LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason’

National security adviser Walt Rostow shows
President Lyndon Johnson a model of a battle
near Khe Sanh in Vietnam.
(National Archives Photo)

March 3, 2012

 

Special Report: In the dusty files of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library in Austin, Texas, once secret documents and audiotapes tell a dark and tragic story of how Richard Nixon’s team secured the White House in 1968 by sabotaging peace talks that might have ended the Vietnam War four years earlier, Robert Parry reports.


By Robert Parry
On May 14, 1973, Walt W. Rostow, who had been national security adviser during some of the darkest days of the Vietnam War, typed a three-page “memorandum for the record” summarizing a secret file that his former boss, President Lyndon Johnson, had amassed on what may have been Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the sabotaging of Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election.

Rostow reflected, too, on what effect LBJ’s public silence may have had on the then-unfolding Watergate scandal. As Rostow composed his memo in spring 1973, President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up was unraveling. Just two weeks earlier, Nixon had fired White House counsel John Dean and accepted the resignations of two top aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.

Three days after Rostow wrote the memo, the Senate Watergate hearings opened as the U.S. government lurched toward a constitutional crisis. Yet, as he typed, Rostow had a unique perspective on the worsening scandal. He understood the subterranean background to Nixon’s political espionage operations.

Those secret activities surfaced with the arrest of the Watergate burglars in June 1972, but they had begun much earlier. In his memo for the record, Rostow expressed regret that he and other top Johnson aides had chosen – for what they had deemed “the good of the country” – to keep quiet about Nixon’s Vietnam peace-talk sabotage, which Johnson had privately labeled “treason.”  READ MORE