S3 Ep 2 - Madame Chennault

Nixon at War

PRX

History

4.8 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Coming out of the conventions in August ’68, Richard Nixon begins his campaign against Hubert Humphrey, his Democratic opponent, with what looks like an insurmountable lead. Running as the peace candidate, Nixon promises a quick end to a costly and increasingly unpopular war. The strategy works, until late October, when Humphrey finally breaks with LBJ and goes public with his own opposition to the war. Overnight, the race begins to tighten. This is Nixon's last shot. He lost to JFK in 1960, by less than two-tenths of a percent – one of the closest elections in U.S. history – and isn’t about to let it happen again. So, when word leaks, a week before the election, of a possible breakthrough in LBJ’s long-stalled Vietnam peace talks, Nixon sees it all slipping away, and moves to avoid that outcome, at whatever risk. His response is to sabotage the Paris Talks, through a mysterious secret intermediary known as the Dragon Lady. LBJ learns of Nixon’s efforts to blow up the talks, but can’t reveal his source – FBI wiretaps on the South Vietnamese Embassy. “Of all of Richard Nixon’s actions in a lifetime of politics,” biographer John Farrell will later say, “this was the most reprehensible.“

Learn more at NixonAtWar.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I just start right at the top and fire some people.
0:04.3	The best politician of all is Nixon.
0:06.9	But boy, when you get in tight and close and he's under attack.
0:10.5	President Nixon heard today, the voice of the campus in a massive appeal.
0:14.6	He was known as the Madman theory.
0:16.3	Make those North Vietnamese think that he was just crazy.
0:18.9	Here was a fellow who seven years before was the biggest loser in American politics.
0:22.6	Astonishing.
0:24.6	It was a textbook or how to damage our democracy.
0:28.6	I have Dr. Kissinger calling you.
0:29.6	He thinks it was a paranoid.
0:31.6	Everybody was told a different story.
0:32.6	Mr. President, you are saving this country.
0:34.6	I thought this is really what he means, and he's the president.
0:38.4	It was a very intense time.
0:42.1	From PRX, this is Nixon at War.
0:47.1	The 1968 presidential campaign was down to its final month, and Richard Nixon was nervous.
0:52.9	On Vietnam, his opponent, Vice President Humphrey,
0:55.9	had finally broken ranks with President Johnson. As president, I would stop the bombing of the North,
1:02.3	as an acceptable risk for peace. Humphrey's break is really an artful straddle, trying to appeal to
1:09.2	anti-war liberals and middle of the rotors. And it's apparently
1:12.9	working. At the end of summer, Nixon had been way, way ahead in the polls. In October, Humphrey is catching
	...

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