The October Farce
Episode Notes
Transcript
Will Inboden, the Executive Director of the William Clements Center for National Security and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas Austin (and editor of the Texas National Security Review) joins Eric to discuss the alleged “October Surprise” in 1980 — the long bruited charge that Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey colluded with Iranian intermediaries to forestall the release of the U.S. hostages until after the election. The original allegation, made by former Carter NSC staffer Gary Sick, resurfaced this spring after former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes gave an interview to Peter Baker of the New York Times alleging that he and the late John Connally travelled the Middle East in 1980 to pass the word to the Iranians that they would get a better deal from Reagan than they would from Carter. One month later Gary Sick (along with Jonathan Alter, Kai Bird, and Stuart Eizenstat) argued in The New Republic that the matter is “All But Settled.” Will and Eric discuss the historical evidence (or lack thereof) that supports the theory and compare it to Nixon’s efforts to affect the Vietnam negotiations during the 1968 Presidential Election and the collusion between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign that was revealed in the Mueller and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Reports.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html
https://warontherocks.com/2023/04/be-skeptical-of-reagans-october-surprise/
https://thedispatch.com/article/smears-and-myths-the-october-surprise-revisited/
https://newrepublic.com/article/172324/its-settled-reagan-campaign-delayed-release-iranian-hostages
https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Shadows-Chennault-Watergate-Presidency/dp/0813937833
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University
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of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two that strong and balanced foreign policy is the Shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman, a counselor at the Center for Strategic and budgetary assessments, a bulwark contributor, and a nonresident fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. My normal partner in this affair, Elliott Cohen, is still on travel. We hope to have him back next week, but in the interim, I am happy to welcome back to the podcast, a friend of Shield of the Republic, William Boden, who is the executive director of the Clement Center for National Security. At the LBJ School at the University of Texas, he’s also associate professor of public affairs and editor in chief, of the Texas National Security Review, author of PeaceMaker by Biography of President Reagan that we went through with Will a couple of months back when it came out, and we’re here to talk about another historical controversy that we want Will to help us help us settle.
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Welcome Will.
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Thank you, Eric. It’s great to be back with you, and of course, we miss Elliot, but you and I hopefully can fill the air with some meaningful content all the same?
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Yeah. Well, you know, you and I are the ones who are actually historians. Elliott’s just a hit, you know, story entrapped in the body of a political scientist. So Yes. So so we can we can settle some historical hash here.
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The the subject for today is something that actually both Will, you and I have written about, which is a hearty perennial that seems to have resurfaced, which is the notion of the October surprise in the nineteen eighty election, allegedly masterminded by Bill Casey, who was running the Reagan campaign and was also later the director of CIA under president Reagan, This idea was first floated in the late nineteen eighties by Gary Sick, who had been the director for Iran Affairs and the National Security Council under President Carter, and the idea was that In the nineteen eighty election, while the hostage negotiations were going on to return the forty four American hostages to the United States, the head of the Reagan campaign, Bill Casey, had a secret meeting in Madrid, Spain in the summer of nineteen eighty in which he passed messages to the Iranian leadership and to Ayatollah Khomeini suggesting that if the Iranians did not release the hostages before the November nineteen eighty election, they would get a better deal from from Ronald Reagan, and this allegedly thwarted the Carter administration’s efforts to negotiate with the Iranian and led to Ronald Reagan’s landslide election in November of nineteen eighty.
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Now the reason this Hory old chestnut has resurfaced is that in March Peter Baker of the New York Times interviewed former lieutenant governor of Texas Ben Barnes, who recounted a tale that suggested that Barnes had accompanied former governor of Texas John Connelly, two meetings in the Middle East, where Connelly, apparently according to Barnes, passed a similar message to what Gary Sick alleged Bill Casey had done, urging the Iranians not to release the hostages. Will you and a colleague have written in war on the rocks about this? I and Ruell, Garek, and and Ray Takei, my occasional coauthor on Things Iranian, and author of the Last Shaw have written about this in national review. Tell our listeners what is wrong in your view with the Ben Barnes story.
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Yeah. Thank you, Eric. And this was in some ways a difficult rebuttal to write because, you know, Ben is a part of the LBJ School and Foundation where where I teach and it’s a you know, someone I certainly hold in high personal affection. Right? He’s a a lovable guy and very much an icon in in tech politics, but I think this is just a fundamentally untrue account, and it really unfairly besmerch’s former Texas governor John Connelly, Bill Casey, and, of course, reg Reagan himself.
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And especially because it’s one of those conspiracies that seems to keep popping up and still somebody’s kind of poisons are political discourse today and contributes to some of the divisions in our in our country today, it seemed that important as a matter of for the historical record and to, you know, tamp down some of the suspicions and hostility to to set try to set the record straight. Or at least point out some of the serious holes in in Ben’s account. And I’ll just walk through the six main ones that we highlight quickly and of course we can go in-depth on any of these and I don’t think you’ll be really important also to cover a little more from the Iranian side, the really important insights that you and Rual and Ray come up with. But My co author Joseph Ledford is currently a post doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins and wrote a great dissertation on the Iran contra affair on US Iran relations in the 1980s. He and I point out that if you were going to believe Ben Barnes tale that he and John Connolly were traveling through, you know, six Middle Eastern countries in in July of nineteen eighty.
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Pass on this message, you need to believe six impossible things, right? And we are driving this of course from Alice in Wonderland when the Queen tells Alice, you know, sometimes I believed as many six possible things before breakfast, right? So first, you’d need to believe that at least five different Arab governments knew about this John Connolly scheme to persuade Iran to hold on to the hostages till after the election. For four decades and never breathe the word about it, right? So here we are in twenty twenty three and now this age of Texas political figure bringing this out and say, yeah, we worked with five different era of governments to promote this message, and I’m just now telling you about it.
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And yet we never would have heard any of this from those five governments before. Second, you would have to believe that even though those five Arab governments knew about it, not a single person in the American diplomatic or intelligence apparatus and system throughout the broader Middle East knew about it, right? Even though, of course, that is now we’re very, as a country, have very extensive posture in the region, thousands of diplomats and intelligence officers and military liaison partners at a number of these Europe capitals who are constantly interacting with their counterparts in the local local governments. Surely they would have heard about such a crazy scheme like this to distort the American election and prolong the hostage release. But none of them had heard a single thing about it.
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Third, you’d have to believe that John Conley, who’s a lifelong who at that time, sorry, was a Republican, had actually been and was angling for a position in the Reagan administration. That he would make these in treaties in the presence of Ben Barnes, who was a lifelong Democrat who had a number of close friends in the Carter campaign and camp. And so that John Connolly would be so stupid as to, you know, try to meddle with the Carter’s reelection in this treasonous gesture with a loyal Democrat sitting there right next to him and assume that Ben would never say anything about this to his friends in in the Carvert camp. Fourth, Ben is now claiming that they did this at the behest of Bill Casey, you know, Reagan’s campaign manager. But even in his own account in the New York Times story, it’s not until one month after he and John Connolly returned from their Middle East trip that they sit down with Bill Casey to supposedly debrief him on this.
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And this is in the crucible of a campaign when every day matters. And they were saying that this is of intense interest to Bill Casey, and yet he waits an entire month to hear from them about it. Bith, you’d have to believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was then as now a sworn enemy of the United States, and of course could have used this information to severely embarrass the Reagan administration. Never breathed a word out about it either And then six, the fact that this is just now coming out with the one little asterisk about what Ben Barnes may have said to Bill Brands a few years ago. You’d have to you’d have to believe that the extensive congressional investigations done twenty or thirty years ago on this, which spent like a year looking into this story, interviewed thousands of people produced tens of thousand page documents, they’d never even come across before any inkling that it was Ben Barnes and Jonathan Last delivering these So anyway, plenty of other holes in the story, but those are just the six biggest ones that we focus on.
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Yeah, and just to underscore the point, this is obviously something that when you were writing peacemaker you delved into and went through all the the major archival collections that would have been relevant here and have found no evidence of of any of this. Let let’s I I do wanna go to the the asterisk about Bill brands, your colleague at UT, and the father of our mutual friend, Hal Brands and, you know — Yeah. — who’s collaborated with both of us in a variety of different projects. If you go back and read Bill Brands’s biography of Reagan, for which he interviewed Ben Barnes and talked to Ben Barnes, the story is actually a little bit different. I mean, the story that he tells Bill Brands is that he and Governor Conley traveled throughout the middle east, in which governor Conley made the observation to his interlocutors in Israel and the Arab world, that were the Iranian to release the hospital before the election in November, presumably in October, that it would upend everybody’s political calculations and be of enormous assistance to Carter.
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Now that was not you know, wildly novel observation for people to to make. In fact, the whole term October surprise was actually coined about whether Carter would actually pull this negotiated rabbit out of his hat before the election in order to seal his election victory. It was actually fears that that would happen that created this term of a potential October surprise. I mean, I can testify to the fact that John Anderson who was a independent presidential candidate came to the Middle East to fill the time between the two conventions and get some public attention to himself, I happen to know this because I was his control officer, the late Sam Lewis ambassador in Israel made me control officer for John Anderson, Sam who’s a fairly intimidating person, also told me that he didn’t want any leaked coming out of this that somehow the embassy had dissed, you know, John Anderson, but he also didn’t want anything coming out of of this suggesting that the embassy had done a whole lot to help John Anderson even. Yeah.
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I suppose for someone who had joined the foreign service like seven months before, a little bit of a a tall order for a first tour officer. But, you know, Anderson actually excluded the embassy from his meeting, so we have no idea what he said. But if he were to have said to his inner Israeli interlocutors that if, you know, Carter did this, it would change and scramble the political calculations. Would I be surprised? Absolutely not because it’s a very common observation.
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But the point is that that is a different story than Ben Barnes told to Peter Baker more recently. It did not include the passing of any messages to the Iranians explicitly. So why how does Ben Barnes explain that he’s only remembering this now?
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Yeah. And that that is one of the several troubling questions about this, and I will just one other difference between his twenty fifteen account and and the one more recently to Peter Baker also is in in Bill Brand’s twenty fifteen book, the first time that Ben Barnes had brought up any connection with this, although as you said it was, you know, not an explicit request to delay the hostage release. Then he also says, we passed message through Israel, whereas now in the New York Times one, he’s saying, okay, we didn’t, we didn’t with Israel also. So again another way that he’s changing his stories from you know, I have not talk to Ben since this came out, so I honestly don’t know why, you know, why now he’s he’s bringing this up or how and why this particular story got in his head. You know, he’s known as a colorful personality who certainly has been a teller of tall tales and in other context.
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He says that he, you know, as he’s in his, you know, more aged years that he wants to, you know, kinda come clean and set set the record straight, but It’s, you know, I don’t want to speculate on motives there. I’ll just say that when we weigh what he is now claiming against the overwhelming weight of historical evidence, it just it just doesn’t add up.
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Well, I I guess what I I would say is he said to Peter Baker that part of the reason for this is he was afraid to, you know, release this earlier because he he was afraid he would have been accused by his Democratic colleagues of treachery and having supported Reagan for president, etcetera, although he was on the record as supporting Carter. I mean, I find that it kind of hard to credit motive in the sense that given the investment that so many people have had in and we’ll get to this in a moment, in this theory that was first propounded by Gary Sick in the late nineteen eighties, you know, if he’d come forward immediately for instance after Gary Sick had about this in nineteen eighty eight. He would have been hailed as a truth teller and a, you know, whistleblower etcetera. So I I it’s you know, even on the surface, the story doesn’t seem to parse.
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Yeah. Yeah. And a couple of other points to reinforce that. I mean, other windows when he could have come forward sooner would have been the, you know, the nineteen ninety one congressional investigations, right, when there’s a natural point. Okay, I’m being asked about this and now I will really tell you what what happened.
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Nothing, right? Or nineteen ninety three when John Connelly dies. Maybe you could have made the case well, Ben Barnes wanted didn’t wanna besmirch Connolly while he’s alive, but now that he’s dead, he can come out and tell truth. And you’re right. Given how this is such a article of faith among so many Carter alums and Carter partisans.
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He, you know, would have been hailed as a hero. And in some ways, he has been now in some of those circles. Right? Hence this near the New New Republic article will I know we’ll we’ll be discussing or, you know, the Twitter blew up about this or since then to follow on New York times stories, treating what he said as as gospel truth. So the whole, you know, I I don’t I don’t buy that rationale for why he why he waited so long.
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Yeah. I mean, Peter Baker and his original article is actually fairly careful to say, you know, this is Barnes’s recollection. There’s no substantive evidence of this conveniently for Barnes, that, you know, two witnesses who could dispositively speak to this, Bill Casey and John Connley are both deceased. Yeah. Although, I would point out, and Baker reported this, that John Connley’s son who was with his father for his father’s meeting with president Reagan, where, you know, given the importance of all this, if it were serious and given Connolly’s desire to curry favor with Reagan for a possible appointment as secretary of state or defense, which is why he was going on this Middle East trip to begin with and burnishing his credentials for that, you know, John Connolly’s son says never came up in the meetings.
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Yeah. Yeah. The one live witness we have, you know, doesn’t support the story at all.
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Yeah. Exactly. And then if you look at the only other documented facts that Barnes presents or presented in the Peter Baker story are, yes, John Connelly and Ben Barnes did travel to these Middle Eastern recent July, right? You know, that’s documented their state department cable on that. And yes, Nancy Reagan did phone Connolly from the Reagan Ranch saying, hey, you know, my husband Ron Reagan wants to talk to you about strategy meetings.
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Right? So if those are the only two facts you have and then you’ve got this wild conspiracy that Ben Barnes is is spinning. I can see if you want to believe that you’d grab onto those two. But I think those two facts are very easily explained otherwise. So why does John Connolly go on this extensive trip to the Middle East?
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Well, he was auditioning to be Secretary State or Secretary Defense in a hoped for Reagan administration. And a few months earlier, when Connelly had still been a presidential candidate, he’d given a widely criticized big speech on Middle East policy. Where he somehow managed to alienate Israel’s supporters with a some very strong skepticism towards US support for Israel. While also upsetting all the Arab governments in the region by calling for a massive increase in the American military presence. And so he had really stepped on it, right?
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And he’s trying to rehabilitate his reputation as a Middle East expert as part of auditioning for a cabinet position in the Reagan administration. So that makes perfect sense why he would do a trip like that. Then why is Nancy Reagan phoning and asking him to help out with campaign strategy? Because Reagan knew it was gonna be a tight race and he wanted to win and he knew that Texas was gonna be a real key swing state. Right?
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Texas had gone for Carter in seventy six John Connelly’s, you know, the multi term former governor of Texas. He knows Texas well. He’s got a great fundraising network there. Reagan is trying desperately to unify fractured and divided Republican Party after a nasty primary, of course they’re going to be asking John Connelly for help with campaign strategy. But that’s a very, very different thing altogether than this wild fabrication or conspiracy theory that the Reagan are reaching out asking him to carry this this secret message to them about delaying the hostage release.
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And then, of course, there’s the whole question of even if some kind of message had been passed to the Iranians, what kind of interest would they have had in actually, you know, assisting Ronald Reagan, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence based on, you know, the researches of someone like Ray Takay who has, you know, written a excellent book on Shah’s fallen revolution was working, by the way, on a book on the Carter administration’s policy towards Iran in in which will be somewhat revisionist in the sense that Ray is much more sympathetic to the Carter administration than others have been with regard to policy towards Iran. I’m not yet a hundred percent persuaded by Rae’s argument, but then again, I haven’t seen the manuscript yet, so I’ll reserve judgment Jonathan Last as Rae points out, there’s absolutely no evidence anywhere that from the Iranian side, there would have been any receptivity to this kind of offer on the part of Reagan, that America was the Great Satan, there was no distinction in their mind between Carter and and Reagan, and they didn’t need any offer from Reagan to wanna exact vengeance on Carter who they believed had organized at an effort to overthrow them early in in the revolution, which, you know, is that is a matter of still debate among historians whether there was that effort or not.
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But they had plenty of reason to despise Carter and wanna hurt him politically without any intercession by folks in the Reagan campaign.
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And Eric, if I can just interject on that because what I’d like you to elaborate on that point which is really important here and here I’m, you know, turning, you know, I’m being the interviewer a little bit, I suppose. But what I really like about your dispatch article is there is a tendency among some especially on the left who are very critical of U. S. S. Iran policy of the years to assume this kind of American omnipotence that we can just dictate these outcomes in Iran.
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And this is partly why, as you point out in the article, they way over determine the American role of the nineteen fifty QQ, which is actually largely an internal Iranian story about disgruntled Iranian over throwing most a day.
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Including the clerics.
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Including the clerics. Yeah. Yeah. And then similarly in this latest crazy conspiracy theory about the October surprise, as you guys rightly point out in your dispatch article, there’s this assumption of American omnipotence to be able to dictate to the Iranians. You know, you will hold the hostages this long and not and not any longer because of American political machinations.
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When as you guys point out, look, this is this is an Iranian story, and they were making up their own mind and what their agenda was. I think those are just very important points you made.
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It’s absolutely right. The the Iranians, as I said, had their own, you know, bill of particulars about about Carter. Even though in the United States, he was regarded as having been very wishy washy and having undercut the the shaw That’s not how the revolutionaries around Khamini saw it. So which brings us to the new Republic article that you mentioned a minute ago. This was appeared about a month after the Ben Barnes interview with Peter Baker in the New York Times, under the headline, it’s all but settled close quote, by Jonathan Last, Kai Bird, Gary Sick, the originator of the October surprise, allegation back in nineteen eighty eight, and Stu Eisenhowerstead, a former senior official in the Carter administration, a cabinet secretary, I believe then, and a very distinguished American public servant I’ve worked with Sue extensively and have extremely high regard for him.
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But this article, I have to say, is terribly unconvincing. It tries to make the case that this issue is now settled and resolved. Although, they admit that they have no documentary evidence for any of the allegations they make and frequently resort to accounts suggesting here’s what likely happened as opposed to here’s what actually happened because they don’t have any evidence. So let’s start with you know, where they start. They start with an interview with Stuart Spencer, who basically says, yeah, well, Casey, he was capable of anything.
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Speaking as a historian, what, you know, what kind of evidence is that for a far ranging charge like this?
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Yeah. It’s it’s no evidence whatsoever. I mean, and again, as you and I have discussed before, Bill Casey was very polite Right? And he was guilty of other misdeeds. I think it’s, you know, overwhelmingly clear.
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He did engineer stealing Carter’s debate briefing book. He was later up to his eyeballs in Ron contra that right. So, but it’s just on this particular case they present no concrete evidence whatsoever and there’s this I think, chasm between their assertions of authority, you know, like their first paragraph say, there’s now enough evidence to say definitively that and then they go into laying out that, you know, Reagan and Casey tried to manipulate the hostage release, but then they just don’t present any of that of it. I mean, it is revealing not to be too self referential, but this new republic’s article came out on May third. Our the leadford and inboat an article refuting this had come out almost a month earlier on April tenth.
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Your article with Ray and Ruel came out in the dispatch on April fifteenth. So these are three weeks articles had been out three or four weeks before this one comes out. It’s revealing that definitely been reference ours. And and again, this is not a plea for clicks by any means. But just if you’re going to be offering a supposedly definitive account like they are here, you at least need to acknowledge the strong skepticism and I think pretty strong evidence that others had brought up.
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So that in itself is revealing.
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Yeah. And that you need to be able to address the questions that, you know, the five of us collectively in the two articles raise about about this story, particularly because they do pin their whole story on Ben Barnes. That’s, you know, for them, that’s the final nail in the coffin. They they talk about, you know, ambassador Joseph Vernner Reed, who was the chief of protocol under president Reagan, and had been, I guess, at one point, ambassador to Morocco as well. They quote him as saying he was particularly involved in in this effort to monitor that Bill Casey had created, and and again, I mean, I have no doubt that Bill Casey was carefully monitoring this situation.
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Because it had huge political implications for Reagan. Read, they quote as saying, in a letter to his, I I guess, family, that he had devoted a chunk of his life to, you know, monitoring this and making sure this didn’t happen. But is that evidence for anything in particular, you know, it it seems to me to be not specific at all with regard to the actual allegation. But rather a generalized sense of, you know, thank God that didn’t happen.
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Yeah. No. And and again, I I will, you know, can strongly reinforce that from my own research. I mean, first, in the nineteen eighty campaign where one of the big issues is America’s appearance of weakness on the global stage because of the hostage crisis and public frustrations with how, you know, Carter seem to be managing or mismanaging it. And yet a general realization that if the hostages were released, of course it Will Saletan boost to Carter just as if the economy started doing better, it would have been a boost to Carter.
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If the Soviets would have withdrawn from Afghanistan, it would have been a boost Carter. That’s just common sense. And so it would have actually been political malpractice for Reagan’s campaign to not be monitoring this closely, right? I mean it’s a huge factor for them. And this is where I will speak personally from having spent weeks reading through almost every page of the Reagan campaign records at the Hoover Institution archives as did, my co author, Joseph Ledford, and we can say two things come out of that.
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First, the Reagan campaign absolutely was monitoring carefully the plight of the hostages and the question that they’re going to be released or not. Because they would have been irresponsible not to. And two, we did not find a single sentence, let alone a single page indicating any effort whatsoever to try to delay the release of the hostages. And that’s what the crux of the issue is here. And that’s — we don’t see any of that evidence in this new Republic article, right?
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I mean, Sure. Stu Spencer the campaign manager is four decades later saying, yes, Casey was obsessed with the the hostages. Well, of course, we knew that at the time. You know, Jim Baker, the great you know, Jim Baker, who was also involved involved with the campaign kind of chuckles and says, yeah, Bill Casey sure was Kennifer. Well, everyone knew that, but that is not evidence at all of trying to persuade Iran not to release the hostages.
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Some of the evidence that they present in some ways, actually, Ron DeSantis their case. So one of one of the pieces of evidence that they adduce is a meeting between president Carter and Yasser Arifat in the nineteen nineties in which Arifat says, oh, I need to tell you something, you know, in nineteen eighty, I was approached you know, to pass a message to the Iranians and I was I would get some arms if I did that, and I turned it down. Which suggests no message actually got passed.
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Yeah. Yeah. If that meeting it took us all.
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Through. And our thoughts are, you know, a a well known prevericator and liar. And and so, you know, why, you know, you would put any trust in in, you know, that you know, long after the fact, you know, revelation is or alleged revelation is beyond But
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And and similarly another part, again, from the new Republic article which is itself refuting if you give it a close read, going back is concerning this alleged July nineteen eighty Madrid meeting between, you know, Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Casey and I told it was a Carubia. You know, a representative of the ITola Comenia in Iran. And this is where the allegation is that Casey sneaks into Madrid and meets with Karubi and make this plea, don’t release the hostages off the election, right? But again, no evidence that Casey was actually there. And they point out that there is that stray kind of third hand document from the Bush forty one administration of a White House counsel saying I heard from someone over at state that there was some cable saying that Casey had been had been in Madrid.
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But Eric, you were an FSO for decades, foreign service office of state department. You know how state department cables work state department cables don’t just go missing. Right? I mean, they are when they are sent from a post to main state, there are many, many copies that go to lots of of people. And the fact that even after a federal judge ordered the state department to look for and find this cable, the new public article conceives this, and it’s never been found I think it’s because the thing just never existed, right?
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There never was a cable from Embassy Madrid saying Bill Casey was was here in town. And there would have been abundant chances for someone at state to come forward with such a cable anytime over the last several decades. So again, that was another one that was just when you when you read more carefully in this, it is a very thin article.
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Yeah. I had exactly the same response on reading this Will as you did, which is it it is inconceivable that in the modern era a telegram could just completely go missing from the record in part because it’s all digitized. And, you know, as you say distributed all over the place, and even when distribution mistakes are made, you know, not all of copies of the cables end up being completely collected back by the operation center or or wherever they, you know, originated. So the idea that that this thing you know could somehow be expurgated from the record particularly because it was going on in the Bush forty one administration, not Reagan. And, you know — Yeah.
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So it’s not as if, you know, there would have been a lot of effort to actually protect Reagan. I mean, having gone through the bush reagan presidential transition, which was, you know, famously described as a hostile takeover by Jim Baker. You know, there was no love lost between the two teams. So the the idea that
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—
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Oh, yeah.
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—
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the Republican administrations, therefore, know, the the, you know, Bush forty one would have covered for Reaganists, just not credible to me.
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Yeah. And and there was particularly no love loss between the Bush forty one camp and Bill Casey. Of course, he was dead by then. Right? But I mean, they they would have no incentive whatsoever to to protect him.
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So with this this crazy alleged cover up.
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Alright. So you and I both agree that there’s less here than meets the eye and it certainly should not be treated as, quote, all but settled. It’s you know, to to the degree that this theory has any standing at all. It ought to be as a theory and come pretty close to conspiracy theory because some people say, well, the fact that you can’t find any documentary evidence just shows that they went and cleaned up all the record behind which is usually the kind of thinking you get associated with these kinds of conspiracies. Now there have been, however, real efforts to intercede in in elections, yeah, both recent and a more distant past, and I thought it’d be worth maybe comparing this episode to to two of those.
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One was the nineteen sixty eight presidential election when president Lyndon Johnson was attempting to launch negotiations with North Vietnam in an effort to help Ubert Humphrey’s campaign running well behind Nixon, you know, catch catch up to the Nixon campaign. And almost did. In the end of the day, the election turned out to be quite close. We know because it’s on tape, Lindon Johnson at one point before the nineteen sixty eight election called in in the fall Richard Nixon and then said, I’ve I’ve caught your campaign with with its hand in the cookie jar, and you need to tell John Mitchell, I know what he’s doing, and he needs to knock it off. And what to what what he was referring to was outreach by Anishinault, the Chinese orn wife of general Claire Chanaut of flying tiger fame during World War two.
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And she had allegedly on, you know, she herself claimed to be acting on behalf of the Nixon campaign as an agent of the campaign contacted the South Vietnamese ambassador in Washington, and told him to to tell the South Vietnamese government general Chiu, the president of of South Vietnam, don’t make a deal before the election, because you’ll get a better deal from Nixon. Of course, the FBI had been listening in on the out there to be some ambassadors, phone calls, and so they had this on on tape. Nixon, of course, you know, expressed no knowledge of this, you know, and said he would make told Johnson that he would make sure nothing untoward was going on on behalf of his campaign and and left? What do you make of that as as a historian? And how does it compare to this other case?
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Yeah. So and I first gotta say, I have not looked very extensively firsthand into the sixty eight case and say the way that I did look very much firsthand to this nine nineteen eighty question. So I can’t be dispositive on this. I do recall that John Farrell’s biography of Nixon from a few years ago, I thought made a pretty persuasive case at this sort of skulduggery was going on. The Anishchnal was doing this at least, you know, implicitly at the best of the Nixon camp and maybe even Nixon himself, which again, if true is you know, horrendous, right?
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It’s deeply troubling, and it’s, you know, very much betraying — betraying the national interest. An advanced plug for a book. I’ve not read yet, but isn’t out, but the historian Luke Nictor has a forthcoming book on the sixty eight elections called nineteen sixty eight the year that pro politic the year that pro politics because these things are so contentious, especially in the wake of RfK’s assassination and Martin Luther King’s assassination. And I understand I haven’t read it yet that Luke raises a few questions about the received wisdom on this. And so until I read the book, I’m not going to render any judgments.
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But there certainly seems to be at a minimum more there on this sixty eight allegation than there is on the nineteen eighty one. So
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Yeah. I mean, there’s the indisputable fact that she reached out to the South Vietnamese. Now, at at whose direction and how much knowledge Nixon had, that’s I think
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—
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Yeah. — potentially open.
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And whether and whether it ended up making make a big difference or not.
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this was going on literally with matter of days, you know, between between this time and the time of of the election. Interestingly, my, you know, colleague can use at the Miller Center has looked into this and and looked looked into both the, you know, the Johnson tapes and the Nixon tapes, and he makes it very It’s circumstantial, but a very powerful case that, you know, a lot of things that otherwise seem inexplicable about watergate, some of the antics of the White House plumbers and you wanna give a un you know, unsolicited plug to the White House lumber’s now appearing on HBO Max.
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I’ve seen the first two episodes. It’s David Mandel is the showrunner who ran the last three seasons of Veep. I mean, There’s some liberties taken here, but by and large is pretty accurate from what I know over the Watergate record. But some of these things that were really kinda inexplicable about why would the Nixon people be, you know, burglarizing less Galb’s office in the Brookings institution for God’s sakes. Part of it seems to have been driven, Ken argues by Nixon’s fear that these transcripts of these anishinault phone conversations had somehow, you know, gotten loose from inside the administration and and various folks Dan Elsberg, Les Galb, who’d been associated with the Pentagon papers project, both of them had been.
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May have had access to this information and would bring it out before the seventy two election, and jeopardize Nixon’s reelection. It’s a kind of interesting counterpoise because, as you say, unlike the so called October surprise of nineteen eighty, there is some evidence here for this, it may have had larger repercussions later on, may have kind of undone nixon later on if Ken uses right about about all this. But also interestingly was not about sending a message to an adversary, which is what is alleged in the nineteen eighty case, but sending evidence to an ally who was you know, had some skin in the game you know, and and therefore, you could imagine that a message to the South Vietnamese government saying, hold out, you know, Johnson is about to sell you out, but Nixon will give you a better deal. Of course, the ultimate irony there is that in nineteen seventy two, And into the spring of nineteen seventy three, the Knicks administration puts excruciating pressure on cue to accept a deal he doesn’t wanna accept, and Christmas bombing of nineteen seventy two is not just aimed at the north. It’s aimed at also persuading president Two.
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You should take this deal because the, you know, a future Nixon administration will support South Vietnam with with their power, which tragically did not happen in nineteen seventy five.
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Yeah. You’re right. That’s one of the many eyewitness in that case. Yeah.
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So let’s let’s turn to another case where there was some skullduggery which is more recent and still has some contemporary resonance, which is the twenty sixteen election campaign. Now, you know, President Trump, former president Trump, likes to say that, you know, the Mueller report totally exonerated him of any charge of collusion. Now, First of all, there is no criminal statute that criminalizes collusion. There are various conspiracy statutes. But the Mueller report does document a pattern of contacts between the various Russian actors or actors purporting to have connections to Moscow and the Putin regime and the Trump campaign.
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You and I were involved in in the, you know, Romney campaign. I don’t remember any kinds of contact like that going on in in twenty twelve.
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Yeah. Not at all.
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And the, you know, Senate Intelligence Committee also has done an extensive port that goes through much of the same material as Mueller did. Of course Mueller actually indicted Russians for interference in the twenty sixteen election folks Bulwark for the Internet, so called Internet research agency in Saint Petersburg, working for Yevgeny Priegogen has become much more a big, bigger public figure now given the Russian Ukraine war. How does that compare to this episode we’ve been talking about, Will, in your view?
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Yeah. Well, and of course, the other big factor is we know, you know, I think the evidence is overwhelming that the Russian government was interfering in the US election and very much on the side of then candidate and later President Trump too. So And in some ways it’s a reminder of just being very careful with our facts and accusations because in the case of the nineteen eighty one where I think the accusations are very wild and the facts just don’t back it up at all. Whereas in twenty sixteen, as you’re as you’re pointing out, the facts are overwhelming that there was Russian interference and there certainly were some troubling outreach and contacts between figures associated with with Trump, which, you know, have been very clearly documented and and and the Russian government and rush Russian interests. Right?
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You know, going on up to campaign manager Paul Paul Manafort. But when you look at something much more contrived. It’s to say the Steel dossier and how that said that it’s, you know, discredit so much of the rest. Again, it’s just a good reminder on all sides, let’s be very careful with our facts and when there is a solid irrefutable fact, take that and run with it. But if there aren’t and if we’re going to be following after conjecture and conspiracy theory, that can discredit the whole enterprise and frankly, allow some generally bad behavior to to be got away with because the other side can say, oh, you know, they fabricated this or that about the steel dossier and and then avoid what is some, you know, otherwise I think some, you know, very worrisome malfeasance.
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Right. So, I mean, this is, as you point out, why people have to be very careful and examine any kind of document you know, first of all, to look for documentary evidence and to to, you know, interrogate the evidence, you know, very, very carefully as you point out there are a number of things about the Steel dossier that should have set off some alarm bells about whether it was a reliable source for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, there does seem to have been at least some, you know, direct kinda consequences in in including for the kind of run up to the Russo Ukrainian war that you know, look even more troubling in retrospect than they did at the time. I I you mentioned, you know, Paul Manafort, who was convicted and pardoned for by President Trump for some of these activities, but they included sharing internal campaign polling with a Russian colleague of Manafort who is believed to have been a a asset of Russian intelligence. And a very troubling effort that both of us know a little bit about from sources, you know, who were among the Republican delegates to the convention, to change the platform with regard to aid to Ukraine.
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That to me, seems in retrospect way more troubling than anything that’s been alleged in this October surprise allegation.
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Know, I would I would add to that even, you know, then candidate Trump himself, publicly, call into the press conference has, you know, urging the Russians to hack into Hillary’s emails. Right? I mean, doesn’t get any more brazen than that and, you know, he he did it in his devious way of later, you know, wanting to claim that he’d all was only kidding or or half kidding. But you know, the Mueller report also documents that it was, you know, within a few hours of that that the Russian hacking efforts did did increase, right? So, yeah, so that’s one where, you know, there’s a, you know, effect in plain sight in ways that they’re just Regan never did anything remotely comparable to that nineteen eighty.
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So
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Will, I wonder if, as a historian, you would wanna draw any conclusions about, you know, how foreign policy plays in election campaigns from these three cases. I mean, obviously, there are only three cases, you know, long history of US presidential elections. But typically, we’re told, you know, as historians and by political scientists that, you know, foreign affairs really doesn’t matter in presidential campaigns. No one really pays attention. It’s it’s usually kitchen table economic issues that are the ones that are are are are dominant, and I’m not disputing that.
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I mean, that that, you know, it seems that evidence is pretty overwhelming that American voters are, you know, in some level are voting about economic conditions, or their perceived economic situation personally. It’s a little bit of debate among political scientists about whether it’s, you know, the personal or whether it’s the larger socio tropic judgments that they’re making, but but that seems pretty pretty clear. But, you know, as a historian, I’ve gotta say, you know, just look at a lot of these election campaigns and, you know, foreign policy seems to be working in there somewhere. American voters do seem to make some kinds of judgments about candidates based on their sense of where these candidates are on foreign policies. How do these three cases, you know, play into your thinking as a historian about this larger subject.
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Yeah. So I I will say, I do generally embrace the conventional view that foreign policy is rarely a determinative factor in presidential elections. Right? There’s a few exceptions not to be too wonky, but nineteen sixteen, you know, Wilson running. He kept us out of the war before world war one.
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Right? Nineteen sixty eight, you know, Vietnam is a pretty pretty big one there. Although, that’s a funny one because, you know, neither Humphrey nor Nixon was promising to get us out of the war entirely Right? I mean, you know, Nixon, you know, Sandi eventually has a plan too. But, yeah, it’s a big issue.
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The nineteen eighty one somewhat, you know, as we’ve been talking about with with your crisis, but also just concerns over Carter’s management of the Cold War in general. More recently for you and me, maybe two thousand and four, you know, Bush V carry, still awake of nineeleven, the Iraq war, things like that. But otherwise, no, I think the way foreign policy generally functions in elections is a little bit of a proxy for voters on the general competence of a candidate. Like, is this somebody that we trust with their finger on the button, is it someone we trust to represent the United States in the global stage?
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The commander in chief task is what
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I thought. Exactly. Commander chief task. It’s more yeah. More of those more of those intangibles rather than what kind of level of support does the candidate wanna provide for Ukraine right now or or or or some something like that.
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So I I think it’s usually the pocketbook issues that do matter a lot more to the average voters. But foreign policy is there is one of those more abstract ones.
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Well, Will, I wanna thank you for helping shed some light on these historical controversies. They’re they’re kind of fun and interesting. I do have, I think, some some lessons to tell us about how open our political system is and therefore the degree to which others can actually you know, intervene and and fool around in it if we’re not careful if we don’t watch things, but also cautionary tale in, you know, being a careful reader as you point out. So thank you very much for joining us on shield of the Republic today.
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Thanks. It’s been a great discussion as always, Eric, honored to be with you.
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And that’s all we have for today for Shield of the Republic. Please drop us a line at shield of the Republic at gmail dot com. Put a review of the podcast if you enjoyed it on Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you get Secret Podcast from. And we’ll be back next week where an Elliot Cohen will return.
