On 14 Feb 2004 1630 -0800, hanoijanekerry@yahoo.ca (Hanoi Jane
Kerry) wrote:

>The real John Kerry. He and Fonda saved North Vietnam's bacon - the
>N. Vietnamese said after the war they were ready to conditionally
>surrender but decided to keep fighting thanks to their allies in


How Nixon plotted to prolong Vietnam

By MARTIN KETTLE in Washington

On the eve of his election in 1968 Richard Nixon secretly
conspired with the South Vietnamese government to wreck all-
party Vietnam peace talks as part of a deliberate effort to
prolong a conflict in which more than 20,000 Americans were
still to die, along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese and
Cambodians.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Ar...049515,00.html

The devastating new charge against Nixon, which mirrors long-
held suspicions among members of president Lyndon Johnson's
administration about the Republican leader's actions in the
autumn of 1968, is made by the authors of a new study of
Nixon's secret world, in the latest issue of Vanity Fair
magazine.

"The greatest honour history can bestow," reads the
inscription on Nixon's black granite tombstone in California,
"is the title of peacemaker." But if the charges by authors Anthony
Summers and Robbyn Swan are correct, Nixon better
deserves to be called a peace wrecker.

At the heart of the new account in Vanity Fair is Nixon's fear
that Vietnam peace efforts by president Johnson in the run-up
to the presidential election in November 1968 could wreck
Nixon's effort to beat Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic
candidate.

Nixon's response to Johnson's efforts was to use a go-between,
Anna Chennault, to urge South Vietnam's president, Nguyen van
Thieu to resist efforts to force his side to the peace table.

Nixon's efforts paid off spectacularly.

On October 31 Johnson ordered a total halt to the bombing of
North Vietnam, the precondition for getting the North and
their Vietcong allies to join the talks. Two days later, under
intense secret urgings from Nixon and his lieutenants, Thieu
announced his government would not take part. Less than a week
later Nixon was elected president with less than a one-point
margin in the popular vote over Humphrey.

The Vanity Fair article charges that Johnson knew what was
going on. Intelligence reports to the president told him that
Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, were playing politics
with the lives of US soldiers.

The authors write: "Had it been made public at the time it
would surely have destroyed Nixon's presidential hopes at one
stroke, and forever."

Johnson offered Humphrey the chance to go public about Nixon,
but Humphrey was afraid that the charges would be seen as
election dirty tricks. Once Nixon had won, Johnson again
contemplated revealing what he knew, but decided the national
interest precluded it.

In the weeks running up to the election, Nixon's public stance
was that, if elected, he would bring the war to an end more
effectively than Humphrey. He promised not to interfere with
pre-election peace efforts, pledging that neither he nor Agnew
"will destroy the chance of peace".

In reality, however, Nixon used his campaign manager, John
Mitchell, later his disgraced attorney-general, to use go-
betweens to encourage Thieu to believe he would get a better
deal under a Nixon administration and to boycott the putative
talks.

Nixon constantly denied that he was conspiring with Thieu
against the US government, but the release of previously
classified FBI files used by the authors shows this was
exactly what he was doing.

Chennault, Nixon's main go-between with the South Vietnamese,
was a right-wing Republican society hostess who was Chinese
born and lived in a newly constructed Washington apartment
complex - named the Watergate.

She was vice-chairman of the Republican election finance
committee and an inveterate lobbyist on behalf of right-wing
and pro-American Asian interests.

Chennault regularly passed messages to Mitchell and Nixon in
1968 and they urged her to put pressure on the South
Vietnamese leader to create delays and to refuse to take part
in the peace talks.

US embassy spy operations, including wiretaps of Thieu's
offices, revealed the Thieu-Nixon connection in October, and
Johnson was briefed about them.


>America - Fonda and Kerry. 20,000 more American boys died thanks to
>Kerry & Fonda's efforts which dragged out the war.
>
>http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2...4/130318.shtml
>
>Saturday, Feb. 14, 2004 12:58 p.m. EST
>Kerry Teamed Up With Fonda's 'F*** the Army' Cast
>
>When Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry teamed up with
>'Hanoi' Jane Fonda and actor Donald Sutherland for a September 1970
>anti-Vietnam War protest at Valley Forge, Pa., he was joining the same
>cast that Fonda had assembled earlier that year for her "F*** the
>Army" tour – a kind of reverse USO tour designed to undermine the
>morale of U.S. soldiers fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
>
>On Friday, Kerry suggested that he had no idea how radical Fonda would
>eventually become, telling radio host Don Imus that he thought her
>decision to turn against her country by traveling to Hanoi 18 months
>after Valley Forge was "terrible."
>
>But by the time Kerry agreed to follow the anti-American actress and
>Sutherland onto the same stage 34 years ago, Fonda's anti-military
>road show was already well known to both soldiers stationed in Vietnam
>and those who had returned home.
>
>In "Winter Soldier: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against
>the War," author Richard Stacewicz notes that when Fonda and Kerry
>addressed the Valley Forge rally – as depicted in the now infamous
>photo published by NewsMax on Monday – Fonda's military-bashing
>credentials were already well-established.
>
>"Fonda was becoming very well known at that point for her support of
>the GI movement. She and Donald Sutherland had been going around to GI
>bases for a while with the FTA show ["F *** the Army," a spoof of USO
>shows that was performed just outside bases]," writes Stacewicz.
>
>Fonda's role as a kind of reverse Bob Hope is confirmed in the Vietnam
>veterans history "Stolen Valor," by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley.
>
>"Fonda was involved in an organization called F.T.A., which we all
>knew stood for 'F--k the Army,'" Burkett, a Vietnam veteran himself,
>reports.
>
>Though both Fonda and Kerry are now both claiming their contact was
>minimal at Valley Forge and afterward, in fact, while the
>Massachusetts Democrat served as the VVAW's leading spokesman under
>the title "National Coordinator," Fonda was named the group's
>"Honorary National Coordinator," according to two histories of the
>VVAW, Andrew Hunt's "The Turning" and Gerald Nicosia's "Home to War."
>
>With her celebrity drawing power, Fonda became Kerry's leading
>fund-raiser at the VVAW, traveling the country to tout the group's
>mission to expose so-called U.S. war crimes in Vietnam.
>
>The effort culminated in the next Kerry-Fonda collaboration, the
>"Winter Soldier Investigation," which she financed and where Kerry and
>other members of the VVAW tried to elicit the most gruesome testimony
>possible from combat veterans. More than a few Winter Soldier
>witnesses later turned out to be complete impostors.
>
>Al Hubbard, VVAW's executive secretary, was also one of the principal
>organizers of the Winter Soldier event. His supposed combat heroism
>had earned him mythical status within the organization, writes author
>Hunt. He and Kerry would later go on to appear side-by side on NBC's
>"Meet the Press" to denounce the war.
>
>But as "Stolen Valor" author Burkett explained to the Wall Street
>Journal last month, his research showed that Hubbard had grossly
>inflated his combat credentials.
>
>"Hubbard claimed to be an Air Force pilot who was wounded in Vietnam.
>Truth: Hubbard was never a pilot, never an officer, never wounded and
>never assigned to Vietnam," said Burkett.
>
>Hubbard is also featured prominently in Kerry's 1971 book about the
>group's April 1971 Washington, D.C., protest, "The New Soldier," where
>he and Kerry appear in a photo together on the same stage as Ramsey
>Clark.
>
>In several calls last week to the Kerry campaign, NewsMax.com
>requested financial records from the Winter Soldier Investigation,
>including Kerry's tax returns from 1970 and expense records for the
>event, to determine to what extent – if any – he may have personally
>benefited from Fonda's largesse.
>
>The calls have not been returned.