Nixon again?

Nixon has several villainies in his record: the wage-price freeze and his effort to be an emperor: above the law and able to command that crimes be committed for his benefit. Now I hear claims that he sabotaged peace talks for campaign benefit, encouraging the South Vietnamese to back out of negotiations in Oct 1968.

The timetable seemed a little odd (Johnson declared a bombing halt 31-Oct-1968), so I tried to get some more details from sources that weren’t referencing the original news item. The linked article suggests a reason for his worrying about the Pentagon Papers: he wasn’t sure if there was some damning evidence associated with them. Unproven, but could be. But it is also evident that there was some fuzziness: Humphrey and Nixon were both making public statements that undercut the administration’s negotiating position. (And later on the US' fallback plans were published while negotiations were still going on—everybody was getting into the treason act, it seems. That doesn’t seem to go out of fashion: Newspapers and presidential candidates still do that sort of undercutting.)

Anyhow, between Humphrey spooking the South Vietnamese and Nixon encouraging them to back out, it complicated negotiations. Were the North Vietnamese serious? Would it have made any difference? They knew the war was unpopular and had every reason to jerk the US around a little more.

My first guess is that it didn’t make a lot of difference in the long run, but that Nixon was worse than he appeared.