by Our Foreign Desk

DOCUMENTS released this week have added support to claims that former US president Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks with Vietnam to win the 1968 presidential election.

Among the tracts released on Wednesday by the National Archives Nixon Presidential Library was a 1970 memo to Mr Nixon by his aide Tom Huston, two years after he beat Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey to succeed president Lyndon B Johnson.

The memo refers to the so-called Chennault Affair, named for Republic activist Anna Chennault, who had ties to leaders of the US-backed military dictatorship of South Vietnam.

Ms Chennault was thought to have been a secret Republican emissary, conveying messages from the Nixon campaign to the South Vietnamese that they should resist peace talks with North Vietnam.

She promised the South Vietnamese regime a better deal if they waited for Mr Nixon to become president.

Mr Johnson was incensed by what he regarded as Mr Nixon’s meddling in war policy, going so far as to accuse him of treason.

US federal law prohibits private citizens — which Mr Nixon still was — from interfering in government diplomacy.

In an oral history released by the National Archives last year, Mr Huston voiced his conviction that Mr Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, was directly involved in the episode and that it was likely Mr Nixon knew about it.

In his 2014 book Chasing Shadows, Nixon historian Ken Hughes asserted that the president, fearing exposure of his 1968 machinations, wanted operatives to break into the Brookings Institution think-tank to steal Chennault Affair documents.