Comparing Nixon to the Modern Deep State

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That's what thirty million customers have been coming back to Zazle for over twenty years to find Right now, save twenty five percent on your first order at zazzle d. comot That's zazzle dot com Make it amazing If we're going to have peace in the world, if our young people are going to have a fulfillment beyond simply those material things They must turn So those great spiritual sources That have made America the great country that it is. For decades, President Richard Nixon has been frozen in time. Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, his resignation, I am not a crook. But something strange is happening online. Across social media, Nixon is back, not as a villain, but as a vibe. Nixon edits memes's even merch all aimed at Gin Z Some of those videos have racked up millions of views, and they're not just ironic. They're sending younger audiences back to Nixon's speeches, his foreign policy, even his worldview. In a recent piece for The Daily Wire, our Washington DC Bureau Chief Tim Rice argues this isn't just a joke. Younger Americans are starting to ree examamine Nixon. And now new material is fueling that reeamination Recently uncovered testimony from Nixon is offering a closer look at what was happening behind the scenes at the height of Watergate. So what did Nixon say under oath and why is it resurfacing now just as his image is making an unlikely comeback? James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax, has been digging into those newly revealed records Staley Wire repeporter Lyndon Blake sat down with Rosen to unpack what he found and what it could mean for Nixon's legacy. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire This is a paid sponsorship for VCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. 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This and other information can be found in the innovations Funds prospectus at getvcX dot com d Investing involves risk including the possible loss of all money invested. Past performance does not guarantee future performance. This is a paid sponsorship I am here with James Rosen. He's the Chief Washington correspondent with Newsmax and the author of a just released best selling book about Supreme Court Justice Antonon Scalia, titled Scalia, Supreme Court Years nineteen eighty six to two thousand one. But today, we're talking with James about this explosive article he wrote in the New York Times about another looming figure in American history, Pident Richard Nixon and Watergate. James, thank you so much for being on the show with us today It's great to be with you, Lyon. thank you. Now we're going to get into the details, but just so you know where I'm coming from in my curiosity about Watergate as someone who was born in the early nineties I think that everything, any controversy in America right now will have some type of gate on the end because of water gate. You think of deflate gate And it could be about anything, but that comes from Watergate, Can you just explain how significant this case was and why it is so important people know about it today? Sure, well, and thank you for having me on. The article you're mentioning ran on february eighth in the New York Times And it was about six thousand words long. So when you get to read it and you can find it through my Xfeed at James Rosen TV, just bring a very big cup of Java with you and settle in. Watergate was so important. I call Watergate the birth of the mater Because all the things we see when presidencies run into trouble in the modern age were first glimpsed in Watergate, where you have a kind of an unholy alliance between the news media doing saturation coverage, a special prosecutor, a whole task force of lawyers buttressed by the investigative agencies and zeal of the FBI And of course, in the case of President Nixon, his taping system, it's something we've seen kind of repeat itself over the years, although Watergate remains unique becausecause after all, at the end of the two year scandal, President Nixon resigned from office and he remains to this day, the only president not to finish his term due to illness, death or assassination. At the time, it was held out as an example of where the system worked that we had a bad actor in the Oval Office and through a Senate investigative committee and aggressive news media and determined prosecutors, we were able to rid ourselves of the bad actor. In truth, Richard Nixon was an exceptional president And he himself, after he left office, admitted in a famous set of interviews with the British journalist David Frost that were broadcast in nineteen seventy seven, that He had been guilty in Watergate, that he had failed to discharge the duties of the president, which is to enforce the laws and that instead he became, as the Watergate investigation intensified kind of a lawyer for the defense for his top aids rather than trying to help the authorities determine where culpability resided. But nonetheless, my article shows that at the same time, Nixon was the most spied on president in modern times And that the joint chiefs of staff, the top uniformed military officers in the country, ran aspiring against President Nixon and his White House National Security advisorer, Henry Kissinger for a year in wartime in which five thousand classified documents were stolen from the Nixon Kissinger NSC and delivered into the hands of the joint chiefs of staff. It was the plumbers, the White House plumbers who discovered this That was a kind of an informal name given to an investigative unit that was formed inside the White House to plug news leaks, thus plumbers These were the same people who broke into the Watergate office complex and installed wire taps inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The cover up that of the origins of that crime was the Watergate coveru upp that wound up toppling President Nixon from office. The plumbers were the same ones who broke into the office of the psychiatrist out in Los Angeles of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times. They were focused on some areas of legitimate national security work, and as President Nixon testified in the seven pages, that I brought to light in the New York Times, he said Despite the stupid and terribly wrong things they did in Watergate and elsewhere, they deserve to be remembered well for what they did here But the plumbers also discovered that this Then twenty eight year old yeoman, a Navy yeoman, now eighty two who declined to be interviewed for this article Yoman Charles Radford. who had been attached to the Nixon Kissinger National Security Council as a Navy trained stenographer and courier and typist em bodiman that he hadd been secretly rifling through Henry Kissinger's briefcase through burn bags, wastebkets and basically five fingering every document he could get his hands on. Within a year's time, he delivered five thousand documents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Back in two thousand, when the Nixon tapes were released of the meeting In december nineteen seventy one, where President Nixon was informed for the first time, guess what? The plumbers have discovered that the joint chiefs of staff have been spying on you and Henry Kissinger for a year. Those tapes came out in the year two thousand. I was the only researcher who showed up at the time to listen to them publish an article called Nixon and the Chiefs about how President Nixon navigated that crisis in the Atlantic mononthly in two thousand two In nineteen seventy five after he was out of office and had been pardoned by his successor, Gerald R. Ford for any crimes he committed or may have committed in the while president of the United States, ex President Nixon had to testify before members of a grand jury out in California for eleven hours over two days And that was june nineteen seventy five That transcript stayed secret until the year twenty eleven thirty six years after the grand jury examination. And seventeen years after President Nixon died And in the year twenty eleven, when that transcript was released, I and some other reporters covered it, but seven pages were held classified. And finally Oh gosh, fifteen years after that I have now obtained those seven pages that were classified President Nixon's grand jury testimony nineteen seventy five, and they dealt with this whole subject of the military spying on the president The FBI was also spying on Nixon, CIA was also spying on Nixon. This has all been borne out by declassified documents and scholarship published since nineteen seventy four. That's why I call Nixon the most spied on president in modern times And these new documents place watergade. the scandal that caused Nixon's resignation in an entirely different light. And I think this is important not just for getting straight what happened in Nixon's time but also for assessing modern claims by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was used to be called the permanent bureaucracy, now better known as the deep state Here's the thing, in America, everyone has a food story. Maybe it's the pizza you had in Chicago, or the barbecue you still talk about from the Great lland of Texas. Perhaps it's the cheesecake your family insisted on every holiday Food has a funny way of becoming a part of our memories. America's turning two hundred fifty this july fourth, an epic milestone that deserves an epic party, and Gold Belly is the official food marketplace of America's two hundred fiftyeth. 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They were still classified. they hadn't been declassified. What I learned in obtaining these seven pages was that in fact, they were declassified in twenty twelve, the year after the rest of the transcript, but no one until me Last year, ever asked for them. U And so there's some irony in that, but nonetheless, they were kept secret for thirty it was classified for thirty seven years after the fact, and the reason is because of the contents Um, here you had President Nixon testifying before eight Watergate prosecutors Two members of the Washington Grand jury and a stenographer, all of them flown out to San Clement, California where he lived. to take his testimony. This was the first time in nineteen seventy five, this was the first time any president had ever appeared before the grand jury in any form And this was also it turned out the only time that Richard Nixon ever testified in depth about Watergate under oath. Now, the two hundred and ninety seven pages were mostly given over to five subjects, one of them, for example, the famous eighteen and a half minute gap that was found on one of the Watergate tapes But near the end of the eleven hours over two days, near the end of the second day, a young special prosecutor opened up a new subject called the Radford proroject And it was about the wiretapping of this yeoman once the plumbers found out what he had done. And Nixon cuts the guy off and he says, no, no, no. This was the most sensitive project of my presidency. And the president's description of why Yeoman Radford was wiretapped What all that Radford knew from his travels with Henry Kissinger and his theft of five thousand classified documents, the reason why neither the Yeoman nor the chairman of the joint chiefs were ever criminally prosecuted because they knew too much in a sense And also because President Nixon In an era when Vietnam veterans were returning back home to U. S. soil and were being jeered and spat on as baby killers President Nixon did not want to further contribute to the vilification of the armed forces. The uniform of our fighting men and women was already under widespread cultural assault in the early nineteen seventies. And Nixon to his eternal credit, even when the Senate Republicans came to him, they found out about the Ma Radford scandal. And they said, Hey, we know the plumbers brokeen into Watergate and they broke into Ellsberg psychiatrist's office, but they also did this legitimate national security work Let us tell the story of the yeomen that and the joint chief spying on you for a year. This will place Watergate in an entirely different context to his eternal credit Nixon said no becausecause again, he did not want to damage the reputation of the armed forces. And he even said to Alexander Hay, who was Kissinger's deputy who was a military guy whose allegiances were greater to the Pentagon than to Nixon and Kissinger, and who most scholars, including this one who interviewed Alexander Haig about all of this have concluded that hey facilitated the spying of the yeomen. Nixon tells Haig on one of the tapes, I could have screwed Admiral Moore, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff and the entire Pentagon in that deal. and I could have been a big hero in doing it. and you know that. And he said, and you know further why I didn't do it because I thought more of the services. So even though he had been victimized by the deep state of his time Nixon as a matter of patriotism and as a matter of good government wanting to protect the armed forces from damaging revelations that would have placed the entire military command structure in a bad light He thought more of the services and put that ahead of his own political interests. So if you think that these if these seven pages would have come out, let's say in the nineteen seventies, I mean, What's the most likely consequence that Nixon would have that he was trying to avoid. Like what how would these seven pages Whatould it changed the perception and course of history, really? We have to remember that President Nixon or ex President Nixon did admit his guilt in Watergate. He admitted that his actions could be considered an obstruction of justice in trying to shield his aids from the grand jury that was investigating the origins of the Watergate break in and wiretapping operation at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office complex in nineteen seventy two, He admitted his guilt in that. The Congress, both houses were controlled by the Democrats. In fact, Nixon was the first president to take office in one hundred twenty years. to find both of the houses of Congress controlled by the opposition U And of course, the news media hated Richard Nixon and had hated Nixon since since He had helped secure the conviction of Al Jaris as a Soviet spy, although it was for perjury back in the forties. So the the major opponents of official Washington, if you will, were stacked against President Nixon, and even had he disclosed in real time, What had been done to him and Henry Kissinger by the chairman of the joint chief, by the entire joint chiefs of staff by the Pentagon It seems to me that although it would have placed the Watergate scandal itself in a different light, Probably those forces, including what became the special prosecutors All of that was a raid against Nixon and he didn't have the base of political support But to combat it all, we had a not great economy in nineteen seventy four as well So I don't know that earlier disclosure would would have spared Nixson his ultimate fate But nonetheless, as we as we continually reassess his historical legacy, it seems to me that he deserves credit for protecting the military from what would have been an episode of great damage to the reputation of the arrmed Forces Only the passage of time sometimes can yield At what really happened And that of course, is the ultimate duty of the historian is to tell what happened. to give it justice. So now we call it in the modern era the deep state. And you spoke about the allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the deep state and how that connects to Nixon, canan you kind of explain that to us? And then, I mean, really Explain to people that hear deep state all the time. I mean you hear it on TikTok, social media is that So it used to be called the permanent bureaucracy. Now it's called the deep state which is of course sounds a little more sinister But in essence, what we're talking about would be padres of government officials who are working actively against the policies of the elected president of the United States. That doesn't always take illegal forms, mind you You know, simple delay in the discharge of your duties, which isn't a crime necessarily, can cause the sabotage of a given policy U now We can't imagine that the deep state today is the same exact deep state as it was in nineteen seventy one when the plumbers discovered this military spying against President Nixon. There would have to be. a significant rate of generational attrition But the way I put this, Lyndon, is that the deep state it reminds me to a certain extent of the New York Mets and the State Department The New York Mets today are not the same New York Mets of nineteen sixty nine. We know this. okay. But yet no matter what management has done over the course of the intervening fifty some odd years, no matter the generational attrition It seems that the same basic features define the New York Mets generation after generation, which is to say, weak hitting and very strong pitching And at the State Department, again, the people working there are not the people who were working there in nineteen sixty nine. There probably isn't a single person left who worked in the State Department even as early as nineteen eighty, I'm willing to bet But Again, the institution displays certain enduring characteristics. and in the case of the State Department, that would be hostility to conservative foreign policies And so in the deep state, again, these are not the same people. The issues that animated the actions taken by the deep state against Nixon and Kissinger in their time were motivated by the Vietnam warar and by the frictions that are perennial in the making of national security policy, but which are particularly acute in times of war. Today, of course, we have in President Trump's time evidence that we've seen of a so called hashtag resistance to his policies as president, both in his first and his second term. There are key similarities between the two men, and Donald Trump since the early eighties has proclaimed his admiration. for Richard Nixon at a time when it wasn't a common sentiment to hear. And I ended this long article in the New York Times by saying two differences between the two men Even though again, they have similarities, they both achieved success early on. they both came to resent. U the establishment that they came to lead in a sense But the key differences are as follows. In this second term, President Trump has displayed a ruthlessness toward purging of the so called or the perceived enemy within the government that President Nixon, despite similar inclinations, could never quite conjure, even when faced as in the Mora Radford scandal with direct criminal insubordination And the other big difference is that at least as we sit here and speak today, Lyondon President Trump appears on track to complete his second term This is so fascinating. Just one more thing for me. So in my head, when you talk about deep state, that reminds me of like what was going on in House of cards. Well, that kind of intrigue kind of intrigue we're talking about has been the stuff of dramatization for a long time. So when the Pentagon investigators who were part of the plumbers discovered what this yeoman had been up to and that the chairman of the joint Chiefs of staff had been presiding over spiring against the civilian leaders in the White House. That individual, W. Donald Stewart proclaimed, this is a seven days in May Seven Days in May was the name of a novel during the Cold War in nineteen sixty two made into a movie, very well regarded film two years later and the plot was about U the top military brass plotting to overthrow the president of the United States because he was pursuing peace accords with the Soviet Union, as Nixon and Kissinger were So these concerns date back even beyond that, probably to President Eisenhower's farewell address when he warned about the malign influence of a military industrial complex. So it doesn't surprise me that we would have seen similar themes in House of Cards We will see them again, I suspect. That is Mr. James Rosen. Thank you so much. Be sure to check out his book Suprem Court Justice about Anton Scalia. It is titled Scalia, Supremeourt Years. nineteen eighty six to two thousand one. I love talking to people smarter than me, so this is a pleasure Well you just to book someone because I knew I didn't meet that standard, but thank you for hosting me Lon That was our reporter Lyndon Blake, speaking to the chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax James Rosen. And this has been a weekend episode of Morning Wire