Assailing Donald Trump’s foreign policy credentials, and his recent speech on the topic, is hardly a demanding task. The blustery frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination exhibits little more than shallow familiarity with national security issues.

But Trump’s superficiality hasn’t stopped critics from overreaching as they lambaste him on foreign policy — overreaching to the point of summoning the media myth about Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. Activist Phyllis Bennis did just that the other day in an appearance on the MSNBC primetime program, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.

In his speech last week, Trump vowed to eradicate ISIS, the radical Islamic State, early in his presidency, but didn’t explain how that would be accomplished. With unconcealed smugness, Bennis declared that Trump’s reference to ISIS “was very reminiscent of Nixon’s call when he was running for president [in 1968] and said, ‘I have a secret plan to end the war.’ The secret plan of course turned out to be escalation.”

Her remark about Nixon’s “secret plan” gained fresh circulation yesterday in a post at a Huffington Post politics blog.

But it’s a claim Nixon never made. And he didn’t campaign for the presidency touting a “secret plan” on Vietnam.

That he did not is made clear in the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included all of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its immediate aftermath.)

Surely, had Nixon campaigned on a “secret plan” in 1968, as Bennis so blithely asserted, the country’s leading newspapers would have publicized it.

Nixon did confront the notion he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. In an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times, he was quoted as saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

Nixon also said:

“If I had any way to end the war, I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just a few days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Nixon may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind in 1968. But he did not make such a claim a feature of his campaign that year. (William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and columnist for the New York Times, periodically called attention to the “secret plan” myth, once observing: “Like the urban myth of crocodiles in the sewers, the non-quotation never seems to go away ….”)

Nixon’s  foes, however, tried to pin the “secret plan” calumny on him. Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Hubert H. Humphrey, for example, took out a display advertisement in the New York Times on October 23, 1968; the ad included this statement: “Last March he said he had a secret plan to end the war.”

The ad included no reference to exactly when or where Nixon had made such a statement. And it carried the headline, “Trust Humphrey.”

The derivation of the “secret plan” tale can be traced to March 5, 1968 and a speech in Hampton, New Hampshire, in which Nixon said “new leadership” in Washington — a Nixon administration, in other words — would “end the war” in Vietnam.

The wire service United Press International noted in reporting Nixon’s vague remarks  that the candidate “did not spell out how” he would “end the war.” The UPI dispatch also said “Nixon’s promise recalled Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge in 1952, when Nixon was his running mate, to end the war in Korea.” Eisenhower was elected president that year.

The New York Times account of Nixon’s speech, published March 6, 1968, quoted the former vice president as saying he “could promise ‘no push-button technique’ to end the war. Nixon said he was not suggesting ‘withdrawal’ from Vietnam.” A brief, follow-on report that day in the Times quoted Nixon as saying he envisioned applying military pressure as well as diplomatic efforts in ending the war.

Nixon may have been vague during the 1968 campaign in describing his ideas about Vietnam. But clearly he wasn’t touting, proclaiming, or otherwise running on a “secret plan.”

WJC

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