So Donald
Trump has actively solicited a foreign head of state to influence an American
election.
Again.
You might
expect me to go crazy and declare this “the worst example of a presidential
candidate selling out his own country in my lifetime”.
Sorry –
nope.
This is
the second worst example of interference by a presidential candidate in my lifetime.
It has managed to knock the 2016 Russian “intervention” out of that position by
virtue of the brazenness of its appearance and the danger of its
impact. But it is still second. An
understanding of the incident that holds first position is necessary in
order to understand why stopping this one early is so important.
In the
latter half of 1968 the government of North Vietnam came under immense pressure
from its allies to conclude a peace with the United States. (Full disclosure - I was 5 years old at the time - I had absolutely nothing to do with this). The motivation for the peace effort was partly an effort to avoid the
increasing cost of the war to the Soviet Union and Communist China, and partly due to the desire of those countries to avoid the possibility of
Richard Nixon becoming President as the result of the November elections
scheduled in the U.S. Lyndon Johnson,
sensing an opening and a chance to secure his own legacy opened a dialogue
which seemed destined to end the war.
All he needed was to get the South Vietnamese government to sign on to
the proposed peace accords.
At about
this same time a Washington socialite by the name of Anna Chennault mysteriously began
making regular contact with the South Vietnamese embassy and other
representatives of that government. Before
we talk about the purpose of her visits – a bit of perspective.
Between
1969 and 1972 well over 20,000 American service personnel were killed in
Vietnam. Estimates vary, but most agree that hundreds of thousands of
Vietnamese military and civilian deaths occurred during this same period.
It was also during this time frame that the final die was cast for the Cambodian
civil war, which resulted in the death of more than 2.5 million people as a
result of the fighting and a subsequent genocide (most famously described in “The Killing
Fields”). During this period the number of American prisoners of war
held by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong increased exponentially, while those
prisoners who had been captured prior to this period continued to suffer torture,
deprivation, starvation and disease.
There is
a good chance none of it needed to have happened.
In 1968 a
peace deal that was at least the equal of the one that ended up being put in
place in 1972 was on the table.
Had it been instituted the South Vietnamese government, unburdened by the ensuing four
years of war, corruption and unrest may have been able to survive.
It is
certain that the United States, free of the constraints imposed by Watergate
and its own internal unrest would have been in a better position to defend its
interests in Vietnam in the event that the treaty had been breached (as it was
following 1972).
No
“Christmas bombings”, no Kent State, no Cambodian invasion, no women and
children being abandoned on embassy rooftops, no helicopters being pushed in to
the sea off aircraft carriers.
Instead
we got all of that – and lost the possibility of saving all those lives –
because of the interference of a presidential candidate who put his personal
interests above that of the people of the United States.
For the mysterious Anna Chennault, also known as the “Dragon
Lady”, was Richard Nixon’s clandestine personal representative and she was under orders
from him to “monkey wrench” the peace talks, extend the war and get
Nixon elected. She instructed the South Vietnamese government to boycott the peace efforts under secret assurances that they "would get a better deal" if Nixon was elected. (Spoiler Alert: they didn't). Watergate was serious – but it was not Richard Nixon’s worst crime. His sabotaging of the Vietnam peace talks in 1968 was, in my opinion, much worse.
Nixon
denied a connection to Chennault until the day he died and went to extremes to
conceal the efforts he made to derail the 1968 peace talks. While long suspected it was not until the
absolute last set of classified documents from his papers were made public that
the clear link between Nixon and Chennault was revealed. Then, in 2017, the disclosure of a set of notes taken by H.R.
Haldeman during a conversation with then candidate Nixon removed all doubt – in
black and white he sets down Nixon’s explicit instructions “keep Anna Chennault
working on S.V.N." (South Vietnam).
It might
as well have read “keep Americans dying in Vietnam”.
So Donald Trump’s shenanigans with Ukraine are still in
second place when it comes to undermining your own country’s interest – but it
would be incorrect to describe it as a “distant” second. For one thing – Nixon wasn’t actually
President when he pulled his stunt. The
other thing is that we are only going to be able to judge the true impact of
Trump’s actions when given the perspective of history – the Ukrainian situation
is extremely volatile and the apparent willingness of the U.S. to withhold
defense funds on a mere whim could still rebound spectacularly against us. Finally – what Trump did is right now on the
verge of being excused by a huge portion of the American electorate who have
come to view any criticism of the current President as an exercise in “fake
news” or “witch hunts”. If that happens,
if this activity is not accurately perceived for what it is, then we are doomed to be left at
the mercy of the act itself – and no good can come of such an act.
