Treason

April 4, 2013
By Mickey Friedman

My “Support The Troops / It’s Time To Come Home” sign has seen better days. I’ve taped and re-taped it; stapled and re-stapled it.

This Saturday a big wind blew it and me several feet, bending us both. But I really don’t want to make a new sign. To acknowledge I’ll be standing out in front of Town Hall long enough to justify the effort it will take to make a new sign.

Google says tin and aluminum are the appropriate gifts for a tenth anniversary. So ten years later, should we send the Iraqi people our tin foil and aluminum cookware? It’s got to be better than shock and awe. The destruction of their middle class, the disintegration of their families, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods.

We live far enough away so that our embarrassing failure is mostly an abstraction. Yes, Colin Powell lied to us at the United Nations. Yes, Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush lied. Yes, the press failed to find the truth.

But resilience comes easy for the mistake-makers. No weapons of mass destruction. No link to Osama Bin Laden. Oops. The only Americans who experience the consequences of our great deception are those we sent to fight and die, their friends and families who’ll live with the loss, the nightmares of those who can’t forget Fallujah, who will imagine an IED waiting on every road they travel. Those who will carry the Iraq War with them the way my older friends can never forget Vietnam. What we could have fixed here at home with the money wasted. The jobs created.

Speaking of Vietnam, the other day at Fuel, my dear Republican friend Anthony put down the Berkshire Beagle and turned to me. “Nixon committed treason,” he matter of factly announced. Now if you’ve spent the last few years talking each morning with Anthony, you’d know this was a positively mind-blowing moment. There should have been trumpets. Confetti from the ceiling. Thousands of “What did you say?”

All I managed was a double-take and a “huh?”

“Nixon committed treason.” Anthony told me that tape recordings made by President Lyndon Johnson reveal that while LBJ tried to negotiate peace with the Vietnamese, Nixon worked to sabotage those negotiations.

By 1968, the Vietnam War was wildly unpopular. Facing a war-weary nation, Johnson reluctantly acknowledged it would be difficult to win re-election. And so a scramble for the Democratic nomination ensued with Robert Kennedy, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, and Eugene McCarthy vying for the chance to take on Richard Nixon.

Members of Johnson’s staff had finally convinced him to negotiate an end to the war. And Johnson told the North and South Vietnamese he would end the bombing of the North in exchange for peace.

But Richard Nixon so desperately wanted the Presidency. And he was a shrewd enough politician to appreciate that peace, and an end to our national nightmare, would also guarantee victory to the Democrats and an end to his dream for power.

Through the wealthy and influential widow Anna Chennault, his Republican campaign advisor, Nixon secretly worked to undermine the President and our national interest. As the BBC puts it: “Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668

Johnson was furious. According to the BBC, “the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon. The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.”

But Johnson had gained this information by an illegal wiretap. The FBI had bugged the South Vietnamese Ambassador. And so Johnson decided not to press the matter. And just before the peace agreement was to be finalized, and before the election, Nixon got his wish and the South Vietnamese walked out of the talks.

Nixon won the election by less than 1% of the popular vote. Like Bush and Cheney, he had successfully lied to the American people. He had no plan or desire to end the war. Instead, he took the war to Laos and Cambodia. And because of him, 22,000 more Americans and countless Southeast Asians died. In 1973, we ended the war we could have ended in 1968.

I haven’t been watching the TV news. So I only know what Anthony has told me and the BBC article I found online just to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated our conversation. This morning Anthony told me he hasn’t seen anything about it on TV.

No national conversation about the fact our President committed treason. No outcry that Nixon’s lies and lust for power cost us 22,000 American lives. It’s probably too much to ask for a plaque at the Nixon Presidential Library.

Something tells me I better fix my sign.