Quote:Richard M. Nixon always denied it: to David Frost, to historians and to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had the strongest suspicions and the most cause for outrage at his successor’s rumored treachery. To them all, Nixon insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage” South Vietnam “not to come to the table,” Nixon told Johnson, in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.
Now we know Nixon lied. A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.
The 37th president has been enjoying a bit of a revival recently, as his achievements in foreign policy and the landmark domestic legislation he signed into law draw favorable comparisons to the presidents (and president-elect) that followed. A new, $15 million face-lift at the Nixon presidential library, while not burying the Watergate scandals, spotlights his considerable record of accomplishments.
Haldeman’s notes return us to the dark side. Amid the reappraisals, we must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia, may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.
Nixon had entered the fall campaign with a lead over Humphrey, but the gap was closing that October. Henry A. Kissinger, then an outside Republican adviser, had called, alerting Nixon that a deal was in the works: If Johnson would halt all bombing of North Vietnam, the Soviets pledged to have Hanoi engage in constructive talks to end a war that had already claimed 30,000 American lives.
Photo Anna Chennault, 1969.CreditIra Gay Sealy/The Denver Post, via Getty Images
But Nixon had a pipeline to Saigon, where the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, feared that Johnson would sell him out. If Thieu would stall the talks, Nixon could portray Johnson’s actions as a cheap political trick. The conduit was Anna Chennault, a Republican doyenne and Nixon fund-raiser, and a member of the pro-nationalist China lobby, with connections across Asia.
“! Keep Anna Chennault working on” South Vietnam, Haldeman scrawled, recording Nixon’s orders. “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.”
Nixon told Haldeman to have Rose Mary Woods, the candidate’s personal secretary, contact another nationalist Chinese figure — the businessman Louis Kung — and have him press Thieu as well. “Tell him hold firm,” Nixon said. [/url] H.R. Haldeman's Notes from Oct. 22, 1968 During a phone call on the night of Oct. 22, 1968, Richard M. Nixon told his closest aide (and future chief of staff) H.R. Haldeman to "monkey wrench" President Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to begin peace negotiations over the Vietnam War. OPEN DOCUMENT
[url=http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/haldeman-notes.html] Nixon also sought help from Chiang Kai-shek, the president of Taiwan. And he ordered Haldeman to have his vice-presidential candidate, Spiro T. Agnew, threaten the C.I.A. director, Richard Helms. Helms’s hopes of keeping his job under Nixon depended on his pliancy, Agnew was to say. “Tell him we want the truth — or he hasn’t got the job,” Nixon said.
Throughout his life, Nixon feared disclosure of this skulduggery. “I did nothing to undercut them,” he told Frost in their 1977 interviews.
“As far as Madame Chennault or any number of other people,” he added, “I did not authorize them and I had no knowledge of any contact with the South Vietnamese at that point, urging them not to.” Even after Watergate, he made it a point of character. “I couldn’t have done that in conscience.”
Nixon had cause to lie. His actions appear to violate federal law, which prohibits private citizens from trying to “defeat the measures of the United States.” His lawyers fought throughout Nixon’s life to keep the records of the 1968 campaign private. The broad outline of “the Chennault affair” would dribble out over the years. But the lack of evidence of Nixon’s direct involvement gave pause to historians and afforded his loyalists a defense.
Time has yielded Nixon’s secrets. Haldeman’s notes were opened quietly at the presidential library in 2007, where I came upon them in my research for a biography of the former president. They contain other gems, like Haldeman’s notations of a promise, made by Nixon to Southern Republicans, that he would retreat on civil rights and “lay off pro-Negro crap” if elected president. There are notes from Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, in which he and his aides discuss the need to wiretap political foes.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that, absent Nixon, talks would have proceeded, let alone ended the war. But Johnson and his advisers, at least, believed in their mission and its prospects for success.
When Johnson got word of Nixon’s meddling, he ordered the F.B.I. to track Chennault’s movements. She “contacted Vietnam Ambassador Bui Diem,” one report from the surveillance noted, “and advised him that she had received a message from her boss … to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was … ‘Hold on. We are gonna win. … Please tell your boss to hold on.’ ”
In a conversation with the Republican senator Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, Johnson lashed out at Nixon. “I’m reading their hand, Everett,” Johnson told his old friend. “This is treason.”
“I know,” Dirksen said mournfully.
Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the “absolute proof,” as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement.
Nixon was elected president the next day.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
Mad props to Bubba, for making it legal to lie under oath !
I already loved him for the presidential decree of a hummer not qualifying as sexual relations.
Maybe if he had run as VP, his old lady would have won ?
Mad props to Bubba, for making it legal to lie under oath !
I already loved him for the presidential decree of a hummer not qualifying as sexual relations.
Maybe if he had run as VP, his old lady would have won ?
None compare to Nixon. I still get goosebumps all over when I recall his statement that we would "bomb Laos back to the Stone Age"! And the way he stood up for Lt. Calley after the My Lai Massacre! I mean, just WOW!. What a man!!!
Mad props to Bubba, for making it legal to lie under oath !
I already loved him for the presidential decree of a hummer not qualifying as sexual relations.
Maybe if he had run as VP, his old lady would have won ?
Except he didn't.
And at least he went under oath. *cough*Bush/Cheney*cough*
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
(01-03-2017, 09:27 AM)GMDino Wrote: Except he didn't.
And at least he went under oath. *cough*Bush/Cheney*cough*
He went under oath because he was a defendant in a lawsuit.
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”-Thurgood Marshall
(01-03-2017, 02:46 PM)Rotobeast Wrote: You're right.
I contradicted myself.
If a hummer is not sexual relations, then he did not lie under oath.
I cannot have both.
I'll go with the hummer.
I mentioned in another thread where Clinton got a loophole (the definition he interpreted as him not having actions meant he wasn't having sexual relations). It would have been a lot different if people didn't giggle over words like fellatio. Because if he'd been asked if he received fellatio from her, then he would have either lied or been transparent.
(01-03-2017, 05:15 PM)Benton Wrote: I mentioned in another thread where Clinton got a loophole (the definition he interpreted as him not having actions meant he wasn't having sexual relations). It would have been a lot different if people didn't giggle over words like fellatio. Because if he'd been asked if he received fellatio from her, then he would have either lied or been transparent.
Good point !
I guess my thoughts would wonder if they would afford the same loophole to someone on statutory rape charges ?
Would the adult be charged with perjury, if they first said they did not act sexually toward the minor, then admit to receiving sex from the minor ?
As always, the outcomes of such things tend to depend of the financial level of the defendant, but my brains still drifts.
(01-03-2017, 05:15 PM)Benton Wrote: I mentioned in another thread where Clinton got a loophole (the definition he interpreted as him not having actions meant he wasn't having sexual relations). It would have been a lot different if people didn't giggle over words like fellatio. Because if he'd been asked if he received fellatio from her, then he would have either lied or been transparent.
Considering he was essentially disbarred (another loophole!) for lying under oath I don't think he found much of one.
(01-03-2017, 05:15 PM)Benton Wrote: I mentioned in another thread where Clinton got a loophole (the definition he interpreted as him not having actions meant he wasn't having sexual relations). It would have been a lot different if people didn't giggle over words like fellatio. Because if he'd been asked if he received fellatio from her, then he would have either lied or been transparent.
You don't really get to make up your own definitions. Hell if you have to be doing something active, then my wife hasn't had sexual relations in 15 years. Well with me anyway.
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”-Thurgood Marshall
(01-03-2017, 06:37 PM)michaelsean Wrote: You don't really get to make up your own definitions. Hell if you have to be doing something active, then my wife hasn't had sexual relations in 15 years. Well with me anyway.
Quote:When Bill Clinton gave his deposition in the Paula Jones case, he said he had never had "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky. But Lewinsky has reportedly testified to a number of acts that most people think of as sex. Can both statements somehow be true? Is it possible that the two of them had intimate contact, yet Clinton still did not perjure himself? In the intricate world of the law, a world of hairsplitting distinctions where the President is famously at home, it just may be so. Here's why.
At Clinton's deposition, Jones' legal team asked Judge Susan Webber Wright to approve a very precise, three-part definition of sexual relations. Clinton's attorney Robert Bennett objected to the whole definition, but to the last two parts especially, as being too broad. Wright agreed to disallow parts 2 and 3, leaving only the first, narrowest definition of sex in place.
With that, Clinton may have been given the room to offer a technically "true" denial to the question of whether he had sex with Lewinsky--even if she happened to perform fellatio on him. The truncated definition characterizes sex in terms of a checklist of body parts, including the genitals, breast and thigh. Oral sex would not necessarily require the President to touch anything on Lewinsky that appears on that list. Strange as it may sound, under one reading of the definition, Lewinsky could have been having sex with him (because she was "touching" the President's genitals) while at the same moment, he was not having sex with her. (At the deposition, Clinton wasn't asked if she had sexual relations with him, just if he had them with her.) Isn't the law a wonderfully intricate device?
There are problems with the legalistic defense. For one thing, if Clinton and Lewinsky did have oral sex, is it really likely that he did not touch any body parts mentioned in the Jones definition? (Lewinsky has testified that Clinton fondled her.) And because that definition says that a person engages in sex if he or she "causes" contact with the genitals of "any person," it could be argued that Clinton caused Lewinsky's contact with his, even if he did not otherwise touch her. He could reply that she was the cause, or at least the active partner, while he was merely the passive receiver, but that makes him seem like either an implausibly shrinking violet or a very cool customer. Beyond all that, Lewinsky's secret grand-jury testimony may simply be so detailed and explicit that it leaves no room for loopholes.
Even if the word-wiggle keeps Clinton out of the perjury trap, it won't help him politically because it doesn't account for his Jan. 26 televised insistence that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." When he spoke before the cameras, the lawyerly definition of sex wasn't in force. And in a recent TIME/CNN poll, 87% of those questioned said that oral sex was, well, sex. Hiding behind the ultimate tortuous legalism could help the President get through his testimony, but it won't pass the laugh test with the American people--which is why Clinton won't be parsing the meaning of "sexual relations" in any public statements. --By Richard Lacayo.
I mean I feel he was lying...but he was also being very lawyery.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
I mean I feel he was lying...but he was also being very lawyery.
He was attempting to be very lawyery afterwards. When he testified he straight out lied thinking nobody could prove otherwise.
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”-Thurgood Marshall
(01-04-2017, 12:34 PM)michaelsean Wrote: He was attempting to be very lawyery afterwards. When he testified he straight out lied thinking nobody could prove otherwise.
He testified using the definition agreed to by the court and the lawyers.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
(01-04-2017, 12:38 PM)GMDino Wrote: He testified using the definition agreed to by the court and the lawyers.
So what was he disbarred for?
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”-Thurgood Marshall
Quote:While Clinton can no longer practice law in front of the highest court, it's not accurate to say that he was disbarred from either the Supreme Court or from practicing law in Arkansas. Clinton's license was suspended in Arkansas, but he was not disbarred, and while Clinton did face the possibility of being barred from arguing in front the U.S. Supreme Court, he resigned before the ruling was handed down.
On his last day in office in 2001, Clinton agreed to a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law license in order to head off any criminal charges for lying under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky. Clinton has been eligible to seek reinstatement of his license since 2006, but as of 2013 he had not applied to do so.
Shortly after Clinton's license was suspended in Arkansas, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended Clinton from presenting cases in front of the highest court (which he had never done) and gave him 40 days to contest his disbarment (which Clinton did not do). Instead, he resigned from the Supreme Court bar
Quote:The US supreme court yesterday issued an order disbarring former president Bill Clinton from practising law before the high court. The ruling is seen as marking the official end of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The ruling struck a jarring note in the current mood of national unity. Mr Clinton has been praised for the supportive role he has been playing and the way he has thrown his political weight behind President George Bush.
The court did not explain its reasons for the disbarment, although such a decision usually follows disbarment in a lower court. In April, Mr Clinton's Arkansas law licence was suspended for five years and he was given a $25,000 fine.
...
Mr Clinton has not practised law since 1983; his main income now is from speech-making and the advance for his proposed memoirs.
The original disbarment lawsuit was brought by a professional conduct committee of the Arkansas supreme court in the wake of the Lewinsky revelations and Mr Clinton's admission that he lied to the investigation. The committee had also sought to disbar the ex-president for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.
Quote:He admitted giving misleading answers to Paula Jones' lawyers when they tried to grill him about Lewinsky in a 1998 deposition.
Clinton denied he was having sexual relations with the White House intern, figuring that because the affair was long over, and because they did not engage in intercourse, he was not technically lying. The evasions ultimately led to his impeachment by the House on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
"I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish that goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false," Clinton said.
But he went out parsing until the end, admitting to giving "false" answers - but not to lying.
He lied before, during the Paula Jones investigation.
Nonetheless, as I have said, he should have stepped down.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
Yeah I used the wrong word. I knew it wasn't permanent.
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”-Thurgood Marshall
(01-04-2017, 01:21 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Yeah I used the wrong word. I knew it wasn't permanent.
Don't worry, he was waiting for someone to make that mistake so he could wag it in their faces. It's why he didn't respond to my pointing out essentially the same thing several posts before. As for the point itself, it's quite like Nixon resigning rather than being impeached. It's not fooling anyone with a brain in their head and we all know the outcome if he hadn't. Kind of ironic this point came up in a thread about Nixon eh?
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