Vietnam: A Blind Eye to LBJ's 'X-File'

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/55321/a-blind-eye-to-lbjs-x-file

A Blind Eye to LBJ's 'X-File'
Lyndon Baines Johnson | Richard Nixon | Vietnam | War
by Robert Parry | April 12, 2014 - 9:06am

Many important officials and journalists have spent time at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, this past week celebrating the half-century anniversary of one of President Lyndon Johnson’s signature achievements, the Civil Rights Act. But no one, it seems, took time to look at what the library’s archivists call their “X-File,” documents that could change how history views Johnson’s legacy.

The “X-File” is the nickname that the archivists gave to Johnson’s secret file on what he considered Richard Nixon’s “treason” in sabotaging Vietnam War peace talks to gain an edge over Hubert Humphrey in the close 1968 election. The “X-File” is actually “The X envelope,” the words scribbled on the outside by Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow.

As a bitter Johnson was leaving the White House in January 1969, he ordered Rostow to take the top-secret file which included national security wiretaps of Nixon’s representatives urging South Vietnamese officials to boycott Johnson’s Paris peace talks and offering a better deal if Nixon won.

Johnson had hoped he could bring the war to a close before his presidency ended, but in late October 1968, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu balked at the peace talks as the Nixon team had requested. The failed negotiations gave a last-minute lift to Nixon who eked out a narrow victory over Humphrey.

[Historic NY]

1. There is a transcript of LBJ's conversations with Sen. Everett Dirksen...

with much about this...

LBJ call Tricky Dick out too late....

"They've been quoting you [Nixon] indirectly, that the thing they ought to do is to just not show up at any [peace] conference and wait until you come into office. Now they've started that [boycott] and that's bad. They're killing Americans every day. I have that [story of the peace-talk sabotage] documented. There's not any question but that's happening. ... That's the story, Dick, and it's a sordid story. ... I don't want to say that to the country, because that's not good."