Richard Nixon

The LBJ Library's Chennault material and presidential recordings exposed contacts between Nixon's 1968 campaign and South Vietnamese officials as Johnson tried to open peace talks. They challenged accounts that treated Nixon as an uninvolved observer of Saigon's refusal to participate. Nixon denied involvement, and historians still debate the chain of instructions and the effect on South Vietnamese decisions. Those officials had their own interests: documentary evidence of campaign contacts does not prove that a peace agreement would otherwise have followed.