A low point in last year's presidential campaign came when the New York Post published a front-page story claiming that in his visit to Baghdad, Barack Obama had engaged in secret negotiations with the Iraqi government to undermine the Bush administration's foreign policy. The story was wildly implausible—these “negotiations” would have occurred before a bipartisan Senate delegation and U.S. diplomats—and quickly disproved.
The Post allegations recalled an event from the 1968 presidential election, in which representatives from the presidential candidate of the party out of power did seek political advantage by involving themselves in diplomatic negotiations. The story of Richard Nixon's surreptitious contacts with the South Vietnamese government is quite well-known: fearful that a last-second peace deal would give Hubert Humphrey the election, Nixon agents—chiefly Anna Chennault—reached out to the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen van Thieu. The message: a peace settlement under a Nixon presidency would be more favorable to the South Vietnamese. The Paris peace talks may very well have collapsed without this Nixonian intervention, but South Vietnamese resistance ensured the doom of the negotiations. While it remains unclear whether Nixon personally directed the Chennault diplomacy, he clearly was aware of it by late October 1968, and seems to have done nothing to repudiate Chennault's toxic message.
The recently released batch of LBJ tapes (from the last eight months of 1968) provide much more detail about the political effects of Nixon's operation. After Johnson privately deemed Nixon's actions as treasonous, an extraordinary call occurred between Johnson and Nixon, in which Nixon did enough to satisfy the President's concerns to prevent Johnson from going public about the Chennault actions.
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