“I’m Reading Their Hand”: LBJ, Nixon, and the Week Before the 1968 Election

Several friends recently passed along to me an article from The New York Times that appeared on New Year’s Eve, one sharing a bit of news regarding Richard Nixon’s actions during the final days prior to the 1968 presidential election when he won a narrow victory versus Hubert Humphrey. They did so both because they know about my ongoing “Nixon studies” and because there’s a small poker reference in the article, too.

The article is titled “Nixon’s Vietnam Treachery” and was written by John A. Farrell who is currently at work on a Nixon bio coming out later this year. The story being told in the article is not new at all, although Farrell does pass along some relatively unknown evidence regarding Nixon’s role in possibly preventing a peace settlement from occurring in Vietnam just prior to the election. (The evidence isn’t new, although it hadn’t gotten a lot of attention before.)

To give a little context, by mid-October 1968 outgoing president Lyndon B. Johnson was hopeful to find some way to end the war before leaving office. After months of negotiations, Johnson had a breakthrough of sorts when the North Vietnamese finally agreed to enter into talks with the South Vietnamese in Paris if the U.S. called a bombing halt. Such talks hardly meant peace would be imminent, but they represented an significant first step toward such an eventuality.

What’s been known for quite some time now (thanks primarily to some FBI-supplied evidence) is that high-level members of Nixon’s campaign team were communicating with South Vietnamese leader Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu at the time, urging Thieu not to enter any peace talks just yet while promising a better negotiating position once Nixon took office. Such a move is rightly regarded with suspicion, obviously motivated primarily by the fact that an announcement of peace in Vietnam on the eve of the election would serve as a last-minute boost to Humphrey in what had become a tight race to the finish.

In The Making of the President 1968, Theodore H. White recounts the day-by-day developments leading up to Election Day, telling how with just one week to go (on October 29) “the promised end of the war in Vietnam was beginning to leak from every news source around the world.” Two days later, on Thursday, October 31, Johnson announced the cessation of bombing “in the belief that this action can lead to progress toward peaceful settlement of the Vietnamese war” (as LBJ said).

The promising news remained atop the headlines for about a day before doubts began to creep back in to cloud the picture regarding peace in southeast Asia, and by Saturday The New York Times was reporting that the word from Saigon was that the South Vietnamese couldn’t participate in any talks. The way White reports it (sharing what was known at the time), it appeared President Thieu had agreed to the talks without having secured the support of his cabinet or the national assembly, and that once they objected the deal had been dashed.

White then introduces the mysterious Anna Chennault into the story, the Chinese-born widow of a WWII hero who became involved in politics and chaired a number of Nixon’s citizen committees during the ’68 campaign. Chennault had numerous connections throughout Asia, and (says White) had learned about the secret negotiations in October. Using her contacts (including some within the South Vietnamese government), “she had begun early, by cable and telephone, to mobilize their resistance to the agreement -- apparently implying, as she went, that she spoke for the Nixon campaign.”

LBJ found out about Chennault’s chicanery, and that weekend accused the Republicans of sabotaging the peace effort, including having a somewhat tense phone conversation with Nixon on Sunday regarding the matter. (You can hear that phone call, with a transcription, over on YouTube.)

All of this tumult during the final week before the election certainly had some effect on the outcome, but it’s hard to say how much.

The situation recalls the one surrounding the final days before the 2016 election. I’m referring of course to FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress saying the bureau would be investigating more of Hillary Clinton emails, a letter Comey delivered just 11 days before the election, then his announcement two days before Election Day that Clinton would face no charges regarding the messages -- a dubious two-step that also likely had some, hard-to-measure effect on a certain number of voters near the end.

As noted above, it has been known for a good while that members of Nixon’s team -- among them campaign director John Mitchell and vice-presidential candidate Spiro Agnew -- were talking with Chennault, which would explain how she could represent herself to the South Vietnamese as speaking for Nixon.

A few books have delved more deeply into the Nixon-Chennault connection, with William Bundy’s A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (1998), Jeffrey Kimball’s Nixon’s Vietnam War (1998), and Anthony Summers’s The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000) among the more earnest efforts. More recently Ken Hughes’s Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (2015) looks even more closely at the story.

As with Watergate, the extent of Nixon’s particular involvement here has long invited much speculation and debate. Was Nixon directly involved with Chennault’s suggestions to the South Vietnamese that they not enter peace talks and wait for a Nixon administration to move forward? Or was this (as with the Watergate break-in and some elements of the cover-up) an example of some of his subordinates freelancing with a kind of vague endorsement from the top man? The new NYT piece sheds some additional light on the situation.

As Farrell shares, notes taken by Nixon advisor H.R. “Bob” Haldeman (later RN’s White House Chief of Staff and key Watergate figure) recount an October 22 telephone conversation in which Nixon advised him to tell others to do what they could to thwart LBJ’s efforts to negotiate the beginning of peace talks. “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” Haldeman scribbled, a fairly direct-sounding directive from Tricky Dick. “Any other way to monkey wrench it?” added Haldeman, referring to Nixon’s ostensible desire to come up with futher means to scuttle the talks.

Such notes strongly suggest that despite Nixon’s later claims to the contrary, he was not only aware of what was going on behind the scenes with regard to those representing him while pressuring Thieu not to enter talks just yet, he was encouraging that effort. The NY Times piece concludes with a reference to another phone call between LBJ and Everett Dirksen, the Republican senator from Illinois who had served as Senate Minority Leader for nearly a decade -- one that can also be heard over on YouTube, if you’re curious.

That call came on Saturday, November 2 (a day before the call to Nixon), and finds LBJ speaking directly about the apparent sabotage. LBJ declares “this is treason,” complaining outwardly that “they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.”

Indeed, for Nixon -- then technically a private citizen -- to have anything at all to do with the country’s talks with a foreign power like this was obviously out of bounds, a violation of the Logan Act, a federal law forbidding unauthorized citizens from negotiating with other governments. (A few weeks ago I was alluding to another, much less outrageous example of this same sort of violation prior to my recent trip to Prague, one involving Frank Zappa’s dialogue with Václav Havel.)

Johnson encourages Dirksen to talk to his party colleagues, telling them how they “oughta keep the Mrs. Chennaults and all the rest of them from running around here” while threatening to go public with the information that the Nixon team was obstructing negotiations that would hopefully lead to an end for the war.

“I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important,” says Johnson. (The mind wanders toward a certain president-elect’s strange communications regarding a certain foreign power.)

Also tucked into that conversation is a poker metaphor, used by Johnson to refer to the fact that he is privy to what all sides have been up to, including what Chennault has been doing on behalf of Nixon.

“Now I’m reading their hand, Everett,” says Johnson, adding “I don’t want to get this into the campaign.” (The NYT piece shares that quote, too, near the end.)

Those conversations are fascinating to listen to, especially the one between Nixon and Johnson, both of whom were accomplished poker players. Understanding the larger context, it is clear both knew full well what the other “player” had in his hand, with both also obviously walking a fine line trying not to give too much away to each other.

Photo: Richard Nixon Foundation.

Little Stories (Using Poker as a Metaphor)

Early in The Making of the President 1972, the fourth and final (formal) installment of Theodore H. White’s series on presidential elections, White discusses the monumental decision of Richard Nixon’s administration to end the free conversion of U.S. dollars to gold at a fixed value -- i.e., the removal of the gold standard.

This event happened quite abruptly, going into effect on August 15, 1971. It was announced that night by the president in a televised speech that also listed several other significant economic measures, including another huge one to impose wage and price controls (a 90-day freeze).

Together these measures are sometimes referred to as the “Nixon shock,” which politically speaking helped Nixon immensely in the way it produced immediate effects (helping the economy avoid a downturn during the following election year) while also giving the impression that Nixon had done something meaningful -- had acted, not sat by passively -- in response to a coming economic crisis. (That latter point is one White fleshes out in the section). Meanwhile the longer-term effects are still being debated (and are beyond the scope of this post).

There’s one moment early in the discussion where White is rapidly explaining how much the world had changed in the quarter-century following WWII. Following the war, the U.S. was by default in the position of providing economic and trading stability to the rest of the world. “Other nations’ money might fluctuate in value with the tides of world trade,” explains White, “but they would fluctuate only in relation to each other, while at the center stood the U.S. dollar, rigid, its strength firmly socketed in gold.”

By the early 1970s, though, the economic supremacy of the U.S. was no longer quite so unamiguous. Other countries’ economies had built back up to the point of being competitive, in part (explains White) because of the U.S. having been generous with aid over those years. “So strong was America in those days that its overpowering investment in science and fundamental research was thrown open to the entire world,” writes White, who also notes other forms of civilian aid to foreign countries.

That’s when White uses a poker metaphor to describe the situation, and in fact it’s a familiar one to those of us who know our Nixon.

“Uncle Sam sat like a winning poker player at the head of the table, giving away chips to the losers, even tipping his hand when necessary just to keep the game going,” writes White.

I say this is a familiar comparison, because Nixon himself used this exact analogy in a speech he subsequently gave on September 9, 1971 to the House Chamber at the Capitol in which he addressed the country’s economy and its relationship to other countries.

Like White, Nixon in the speech points out the “nearly $150 billion in foreign aid, economic and military, over the past 25 years” the U.S. had doled out, then turns to talk of how the U.S. “will remain a good and generous nation -- but the time has come to give a new attention to America’s own interests here at home.”

“Fifteen years ago a prominent world statesman put this problem that we confronted then in a very effective way,” says Nixon. “He commented to me that world trade was like a poker game in which the United States then had all the chips, and that we had to spread them around so that others could play. What he said was true in the 1940’s. It was partially true in the fifties and, also, even partially true in the early sixties. It is no longer true today. We have generously passed out the chips. Now others can play on an equal basis -- and we must play the game as we expect and want them to do. We must play, that means, the best we know how. The time has passed for the United States to compete with one hand tied behind her back.”

I’m not completely sure, but I believe the statesman to whom Nixon refers might be Winston Churchill, who did play poker occasionally (including once famously with Harry Truman). (The reference to 15 years before suggests one of RN’s meetings with Churchill when Ike’s VP.) In any event, it’s essentially the same point White makes, although White doesn’t quote or allude to the speech to Congress when he makes the analogy (making it seem perhaps as though he’d come up with it on his own).

Incidentally, Nixon and his aides can be heard on the White House tapes discussing this passage a lot both before and after the speech.

A couple of days before, Raymond K. Price (a Nixon speechwriter) isn’t so sure about it, saying “it’s a good image... uh... the poker game,” but adding “there would be some people who would think it inappropriate to talk in terms of a poker game.” But Nixon responds “it would be inappropriate if Harry Truman did it, but it’s not for me. See, most people don’t think I play poker.”

This was true. Nixon’s poker-playing background wasn’t a secret -- in fact, it had been described at length in a Life magazine cover story about “The Young Nixon” in November 1970 -- but it wasn’t nearly as well known among most of the public as was Truman’s penchant for poker.

Then after the speech the tapes reveal Charles Colson and Bob Haldeman congratulating him for the speech as a whole and the poker passage in particular. It’s a “catch line,” as Colson calls it -- that is, a memorable image or metaphor that sticks with the listener and thus conveys the message more effectively. “Even kids understand that,” says Haldeman of the reference to having “generously passed out the chips.”

“Kids play games, you know?” says Haldeman. “That’s the thing my family was talking about, the chips,” adds Colson. “It’s vivid and it’s illustrative and they understand it... and that hit a hell of a [nerve].”

“I can’t emphasize too strongly about this,” Nixon interrupts. “Every damn speech I’ve made, that what people remember... [you say] ‘What the hell do they remember about that speech?’ They remember the little stories. They remember the story about the chips, right...? It’s the little stories, the illustrations, that people... uh, people love.”

The line does convey the idea, no doubt. It’s memorable, too, which is why when reading White I immediately recognized it.

Image: Richard Nixon Foundation.