information.)⁷ If Kissinger was right, then even if Nixon got someone to break into Brookings and steal the bombing halt report, it was unlikely to contain the blackmail information he said he wanted.

Yet Nixon ordered the Brookings burglary at least three more times in the next two weeks. It was one of the reasons he took the fateful step of creating the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), an unconstitutional secret police organization better known as the Plumbers because one of its jobs was to plug leaks. The SIU recruited a former FBI agent with experience doing black bag jobs (that is, government-conducted break-ins) and a former CIA agent experienced in covert operations.⁸

Exactly one year to the day after Nixon first ordered the Brookings break-in, a different one planned by these two former government agents took place at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in Washington’s Watergate apartment and office complex. Once Washington, DC, police arrested five men in dark suits and blue gloves at the DNC offices on the morning of June 17, 1972, President Nixon faced a stark choice. An unobstructed investigation of the crimes the two former government agents had committed would lead back to ones that the president himself had ordered. He could either order a cover-up or face impeachment.

So why did Nixon want the bombing halt file so badly in the first place? What good would blackmailing LBJ do, anyway? (At that point, Nixon just wanted the former president to hold a press conference denouncing the leak of the Pentagon Papers—not much of a motive to commit a felony.) The potential downside was enormous—impeachment, conviction, prison, disgrace—and the upside was questionable at best. If Nixon were the kind of president to conduct criminal fishing expeditions for dirt on his predecessors, his tapes would be littered with break-in orders. But Brookings is the only one.

There is a rational explanation. Nixon did have reason to believe that the bombing halt file contained politically explosive information—not about his predecessor, but about himself. Ordering the Brookings break-in wasn’t a matter of opportunism or poor presidential impulse control. As far as Nixon knew, it was a matter of survival. The reasons why are not on Nixon’s tapes, but on those of his predecessor.

The Chennault Affair

October 30, 1968, 10:25 a.m., the President’s Little Office. President Lyndon B. Johnson had a problem unlike any he’d ever faced. For guidance he turned to the last of his three great mentors. All were giants of Democratic politics. The first two were President Franklin D. Roosevelt and House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan. The third was Sen. Richard B. Russell of Georgia.

Johnson valued Russell’s judgment above all others’. But on the two issues that dominated his legacy as president, civil rights and Vietnam, LBJ had defied his counsel. In this job a man must set a standard to which he’s working. In my case, it is what will my grandchildren think when I’m buried out there under the tree on the ranch, Johnson told a New York Times reporter writing about the twilight of his presidency. I think they will be proud of two things: what I did for the Negro and seeing it through in Vietnam for all of Asia. The Negro cost me 15 points in the polls and Vietnam cost me 20.¹ Russell was the president’s public opponent on civil rights and his private counselor on Vietnam. While he acknowledged that Johnson would suffer politically if he didn’t fight in Vietnam, Russell told the president in 1964 that this was a war America didn’t need to wage: It isn’t important a damn bit.² Other critics emerged as the war went badly, but Russell warned LBJ long before he sent in the first combat brigade. I never did want to get messed up down there. I do not agree with those brain trusters who say this thing has tremendous strategic and economic value and that we’ll lose everything in Southeast—in Asia if we lose Vietnam, Russell told the president. I don’t think that’s true. But I think as a practical matter, we’re in there, and I don’t know how the hell you can tell the American people you’re coming out. There’s just no way to do it. They’ll think that you’ve just been whipped and you’ve been run, you’re scared. And it’d be disastrous.³

The president was on the brink of another Vietnam-related political disaster in October 1968. For months, Hanoi had demanded an unconditional halt to American bombing of North Vietnam before it would discuss any settlement of the war. Johnson, however, insisted that Hanoi meet certain secret military conditions before he would call off the aerial and naval bombardment of the North. Hanoi had finally accepted his demands, but just as LBJ was getting ready to order the bombing halt and announce the start of peace talks, he received a warning: the Republican presidential nominee was trying to sabotage the peace talks before they even began. Faced with an unprecedented problem, he turned, as he had so many times before, to Senator Russell.

[ audio link ] President Johnson: Well, I’ve got one this morning that’s pretty rough for you. We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, our allies and the others. He’s been doing it through rather subterranean sources here. ⁴

The warning came from a source no president could safely ignore: Alexander Sachs. An economist at Wall Street’s Lehman Corporation who had helped write campaign speeches for FDR, Sachs entered history when he warned Roosevelt on behalf of Albert Einstein and other leading physicists that Nazi Germany might build an atom bomb. An October 11, 1939, meeting in the Oval Office between FDR and Sachs led to the Manhattan Project.⁵ Sachs had a pretty good track record of forecasting trouble. Among the developments he was credited with having predicted, the New York Times wrote, were the 1929 Depression, the 1933 banking crisis and the rise of Hitler.⁶ Like these earlier warnings, the one Sachs gave Johnson concerned matters that could affect the future of America and the world.

At an October 28, 1968, working lunch on Wall Street, Sachs had heard from a member of the banking community, a colleague, a man he has known for many years, and one in whose honesty he has absolute confidence that Nixon was approaching the peace talks like another Fortas case.⁷ Conservative senators had successfully filibustered Johnson’s nomination of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas to become chief justice earlier that month. Sachs wouldn’t reveal the identity of his source, but told Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Eugene V. Rostow what he’d heard:

The speaker said he thought the prospects for a bombing halt or a cease-fire were dim, because Nixon was playing the problem as he did the Fortas affair—to block. He was taking public positions intended to achieve that end. They would incite Saigon to be difficult, and Hanoi to wait.

Part of his strategy was an expectation that an offensive would break out soon, that we would have to spend a great deal more (and incur more casualties)—a fact which would adversely affect the stock market and the bond market. [North Vietnamese] offensive action was a definite element in the thinking about the future.

These difficulties would make it easier for Nixon to settle after January. Like Ike in 1953, he would be able to settle on terms which the President could not accept, blaming the deterioration of the situation between now and January or February on his predecessor.⁸

Mere hours after LBJ got this warning from Sachs, he learned that the South Vietnamese government was indeed going to be difficult. South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu had started saying that three days between stopping the bombing and starting the peace talks just wasn’t enough time for him to get a delegation to Paris. "Didn’t he say one day originally?" Johnson asked his advisers. The president began to suspect Sachs was right.⁹

[ audio link ] President Johnson: The next thing that we got our teeth in was one of his associates, a fellow named [John] Mitchell, who’s running his campaign, who’s the real [Eisenhower White House chief of staff] Sherman Adams of the operation, in effect, said to a businessman that we’re going to handle this like we handled the Fortas matter, unquote. We’re going to frustrate the President by saying to the South Vietnamese, and the Koreans, and the Thailanders, ‘Beware of Johnson.’ ¹⁰ At the same time, we’re going to say to Hanoi, ‘I can make a better deal than he has because I’m fresh and new, and I don’t have to demand as much as he does in the light of past positions.’ [coughs] Now, when we got that pure by accident, as a result of some of our Wall Street connections, that caused me to look a little deeper.

Russell: I guess so.

President Johnson: And I have means of doing that, as you may well imagine.

Russell: Yes.¹¹

The president didn’t spell it out on the telephone, but US intelligence agencies were reporting Saigon’s internal discussions of the bombing halt negotiations to him. The National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting diplomatic cables from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, DC, to its home government; the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a bug in the office of South Vietnam’s president. It took decades for the US government to declassify the CIA and NSA reports, and even then the intelligence agencies redacted many passages with thick black markers. So heavily censored are the public versions of these reports that they do not include the next name Johnson mentioned, the central figure in what came to be known as the Chennault Affair.¹²

[ audio link ] President Johnson: And Mrs. [Anna] Chennault is contacting their ambassador from time to time. Seems to be kind of the go-between. ¹³

Anna Chan Chennault was the widow of Lt. Gen. Claire L. Chennault, the American leader of a volunteer air group, the Flying Tigers, that defended China against Japanese invaders in World War II. It was then that he met Chen Xiangmei (Plum Blossom), a beautiful young war correspondent. Once the war was over, Chennault divorced his American wife of thirty-four years.¹⁴ In 1947, he married Chen Xiangmei, now Anna Chan, in Shanghai. He was fifty-seven; the press couldn’t determine her age (twenty-two).¹⁵ The Chennaults planned to live in China, where they ran a new airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT). Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution disrupted their plans. When the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan while continuing to lay claim to all of China, CAT moved to the island as well.¹⁶

The Chennaults became fixtures of the China Lobby. Not so much an organization as an alliance of conservative American politicians, activists, and Chinese Nationalists, the China Lobby blamed President Harry S. Truman and the State Department of the World War II general George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson for losing China. The China Lobby never really came up with a way Truman could have saved China from Communism. Nor did it have to—the rallying cry of Who lost China? was effective enough to help Republicans win the House and Senate in the 1950 midterm elections. Politicians tried to make their opponent’s name the answer to the question Who lost _____? during the Cold War because the tactic paid off on Election Day. Successfully casting an opponent as the sort who would leave the nation vulnerable to foreign threats—due to weakness, failure to grasp the nature of the global challenge, cowardice, shortsighted political opportunism, even disloyalty—won elections.

Anna Chennault’s narrative of her life story reflected and reinforced such attacks. In her account, Chennault lost her homeland to Mao’s revolutionaries because a Democratic administration in Washington failed to support Chinese anti-Communists.¹⁷ This was a tale Republicans loved to tell. Once Chennault moved to America, she rose rapidly in political circles. In the age of the Washington hostess, Chennault made herself a renowned one (Our China doll, in the words of another) for the parties thrown at her penthouse apartment in the capital’s new and fashionable Watergate complex.¹⁸ Life magazine sent photographers to shoot her party prep.¹⁹ Chennault rose in business, too, as vice president of the Flying Tiger Line, founded by her late husband’s World War II comrades and then the biggest freight airline on the planet.²⁰

Chennault assembled a dazzling network of social, business, and political connections. With former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, Chennault served as cochair of the women’s advisory committee for the Nixon campaign.²¹ She was the only Chinese American woman to attend the 1968 GOP convention as a delegate. Chennault raised a quarter million dollars for Nixon, making her his top woman fund-raiser.²²

The men of the Johnson administration never knew what to make of her. To them she was the Dragon Lady (a name drawn not from Asian history or culture but from an American comic strip, Terry and the Pirates) or the Little Flower or the Lady or just the woman. She was singular.

[ audio link ] President Johnson: I know it’s her.

Russell: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

President Johnson: Mrs. Chennault, you know, of the Flying Tigers.

Russell: I know Mrs. Chennault.

President Johnson: She’s young and attractive. I mean, she’s a pretty good-looking girl.

Russell: Certainly is.

President Johnson: And she’s around town and she is warning them to not get pulled in on this Johnson move.²³

The president had a great deal of information from the NSA intercepts and the CIA bug, but he was missing the central piece of the puzzle. Nixon had taken pains to keep it from him. One of his speechwriters, without realizing how important it was, kept the following memo from the foreign policy adviser Richard V. Allen to the candidate (referred to within the campaign as DC).

3 July 68

To: DC

From: Dick Allen

Re: Possible meeting with South Vietnamese Ambassador

Talked with Mrs. Chennault, who is long-time friend of Saigon’s Ambassador to the U.S., Bui Diem. He is now in Paris, designated official observer and representative of SVN government to the peace talks. He is due back in here (Washington) next week some time.

Mrs. Chennault has apparently asked him if he would talk to DC. I explained schedule tight, but possible to check on available time.

Meeting would have to be absolute top secret, etc.

Initiative is ours—if DC can see him, I am to contact Mrs. Chennault, she will arrange.

Near the words top secret, Nixon scribbled, Should be but I don’t see how—with the S.S. Secret Service agents provided Nixon protection as a candidate, but their boss was President Johnson. If it can be (secret) RN would like to see, the candidate wrote, referring to himself by his initials. The speechwriter who kept the memo thought the meeting hadn’t taken place.²⁴

The meeting had taken place, however; Nixon had managed to keep it secret.²⁵ On July 12, 1968, Chennault and South Vietnamese ambassador Bui Diem flew from Washington, DC, to New York City, where the Nixon campaign was headquartered, for a meeting with the candidate and his campaign chairman, John N. Mitchell. Chennault revealed this years after the fact in her 1980 memoir, The Education of Anna. Ambassador Diem provides a corroborating account of the meeting in his own memoir, 1987’s In the Jaws of History.²⁶

Chennault introduced Nixon to the South Vietnamese ambassador for the first time. Nixon designated her as the sole representative between the Vietnamese government and the Nixon campaign headquarters, Chennault wrote. She quoted the candidate as saying: Anna is my good friend. She knows all about Asia. I know you also consider her a friend, so please rely on her from now on as the only contact between myself and your government. If you have any message for me, please give it to Anna and she will relay it to me and I will do the same in the future. We know Anna is a good American and a dedicated Republican. We can all rely on her loyalty.²⁷

So when President Johnson told Senator Russell that Mrs. Chennault is contacting their ambassador from time to time, seems to be kind of the go-between, he was more right than he knew.

[ audio link ] President Johnson: In addition, their ambassador is saying to him [South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu] that Johnson is desperate and is just moving heaven and earth to elect Humphrey, so don’t you get sucked in on that. He is kind of these