Chasing Shadows; The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. First paperback edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. x, [2], 228 pages. Includes Introduction. Chapters cover Chasing Shadows; The Chennault Affair; Johnson v. Humphrey; Nixon v. Nixon; On the Case; "Hold On"; Election Eve; "I Let You Down"; 'Time to Blow the Whistle;" The United Front; "Candid and Forthright"; "The Man Who Knew Too Little", "All the Documents"; The Huston Plan; Nixon Tapes; Tricia's Wedding; The Pentagon Papers; The Secret Bombing of Cambodia; Leaks; The Wrong Men; "Charge Gelb"; LBJ Cracks the Case; Ellsberg's Decision; Fear of a Damaging Disclosure; Legal Action; The Diem Chapter; "Destroy the Times"; Legal Action; The Diem Chapter; "Destroy the Times"; Illegal Action; "A Natural Enemy"; Lord High Executioner; Supreme Court Rules; 1969 Documents; "Break In and Take It Out"; "Rumors and Reports of a Conspiracy"; "Imitation of the Enemy; Special Investigations Unit; "All These Harvard People", The Economic Conspiracy Theory; "Are They All Jews?''; "They're All Over"; "Somebody Sits on High"; Counting Ivy Leaguers, Counting Jews; Above the Law; "Pretty Much Carte Blanche"; "One Little Operation"; The CIA Bluff; The Smoking Gun; "I Don't Kiss and Tell"; Dean Testifies; The X Envelope; and The White House Tapes. Also contains Acknowledgments, Notes, and Index. Hughes shows that we still have much to learn by connecting the dots of Nixon's angry venting and the shadowy world of national-security spying. Ken Hughes has written about the secret White House tapes of Richard M. Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe Magazine, Salon and more. As a researcher with the University of Virginia's Miller Center since 2000, Hughes has been interviewed on the tapes and the Vietnam War by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, 60 Minutes, Politico, CNN and news organizations around the world. Hughes was senior consultant on Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words, a documentary by Kunhardt Films for HBO and served as a consultant on "The Vietnam War" by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The break-in at Watergate and the cover-up that followed brought about the resignation of Richard Nixon, creating a political shockwave that reverberates to this day. But as Ken Hughes reveals in his powerful new book, in all the thousands of hours of declassified White House tapes, the president orders a single break-in--and it is not at the Watergate complex. Hughes's examination of this earlier break-in, plans for which the White House ultimately scrapped, provides a shocking new perspective on a long history of illegal activity that prolonged the Vietnam War and was only partly exposed by the Watergate scandal. As a key player in the University of Virginia's Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program, Hughes has spent more than a decade developing and mining the largest extant collection of transcribed tapes from the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. Hughes's unparalleled investigation has allowed him to unearth a pattern of actions by Nixon going back long before 1972, to the final months of the Johnson administration. Hughes identified a clear narrative line that begins during the 1968 campaign, when Nixon, concerned about the impact on his presidential bid of the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese, secretly undermined the negotiations through a Republican fundraiser named Anna Chennault. Three years after the election, in an atmosphere of paranoia brought on by the explosive appearance of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon feared that his treasonous--and politically damaging--manipulation of the Vietnam talks would be exposed. Hughes shows how this fear led to the creation of the Secret Investigations Unit, the "White House Plumbers," and Nixon's initiation of illegal covert operations guided by the Oval Office. Hughes's unrivaled command of the White House tapes has allowed him to build an argument about Nixon that goes far beyond what we think we know about Watergate.