Pegged to Presidents’ Day weekend – and the upcoming half-century anniversary of many LBJ accomplishments – the article cites a recent CNN/ORC poll asking Americans how they rated the last nine presidents and putting Johnson at number seven behind Jimmy Carter and ahead of only George W. Bush and Richard Nixon.
But what isn’t addressed in the article is how Americans might have assessed Johnson if his plan for ending the Vietnam War in 1968 had not been sabotaged by Nixon’s presidential campaign, a reality now well established by documents and tape-recordings declassified by the National Archives but still outside the frame of most mainstream journalists and ignored by conventional historians.
This new history on Nixon’s “treason” also changes our understanding of the Watergate scandal, which began to take shape nearly three years later. The fact that Johnson in January 1969 secretly ordered Rostow to take with him the file on Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage – what Rostow then labeled “The ‘X’ Envelope” – clarifies the longstanding mystery of why Nixon launched his “Plumbers” operation in June 1971, thus setting in motion what would become the Watergate scandal.
In June 1971, after U.S. newspapers began publishing Daniel Ellsberg’s leaked Pentagon Papers which catalogued mostly Democratic lies about Vietnam through 1967, Nixon immediately recognized his own vulnerability to a possible sequel if the missing file on his 1968 treachery ever surfaced.
After entering the White House in 1969, Nixon was told by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about the existence of the file but a search by top aides, Henry Kissinger and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, failed to locate it. So, on June 17, 1971, as the Pentagon Papers dominated the front pages of American newspapers, Nixon ordered a redoubling of the search for the missing 1968 file, even to the point of authorizing a break-in at the Brookings Institution where Nixon thought the file might be.
