On July 1, 1975, under gray skies, two Watergate prosecutors arrived in the office of the White House counsel. Also present was the deputy national security adviser, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft. They were gathered for a burial.
The intended object was a 297-page transcript created the previous week, when eight members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, joined by a stenographer and two members of a federal grand jury, among others, had interrogated Richard Nixon under oath near his home in San Clemente, Calif. Over two days, the ex-president’s grand jury testimony consumed 11 hours. Then came an interview by the prosecutors, undisclosed until now, that lasted another two.
President Gerald Ford had pardoned Nixon for all crimes he committed or may have committed in office, but the threat of perjury still hung over him. It was, by all accounts, the first time that any president had appeared before a grand jury and the only time that Nixon testified in depth about Watergate.
Since early 1973, when the scandal morphed from a caper covered chiefly by newspapers into a televised national obsession — the dawn of saturation coverage — the nation had endured a cascade of headlines, resignations, hearings, trials, reports, memoirs and archival releases. In the eyes of prosecutors, the former president figured centrally in what one termed the “organized criminal activity” of the Nixon administration: the Ellsberg break-in, the Kissinger wiretaps, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters cash, Howard Hughes and the casinos, the sale of ambassadorships, I.R.S. abuses, C.I.A. assassination plots.
Near the end of Nixon’s second and final day on the stand, the examination strayed into a subject that wasn’t listed on the agenda. This prompted Nixon to admonish his interrogator, “I would strongly urge the special prosecutor: Don’t open that can of worms.” More extraordinary still, the prosecutors agreed.
The four men gathered in the White House that July recognized that the document they held was a road map to the darkest precincts of the Cold War. In a sworn setting, the nation’s only ex-president had explored, from his lonely perspective, the entwined subjects of war and peace, power and money, scandals and secrets. Proper procedure required secrecy; the officials went beyond that.
The transcript was placed under the protective seal of the grand jury and ordered withheld even from top officials at the Justice Department. In the White House counsel’s office, General Scowcroft determined that one seven-page segment, focused on the very subject that Nixon had warned about, was so incendiary that it needed to be withheld even from the rest of the grand jury.
According to a previously unpublished memo by a Watergate prosecutor, Peter Kreindler, who was present, General Scowcroft stamped “CLASSIFIED” on each of the seven pages. Kreindler placed them in an envelope and stapled to its front a judicial order sealing the contents. General Scowcroft placed that package in another White House envelope, sealed it, dated it and scrawled: “Do not touch, to be opened only by Brent Scowcroft.”
Not until 2011 — 36 years after Nixon’s testimony and 17 years after his death — did the National Archives release the grand jury transcript. A few journalists, including me, reported on it, but the vast majority of the contents was ignored. And the seven pages remained withheld, until now.
In the avalanche of official disclosure that defined the 1970s, what remained so sensitive that even the special prosecutors wouldn’t touch it?
The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own. The classified portion of the grand jury transcript, obtained by Times Opinion, bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the “deep state.”
Seated in a small Coast Guard station in June 1975, Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but that he himself, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.
“Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give in this deposition proceedings,” the judge asked, “shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do,” the witness replied.
Administering the oath to Nixon at 9 a.m. on June 23, 1975, was the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. To avoid attention, the special prosecutors, the grand jurors and the stenographer had spent the night near San Diego and had driven to the former Western White House.
“Sir,” began Henry Ruth, the head of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. It was a sly snub, a refusal to show Nixon the deference of addressing him as “Mr. President.” Ruth delivered a rehearsed opening statement that ended with a reminder of the potential consequences of false statements.
“Yes, I understand everything you have said, Mr. Ruth,” Nixon said. “Needless to say, I am here, as I indicated in taking the oath, to make true statements, and while, of course, I suppose it is your obligation to warn witnesses, I did not feel that it was particularly necessary for you to warn me.”
Even in disgrace, facing eight prosecutors armed to the teeth with documents and tapes, Nixon — the only politician besides Franklin Roosevelt, and the only Republican, to run on a national ticket five times — projected an aura of power.
Fifty years ago, the information age had already arrived. The Senate Watergate committee publicized its use of computers for data storage and retrieval; TV networks broadcast hearings via satellite; and print outlets, including The Times, rushed out paperbacks collecting the hearings, documents and transcripts. Congress created the Pike and Church committees, precursors to today’s intelligence panels, to process all the documents tumbling out of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.
As a result, the tower of exposed skeletons from the closets of the previous six White Houses was stacked high. Nixon was not going to allow his singular sacrifice on the altar of All That without the record reflecting this long lineage of presidential misconduct. Watergate had not arisen in a vacuum; nor was it, in an era of assassinations and secret drug tests, the worst of the abuses.
Stressing the importance of confidentiality in both the Oval Office and the current proceedings, Nixon reminded his listeners that not so long ago he had been the leader of the free world. “Only if there is an absolute guarantee that there will not be disclosure of what I say,” he testified, “I will reveal for the first time information with regard to why wiretaps were proposed, information which, if it is made public, will be terribly damaging to the United States.”
Five topics were to be explored, including the infamous 18-and-a-half-minute gap discovered on the White House tapes. As the second session wound down, another prosecutor, Jay Horowitz, opened a surprise line of questioning. Horowitz said he needed to broach “this other electronic surveillance project which I will dub the Radford project.” Promising to ask only a few questions, the prosecutor said the project included surveillance of a number of people, among them a Yeoman Radford, from December 1971 to June 1972.
Who was Yeoman Radford? Among all the era’s scandals, what made his case, virtually unknown today, the most sensitive of all?
Nixon recalled it vividly: “This project was the most highly sensitive that we had while I was president.”
“I understand that,” Horowitz replied. “And I understand ——”
Nixon cut him off. Apparently the framing was too goddamned important to be left to this kid.
“I am going to describe the project,” the ex-president declared.
War between India and Pakistan broke out on Dec. 3, 1971. The White House convened the Washington Special Action Group, an elite cell of the National Security Council.
“This was a regional Cold War issue,” Gen. Alexander Haig, a deputy to Henry Kissinger at the N.S.C., told me in 2000. “We had firm evidence that the Russians and the Indians were colluding” against Pakistan. Indeed, the Kremlin and India had signed a strategic treaty that summer.
Beyond wishing to check Soviet aggression, Nixon distrusted Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India. He also had reason to support the Pakistani president, Yahya Khan, despite his abysmal human rights record: Islamabad had hosted Nixon’s back-channel diplomacy that would lead, in 1972, to his historic visit to China, the president’s foreign-policy masterstroke. Publicly, however, the U.S. remained neutral.
“I am getting hell every half-hour from the president that we are not being tough enough on India,” Kissinger told the N.S.C. group on Dec. 3. “He does not believe we are carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan.” Without consulting the Navy, Nixon ordered a task force, led by the nuclear carrier Enterprise, to the Bay of Bengal.
All this and more surfaced 11 days later when the investigative reporter Jack Anderson published excerpts from top-secret memorandums and, more alarming, minutes taken at the N.S.C. meetings. It would win Anderson a Pulitzer. With their timely contradiction of official narrative, observed Theodore H. White, Anderson’s columns “stripped bare the essential privacy of national-security planners as never before.”
The task of determining how Anderson had obtained the material fell to the White House Plumbers, a secret unit formed in June 1971 to plug news leaks. It didn’t take long for the investigation to zero in on a 28-year-old, Navy Yeoman First Class Charles Radford.
Radford enlisted in the Navy in 1963. Skinny and mustachioed, he possessed “a gift for disarming people and collecting information,” according to “Silent Coup,” a groundbreaking book about the Watergate scandal. Stationed at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, Radford had grown passionate about India. He began working at the Pentagon and the White House in 1970 as a stenographer, typist and courier. He was, like Anderson, a Mormon; the Radfords and Andersons had grown friendly after meeting at church.
In the Old Executive Office Building, Radford worked for the liaison office that connected the Pentagon’s senior military brass, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Kissinger’s N.S.C. His superiors included a pair of admirals who reported directly to Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a 59-year-old arch-conservative from Alabama and a highly decorated former naval aviator.
As the Vietnam War worsened, Admiral Moorer complained publicly that the country’s civilian leaders paid only “lip service” to the needs of frontline troops. Shortly after Nixon selected him as the chairman, Admiral Moorer expressed dismay at America’s trajectory. “As I pass into what one might call the twilight of my career,” he wrote for a Navy publication in 1970, “I often wonder if everything my generation has attempted to do has been worth the effort.”
From their fortress across the Potomac, the Joint Chiefs watched a problem grow under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and become acute under Nixon: the exclusion of the president’s military advisers from policymaking. Worse, their exclusion served to advance policies they abhorred, including rapprochement with the Soviet Union and China and budget cuts that left military spending at its lowest level, as a percentage of federal outlays, since 1950.
Nixon, for his part, held the Pentagon brass in low regard. “Goddamn it, the military, they’re a bunch of greedy bastards!” the commander in chief railed on an April 1971 tape. “They want more officers’ clubs and more men to shine their shoes! The sons of bitches are not interested in this country!”
Into this cauldron of Cold War paranoia stepped the easygoing Chuck Radford, who the F.B.I. later determined had been brought to Washington by Admiral Moorer. Dutifully, Radford followed the admirals’ instructions to gather intelligence on the N.S.C. Any documents he touched, he copied; he dived into wastebaskets and burn bags; what he couldn’t copy, he memorized. Radford also recruited to assist him a Navy personnelman second-class from Texas who managed the N.S.C. mailroom at night.
“If it became available, I took it,” Radford told the authors of “Silent Coup.” “I made a career out of it. Every day. Constantly. Every minute. … It was coming in so fast that they couldn’t digest it. They were so delighted to have the data … Each time I came back they were even more delighted.”
Selected to accompany General Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, on trips to Vietnam and Cambodia, Radford deployed all his gifts for theft, including raiding the general’s briefcase. According to “Silent Coup,” Radford turned over “a huge government envelope overflowing with hundreds of pages of documents.”
Scholars have concluded that General Haig, who maintained a strong allegiance to the Pentagon, tacitly encouraged Radford. Certainly, the general disapproved of Nixon’s policies. “Vietnamization,” General Haig told me in 2000, referring to Nixon’s program of shifting the war’s burdens to Saigon, “was as phony as a two-dollar bill!” (I considered it imprudent to remind the general that the Treasury had issued two-dollar bills, on and off, since 1862.)
General Haig, who died in 2010, denied any role in the spying but depicted it as routine. “What kind of hanky-panky went on in the chairman’s office with Tom Moorer, that’s not unusual,” he said. “Anybody that’s grown up in the Pentagon knows the Army spies on the Navy and the Navy on the Air Force.” He concluded, “They all spy on each other.”
In June 1971, having received superlative reviews from General Haig, Radford was chosen to accompany Kissinger on a tour of Asian capitals. On a stopover in Pakistan, the accompanying press were told falsely that Kissinger had fallen ill; in fact, he flew secretly to Beijing to finalize Nixon’s trip. “Don’t get caught,” warned Radford’s direct supervisor, Adm. Robert Welander, ahead of his departure. Once again, the yeoman snatched every document within reach, including rifling Kissinger’s briefcase. Radford collected so much material that he enlisted a contact at the embassy in New Delhi to ship it back to the Pentagon via secure diplomatic pouch.
Five months later, with Jack Anderson’s columns sending shock waves across Washington, Radford found himself under virtual house arrest.
On Dec. 16, he was summoned to Pentagon Room 3E933 for questioning. Radford admitted that he knew Anderson but denied giving him documents. Strapped to a polygraph machine, Radford repeated this denial. The machine registered deception. Officials told the F.B.I. the test indicated “unaccounted-for relations with Anderson” and “guilty knowledge of material being leaked to Anderson.”
Asked next if he had furnished classified material to any “uncleared persons,” Radford told the truth. When the polygrapher followed up, Radford broke down crying. The examiners said he “became emotionally distraught,” and halted the test. Wires removed, Radford would say only that there was a sensitive operation he needed Admiral Welander’s approval to discuss.
The investigators contacted Admiral Welander, who, believing erroneously that Radford was being interrogated solely about Anderson, gave his blessing for the yeoman to tell all. Speaking for the first time about his year as an internal spy, Radford broke down repeatedly. The report said he confessed to feeling “very guilty,” as stealing was contrary to his faith. Now the Plumbers understood. This was far bigger than leaks.
“We walked out thinking this was ‘Seven Days in May,’” recalled the lead Pentagon investigator, W. Donald Stewart. He was referring to a Cold War novel and film in which the military attempts, unsuccessfully, to overthrow a president who is pursuing peace with the Soviets.
The Moorer-Radford affair, as the episode became known, constituted a unique constitutional crisis. Over 13 months, in wartime, an enlisted man had stolen an estimated 5,000 documents, most of them classified, from the N.S.C. and delivered them to the nation’s top uniformed commanders. It was time to brief the president.
As the helicopter’s rotors atop Marine One ground to a halt, the commander in chief bounded across the South Grounds and into the Oval Office. It was just before 6 p.m. on Dec. 21, 1971, and Nixon, fresh from talks with British leaders in Bermuda, had only a few minutes before a trio of aides arrived for a rare evening session.
First was Attorney General John Mitchell, the president’s taciturn, pipe-smoking confidant, the closest thing Nixon had to a friend. Two minutes later came the White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, the architect of modern White House operations, and Haldeman’s close friend and fellow Christian Scientist John Ehrlichman, the sharp-tongued domestic policy czar who ran the Plumbers. Heavy hitters only. All three served prison sentences after Watergate.
Kissinger’s exclusion was deliberate. Though he was a victim of the spying, the men considered the former Harvard professor to be part of the problem. Once, when Kissinger left a cabinet meeting, Nixon quipped: “There goes Henry … to call the Washington Post.”
The Dec. 21 recording remained classified until 2000. Its contents, and those of succeeding tapes, were first disclosed publicly in my article “Nixon and the Chiefs” in The Atlantic in 2002.
Reveling in his role, Ehrlichman outlined the facts. Under his supervisors’ encouragement, Radford had “systematically stolen documents out of Henry’s briefcase, Haig’s briefcase, people’s desks — any place and every place in the N.S.C. apparatus,” then had “turned them over to the Joint Chiefs.”
“He reads and retains everything that comes through,” Ehrlichman continued. “This guy was trained. He can tell you exactly the sequence in which he Xeroxed things, he moved to this room, to that room.” The adviser said, “He just has total recall.”
Nixon was astonished. Few presidents had faced such a brazen and illegal challenge. He called it “a federal offense of the highest order.”
The president wondered aloud whether to wiretap General Haig — an ironic suggestion, since the general had managed an earlier wiretapping program that targeted 17 N.S.C. aides and newsmen. The others endorsed the idea, but it was never implemented. The president then turned to the yeoman’s superiors. Nixon was certain the admirals had to know Radford was raiding General Haig’s and Kissinger’s briefcases.
“That is wrong!” the president fumed. “Do you agree?”
“No question about it,” Mitchell replied. It was, he said, as though the Joint Chiefs were “robbing your desk.”
Nixon demanded that Admiral Moorer be prosecuted. Mitchell reminded the commander in chief, obliquely, of all the secret operations he had going, in Cambodia and elsewhere, and the risks of exposure in any such trial.
“What has been done has been done,” said the attorney general. Instead, Mitchell proposed dissolving the liaison office where Radford worked and reassigning Admiral Welander “to Kokomo, or Indiana or anywhere we want.” Radford would also be transferred far away, and wiretapped, while a security officer was installed for the first time at the National Security Council. As for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the attorney general proposed that he “sit down with Tom Moorer” and convey the message “This ballgame’s over with.”
Nixon accepted all of Mitchell’s recommendations.
The next day, however, the president started to worry Radford could be “a potential Ellsberg.” Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department official, had leaked the Pentagon Papers to The Times. Three months earlier, the Plumbers had burglarized the Los Angeles office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
Nixon wanted the yeoman to be warned that a criminal offense was hanging over him: “I’d like to scare the son of a bitch to death!”
“You can’t touch him,” Ehrlichman countered.
Nixon knew this. Although he longed to nail Admiral Moorer and his crew to the wall, the commander in chief wanted to protect the reputation of the armed forces. He also agreed with Mitchell that moving against Admiral Moorer ran the risk of exposing the administration’s secret — sometimes illegal — operations.
“My recollection,” Haldeman said in a 1988 oral history, “is that at the time of the Watergate-related hearings, when this issue came up, that I was told … we were not to testify as to anything on this, or allude to it in any way, or even indicate that it existed, because of the president’s concern as to what this would do to the status of the military … from an image and public opinion and public support viewpoint.”
Nixon also recognized that his penchant for secrecy had helped spawn the crisis. “Damn,” he rued. “I created this whole situation, this — this lesion. It’s just unbelievable.”
Early on Dec. 22, Mitchell telephoned Mark Felt, the F.B.I.’s No. 3 official, and ordered a wiretap on the landline in Radford’s personal quarters at Bolling Air Force Base. The order came directly from the president, Mitchell had said. Radford’s calls were monitored by 10:30 a.m. the next day.
That same day, Dec. 23, Ehrlichman briefed the president on Mitchell’s showdown with Admiral Moorer.
“Moorer admits that he saw stuff, but that he operated on the assumption that his liaison man was working this all out with Henry,” Ehrlichman reported. “I said, ‘Well, did you get a plea of guilty or a not guilty?” Nolo contendere, he quoted Mitchell as replying.
Haldeman told the president that Kissinger wanted Admiral Moorer thrown in jail. Admiral Moorer, in turn, thought that Admiral Welander should be jailed; and Admiral Welander was demanding the jailing of Yeoman Radford. “As you go up the ladder,” Haldeman quipped, “everybody’s going to crucify the guy under him.”
The Plumbers conducted a recorded interview with Admiral Welander, who confessed to passing documents to the chairman, and repeatedly implicated General Haig as an accomplice. When the tape of Admiral Welander’s confession was played for Kissinger, the national security adviser, by nature mercurial, exploded. Nixon “won’t fire Moorer!” he said. “They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us and he won’t fire them!” He continued: “I assure you all this tolerance will lead to very serious consequences for this administration!”
He was right. To outsiders, however, Kissinger, like everyone else, played down the episode. In a call with Hugh Sidey of Time magazine, recorded in 1974, Kissinger referred to “these people spying on me” but said he couldn’t tell how sinister it was: “It may have started as bureaucratic gamesmanship, and it got out of control.”
Nixon spent that Christmas Eve working the phones. He called General Haig to wish him a merry Christmas and urge him not to worry. Nixon knew the reassurance would be passed along, like the stolen documents, to the Pentagon.
“On the Moorer thing,” Nixon said, “the damn thing, I’m sure, started before he was there.”
“That’s right,” General Haig replied.
“I think it goes back over years, and it probably went further than he ever expected it was gonna go. That’s my guess.”
“That’s what I think, sir ——” General Haig began to say.
“We gotta remember that basically he’s our ally,” Nixon continued. “The worst thing we can do now is to hurt the military.”
Two days later, Nixon spoke, finally, to Admiral Moorer. Since Mitchell had handled the unpleasant part — Nixon hated confrontations — the president focused on the war. His tone was inquisitive, deferential. (“Can you do that?” he marveled when Admiral Moorer mentioned that pilots rely on instruments in bad weather.) The chairman wished the boss a merry Christmas.
On Jan. 4, 1972, according to the F.B.I.’s declassified transcripts of Radford’s surveilled conversations, previously unpublished, a man, never identified, called the yeoman’s home. After “our little talk this afternoon, which seemed so benign at the time, I did some checking around,” the man said. “I think you and I need to sit down and talk.” Radford agreed to visit the man’s home.
Late that night, the man called again and asked, “How does Portland or Seattle sound?”
“Wonderful,” Radford replied; he and his wife had family in Portland and Seattle.
A moving van arrived the next day. Radford was given 30 days to drive his family across the country. A few days later, Admiral Welander was transferred to a remote command at sea.
The Radfords were wiretapped at home for another five months, and at Chuck’s new job, at the Naval Reserve Training Center in Salem, Ore., for another two. Two of Radford’s friends — Robert Carroll, a Defense Department official, and Georgianna Prince, a State Department official, identified here for the first time — were also wiretapped.
According to declassified F.B.I. transcripts, one of the individuals placed under surveillance said, in reference to the classified documents that Anderson had published, “Certainly some had to come from somewhere else,” to which the yeoman replied: “I think so, of course.” It was tantamount to an admission that some had come from Radford. Contacted for this article, Radford, now 82, did not provide any comment.
When the revelations of Watergate forced the disclosure of the earlier N.S.C. wiretap program, the F.B.I. took additional steps to maintain the secrecy of the Radford project. “Because of the very sensitive nature of the matter,” a member of the bureau’s intelligence division wrote in 1973, “it is being given a code word”; additionally, “all records and documents relating to the matter will be kept in the associate director’s office with access limited to those persons who have received prior individual approval.”
In the summer of 1973, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, learned of the Radford project and considered it vital to Nixon’s defense. The White House, now run by, of all people, General Haig, enjoined Baker from disclosing the critical work that the Plumbers had done in Moorer-Radford. Nixon and General Haig each harbored good reasons to let the matter rest.
As the president pointedly reminded General Haig in a recorded meeting on May 11, 1973: “Admiral Moorer, I could have screwed him on that and been a big hero, you know. I could have screwed the whole Pentagon about that damn thing, and you know it. Why didn’t I do it? Because I thought more of the services.”
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Watergate sleuths for The Washington Post, learned about the Radford project. They published a vague story in October 1973 alluding to the yeoman as a “military assistant” whose phone had been tapped, but the espionage by the Joint Chiefs went unmentioned. The Post reported only that the wiretapping had stemmed from a 1971 leak to Anderson about the India-Pakistan war. It was, instead, Dan Thomasson of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain and Jim Squires of The Chicago Tribune, permitted by their editors to work together, who broke the story of the Pentagon spying in articles published in their respective outlets on Jan. 11, 1974.
Anderson denied that Radford was his source, as he would for the rest of his life. Admiral Moorer dismissed the talk of military spying as “ludicrous.” Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show on Jan. 18, he acknowledged receiving papers from the “overzealous” yeoman but said he’d found them “useless,” duplicative of what he already knew.
Officially, the White House dismissed the significance of the “low-level employee whose clerical tasks gave him access to highly classified information.” Anonymously, however, an aide confided to The Times’s Seymour Hersh that the president had buried the scandal because exposure would have placed “the whole military command structure on the line.”
Across February and March 1974, as calls for Nixon to be impeached intensified, the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings on the military spying. Behind closed doors, the panel heard testimony from Kissinger, Admirals Moorer and Welander, and Radford. “All sorts of conflicts,” a Senate aide wrote, “withholding full story.”
Like the White House and the Pentagon, the Senate preferred to drop the matter. That June, the panel declared Admiral Moorer “not culpable” and recommended that he be allowed to retire with full rank, pension and honors, which he did.
This, then, was the can of worms Nixon had warned against opening.
In the grand jury room on June 24, 1975, the ex-president had just been describing the Soviet Union’s role in the India-Pakistan conflict. The next seven pages were those marked CLASSIFIED by General Scowcroft and buried in his safe.
Fifty years later, their contents can finally be revealed. The redacted portion began with Nixon describing the plan — “my decision, not Kissinger’s” — to use Pakistan as the bridge to China. Since the Eisenhower era, Nixon had cultivated relationships with Pakistani officials, and those relationships had facilitated his détente with Beijing. As a result, Nixon said, “we felt a great obligation to the Pakistanis.”
He continued: “The Russians were supporting India. … Nobody was supporting Pakistan because there was an embargo on the shipment of arms. … But we were giving moral support to them, and also we gave to the Chinese an assurance privately that if India jumped Pakistan and China decided to take on the Indians that we would support them.”
This was inside dope on global power politics at a level that none of Nixon’s listeners had heard before. Richard Davis, one of the prosecutors who interrogated the ex-president, told me in a recent interview that he and his colleagues knew immediately they “weren’t comfortable not bringing [these passages] to the attention of the White House.”
Nixon then recounted what happened after Anderson’s first column appeared. “Kissinger came in, and he is quite an emotional man,” Nixon said. “He was practically on the ceiling.” The national security adviser, according to Nixon, warned that the leaks would jeopardize U.S. relations with Pakistan and China, as well as the president’s plans to travel to China. “The trip may blow — you won’t go,” Kissinger said, according to Nixon. “We have got to find out how this is leaking out.”
The job was given to Ehrlichman, Nixon testified. “It was here that the so-called Plumbers did a remarkable job. And despite the terribly wrong and stupid things they did in the Watergate thing, they should be well remembered for what they did here.”
The signal revelation of the unsealed testimony is that Nixon and the mole came face to face. “I had met him just casually on a plane,” the ex-president said of Radford, “a brilliant young man.”
“He took shorthand and typed at incredible speed. I think he spoke several languages,” Nixon recalled, noting that Radford “had been with Kissinger on his secret trips,” serving as “the note-taker, and knew what Kissinger had said and what the other side had said. He knew, for example, that the French government were responsible for making those trips possible, which would have been terribly embarrassing to the French government if it had come out. He also knew what Kissinger said when he met with Chou En-lai on his visits to China, and he also knew, of course, every discussion that had taken place in the N.S.C.” Nixon pondered: “Why did he do this thing? Why would he deliver these top secret documents to Jack Anderson?”
In Nixon’s brief treatment of the Moorer-Radford scandal in his 1978 memoir, he omitted having met the yeoman. Their encounter establishes how high up the chain of command the mole’s maneuvering took him and recalls the infamous photograph of Alger Hiss — the State Department official later convicted of perjury for lying about his role in passing documents to a Soviet agent — shaking the hand of President Harry Truman in San Francisco in 1945. It was, of course, a young Republican congressman, Dick Nixon, who rose to fame by accusing Hiss of treason.
Answering his own question about Radford’s motives, Nixon reprised the yeoman’s “violently pro-India” views and his shared Mormon faith with Anderson. “We had them cold because the yeoman broke down when they gave him a polygraph,” the ex-president testified. “He cried — I wasn’t there, but I got the report on it — and virtually admitted his guilt.”
Next came a double-barreled blast that only Richard Nixon could fire off: He admitted breaking the law and, in practically the same breath, shared something that Chairman Mao had told him.
“I suppose that it could be said that I obstructed justice by not immediately calling up [the Justice Department] and saying, ‘Prosecute him, and, in this case, Anderson,’” Nixon said. “The reason that we couldn’t prosecute and wouldn’t was that, if we did,” he added, Radford “could expose these highly confidential exchanges we were having to bring the war in Vietnam to a conclusion, and particularly the exchange in China.
“I remember when I saw Mao,” Nixon continued. Mao called himself the “most famous or infamous communist in the world” and Nixon “the most famous or infamous capitalist in the world.” What brought the two men together? Nixon recalled Mao asking. “History brings us together in our interests,” Mao said. Nixon persuaded Mao to accept a defense alliance between the United States and Japan.
“Yeoman Radford had all of this information and if he had been prosecuted, it was my opinion that there was a very great risk, because of his obvious emotional instability, that he would blow the whole thing. … The war in Vietnam would have continued for a while longer. … I had to make a decision.”
At this point, the CLASSIFIED section ended. Seeking a final flourish, the old politician wanted the audience to know that except for the most infamous wiretapping of all, at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, the Plumbers’ work had involved vital national security interests.
That’s when Nixon warned the prosecutors not to open “that can of worms,” adding, “There is even more, because [Radford] not only ——”
Ruth, the lead prosecutor, interjected: “We are not opening it up.”
“Yeoman Radford was not only there,” the ex-president persisted, “but he was a direct channel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
There it was, finally — the secret Nixon had sought to keep under wraps: It was not the far left that most actively sought to sabotage the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy but the hard right, not lowly pencil-pushers in the civil service but the most senior commanders at the Pentagon.
The prosecutors had heard enough. They did not want Nixon to elaborate. Jay Horowitz, the last questioner, cut in.
“Sir, if I might take us back now to ——”
Nixon would not be deterred.
“This indicates to the members of the grand jury, if I might address them for a moment, why it is that” the Radford project “had to be top secret.” He added: “Particularly, I didn’t want the Joint Chiefs of Staff involved.”
Nixon had no intention of exposing the affair’s full depths; even here, he wished not to join in vilification of the services, something that was pervasive when Vietnam veterans were often jeered on return to U.S. soil as “baby killers.”
After some additional questioning on other subjects, Horowitz consulted the grand jurors, then declared, “No further questions.”
Ten minutes later, with the grand jurors and the stenographer hustled from the room, Ruth and Davis conducted a final interview with the witness. The prosecutors’ memos, previously unpublished, show that they interrogated Nixon on four additional topics, including proposals, captured on the tapes but never enacted, to hire thugs to attack antiwar demonstrators.
The 13 hours of interrogation produced no perjury charges against Nixon nor anything material to the remaining prosecutions.
Publication of the classified segment of the ex-president’s grand jury testimony represents a major addition to the historical record of the era of Vietnam and Watergate. Its significance extends to the current day.
The issues that animated the “deep state” against Nixon and Kissinger were rooted in the Cold War. But the frictions inherent in the making of national security policy, most acute in times of war, are perennial. Moorer-Radford exposed a hidden feature of the American political system that endures: When excluded from their spheres of interest, entrenched bureaucratic forces will, almost as a biological reflex, respond aggressively.
The Joint Chiefs’ spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times. Declassified documents and scholarship published since 1974 have established that the F.B.I., under its director, J. Edgar Hoover, spied on Mitchell, the attorney general, and that the C.I.A. detailed its personnel to various units associated with Nixon, including the Watergate burglary team and “components intimately associated with the office of the president,” as the agency admitted in 1975.
Mr. Trump has long expressed admiration for Nixon. As early as 1982, the rising tycoon told the disgraced ex-president, “I think you are one of this country’s great men.” Not many prominent people in that era expressed such a sentiment. Both men achieved success at young ages. Both men, at once craving and scorning the approval of the elites, remained resentful of the establishment that they came to lead.
They differ in two crucial respects. Mr. Trump’s purge of the federal government since returning to the presidency has displayed a ruthlessness toward the perceived “enemy within” that Nixon, despite similar inclinations, could never conjure — even when faced with criminal insubordination.
Mr. Trump also appears on track to complete his second term.
James Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author, most recently, of “Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.”
Source photographs by Wally McNamee, Soubrette, PhotoQuest and MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
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