I’ve been using the legal def all along. You only just now switched to the “substantive and moral” in this post. A little late.
I didn't switch.
Even the argument for “substantive” treason is thin. It could not be proved that Nixon initiated Chennault’s contact with the SV govt. Only that he knew of it and approved it. Chennault would have been the one up for” substantive” treason.
No, it' s not thin at all, and yes, that can be proved. It's absurd to suggest the relationship between Chennault and Nixon was her in charge.
But I don’t know what your definition is... I doubt Nixon, or Chennault, would have done so if the action met the legal def of treason. Hence, coin-toss. The “moral” treason is clear.
The moral treason is clear, though I don't know how you say that when you question Nixon even being behind it. It's pretty simple. The country wanted the US to leave the war. The president wanted the US to leave the war, and did not run for re-election and spent the last year of his presidency successfully negotiating to leave the war. Nixon decided that his winning the election was more important, and caused a million more to be killed over years.
Nixon only wanted Thieu to believe that he could get a better deal with him, Nixon, than with LBJ, not to thwart peace en toto. All indications are that the Paris talks would have reconvened after the election. Nixon had as much a commitment from Thieu to peace as did LBJ.
The REASON Nixon persuaded Thieu to refuse the agreement was simply to sabotage the deal because peace meant a very likely Humphrey win. Thieu did agree because he 'wanted peace', he would have agreed because he had no leverage with the US if the US did - EXCEPT the leverage of making a deal with a possible new president. He jumped at the chance only because Nixon offered it to him. It had a very high price.
LBJ couldn’t use the matter of treason against Nixon, or Chennault, because he would have exposed his own wrongdoing, and put the US in a bad position, for having bugged the SV Ambassador’s office.
It wasn't exposing 'wrongdoing', but it was exposing a critical intelligence technique that would have hurt the US to have it exposed. LBJ asked his staff how much the damage would be, because he had wanted to expose it, but they said the damage was very high and he chose the harm of letting Nixon commit treason and kill peace over the harm of exposing the method.
LBJ DID tell Humphrey, and Humphrey could have used the info, but much like 2016 the polls were showing a Humphrey surge where he was likely to win, and he decided the harm to the country wasn't worth exposing the treason to help his chances to win - the opposite of Nixon. Most experts say if the election were two weeks later Humphrey would have won. Instead, we got the war continued and Watergate and other crimes.
An all the other harms from Nixon, such as the creation of Roger Ailes, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush family, the move to plutocracy on the Supreme Court; it was under Nixon or just after because of Nixon the country saw the creation of the big business takeover of politics, from the Heritage Foundation to Cato to the Federalist Society.
Yeah, go back to Eisenhower for supplying SV with arms as the policy error that resulted in 55,000 American deaths and all the others you spoke of. LBJ had trumped-up the Gulf of Tonkin incident into war. That was the trigger that fired the gun that killed so many people. It wasn’t Eisenhower that cooked-up that false pretense.
I don't think you understand the history of the Vietnam War's key point was Eisenhower's policy. There were three other key points for war, and two against: for were Ho Chin Minh, already an activist for independence who had studied in the US, writing President Wilson asking for support and getting no reply; post-WWII when Truman refused to support independence; and LBJ's choice for strong escalation.
The two key points against the war were the election of JFK, who strongly refused to escalate the war and planned to leave unilaterally, and LBJ's peace efforts sabotaged by Nixon. Other elements of LBJ's peace efforts were the public turning on the war, including politicians such as Robert Kennedy, leading to the political changes that pushed LBJ to change his policy.
