The Vietnam War and Its Impact - Tapes, blackmail, and peace talks



The Watergate tapes revealed that in January 1973, when the Democratic-controlled Congress was investigating the Watergate break-in, Nixon devised a bizarre scheme of pressuring former President Lyndon Johnson to call his Democrat friends in Congress and request that they stop the Watergate investigation. Nixon threatened Johnson with a public disclosure that Johnson had bugged the Nixon and Agnew planes and campaign offices during the 1968 campaign, thus embarrassing Johnson and also proving that Nixon was not the first to illegally wiretap those suspected of leaking information. On a 9 January 1973 tape, Nixon says, "LBJ could turn off the whole Congressional investigation." But Johnson trumped Nixon by threatening to release the complete National Security Agency (NSA) Chennault files showing that the Nixon campaign had "illegally interfered with the Paris peace talks by convincing Saigon to stay away until after Nixon came to office."



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