Nixon’s efforts to win over Johnson also intensified. The Rev. Billy Graham reassured the president that if elected, Nixon would never blame Johnson for the war and would honor him in his post-presidential years.
This flattery worked. Johnson actively continued to hurt his vice president’s campaign. First, he denied Humphrey’s cash-starved operation funds from the Democratic National Committee and his base of wealthy Texas donors and refused to campaign for him in the border states where he might have helped. Johnson also denied Humphrey his statutory National Security Council seat and access to key war information, and refused to reveal publicly that the Nixon campaign had received $500,000 from the military junta in Greece that had overthrown the government in Athens in 1967. Johnson also began to curse out Humphrey regularly in front of White House staff, leading trusted aide Charles Murphy to believe the president preferred Nixon to be elected.
By late September, Humphrey’s campaign was in dire straits. Desperation prompted Humphrey to take a bold gambit. On Sept. 30, he declared that as president he would propose a bombing halt as an acceptable “risk for peace.” By separating himself from Johnson’s war policy, Humphrey breathed new life into his campaign.
But he also angered the president. Johnson told two close supporters that Nixon “is following my policies more closely than Humphrey.” When Hanoi indicated an Oct. 31 bombing halt would bring negotiations on Nov. 2, Johnson denounced this as a “dangerous” date that would be seen as helping Humphrey in the Nov. 5 election.
Even more critically, when Johnson learned on Oct. 28 from FBI, CIA and NSA wiretaps that Nixon’s campaign had been working through prominent Republican fundraiser Anna Chennault and South Vietnam’s Ambassador Bui Diem to get the Saigon government (and even Hanoi) to reject peace talks to get a better deal from a President Nixon, Johnson merely called Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, a Nixon ally, to say the candidate should stop playing “dirty pool.”
Then, as Johnson finally prepared to announce a bombing halt on Oct. 31 — to begin the day after the election — he called Humphrey to insist that he should let “all the laurels come to me.” Johnson also told Humphrey that Nixon was encouraging South Vietnam to resist talks to ensure the Humphrey’s defeat, but he insisted that he had no “hard proof” of the Republican candidate’s action to impede peace efforts. Humphrey understood this meant Johnson would not give him access to the tapes he needed to charge Nixon publicly with this perfidy.