On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stunned Americans watching his televised address from the Oval Office. After announcing that he would unilaterally scale down the bombing of North Vietnam and cease bombing entirely should Hanoi enter peace talks, Johnson surrendered his political ambition.
“I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” the president said. Johnson, under immense stress from the failure of his Vietnam War policy, had nearly lost the first Democratic primary on March 12 to the peace candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey would prevail at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as massive riots broke out on the streets outside. By late October, Humphrey was gaining ground on Republican Richard Nixon, whose double-digit lead shrank as word of a potential bombing halt and peace talks began to lead the news. On Oct. 31, 1968, Johnson announced the bombing halt because the North Vietnamese had agreed about two weeks earlier to his conditions, kept secret from the public, to enter peace negotiations in Paris.
What the public also did not know was that days before the announcement of the bombing halt, Johnson learned that Anna Chennault, on behalf of the Nixon campaign, was interfering in his diplomatic efforts to convince the South Vietnamese government to sit down at the negotiating table with the North Vietnamese Communists. As it turned out, Saigon boycotted the peace talks just days before Americans went to the polls, electing Nixon in a historically close contest.
This is the story of the Chennault Affair. In this episode of History As It Happens, Ken Hughes, a master researcher of presidential audio tapes at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, lays out the timeline of events in October 1968 to demonstrate when and how Nixon subverted the peace talks to undermine Humphrey’s momentum.
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