ON JUNE 19, 1972, two days after the Watergate break-in, an employee of the Safemasters Company, armed with a high-powered drill and accompanied by a Secret Service agent, rushed to Room 522 in the Executive Office Building. There, they bored open the safe of an obscure Nixon White House consultant named E. Howard Hunt. A 20-year veteran of Central Intelligence Agency covert operations and a prolific spy novel author, Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy, had planned the ill-fated break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters. What the authorities found inside Hunt’s safe–a treasure chest of Cold War espionage artifacts–astonished them: a .25-caliber automatic Colt revolver; electronic eavesdropping equipment; and hundreds of copies of old State Department cables chronicling events leading up to the November 1963 coup d’état against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, which climaxed in the bloody murder of Diem and his brother. Investigators also found two forgeries of similar cables, implicating the administration of President John F. Kennedy–himself slain three weeks after Diem–in the assassination of Kennedy’s Saigon counterpart.
When word of Howard Hunt’s forged Diem cables first surfaced in 1973, they seized the imagination of Richard Nixon’s critics. The disingenuous Diem cables supposedly exemplified the craving of Nixon and his men not just to win an election and cover up their crimes, but to rewrite, in Orwellian fashion, the history of the Vietnam War–to tamper with our national memory itself. One unfriendly author, Fawn M. Brodie, in her 1981 psychobiography “Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character,” went even further, touting the Diem cables as “essential in illuminating the theme of fratricide in Nixon’s life. . . . The pains to which Nixon went to try to prove that John Kennedy connived in the assassination of the brothers Diem would seem to have been one more attempt to say, ‘Someone else is guilty, not I.'”
Now, three decades later, comes evidence that Nixon and Hunt need hardly have resorted to forgery to prove their point about Kennedy, Diem, and America’s trajectory in Southeast Asia. Ironically, the evidence was preserved on secret White House tapes–but not Richard Nixon’s.
On February 28, 2003, the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas released 30 hours of recordings made surreptitiously by President Lyndon B. Johnson in early 1966. The few news organizations that reported on the tapes played up perceived similarities between LBJ and the next Texan to occupy the Oval Office, George W. Bush: Both men grumbled about coverage of their war conduct, and both, it turns out, expressed skepticism about the usefulness of the United Nations in resolving international crises. We also got further insight into Johnson’s familiar torment over his failure of leadership in Vietnam (“I can’t get out, I just can’t be the architect of surrender”).
Yet the LBJ tapes also contained a bombshell that went unnoticed. Johnson himself believed what Richard Nixon always suspected: that the Kennedy White House did not merely tolerate or encourage the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem, but organized and executed it.
Johnson left little doubt about this when, in a February 1, 1966, call to Senator Eugene McCarthy, he complained about the Kennedy administration and its left-wing allies in the Senate, who had supported Kennedy’s entrance into the war but not Johnson’s continuance of it. “They started on me with Diem, you remember,” Johnson pointedly told McCarthy, recalling the words of the coup’s proponents. “‘He was corrupt and he ought to be killed.’ So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and assassinated him. Now, we’ve really had no political stability [in South Vietnam] since then.”
Minutes later, in a call to General Maxwell D. Taylor, until recently America’s ambassador to South Vietnam, LBJ expounded on his recollection, and the general echoed it. “They started out and said, ‘We got to kill Diem, because he’s no damn good. Let’s, let’s knock him off.’ And we did,” Johnson told Taylor. “Yeah, that’s where it all started,” the general agreed. “That’s exactly where it started!” Johnson replied, his anger palpable. “And I just pled with them at the time, ‘Please, don’t do it.’ But that’s where it started. And they knocked him off.”
LBJ’s beyond-the-grave words invite legitimate revisionism. As recently as 1997, Newsweek reported flatly, in an article by Evan Thomas and Lucy Shackelford on new Nixon tape releases: “In fact, Kennedy encouraged Diem’s overthrow but not his murder.” A survey of recent biographies of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson–including Richard Reeves’s acclaimed “President Kennedy: Profile of Power” (1993); Michael Beschloss’s two collections of previous LBJ tape releases, “Taking Charge” (1997) and “Reaching for Glory” (2001); Irwin and Debi Unger’s 592-page “LBJ: A Life” (1999); the best-selling “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963” by Robert Dallek, and Howard Jones’s “Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War,” both released this year–finds none of them advancing the Kennedy-Diem story much beyond what the Pentagon Papers revealed back in 1971: that JFK encouraged the coup against Diem, and may or may not have anticipated his murder. Even Seymour Hersh’s highly critical “The Dark Side of Camelot” (1998) relied on a recent interview with Lucien Conein to establish that JFK must have known Diem would perish in the coup; but the CIA veteran claimed otherwise to at least one previous author, and Hersh presented no direct evidence beyond Conein’s deductive account. The new LBJ tapes offer a darker view of Camelot.
In fairness to Kennedy and his defenders, Lyndon Johnson did not use his predecessor’s name in his charges about Diem’s murder. However, when Johnson said “we killed him, we all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and assassinated him,” LBJ was referring to a time when he served as the duly elected vice president under Kennedy. What else could he have meant but to implicate Kennedy? To imagine that such bold steps as the overthrow and assassination of a head of state whom America was militarily supporting would be undertaken without the knowledge of the commander in chief, yet with the knowledge of his vice president, is to indulge in the kind of fantasizing about a “rogue government” that responsible scholars discourage when the subject is Kennedy’s own assassination.
And, in fairness to Nixon’s critics, that he and Howard Hunt may have been correct about the Kennedy administration’s culpability in the assassination of President Diem does not in any way justify Hunt’s effort to forge cables proving as much. Nonetheless, our history of the Vietnam era must, as Nixon and Hunt wished, be revised accordingly. Reached at his home outside Miami, Hunt, now 84 but still sharp and combative, welcomed–and said he felt somewhat vindicated by–the release of the Johnson tapes. “[My] effort failed in a sense, and led in some ways to Watergate and to Nixon’s defenestration. That would not have taken place if these tapes were made public at the time they were recorded,” Hunt said. “They help in clarifying a lot of misapprehensions.”
James Rosen is a Fox News White House correspondent. His book, “The Strong Man: John Mitchell, Nixon and Watergate,” will be published by Doubleday next year.
