but then less than a week before the election, it all went horribly wrong for richard nixon, because less than a week before election, on halloween night, 1968, the democratic president, lbj, went on tv in a surprise nationally televised address. he made a surprise announcement that peace was at hand. the communist side, the vietnamese side was going to be make concessions at peace talks. the south vietnamese were going to agree to a deal. peace was at hand. the terms were all set. peace was at hand. in recognition of the fact that peace was about to be declared, the united states would step back right away and stop all military operations in vehement. lbj said that on thursday night. the election was going to be tuesday. turns out the democrats know how to end this war. that was bad news for richard nixon, but good news for the
in 2013, what are we supposed to do with that information? lbj is dead, nixon is dead, george wallace is dead. 15,000 americans are dead who otherwise would not have been. how does this get made right? it cannot get made right because the people of this decision cannot be brought back from the dead. you also can t get revenge. you can t indict nixon s ghost. but you can refuse to let him get away with it again.
deal fell through because a candidate who wanted there not to be peace before the election intervened to make one sidewalk away. now, why didn t lbj say anything publicly? this is right before the election. can you imagine how the country would have reacted to that? this is a war the whole country was against. it was going to be over except candidate nixon intervened to undo the peace deal and keep the war going? can you imagine how angry the american public would have been. but lbj did not say anything publicly at the time because he thought he couldn t. the reason he thought he couldn t is the way he found out what nixon had done. the fbi illegally wire-tapped the phones of the south vietnamese ambassador. we couldn t let anybody know that we were illegally listening into the ambassador s phone lines so they couldn t let anybody know what they had heard. so nixon got away with it. and the october surprise. the halloween night surprise
can you imagine how angry the american public would have been. but lbj did not say anything publicly at the time because he thought he couldn t. the reason he thought he couldn t is the way he found out what nixon had done. the fbi illegally wire-tapped the phones of the south vietnamese ambassador. we couldn t let anybody know that we were illegally listening into the ambassador s phone lines so they couldn t let anybody know what they had heard. so nixon got away with it. and the october surprise. the halloween night surprise that the war was ending right before the election, that october surprise ended up getting undone. anybody who was anti-war in the country had no reason to vote for a democrat. the racist right wing voted peeled off the the vote on the other side. and yes, nixon won. he got by barely.
both, he s been doing it through rather subterranean sources here, and he has been saying to the allies that you re going to get sold out. you better not give away your liberty just a few hours before i can preserve it for you. mrs. chennault is contacting their ambassador. this is not guess work. she s young and attractive. she s a pretty good-looking girl. she s around town, and she is warning them to not get pulled in on this johnson move. president lyndon johnson, 1968, saturday morning, november 1st, explaining to senator richard russell what had gone wrong with this peace deal that everybody thought was going to end the war. lbj was so sure this was going to end the war that he went on tv thursday night. the reason peace did not happen, what he was explaining on the phone, is that the republican nominee for president that year, richard nixon, had intervened in the peace talks to blow them up. he used an intermediary who was involved in the talks to approach the south vietnamese