-Caveat Lector-
November 13, 2000
Who Should Concede?
The Secret History of Modern U.S. Politics
By Robert Parry
Op-ed columns in major American newspapers are calling for Vice
President Al
Gore to accept defeat and concede, even though he seems to have
won the
nationwide popular vote by about 200,000 and was the apparent
choice of a
plurality of Florida voters though some miscast their votes.
�Do the Right Thing, Mr. Gore,� read the headline of an article
by former Sen. Bob Dole on
The Washington Post�s opinion page on Nov. 11.
�It was a close election, but it�s over,� wrote Dole about the
Nov. 7 presidential vote. �I urge
Al Gore to put his country�s agenda ahead of his agenda; to put
the people�s interests
before his personal interests.�
Dole, the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, cited the
examples of Richard Nixon
conceding defeat in 1960 and Gerald Ford conceding in 1976.
Dole described Ford as
rebuffing calls from aides who felt �a few changed votes in a
couple of key states� would
have elected Ford.
But the Ford example was not parallel to the present situation.
What Dole left out of the
article was that Jimmy Carter defeated Ford by 1.7 million
votes nationwide. Even if Ford
could have reversed enough votes in a few states to get the
Electoral College, he would
have won by defying the popular will.
The same was true of Nixon, though the national news media
seems clueless about the real
history.
On Nov. 10, The New York Times highlighted on its op-ed page
the supposed example of
Nixon�s gracious acceptance of defeat in 1960, despite
questions of voting irregularities by
John F. Kennedy's campaign in Illinois and Texas.
�Whatever else he was, Nixon was a patriot,� wrote author
Richard Reeves. �He understood
what recounts and lawsuits and depositions carried out over
months � even years � would
do to the nation.�
Though the stories of Nixon�s graceful exit have taken on the
color of history from constant
retelling, they do not comport with the facts either.
Indeed, contrary to the image of Republicans meekly accepting
the 1960 results, the GOP
sought recounts in 11 states and mounted aggressive legal
challenges in some. The
Eisenhower administration even launched criminal
investigations, though without much
result.
[For details, see two articles about the myth of Nixon�s
graceful exit at Slate and Salon.com]
Yet, beyond Nixon�s Electoral College loss, he too was the
loser in the popular vote which
Kennedy won by about 118,000 ballots.
While these cherished tales of political statesmanship by Nixon
and Ford may seem
innocuous enough, they are feeding today�s resentment by
Republicans who are
demanding that Al Gore step aside and let Texas Gov. George W.
Bush win.
The thinking goes that it�s the Democrats� turn to do �what�s
right for the country.�
Beyond the faulty history of graceful exits and the GOP grudges
that the myths have
nurtured, the major news media is missing an even larger and
more important reality.
For the past four decades, the Republicans have built a record
of dirty tricks and October
Surprises in presidential contests. And typically, it is the
Democrats who stay silent after
learning of the schemes � to avert constitutional crises and
avoid public disillusionment with
the political process.
Nixon's Role
Nixon appears to have been the modern-day father of the October
Surprise strategy, the
manipulation of some major event in the campaign�s waning days
to stampede voters in one
direction or another.
In 1960, then-Vice President Nixon saw communist Cuba as both a
threat to his election
and a possible boon. He hoped that the CIA could overthrow � or
assassinate � Cuban
leader Fidel Castro in the weeks before the election.
�The agency called the scheme Operation Pluto, after the Roman
god of the dead,� wrote
Anthony Summers in his new biography of Nixon, The Arrogance of
Power. �To Nixon,
Pluto was a potential stepping-stone to the goal that motivated
him more than the overthrow
of any Caribbean dictator, the presidency.
"Thomas McCoy, a CIA man offered an assignment on the project,
was told there was
�substantial pressure coming from the White House to get the
thing settled by October of
1960, so that this would not be an issue that Nixon had to deal
with in the presidential
campaign�.�
Nixon also recognized how Castro�s ouster could boost his
campaign. �He told his press
aide, Herb Klein, that the toppling of Castro would be �a real
trump card',� Summers wrote.
He quoted Klein as saying that Nixon �wanted it to occur in
October, before the election.�
Because of problems in execution, the CIA plot failed. Castro
remained in power and
Kennedy eked out a narrow victory.
This concept of a well-timed international event did not leave
Nixon�s thinking, however. In
1968, Nixon again secured the Republican nomination and again
found himself locked in a
close race, this time with Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
The Vietnam War was raging and was creating deep divisions
within the Democratic Party.
In October 1968, President Lyndon Johnson was maneuvering to
achieve the framework for
a peace settlement with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong through
negotiations in Paris.
At the time, 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone,
and civil strife was tearing the
United States apart. Nixon feared that a pre-election peace
agreement could catapult
Humphrey to victory.
According to now overwhelming evidence, the Nixon campaign
dispatched Anna Chenault,
an anti-communist Chinese leader, to carry messages to the
South Vietnamese
government of Nguyen van Thieu. The messages advised Thieu that
a Nixon presidency
would give him a more favorable result.
Journalist Seymour Hersh described the initiative sketchily in
his biography of Henry
Kissinger, The Price of Power. Hersh reported that U.S.
intelligence �agencies had caught
on that Chennault was the go-between between Nixon and his
people and President Thieu
in Saigon. � The idea was to bring things to a stop in Paris
and prevent any show of
progress.�
In her own autobiography, The Education of Anna, Chennault
acknowledged that she was
the courier. She quoted Nixon aide John Mitchell as calling her
a few days before the 1968
election and telling her: �I�m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon.
It�s very important that our
Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I
hope you made that clear to
them.�
Reporter Daniel Schorr added fresh details in The Washington
Post�s Outlook section
[May 28, 1995]. Schorr cited decoded cables that U.S.
intelligence had intercepted from the
South Vietnamese embassy in Washington.
On Oct. 23, 1968, Ambassador Bui Dhien cabled Saigon with the
message that �many
Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged me to stand
firm.� On Oct. 27, he
wrote, �The longer the present situation continues, the more
favorable for us. � I am
regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage.�
On Nov. 2, Thieu withdrew from his tentative agreement to sit
down with the Viet Cong at
the Paris peace talks, destroying Johnson�s last hope for a
settlement. Though Johnson
and his top advisers knew of Nixon�s gambit, they kept Nixon�s
secret.
Summers�s new book provides the fullest examination of the
Nixon-Thieu gambit, including
the debate within Democratic circles about what to do with the
evidence.
Both Johnson and Humphrey believed the information � if
released to the public � could
assure Nixon�s defeat.
�In the end, though, Johnson�s advisers decided it was too late
and too potentially
damaging to U.S. interests to uncover what had been going on,�
Summers wrote. �If Nixon
should emerge as the victor, what would the Chennault outrage
do to his viability as an
incoming president? And what effect would it have on American
opinion about the war?�
Summers quotes Johnson�s assistant Harry McPherson, who said,
�You couldn�t surface it.
The country would be in terrible trouble.�
A late Humphrey surge fell short. Nixon won the election.
The direct U.S. role in the war continued for more than four
years with American casualties
standing at 20,763 dead and 111,230 wounded during that period.
The toll among the
people of Indochina was far higher. Johnson and Humphrey went
into retirement keeping
silent about Nixon�s treachery.
Yet, Nixon is now hailed on The New York Times� op-ed page as a
�patriot� who put his
country ahead of his political career. The Chennault gambit
became another chapter of
"lost history."
On to Watergate
The Democratic silence about Nixon's sabotage of the Paris
peace talks did not bring
them political peace, either.
In the years that followed his 1968 victory, Nixon continued
his high-handed strategies. He
began building a clandestine apparatus for combating his
political enemies and ensuring
his reelection in 1972.
Nixon�s �plumbers unit,� employing former CIA operatives, spied
on individuals who
caused Nixon difficulty � the likes of Daniel Ellsberg who
exposed the Pentagon Papers
history of the Vietnam War � and on the Democrats.
The plumbers were searching for intelligence about the
Democrats when they were
caught bugging the phones of the Democratic National Committee
at the Watergate
complex in Washington in June 1972.
Even earlier, other Nixon operatives had worked to sabotage the
campaigns of
Democratic candidates that Nixon considered formidable threats
to his reelection, which
Nixon won in a landslide in November 1972.
Ultimately, the Watergate scandal was exposed and Nixon was
forced to resign in 1974.
But the Republicans never changed their tactics.
The Iranian Hostages
In 1980, the Reagan-Bush campaign saw the lingering hostage
crisis in Iran as a powerful
vulnerability for President Carter.
Again, the evidence is now overwhelming that the Republicans
contacted senior Iranians
behind Carter's back to assure that Carter failed to secure the
release of 52 American
hostages before the election.
Over the past two decades, more than a score of witnesses �
including senior Iranian
officials, top French intelligence officers, Israeli
intelligence operatives and even Palestine
leader Yasir Arafat � have confirmed the existence of a
Republican initiative to interfere
with Carter�s efforts to free the hostages.
In 1996, during a meeting in Gaza, Arafat personally told
former President Carter that
senior Republican emissaries approached the Palestine
Liberation Organization in 1980
with a request that Arafat help broker a delay in the hostage
release.
�You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me
with an arms deal if I
could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the
elections,� Arafat told Carter.
[For details, see Diplomatic History, Fall 1996]
Arafat�s spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif has said the GOP gambit
pursued other
channels, too. In an interview with me in Tunis in 1990, Bassam
indicated that Arafat
learned upon reaching Iran in 1980 that the Republicans and the
Iranians had made other
arrangements for a delay in the hostage release.
�The offer [to Arafat] was, �if you block the release of
hostages, then the White House
would be open for the PLO�,� Bassam said. �I guess the same
offer was given to others,
and I believe that some accepted to do it and managed to block
the release of hostages.�
In a little-noticed letter to the U.S. Congress, dated Dec. 17,
1992, former Iranian
President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the
Republican hostage initiative
in July 1980 when a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
returned from a meeting with
an Iranian banker, Cyrus Hashemi, who had close ties to
Reagan�s campaign chief William
Casey and to Casey�s business associate, John Shaheen.
Bani-Sadr said the message from the Khomeini emissary was
clear: the Republicans were
in league with the CIA in an effort to undermine Carter and
were demanding Iran�s help.
Bani-Sadr said the emissary �told me that if I do not accept
this proposal they [the
Republicans] would make the same offer to my rivals.� The
emissary added that the
Republicans �have enormous influence in the CIA,� Bani-Sadr
wrote. �Lastly, he told me
my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.�
Bani-Sadr said he resisted the GOP scheme, but the plan was
accepted by the hard-line
Khomeini faction.
[For more details about the evidence of a Republican-Iranian
deal in 1980, see The
October Surprise X-Files series in the archives at this Web
site or Robert Parry's book,
Trick or Treason, available at Amazon.com]
Though some Carter advisers held suspicions about Republican
hostage shenanigans at
the time, the Democrats again kept silent. Only after the
Iran-contra scandal broke in
1986 and witnesses began surfacing was the 1980 story fleshed
out enough to compel
Congress to take a closer look.
Again, though, the Democrats feared that the evidence could
endanger the fragile
relationships in Washington that enable governing to go
forward. Once more, they chose
to ignore the machinations of the Republicans and, in some
cases, literally hid the
evidence. [See History on the Ballot or the October Surprise
X-Files series.]
he Senior Bush
The Nixonian strategies carried over into the campaigns mounted
by George H.W. Bush
in 1988 and 1992. The elder Bush's dark side came out most
glaringly when he was in
what he called �campaign mode.�
The general election campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988
stands as one of the
nastiest in U.S. history, with Bush playing the race card by
exploiting Willie Horton, a black
inmate who raped a white woman while he was on a Massachusetts
prison furlough.
Bush charted a similar course in 1992, with the goal of
destroying Bill Clinton�s reputation
and winning re-election by political default. The strategy,
managed by then-White House
chief of staff James Baker, involved searching Clinton's
passport files looking for dirt to
use against the Democratic candidate.
Documents at the National Archives show that Bush was
personally involved in this "silver
bullet" strategy aimed at portraying Clinton as disloyal to his
country or even a pawn of
Soviet bloc intelligence.
In an interview with federal prosecutors, Bush acknowledged
that he was "nagging" his
aides to press a sensitive investigation into Clinton's student
travels to the Soviet Union
and Czechoslovakia. Bush also expressed strong interest in
rumors that Clinton had
sought to renounce his U.S. citizenship.
Bush then described himself as "indignant" that his aides
failed to discover more about
Clinton's student activities. But Bush stopped short of taking
responsibility for the
apparently illegal searches of Clinton's passport records.
"Hypothetically speaking, President Bush advised that he would
not have directed anyone
to investigate the possibility that Clinton had renounced his
citizenship because he would
have relied on others to make this decision," the FBI interview
report read. "He [Bush]
would have said something like, 'Let's get it out' or 'Hope the
truth gets out'."
The documents depict President Bush as raging, Nixon-like,
about political enemies,
demanding action and then counting on his subordinates to
ignore some of his more
outrageous ideas. When the subordinates didn't and a political
crisis followed, Bush coolly
distanced himself from the fallout.
But the documentary record now makes clear that Bush was the
driving force behind this
search for a �silver bullet� to destroy Bill Clinton. [For more
details, see Bush Family
Politics.]
When the passport caper backfired in early October 1992 with
disclosure of the State
Department search, the Bush campaign suffered one of its rare
setbacks. Some inside
the Bush administration, including James Baker, saw the scandal
as an element in Bush's
eventual defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.
After the election, more disclosures prompted calls for a
special prosecutor. Fearing a
spreading scandal, a distraught Baker contacted Bush on Nov.
16. According to Bush's
diary, Baker was "worried that it's going to end up on his door
step."
Though the Washington Establishment held Baker in high regard,
Baker had been
implicated in another famous electoral dirty trick, the
purloining of President Carter's
debate briefing book during the 1980 campaign.
Increasingly nervous, Baker tried to submit a letter of
resignation on Nov. 20, but Bush
refused to accept it. "Jim Baker came in here this morning
about 10:30 deeply disturbed
and read to me a long letter of resignation all because of this
stupid passport situation,"
Bush wrote in his diary.
When a special prosecutor was named, the Bush administration
was lucky because
Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist had ousted a
moderate Republican,
Judge George MacKinnon, who had picked Lawrence Walsh to
investigate the Iran-contra
scandal.
Rehnquist had replaced MacKinnon with U.S. Appeals Court Judge
David Sentelle, one of
President Reagan's conservative judicial appointees and a
prot�g� of Sen. Jesse Helms,
R-N.C. Sentelle recruited a fellow Reagan appointee, former
U.S. Attorney Joseph
diGenova, to act as the independent counsel.
DiGenova's investigation confirmed many of the facts of the
case, but it ultimately cleared
the Bush administration of wrongdoing. Although the evidence
once more pointed to a
Republican effort to use illegal means to influence the outcome
of a presidential election,
the Democrats again acquiesced to a finding of Republican
innocence.
The Danger of False History
Over the past 40 years, what has emerged from these
complementary tendencies � the
Nixon/Republican strategy of hardball politics and the
Democrats� desire to avoid
confrontations � is something akin to an abusive marriage in
which one party harms the
other but is forever excused amid rationales about what is good
for the family.
While the Democrats may view their complicity in concealing
these Republican political
crimes as �good for the country,� the pattern has not
contributed to an informed
electorate, the bedrock of any healthy democracy.
Today�s developments around the stalemated Gore-Bush election
are an indication of
how dangerous false history can be. Pundits, politicians and
pop historians are applying a
sanitized history to the present as a way of making judgments
about what should be done.
Based on this false history, rank-and-file Republicans feel put
upon and ready for
revenge. Even some Democrats have bought into the notion that
it's their turn to make
concessions and let Gov. Bush take the White House, even though
he lost the popular
vote.
The Bush campaign seems also to have benefited from the media's
extraordinarily short
memory. Pre-election Bush plans to challenge the outcome -- if
Bush won the popular
vote and lost the Electoral College -- were forgotten, when the
election turned out
differently, with Bush losing the popular vote and hoping to
scratch together enough
electoral votes to win.
[For details, see The GOP's Popular Vote Hypocricy.]
Ironically, though, many of the players in the current dispute
have knowledge of the secret
history. Warren Christopher, who is heading the Gore campaign's
recount effort in
Florida, was a principal State Department official during the
1980 Iranian hostage crisis.
As a senator, Gore himself took an interest in that issue.
On the Republican side, James Baker was a top adviser to the
1980 Reagan-Bush
campaign and was personally implicated in the theft of
President Carter's debate book.
Baker also was connected to the Passportgate affair in 1992.
While this crisscrossing secret history might never fully
penetrate the public�s awareness
� given the general ineptitude of the national news media � the
people should know
something about it.
Contrary to what they may have read, the Republicans do not
have a record of graciously
accepting political defeat. Nor can it be fairly argued that it
is the Democrats� turn to do
�what�s good for the country� and submit.
Ultimately, what might be best for the United States is to let
the American people in on the
secret history of the past 40 years: how we really select our
presidents.
Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the
Iran-contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek.
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