Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War by F. C. Schaefer Page B

President to me the day after it happened, which would have been the second day of August. “Those sons of bitches really thought they were going to put one over on us,” were Mr. Nixon’s exact words. “They put the screws to me to me 1960, did the same thing to the President when he was running against Jack for the nomination. And Bobby is playing the same dirty game this year. Well, not this time.”
    The Secretary explained the details to me this way: a cabal of old JFK hands-Sorenson, O’Brien, Powers, and O’Donnell, among others at Senator Robert Kennedy’s direction-had been in contact with Democratic Party bosses and big dogs. This cabal was intent making Senator Kennedy the Democratic Party’s nominee at the Chicago Convention instead of President Johnson. They would do this despite the President having more than enough pledged delegates to win the nomination by having the states of New York, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, along with several hundred other delegates scattered among other state delegations simply abstain on the first ballot. That would be enough, combined with the 400 votes pledged to McGovern, to deny the President the nomination on the first roll call. It seemed that party rules only bound delegates to vote for a certain candidate on that first ballot, after that they were free to vote their conscience for whomever they wished and presumably would have flocked to the Kennedy banner and a chance to resurrect Camelot. Secretary Nixon assured me that this scheme not only could have worked, but was well on its way to success if he had not found out about it and alerted the President.
    Now let me say this: I have no first hand knowledge of how the Secretary came by this information. Some-such as Mr. Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson-claim it was through the use of military intelligence agency assets, specifically Army and Naval Intelligence units deployed under Secretary Nixon’s orders. Let me say that such actions would have violated certain legal statutes and there is no credible evidence-now or then-that anything like that ever occurred.
    But no matter how it is obtained, knowledge is power, and Secretary Nixon certainly used the power this knowledge gave him to his advantage. It is a damn shame that a decent man like Vice President Humphrey got put on the list of those found to be false in their loyalty to the President, but it is undeniable that members of his senior staff had been talking to Kennedy’s people. It seemed the Vice President’s men were playing a double game, angling to have their guy emerge as a compromise candidate if President Johnson and Senator Kennedy deadlocked themselves. The Vice President had no knowledge of what his men were up to; I know this because Mr. Nixon told me as much. It did not stop him from ordering Mr. Haldeman to leak this particular story to the press two days before the convention was to convene; I’ve always known politics was a tough and dirty business, but I had no idea just how much so until that last week of August of 1968.
     
    Ruth Eleanor Green: Why did Robert Kennedy wait so late to challenge LBJ? His people would later say that it was the assassination of Dr. King and the accounts of Vietnamese suffering from horrible radiation sickness that appeared in the American press in the spring of ‘68 that finally motivated them to try and change the direction of the country. Maybe, but I think they were cowed too long by opinion polls that showed huge public approval for the President’s policy in Vietnam-immoral and criminal as that policy might have been.
    In the end, they tried and thousands of us traveled to Chicago to stand witness and show our support; and for a few too short days it looked like we might actually succeed in toppling the warmongers. A group of us stayed with a school teacher on the South Side and watched a lot of what went down on her television set. That’s where we saw Senator Kennedy announce that his name would