Thật tráo trở

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During the 1968 election, the Nixon campaign, armed with Henry Kissinger’s leaks (rò rỉ) from the Paris peace talks (đàm phán hòa bình) with North Vietnam, used a surrogate (người đại diện) to advise the South Vietnamese government not to cooperate with any peace agreement and promised a better deal after he won. Nixon feared that if a deal was reached before the election (trước kỳ bầu cử), it would redound to the favor of his Democratic opponent (đối thủ), Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon’s “deal” worked out in that the South Vietnamese went along with it and he won the election, but not in the sense that it paid off for South Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger took essentially the same deal that the North Vietnamese offered, millions of deaths later, in 1973, over the objections of their since disappeared South Vietnamese co-conspirators in that now disappeared nation. Just as Barack Obama decided to keep quiet about the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia in the fall of 2016, so Lyndon Johnson preferred to let Nixon beat Humphrey rather than alert the country to the Republicans’ perfidy (sự bội bạc, xảo trá). (In Johnson’s case, he did not want his likely illegal domestic spying on Nixon to be revealed, but he also may have actually preferred Nixon to Humphrey.)