Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

An exotic beauty known as the Dragon Lady helped the Nixon campaign collude with a foreign government to defeat Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

As a beauty pageant promoter promised President Trump's son negative information on Hillary Clinton

from the Russian government during the 2016 campaign, we returned to the story of Anna

Chenow from the Humphrey and Nixon campaign and the last-minute efforts by President

Lyndon Johnson to salvage his plan for a pause in the bloodshed in the Vietnam War.

Our whistle stop today is the 3rd of November, 1968.

President Lyndon Johnson has been trying to negotiate a bombing halt in Vietnam.

More than 11,000 Americans had died.

The year before, close to 17,000 had died in that year of 1968, the most that would die in a single year in that conflict.

Johnson had been patiently working to halt the bombing for months.

Hanoi, in the north, had demanded an unconditional halt to the bombing of North Vietnam before it would discuss any settlement of the ward.

Johnson, however, insisted that Hanoi meet certain secret conditions before he would call off the aerial and naval bombardments.

The North wouldn't bomb the cities or move into the demilitarized zone.

Hanoi and this period had finally, in the fall of 1968, had finally accepted

his demands. But just as he was working on the U.S. allies to put this pause into place,

most importantly, just as he was working on the South Vietnamese, America's ally. The president

and his plans were unwound. There were two culprits. The first was from his own team,

Kennedy Hubert Humphrey, the vice president who was running since Johnson had taken himself out of the race.

He gave a speech saying that he would withdraw troops if he was president. Get out of the Vietnam War.

McGeorge Bundy, a former national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson,

offered a similar statement.

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