Three days before the 1968 presidential election, President Johnson contacted Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen [R–Illinois] to inform him that the White House had received hard evidence from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Richard M. “Dick” Nixon was interfering with Johnson’s efforts to start peace talks to end the Vietnam War. In this call, Johnson referred to contacts between Nixon’s campaign and South Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu that urged Thiệu to thwart any such negotiations.