“The reason that we couldn’t prosecute and wouldn’t was that, if we did… [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… 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… Yeoman Radford was not only there… but he was a direct channel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
That was Richard Nixon from newly revealed testimony from his interview with Watergate prosecutors in 1975, featured in a Feb. 8 New York Times piece by author and Newsmax Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen, on why the then-president made top secret the theft of hundreds of documents from 1970 to 1971 by U.S. Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, who was spying on the Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissiinger and the Oval Office on behalf of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer via Admiral Robert Welander to garner intelligence on Nixon’s détente with China and the Soviet Union, some of which was leaked to newspapers like the Washington Post, on Nixon’s efforts to back Pakistan in its war with India as a Cold War play.
In 1973, in one of the Nixon White House tapes, Nixon told then Chief of Staff, General Alexandar Haig, “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.”
Commenting on the Nixon’s decision to keep the matter secret, and not to pursue prosecutions, in an exclusive interview with Americans for Limited Government’s Frank McCaffrey, Rosen called “one of Nixon’s finest moments as a public servant, really. Even though he allowed this criminality to go unpunished, he did so because he thought that any move to punish the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the yeoman who was responsible for the spying would damage the institution of the armed forces of the United States. And Nixon deserves eternal credit for hewing to that decision even when the political pressures of Watergate might have compelled some other politicians, some other elected officials to a different course of action.”
Rosen added, “he was persuaded by… Attorney General John Mitchell… that any such disclosure would risk exposure as well of secret and sensitive and perhaps illegal operations around the world in Cambodia and elsewhere… [And] President Nixon was determined not to contribute to the vilification of the armed forces that was culturally widespread in the United States of America in the early 1970s when Vietnam veterans were returning to US soil and being jeered as baby killers.”
And as Nixon stated himself, reported Rosen, there was incredibly sensitive diplomacy at hand among several countries, including with North Vietnam to conclude the Vietnam War and separately with China, resulting in Mao Zedong tacitly accepting the U.S.-Japanese defensive alliance treaty, which the U.S. argued at the time in talks with China in 1971 put a cap on Japanese military aggression and therefore did not endanger Chinese interests. There was a lot at stake at the time.
This was the era that gave us the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (terminated in 2002) and Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the USSR, later setting the stage for Ronald Reagan to later get the now-terminated Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) (terminated 2019) and George H.W. Bush to complete the now-terminated Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), allowed to expire in 2026, but at the time these treaties directly played a role leading to the end of the Cold War. It helped pause the now-resumed arms race.
And in order to be able to end the Vietnam War and carry forward détente, Nixon allowed the forces who sought to undercut those very kinds of efforts to pull back from the brink to all escape.
That is, to save and ensure peace, Nixon kicked the can on this division of the executive branch that Hamilton warned against. It was probably the right thing to do. Maybe Nixon bought the world a generation or so.
But because it was never dealt with, it ultimately allowed it to happen again: Russiagate, the illegal and unconstitutional spying on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign by the Justice Department on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign, falsely alleging he was a Russian agent who had conspired with Moscow to hack the DNC and put the emails on Wikileaks, bringing U.S.-Russian relations to a low point and escalating the war in Ukraine that had begun in 2014.
President Trump spoke of peace on the campaign trail in 2016, that we were at risk of a wider war thanks to Ukraine, Syria and other hotspots and that he would resume détente — and these same exact kinds of forces tried to take him down for it. The worst constitutional crisis of our lifetimes — and maybe the most dangerous.
It’s still up in the air — what happens as a result of the Ukraine war? What was set in motion? How does it end? Could the escalation have been averted if not for Russiagate? A future generation might ask these questions, and perhaps not under great circumstances.
Just think, it was made it a crime for the President to do his most important job in the nuclear era: Keep us out of World War III. Former President Joe Biden appears to have never spoken with Putin after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. And why not? The perverse incentive for Trump and then Biden was to allow escalation even in small amounts, in the least sending arms, lest they be accused of being soft on Russia.
Much like the Moorer-Radford affair, since nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted for Russiagate — which in many ways is just as bad as this Radford affair — and these forces appear to still be entrenched, it would appear President Trump and all future presidents remain in great peril. And, as a result, so does peace.
Judicial Watch is suing for additional Russiagate documents and so more disclosure is coming and may even be imminent, an important program that must be completed. But there’s got to be more. This spans administrations.
How could Nixon’s testimony of the Joint Chiefs spying on the President to stop détente have been hidden all these years? What else are we not being told? These are repeated examples of forces attempting to leverage and potentially blackmail presidents to achieve dangerous escalations.
Maybe just tell the whole story through the Cold War. Start at the beginning. This would be a good one to do from the Oval Office. But don’t just tell us. Show us what happened. Get some charts. Nixon would have enjoyed that.
One gets the sense that these forces are more than capable of running out the clock on President Trump, and all presidents. That’s what they always do. Can this sort of thing even be prevented? The President’s ability to make decisions the permanent bureaucracy hates is a toxic recipe for recurrences. There will always be a new policy. How to lock all this down and restore the unitary executive envisioned by the Framers?
The President should of course stick to his vision for overall peace. I guess we need a New New START now — President Trump has spoken of pursuing trilateral arms talks with China and Russia.
Any president pursuing détente today is obviously hampered by these past attempts at internal sabotage, making the Moorer-Radford affair and Russiagate both astonishing and terrifying. How disposable the Presidency must appear to be to our allies and adversaries. How vulnerable.
In the meantime, there are still more than enough nuclear weapons to render much of civilization uninhabitable and creating the even deadlier nuclear winter. They’re too dangerous not to be dealt with via treaties and diplomacy and not to have the talks, so maybe the other parties are still happy to talk if it means we’re all distracted from pushing the button. There’s nothing really better to do. Just keep talking.
Trump faces similar risks as Nixon did, exposure of our inner sanctums, treacherous as they are, can undermine outward efforts. Pursue peace, or pursue justice, but Nixon judged he could not do both. He had to sacrifice one to get the other. But maybe if Nixon had just rooted it out then and there, Reagan’s START talks could have gone all the way and ended the nuclear weapon threat for good.
At Reykjavik in 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev were agreeing in principle to get rid of all the nukes, according to official readbacks of the negotiations, and the Cabinet freaked out. It was opposed internally. Even then, with all the wind at Reagan and Gorbachev’s backs, it couldn’t be done. Maybe that was our only shot.
But maybe the enemy within is why peace remains elusive. Could it have been different if Nixon had done more to push back against it in 1971?
In his 1961 farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex,” that “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” In the Moorer-Radford and Russiagate affairs, we have seen its face. How can peace be brokered when the button decides it will never be disconnected? It’s a troubling question, and with the current expiration of the START Treaties, one that President Trump and future presidents will to continue to contend with. We invite many more Russiagates by leaving the beast in the belly.
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
