Video: '11 Cold War CNN Vietnam 1954 1968' (Nixon order at 43:46)

(Tuesday, October 22, 1968; during the United States presidential election, 1968 campaign, during the Vietnam War, part of the Indochina Wars and the Cold War) — Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon telephoned his closest aide (and future Chief of Staff) H. R Haldeman tonight and ordered him to get intermediaries to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to refuse to participate in the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War.

Haldeman’s handwritten notes of the conversation referred to Anna Chennault, who had connections with other people who knew Thieu, and included the entry “VN— keep Anna Chennault working on SVN”; the second page of notes were “re V.N. bomb halt news” and Haldeman’s summary, “any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.”

In 1977, Nixon denied that he had any knowledge of Chennault’s contact with the Thieu government as rumors of “the Chennault affair” circulated, but in 2007, the Nixon presidential library opened the Haldeman notes to researchers, and historian John A. Farrell discovered the note in 2016.

Whether Thieu would have derailed the talks anyway, without Nixon’s efforts, efforts by private citizens to “defeat the measures of United States” were a federal crime.