I’m not going to bury the lede here.
Christopher Hitchens continues:
The chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger.
H.R. Haldeman
I can already hear the guardians of consensus scraping their blunted quills to describe this as a "conspiracy theory."
I happily accept the challenge. Let us take, first, the White House journal of that renowned conspirator (and theorist of conspiracy) H.R. Haldeman, published in May 1994.
I choose to start with this for two reasons. First, because, on the logical inference of "evidence against interest," it is improbable that Mr. Haldeman would supply evidence of his knowledge of a crime unless he was (posthumously) telling the truth.
John Dean
Second, because it is possible to trace back each of his entries to its origin in other documented sources. In January 1973, the Nixon-Kissinger administration-for which Mr. Haldeman took the minutes-was heavily engaged on two fronts.
In Paris, Henry Kissinger was striving to negotiate "peace with honor" in Vietnam.
In Washington, DC, the web of evidence against the Watergate burglars and buggers was beginning to tighten.
On 8 January 1973, Haldeman records: John Dean called to report on the Watergate trials, says that if we can prove in any way by hard evidence that our [campaign] plane was bugged in '68, he thinks that we could use that as a basis to say we're going to force Congress to go back and investigate '68 as well as '72, and thus turn them off.
Attorney General John Mitchell
Three days later, on 11 January 1973, Haldeman hears from Nixon (“The P," as the Diaries call him): On the Watergate question, “he wanted me to talk to [Attorney General John] Mitchell and have him find out from [Deke] De Loach [of the FBI] if the guy who did the bugging on us in 1968 is still at the FBI, and then [FBI acting director Patrick] Gray should nail him with a lie detector and get it settled, which would give us the evidence we need.
“He also thinks I ought to move with George Christian [President Johnson's former press secretary, then working with Democrats for Nixon], get LBJ to use his influence to turn off the Hill investigation with Califano, Hubert, and so on. Later in the day, he decided that wasn't such a good idea, and told me not to do it, which I fortunately hadn't done.”
President Thieu
On the same day, Haldeman reports Henry Kissinger calling excitedly from Paris, saying “he'll do the signing in Paris rather than Hanoi, which is the key thing." He speaks also of getting South Vietnam's President Thieu to “go along."
On the following day: The P [Haldemann] also got back on the Watergate thing today, making the point that I should talk to Connally about the Johnson bugging process to get his judgment as to how to handle it.
He wonders if we shouldn't just have Andreas go in and scare Hubert. The problem in going at LBJ is how he'd react, and we need to find out from De Loach who did it, and then run a lie detector on him.
De Loach
I talked to Mitchell on the phone on this subject and he said De Loach had told him he was up to date on the thing because he had a call from Texas.
A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and LBJ got very hot and called Deke [De Loach] and said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release [deleted material–national security], saying that our side was asking that certain things be done.
LBJ
By our side, I assume he means the Nixon campaign organization. De Loach took this as a direct threat from Johnson....
As he recalls it, bugging was requested on the planes, but was turned down, and all they did was check the phone calls, and put a tap on the Dragon Lady [Mrs. Anna Chennault].
Mrs. Anna Chennault
This bureaucratic prose may be hard to read, but it needs no cipher to decode itself. Under intense pressure about the bugging of the Watergate building, Nixon instructed his chief of staff Haldeman, and his FBI contact Deke De Loach, to unmask the bugging to which his own campaign had been subjected in 1968.
He also sounded out former President Johnson, through former senior Democrats like Governor John Connally, to gauge what his reaction to the disclosure might be.
The aim was to show that "everybody does it." (By another bipartisan paradox, in Washington the slogan “they all do it" is used as a slogan for the defense rather than, as one might hope, for the prosecution.)
However, a problem presented itself at once. How to reveal the 1968 bugging without at the same time revealing what that bugging had been about?
Hence the second thoughts ("that wasn't such a good idea..."). In his excellent introduction to The Haldeman Diaries, Nixon's biographer Professor Stephen Ambrose characterizes the 1973 approach to Lyndon Johnson as "prospective blackmail," designed to exert backstairs pressure to close down a congressional inquiry. But he also suggests that Johnson, himself no pushover, had some blackmail ammunition of his own.
As Professor Ambrose phrases it, the Haldeman Diaries had been vetted by the National Security Council (NSC), and the bracketed deletion cited above is "the only place in the book where an example is given of a deletion by the NSC during the Carter administration.
Eight days later Nixon was inaugurated for his second term. Ten days later Johnson died of a heart attack. What Johnson had on Nixon I suppose we'll never know."