Don't forget the old "October Surprise" ..feel free to contribute

October surprise of 1968

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/111300a.html

From:

November 13, 2000

Who Should Concede?
The Secret History of Modern U.S. Politics
By Robert Parry

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The Vietnam War was raging and was creating deep divisions within the Democratic Party. In October 1968, President Lyndon Johnson was maneuvering to achieve the framework for a peace settlement with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong through negotiations in Paris.

At the time, 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone, and civil strife was tearing the United States apart. Nixon feared that a pre-election peace agreement could catapult Humphrey to victory.

According to now overwhelming evidence, the Nixon campaign dispatched Anna Chenault, an anti-communist Chinese leader, to carry messages to the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen van Thieu. The messages advised Thieu that a Nixon presidency would give him a more favorable result.

Journalist Seymour Hersh described the initiative sketchily in his biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power. Hersh reported that U.S. intelligence “agencies had caught on that Chennault was the go-between between Nixon and his people and President Thieu in Saigon. … The idea was to bring things to a stop in Paris and prevent any show of progress.”

In her own autobiography, The Education of Anna, Chennault acknowledged that she was the courier. She quoted Nixon aide John Mitchell as calling her a few days before the 1968 election and telling her: “I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you made that clear to them.”

Reporter Daniel Schorr added fresh details in The Washington Post’s Outlook section . Schorr cited decoded cables that U.S. intelligence had intercepted from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington.

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```````````````Nixon and Kissinger

http://www3.sympatico.ca/ian.g.mason/Robert_Dallek.htm

Nixon and Kissinger came together, appropriately enough, over a subterfuge. As the 1968 presidential election approached, Nixon desperately wanted inside information on the progress of the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam, fearing a peace agreement that would hand the election to Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey. Kissinger had a contact on the negotiating team in Paris, and secretly passed updates to the Republican candidate’s campaign. In an act of stunning cynicism, Nixon then put pressure on the government of South Vietnam to avoid the peace talks. There would be no October surprise for Richard Nixon.
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http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:3asKXYmXu1cJ:www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/dont_quote_me/documents/00671039.htm+1968+kissinger+humphrey&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Kissinger, a Democrat, was working as a low-level functionary for the Johnson White House, assisting with peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris. Kissinger leaked word to the Nixon campaign that Lyndon Johnson was considering a last-minute bombing halt to help the presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey. Nixon’s minions, in turn, made use of that intelligence to pass messages to the South Vietnamese to hang tough, telling them they would get a better deal from Nixon than they would from Humphrey. Sadly, it worked — and, as Hitchens writes, “four years later the Nixon Administration tried to conclude the war on the same terms that had been offered in Paris. . . . n those intervening years some 20,000 Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. Lost them, that is to say, even more pointlessly than had those slain up to that point.”
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