What follows is the tale of how the campaign of a megalomaniacal Republican candidate colluded with a foreign power to swing an American presidential election. And how US national security agencies unearthed proof of the plot, but failed to intercede and stop it — leaving an incumbent Democratic president fuming in impotent fury.

As you doubtless suspected, we are speaking not about Donald Trump and his interactions with Russia, but another episode in modern presidential history — namely, Richard Nixon’s off-the-books diplomacy with South Vietnam, in advance of the 1968 elections. In that year, Nixon employed secret emissaries to urge South Vietnamese officials to stall, and thus wreck, President Lyndon Johnson’s election eve effort to convene a peace conference and bring an end to the Vietnam War.

Johnson learned of the Republican intrigue but, like President Barack Obama and US security agencies almost 50 years later, declined to go public without proof of the candidate’s direct, personal involvement.

Although the Trump-Russia story has yet to fully unfold, some of the parallels are striking. The earlier episode, moreover, offers cautionary lessons for the left.

The story of “the Chennault Affair,” as the episode was known, and its impact on the 1968 election, should throw some cold water on the notion that this month’s stunning revelations — that Donald Trump Jr. and two other Trump confidants met with a reputed emissary of the Russian government with the purpose of conspiring against Hillary Clinton — will lead to President Trump’s swift downfall.

Nixon won election in 1968, and reelection in a 1972 landslide. “They got away with it,” Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, would write, in a bitter memo to his files, in 1973.

Gleeful liberals would be fools to treat lightly the hard work facing them in the 2017 and 2018 off-year elections, and the 2020 presidential race. They underestimated Trump last fall, and look what that got them.

There are other lessons. While some observers have treated the Donald Trump Jr. emails as the proverbial smoking gun, it’s also the case that we don’t know the extent to which then-candidate Trump was aware of that meeting — or aware of other contacts with Russians. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, or the intrepid efforts of journalists, may yet turn up such information, but the Nixon episode suggests that governments may yield secrets, and history its lessons, begrudgingly.

Indeed, confirmation of Nixon’s personal direction of the Chennault Affair did not come until this year when (horn-blowing moment at hand) I published the evidence in my new biography, Richard Nixon: The Life.

Anna Chennault served as a contact point between Nixon’s campaign and the South Vietnamese government

The Chennault Affair takes its name from Anna Chennault, Nixon’s chief conduit to the South Vietnamese. She was a China-born doyenne and Republican fundraiser, and a member of good standing in the militant, conservative China Lobby an anti-communist group advancing the interests of the nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan. Some called her the Little Flower; others, the Dragon Lady.

Like Trump and his aides in their dalliance with the Russians, the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese each saw the advantage of an election-year relationship.

According to Chennault’s memoirs, and those of Bui Diem, who was then the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, the two of them met with Nixon and his campaign manager, John Mitchell, in early and/or mid-1968. By Chennault’s account, one meeting took place at Nixon’s Fifth Avenue apartment (just up the street from where Trump Tower now sits, and where, in June 2016, Trump Jr., campaign chieftain Paul Manafort, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, took a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and several others).

Diem was informed by Nixon and Mitchell that Chennault would serve as their campaign’s intermediary.

We don’t know precisely what Trump’s aides thought to get from the Russians, and exactly what (besides the old naval sentiment of “Confusion to our enemies!”) Vladimir Putin’s government hoped to gain when helping Trump. But today we have a clear understanding of Nixon’s motivations.

Nixon was worried as Election Day drew near. He had entered the home stretch with a formidable lead over Humphrey. One of Nixon’s staffers, a young number cruncher named Alan Greenspan, had brashly predicted that Republicans would win 461 electoral votes, with Humphrey taking only 11. But Nixon’s lead in the polls began to shrink as working-class voters returned to their ancestral home in the Democratic Party.

Nixon recalled the 1966 congressional campaign, when Johnson had flown to Manila on the eve of the election for a conference with Asian leaders and announced a new Vietnam peace plan to sway the voters. The Republican candidate feared Johnson was working on another October surprise.

Nixon worried that Johnson would use foreign policy to affect the election

He bitterly remembered, as well, the 1960 election that he lost to John F. Kennedy, on an election eve that author Theodore White christened “the night of the gnomes.” It was a night, White wrote, when “political thieves … were counterfeiting results all across the nation.” In Illinois and Texas, White concluded, Democratic “vote-stealing had definitely taken place on a massive scale.”

“We won, but they stole it from us,” Nixon told a colleague. It is impossible to prove what happened that night, but Nixon believed the Kennedys had employed the rankest sort of political larceny to win. The experience left him with a fierce resolve to never be out-cheated again.

It was Henry Kissinger, an adviser to the Johnson administration and a less-than-discreet observer of American diplomatic maneuverings, who alerted the Nixon campaign in late September, and again in early October 1968, that trouble might be brewing. There was “a better than even” chance, Kissinger told Mitchell, that Johnson would call a pause to the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam.

“RN th[i]nks attempt by LBJ to get pause before election,” Nixon’s campaign chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recorded in his notes. “Is attempt to build up idea war is at end.”

In fact, Johnson and his team had good reason to believe that a bombing pause would yield results. The Russians have never been opposed to meddling in American elections (though not on a scale like the 2015-2016 intrusions), and the Soviet leaders did not much like the red-baiting, anti-communist Nixon. To help Humphrey become president, they pressed their clients in North Vietnam to agree to a ceasefire and hold talks to end the war.

“My colleagues and I think — and we have grounds to do so — that complete cessation by the United States of bombing and other acts of war … could contribute to a breakthrough,” the Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, wrote Johnson.

Johnson’s aides performed their due diligence, and reached the conclusion that the offer was genuine. “All of us know that, with all its uncertainties, we have the best deal we now can get — vastly better than any we thought we could get since 1961,” the national security adviser, Rostow, wrote the president. “If we go ahead we know it may be tough. But with military and political determination we believe we can make it stick. … None of us would know how to justify delay.”

Johnson saw a glimmer of peace. Nixon believed it was a ruse. In such misunderstandings the tragic lurks. In the years to come, millions more Asians, and 20,000 more American soldiers, would die in Indochina.

Johnson smells a rat

On October 31, Johnson announced his bombing halt, and Humphrey’s campaign soared toward the November 5 finish line. But South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu dragged his feet, announcing his reluctance to join in peace talks. LBJ already had a “credibility gap” when it came to Vietnam; he had offered rosy outlooks and promises before. Without Thieu’s support, the bombing halt looked like a cheap political trick, employed to get Humphrey elected.

South Vietnam’s motivation was clear to the president. “We could stop the killing out there,” LBJ told Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, in remarks captured on the Johnson White House taping system. “But they’ve got this … new formula put in there — namely, wait on Nixon. And they’re killing four or five hundred a day waiting on Nixon.”

The seething Texan erupted when Rostow (who had picked up rumors on Wall Street) reported that the Nixon campaign, and specifically Chennault, was behind Saigon’s reluctance. Johnson put his security agencies to work, and soon the FBI, CIA, and NSA were focusing their surveillance tools on the South Vietnamese, Chennault, and her associates.

The eavesdropping yielded fruit. “Anna Chennault contacted Vietnam Ambassador Bui Diem,” one report noted, “and advised him that she had received a message from her boss … which her boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was that, ‘Hold on. We are gonna win. … Please tell your boss to hold on.’”

Johnson got Dirksen on the phone again. “I’m reading their hand, Everett,” he told his old friend. “This is treason.”

After hearing from Dirksen, Nixon called Johnson. The Republican candidate denied it all. “My God, I would never do anything to encourage … Saigon not to come to the table,” he assured LBJ.

Rostow urged the president to “blow the whistle” on the Republicans and “destroy” Nixon’s candidacy. Johnson — and Humphrey, who by now had been informed of the plot — faced difficult questions, quite similar to those confronted by Barack Obama last year.

Without proof of the Republican candidate’s direct and personal involvement, could a Democratic White House accuse him of conspiring with a foreign power to swing the election? What if Nixon were elected anyway? It would be “inimical to our country’s interests,” Defense Secretary Clark Clifford warned Johnson, if a President Nixon were left to govern in a crippled condition. Johnson and his aides balked, moreover, at disclosing his authorization of government surveillance on a political foe — which might have caused an uproar on its own. Might it not appear, in the heat of a presidential campaign, like a Democratic dirty trick?

Even Rostow admitted that they had “no hard evidence that Mr. Nixon himself is involved.” And so Johnson, like Obama, kept the information from the American electorate. On November 5, in one of the closest presidential elections ever, Nixon won with 43.4 percent of the vote in a three-way contest with Humphrey, who received 42.7 percent of the votes, and a third-party candidate, the Alabama segregationist George Wallace (13.5 percent.)

Nixon’s actions were not “treason”  — South Vietnam was an ally, not an enemy. But they fit actions proscribed by the Logan Act, a little-used statute adopted by the Founding Fathers that was enacted to prohibit this very sort of meddling by private citizens in the diplomacy of the United States. Even Kissinger, who claimed not to have known of Chennault’s behind-the-scenes efforts, would concede in his memoir Ending the Vietnam War that, at the very least, Nixon’s actions were “highly inappropriate if true.”

The decades-long effort to conceal Nixon’s overtures to South Vietnam

Hazy, unconfirmed reports of the Chennault Affair appeared in the newspapers almost immediately, and in books about the 1968 campaign by White and others, but Johnson and Rostow had the relevant Johnson administration documents locked up for decades, in a folder known as “the X envelope.” It was not until recently that the release of the records and White House tapes by the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library put flesh on our then-skeletal knowledge of the affair. (For the fullest account of Nixon’s intrigue, and how it has come to light over the years, see Chasing Shadows, a 2014 book by Ken Hughes, a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.)

Nixon lied to Johnson, and he lied again when grilled by David Frost about the episode in their famous 1977 televised interviews, and elsewhere through the years. The former president’s lawyers fought for decades to maintain control of his most sensitive political files, which were not released to the public until well into this century.

In those files are Haldeman’s notes from the 1968 campaign, recording the Nixon campaign’s discussion of how to “monkey wrench” Johnson’s election eve maneuvers. Haldeman recorded Nixon’s instructions to “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN” and to have other emissaries press Saigon to resist.

Luke Nichter, one of the country’s leading experts on the Nixon tapes, and a scholar of his presidency, warns that our propensity to view Tricky Dick as villainous may lead us to harsher judgments of his actions than the evidence warrants. Duly noted. Here, and in my book, I have tried to present Nixon’s motivations in the best possible light — that of someone cheated, and singed, by Kennedy and Johnson.

Nichter rightly notes, as well, that for historians an important question lingers: Just what impact did the Chennault Affair have? And, indeed, the droves of variables forestall a conclusion that Nixon’s meddling, alone, cost the United States an opportunity to end the war in the fall of 1968. The stubbornness displayed by both North and South Vietnam in future negotiations, and history’s analysis of the internal political machinations in Saigon and Hanoi, preclude so ready a judgment.

In a long, reasoned examination of the incident in A Tangled Web, his book on Nixon’s foreign policy, the Democratic national security expert William Bundy did some Monday morning quarterbacking and concluded that Johnson’s hopes for a 1968 settlement, while genuine, now seem extravagant. “Probably no great chance was lost,” he wrote. That’s also the verdict I reached in my Nixon biography.

But Bundy closed his discussion of the affair with an ominous note about the leverage Nixon’s actions gave Thieu, the South Vietnamese president. In this there is a parallel to the Trump campaign’s interactions with the Russians, and what Vladimir Putin may have hoped to gain.

Thieu emerged from the Chennault Affair armed with knowledge of the Nixon campaign’s secret machinations, and a belief that “Nixon owed him a great political debt,” Bundy wrote. “The effect of such a debt on future dealings between the two men … was in my judgment the most important legacy of the whole episode.”

Time and again, in their difficult relationship, an emboldened Thieu would dig in his heels, hindering Nixon’s efforts to bring the war to a quick conclusion.

“That a new American President started with a heavy and recognized debt to the leader he had above all to influence was surely a great handicap,” Bundy wrote.

It’s a relevant consideration today, as federal investigators ponder whether Russia has the evidence with which to blackmail or extort Trump administration officials — and so influence American foreign policy.

John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life, which was published in March.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

[Editor’s note: Nixon biographer John A. Farrell wrote this comparison of the two presidents in February — well before the firing of FBI Director James Comey. It is reposted here with only light edits.]

We’re barely into the Trump administration and we’ve had war on the press, electronic eavesdropping, a sacked attorney general, humongous demonstrations, fury over a Democratic National Committee break-in, Cold War­­–style skirmishes, and scandalous intrigues akin to Watergate.

Sound familiar?

“Imagine packing 6 yrs of the Nixon admin into 3 weeks,” tweeted Nicole Hemmer, a scholar from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center (and Vox columnist), in February. “It’s like Nixon speed-dating.”

Veteran hands like Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, John Dean, and William Kristol have joined youngsters like Rachel Maddow in drawing parallels between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

As the author of a new biography of Nixon, I get asked — a lot — how I plotted the book’s release to coincide with the surge in discussion, in the press and social media, of similarities between the disgraced 37th president of the United States and his latest successor, Donald Trump.

Having lived the past six years with Nixon in my head (I seek no pity; just buy the book), I approach the idea of comparing the two leaders with caution and restraint, for there are important differences.

As bad as Nixon was, for example, he never embraced white nationalists, much less sat one on his National Security Council. Nixon supported every major civil rights bill in the 1960s, and may have lost the 1962 gubernatorial election in California as a result of his spirited denunciation of the John Birch Society, the alt-right wack jobs of their day. “It was time to take on the lunatic fringe,” he wrote to Dwight Eisenhower.

Which is not to cast Tricky Dick as a saint. Fallacious comparisons cut both ways. When Trump dismissed acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a Justice Department holdover from the previous administration, for declining to defend his executive order on immigration, the episode was immediately compared to Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” But Trump’s move hardly rates with Nixon’s. The stakes were far higher in 1973, with war in the Middle East, a nuclear alert, and the resignation of a corrupt vice president as a backdrop. Nixon’s own attorney general and his successor resigned over principle after refusing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, before Solicitor General Robert Bork stepped in to do the deed.

So restraint keeps me from overstating the echoes. But then Trump will produce a performance like his rambling, combative February 16 press conference (“Russia is fake news!”) so rich with “narcissism, thin skin and deeply personal grievances,” as NBC’s Brian Williams put it, that the analogies with Nixon’s piteous “last press conference” of 1962, or his Watergate-era clashes with the media, are insistent and appropriate.

And finally, perhaps inevitably, Trump himself joined the game: He alleged that Barack Obama had bugged Trump Tower in an act worthy of “Nixon/Watergate.” (You want to see your book sales leap on Amazon? Have POTUS tweet your topic.)

Why is Nixon the go-to model for presidential misbehavior? For one thing, he is deeply embedded in our lives and culture. The only president to resign in disgrace was famously polarizing long before Watergate. This red-baiter from Southern California was the point man for McCarthyism, earning the eternal enmity of postwar liberals.

In the swinging ’60s, he was the stodgy self-made man: the square in the age of hip. As such, Nixon was a model for Mad Men’s Don Draper and, after stretching out the Vietnam War for four additional years, his reign helped inspire the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars (according to George Lucas). He may not be the subject of a hip-hop Broadway musical, but he has served as the central figure in an opera (Nixon in China) and played the villain in the X-Men and Watchmen movies.

On the other hand, some two-thirds of the current American population were either not alive or not residents of the United States, when Nixon resigned in 1974. In my Nixon biography, and in what follows, I’ve tried to portray this oft-caricatured scoundrel, in all his glories, for Gen X-ers and millennials who may know him only as the disembodied head on Futurama.

Thinking through the points of similarity between Nixon and Trump, and where they differ, may help us to better understand both men.

Psychobiography — correlation: modest

The differences in their upbringing — Trump came from a wealthy home in New York, Nixon from the California outback and a family wracked by illness, death, and poverty — make any comparison between the two men on this score somewhat strained. Yet both are known for self-centered, narcissistic personalities — and these, perhaps were sired by the emotional austerity of their childhoods. Trump exhibits insecurity, harbors grandiose fantasies, and shows a tetchiness about criticism. So did Nixon.

The Nixon home was known for its physical and emotional severity. Frank Nixon was a crotchety and abusive dad described, by a nephew, as “a highly acquisitive person and a slave driver” who “worked all his children and he worked his wife.” Nixon’s mother, Hannah, a devout Quaker, gave the future president his sense of idealism: He really did want to bring peace to the world. But she was preoccupied with his four brothers, two of whom died as youths, and the demands of the family store. Dick craved her approval, but she never, as Nixon famously confessed, told him that she loved him.

Historians tread lightly when it comes to psychobiography, but Nixon’s career “vindicates one of that maligned genre’s most trustworthy findings: The recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough,” wrote Rick Perlstein in Nixonland.

Much of that may apply to Trump. As biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher describe him in their book, Trump Revealed, the president’s father, Fred Trump, was also a disciplinarian, a workaholic, and a skinflint. At 13, Donald was culled from his family and exiled to military school as a disciplinary remedy. It may not be unreasonable to suggest that, like Nixon, Trump has spent his life seeking to fill an emotional void.

The press — correlation: high

It is no accident that both Nixon and Trump are famous for waging war beyond reason with the press. In men with their backgrounds, criticism may be interpreted as rejection, ripping the scabs from old psychic wounds and inducing emotional pain and hostility.

It’s also no small irony that each was quite successful at courting the press in their early years. Nixon was a protégé of the Chandler family, which owned the then-right-wing Los Angeles Times and promoted Nixon’s career through the simple tactic of imposing news blackouts on his opponents. Trump was a dealmaking playboy in New York’s tabloid jungle. The experiences left both men spoiled by the media’s fawning, cynical about its professed values, and reckless with the truth.

Trump’s well-documented disregard for veracity was well matched by Nixon’s: He lied repeatedly about Vietnam and Watergate as president. When announcing that he was dispatching troops to invade Cambodia, Nixon solemnly assured the nation that the US had been scrupulous, to that point, in observing that poor country’s neutrality. In fact, he had been bombing Cambodia, secretly, for a year.

Nixon was as brash about his lying as Trump. On one occasion, when he thought the camera had stopped filming, Nixon told an interviewer how he had inserted a crude obscenity into a quote from Lyndon Johnson, because it made for a more colorful story — and portrayed Johnson as a vulgar bumpkin. When his aides could not find the chopsticks he used during his famous trip to China, Nixon told them to use any pair for a museum display, as the public would never know the difference.

Striving to maintain control, Trump rages over leaks. Nixon, too, confessed to being “paranoid” about leakers, and famously declared: “The press is the enemy.” Trump has friends in some corners of the media, and his declaration of war may be cynical and manipulative. For Nixon, the hate was real.

Trump, erupting in nocturnal tweets — emissions quite similar to those captured on Nixon’s White House tapes, except that they are instantaneously blasted out to tens of millions of Twitter fans — has taken it further. The press is not just his enemy, he tweeted, but the “enemy of the American people.”

Their politics — correlation: modest

Trump and Nixon both rode the politics of grievance — particularly white grievance — to the White House.

“I am your voice,” Trump told the disaffected electorate of the South, West, and Midwest, who responded by giving him an Electoral College majority. In his speeches, Trump called for the return of “law and order,” just like Nixon in 1968. “The silent majority is back,” Trump said, identifying his voters precisely as Nixon did. “We are going to take the country back.”

The division between coastal elites and the heartland is a hardy theme in American political history — the tension between frontier farmers and the Founding Fathers led to open rebellions in 1787 and 1791. In crises, the country draws together, then the old divisions reemerge in times of peace.

The gulf yawned after World War I, when the carnage of industrial warfare and the doctrines of scientific and moral relativity inspired a fundamentalist response in the midlands. Americans came together during the Second World War, but the rifts reappeared thereafter. In 1946, a young Navy veteran, running as a Republican, unseated a New Deal Congress member in rural California with a campaign that promised, “Richard Nixon Is One of Us” — not one of the pointy-headed pinko elitists running things in Washington.

Arriving in Washington, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Rep. Nixon embraced journalist Whittaker Chambers, a reformed communist agent, and went to war with the establishment by identifying one of the New Deal’s golden lads, the former diplomat Alger Hiss, as a Soviet spy.

It was “an epitomizing drama,” Chambers wrote in his memoir Witness, a book that would become a bible for the conservative movement. There was “a jagged fissure” between “the plain men and women of the nation and those who affected to act, think and speak for them … from their roosts in the great cities, and certain collegiate eyries.” The left “controlled the narrows of news and opinion,” Chambers wrote, but “my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness” were led and inspired by Nixon — “the kind and good.”

Nixon used the Hiss case as a launchpad to the Senate, and then to a spot as Eisenhower’s running mate. He survived a brush with scandal over a campaign slush fund filled by wealthy businessmen with a now-legendary televised address, in which he made memorably mawkish mention of his mortgage, his wife’s cloth coat, and the family cocker spaniel, Checkers.

“The sophisticates … sneer,” wrote columnist Robert Ruark, but Nixon’s speech “came closer to humanizing the Republican Party than anything that has happened in my memory. … Tuesday night the nation saw a little man, squirming his way out of a dilemma, and laying bare his most private hopes, fears and liabilities. This time the common man was a Republican.”

That was 1952. Long before the ’60s, the culture war was raging. The ’50s were “the Nixon years,” columnist Murray Kempton would write, when “the American lower middle class in the person of this man moved to engrave into the history of the United States, as the voice of America, its own faltering spirit, its self-pity and its envy, its continual anxiety about what the wrong people might think, its whole peevish resentful whine.” And so Trump and his legions follow Nixon down a well-worn path in American politics.

However, there is one significant difference in how Nixon and Trump got elected. As circumstances had it, in all three of Nixon’s campaigns for the presidency —against John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” in 1960, amid the chaos of 1968, and against George McGovern in 1972 — he ran as the candidate of moderation, of calm and experience. His speeches were generally soothing.

A young Navy officer named Bob Woodward cast his vote for Nixon, convinced he was the candidate who could end the Vietnam War. Even Hunter S. Thompson bought in.

“For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad,” Thompson wrote in 1968. But “the ‘new Nixon’ is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow.” Nixon’s were campaigns, as the political scientists Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg put it, of “social stolidity.”

Trump is anything but stolid.

Monkey-wrenched elections — correlation: high?

It is a testament to the efficacy of the Republican cover-up that four months after a foreign power affected — may even have determined — the outcome of an American presidential election, we still don’t know the facts. The timidity of the electorate, permitting Congress to let this pivotal question go unanswered, is stunning.

From what we do know, it is safe to say that the Russians sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, in favor of Donald Trump. We don’t know how or if he and his advisers, in contacts with Russian officials, acted to further the illegal hacking of Democratic organizations and officials. We know that Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to do so (though whether this was a serious request or a glib comment is debatable). This has been written off, like several such misdeeds, as “Trump being Trump.”

In Nixon’s case, it has taken almost half a century for the truth to come out about the 1968 election — about his own conspiring with a foreign power, and the steps that he took to affect that year’s outcome.

Nixon feared that Lyndon Johnson’s election year initiative to negotiate an agreement that would bring an end to the Vietnam War was nothing more than an “October Surprise” designed to elect Vice President Hubert Humphrey. (LBJ had pulled such a trick in the off-year elections of 1966.) And so Nixon employed a campaign official, Anna Chennault, to act as a go-between and persuade South Vietnam to drag its feet and scuttle peace talks with North Vietnam. He — and she — promised the South Vietnamese better terms if Nixon won. 

Tragically, peace was indeed close at hand in 1968. The Soviet Union, wanting to promote Humphrey, had promised Johnson a “breakthrough” in the talks and vowed to pressure North Vietnam. But Nixon’s attempts to monkey-wrench the talks were successful. In a telephone call to Sen. Everett Dirksen, a bitter LBJ, who had been getting details of Nixon’s machinations from electronic eavesdropping conducted by US intelligence agencies, accused Nixon of “treason.”

(Trump has offered no evidence for his claim that his campaign was “tapped” by President Barack Obama last fall, but there is no doubt that LBJ was eavesdropping on Chennault, a Nixon campaign official, in her discussions with the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.)

There is a law — the Logan Act — that makes it illegal for a private citizen to interfere in the foreign affairs and diplomacy of the United States. Nixon appears to have crossed that line; without more facts, we cannot say that Trump did too.

The deep state — correlation: modest

Like Julius Caesar, cut down by Brutus and a gang of conspirators, Richard Nixon fell victim to a coalition of mutinous forces. He had clashed repeatedly with Congress over its power to declare war, to appropriate funds, and to have access to presidential documents and tapes. He declared war on the press. His antipathy for the State Department, the CIA, the military brass, and other power centers was well-known, and his reliance on backchannel diplomacy with China and the USSR spurred the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plant a spy in the White House. Nixon may also have alienated the federal judiciary by pledging to end its lifelong terms and security.

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

The FBI offers an instructive test case on what Nixon’s rash antipathy yielded. Nixon had come to power in Washington with the help of Director J. Edgar Hoover, but after Hoover died, the president provoked the bureau by trying to install a Nixon loyalist as a replacement. “Deep Throat” — the legendary anonymous source for Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward — was Mark Felt, a deputy director that Nixon passed over when choosing Hoover’s successor.

Trump has been tormented by leaks he blames on Obama holdovers in the national security agencies and other entrenched bureaucracies. Trump profited during the campaign from FBI Director James Comey’s eleventh-hour revelation about Hillary Clinton’s emails. But Comey was reportedly outraged by Trump’s allegation that Obama tapped Trump’s headquarters during the campaign and, according to leaks, demanded a public repudiation of the imputation. (And now, of course, Comey has been fired.)

Scandals — correlation: to be determined

There are more than half a million responses to a Google search for Trump and Watergate. But as much as his critics hope to see the 45th president exit the White House like Nixon, we have a long way to go before “Russiagate” is reasonably equated to Watergate.

There are obvious parallels. Both scandals stem from break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters, whether real or virtual. Both involve electronic eavesdropping. And credit must be given to Roger Stone, a minor figure in the Watergate wars, who managed to survive the decades since and surface once more in the Russiagate stew.

Yet Nixon had years to dig his grave, and the Watergate scandals were, as Woodward and Bernstein famously wrote, “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage.”

The DNC headquarters at the Watergate were one of a half-dozen targets for burglary and/or bugging, including the campaign headquarters of Sens. Edmund Muskie and George McGovern and the offices of the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. By the time Nixon resigned, Watergate was a vast umbrella. The scandal brought to light subsidiary issues — like whether Nixon shortchanged the Treasury on his income taxes, and used taxpayer funds to protect and improve his Florida vacation home — that have obvious correspondence to Trump’s behavior.

But there will have to be some remarkable revelations — proof that Trump and his aides offered inducements to the Russian hackers — before Russiagate can be compared to Watergate. On the other hand, if it is proven that the Trump campaign, in league with a foreign power, stole the White House, it could supplant Watergate as the greatest political scandal of them all.

John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life, which is being published March 28.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.