Overthrowing Nixon, ft. James Rosen

Welcome everyone to a special segment of the American Mind podcast. We have joining us today James Rosen, the Chief Washington Correspondent at Newsmax and the author of, among other things, a new book on Antonin Scalia. James published a book about Scalia's early years and has a new book out on Scalia's term on the Supreme Court, which was long and significant. We'll get to that at the end of this segment. For our purposes right now, we wanted to talk about this long piece of the New York Times that James wrote over the weekend about new revelations about the Joint Chiefs, Richard Nixon, and the pieces of Watergate that surprisingly we're only learning about just recently, even though we're long removed from the fact. I encourage you all to look at James's book on Nixon, The Strongman, John Mitchell, and the Secrets of Watergate. James, if you could just give us your kind of sketch of what led to this long piece. I know you've been researching and writing about Richard Nixon now for the better part of three decades, but what new have we learned and what should we make of it? So first of all, thanks for having me. It's great to be with you, Ryan, and with all my friends at the American Mind. This article that I published in the New York Times on Sunday, February 8th, the original headline of it that the New York Times chose and then changed about two hours after it was up online, I think due to the focus grouping of different headlines and clicks. The original headline was The Secret History of the Deep State, and it's a long article. It's 6,000 words. As you say, it reflects decades of work on the subject matter, but the heart of it is that I obtained seven pages that were classified from ex-president Nixon's testimony before the grand jury in June 1975 that no one had ever seen. Back in June of 1975, Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency. He'd been pardoned by his successor, Gerald R. Ford, for all crimes that Nixon committed or may have committed while president of the United States from 1969 to 1974. Nixon had been in the hospital for phlebitis for two weeks. He had nearly died. But the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the special prosecutors in Watergate, who had helped by this point already secure convictions against the former president Nixon's top aides, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, the former attorney general, John Mitchell, the subject of my book, they were still in business in 1975, and they had some remaining cases they were focused on, and they wanted Nixon's testimony, and they wanted it before the grand jury. So after torturous negotiations with Nixon's attorneys in June 1975, eight Watergate special prosecutors armed to the teeth with tapes and documents, two members of a federal grand jury empaneled in Washington, plus a stenographer, flew out to San Clemente, California, the former Western White House where Nixon lived. And over two days in June 1975, this group took 11 hours of sworn testimony from ex-president Richard Nixon. It marked the first time that any president had ever appeared before the grand jury in any form. And it was also the only time, as it turned out, that Richard Nixon ever testified in depth about Watergate. The transcript of the 297 pages that ensued over those 11 hours over two days was placed under protective seal of the grand jury. But seven pages were marked classified by the White House Deputy National Security Advisor under President Ford at that time, a man named General Brent Scowcroft, one of the finest public servants this country has ever had. And those seven pages were withheld even from the other members of the grand jury, from everyone at the main Justice Department, and from historians and researchers for the next 50 years until yours truly got his hands on them and published them in the New York Times. The subject matter was one where Nixon had actually warned the special prosecutors, I would urge the special prosecutor, don't open that can of worms. And what more extraordinary still, the prosecutors agreed. And these seven pages were buried until now. What they focus on is a scandal that first became known in 1974, but which was quickly eclipsed by the larger revelations of Watergate. It has received some scholarly attention, including from me over the years, but I think it is a little known and little understood episode. And I think that's why this New York Times article has gotten such a tremendous reaction. I'm referring to the discovery in 1971 during Nixon's first term by the White House plumbers. This was a special investigative unit that the Nixon White House created in order to plug news leaks such as the Pentagon Papers, New York Times, and so on. The plumbers are the same group that broke in wiretapped the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. The plumbers are the same group that broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg, a psychiatrist out in Los Angeles. Ellsberg was the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, New York Times. And the plumbers also looked into a series of leaks that won a Pulitzer Prize for the investigative columnist at that time, Jack Anderson, who had published minutes taken at a National Security Council meeting just 11 days before, detailing the secret policy that the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy was taking toward the war that had just broken out between India and Pakistan. The country and official Washington had never seen a leak like that before, the minutes of an NSC meeting taken just 11 days earlier. So the plumbers were assigned to figure out how Jack Anderson got his hands on those NSC minutes. They very quickly zeroed in on a guy who was 28 years old in 1971, who's now 82 years old, and who declined to comment on my article, a young Navy yeoman named Charles Radford, who was a trained stenographer, courier, typist, body man. And he was attached to Kissinger's National Security Council. And he was polygraphed on his connections to Jack Anderson when he admitted knowing as a fellow Mormon. And he denied having given the documents to Anderson, although over time that denial has not held up. But he did break down and cry when he was strapped to a polygraph machine, the young yeoman Radford. And he basically disclosed to the plumbers that he had stolen 5,000 documents, most of them classified, from the National Security Council, which was run by Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, his deputy. And yeoman Radford delivered those 5,000 documents to a pair of admirals who ran the liaison office between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council. And those admirals had in turn given those documents to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And when the plumbers broke this news to President Nixon, we've discovered something much larger than just leaks to a journalist. We've discovered a military spy ring being conducted during wartime by the top military uniformed command officers in the country against the president and his civilian National Security Advisor. Yours truly, back in October of 2000, was the first researcher to show up at the National Archives when that tape was released. And I wrote about the contents of that and ensuing tapes about how Nixon navigated this extraordinary constitutional crisis for the Atlantic Monthly in 2002. Nixon on the tape can be heard saying that this is a federal offense of the highest order. And Attorney General John Mitchell, the subject of my book, can be heard replying, yes, it's just as though the Joint Chiefs were coming in here and robbing your desk, sir. And when I published my book on John Mitchell in 2008, that was the name of this chapter, robbing the president's desk. The 300 pages of ex-President Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony were finally released by the National Archives to the public in 2011. That's 37 years or so after the testimony and 17 years after Nixon's death. But even then in 2011, and I covered it, Josh Gerstein of Politico covered it, a bunch of reporters covered the release of the transcript, but you're getting about 300 pages worth of transcript. You're a daily deadline reporter. You're going to pick a few quotes, you're going to write a story, you're going to move on. The vast majority of the contents went ignored. And even then in 2011, those seven pages were held classified. Now we know that they related to the very subject the president called a can of worms and urged the special prosecutors not to open, and which indeed they did not open. And this was the wiretapping of Yeoman, which Nixon described the grand jury as the most sensitive project of his presidency. And these seven pages are extraordinary in revealing the geopolitical power struggle between the US and the Soviet Union and their various proxies in the form of India, Pakistan, and China. And also I'd say the signal revelation is that the ex-president testified before the grand jury that he actually met Yeoman Radford, and that had never been disclosed before. And he talked about what a brilliant young man he was, how he spoke several languages, and he could type at incredible speed, and he had a photographic memory, and so forth. Now there was no photograph of President Nixon shaking the hand of Yeoman Radford, but to Americans of a certain age, it brings to mind the infamous photograph of Alger Hiss shaking the hand of President Truman at San Francisco in 1945. If you want to know how high up the chain of command the mole got, the answer we now know from these seven recovered pages of declassified grand jury testimony, the answer is the very top. As you well-known have written about, I mean, the scandal of Watergate has a related scandal. I mean, the public understands it as the corruption of a president, and the plumbers, and break-ins, and skullduggery, and people went to jail for it. You know, this caused quite a scandal. I mean, there were two different committees in Congress, and the House, and the Senate, the Church and Pike committees to investigate this thing and to recommend reforms to the intelligence community. As you put in your New York Times piece, it's Nixon is not extraordinary in his secrecy, his wiretapping of folks. I mean, these stacks of skeletons, as you put it in your New York Times piece, goes back to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. J. Edgar Hoover's wrapped up in all of this. How should we understand that first, is it a first deep state quasi-coup of Nixon? Should we understand Nixon's downfall as, at least in part, the deep state taking him out because of their disagreement with his conduct of foreign policy, among other things? Nixon himself probably put it best in his televised interviews in 1977 with the British journalist David Frost. As Nixon put it, I gave my enemies a sword, and they twisted it in with relish. And I suppose had I been in their place, I'd have done the same thing. But yes, this is a deep state in action. And the Joint Chiefs' military spying against President Nixon while he was a sitting president is really only one prong of a multi-pronged campaign of spying against President Nixon, who I call in the New York Times story, the most spied on president in modern times. I used the Freedom of Information Act when I was writing my book about Attorney General John Mitchell, who of course is nominally the boss of the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. And the release from the FBI of the FBI files for John and Martha Mitchell show that the Mitchells were the first cabinet couple to receive round-the-clock security protection from the FBI. Because Martha Mitchell was quite a public figure in her own right, and they received a lot of death threats. And it turns out that, and we didn't know this until I got those files in 1992 and published them in my book in 2008, that the FBI agents who were assigned to drive the Mitchells around, occasionally to iron one of Mrs. Mitchell's dresses, as was famously photographed and published in Life magazine, repairing their burglar alarm when Mrs. Mitchell accidentally set it off, and just conducting a wide variety of chores for the Mitchells, were typing up every single thing that the Mitchells said in their presence and passing it up the FBI chain of command, all the way up to Director Hoover himself. And we know this because Hoover would literally write on these documents his comments, and then initial them with his initials. That is spying on your boss, the Attorney General of the United States, Department of Justice, and the closest confidant that President Nixon had in the government. We also know from declassified documents and scholarships that have been published since 1974, that the CIA spied on President Nixon in a variety of ways, by detailing its personnel, whom they considered agents, to various units or offices or committees associated with President Nixon. The CIA had an active agent reporting on the Watergate burglary team on its comings, goings, and doings, and was actively on CIA payroll at the time that he was arrested with the other Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez. When the Watergate Special Prosecutors went to CIA headquarters in Langley and said, we demand to see Eugenio Martinez's complete personnel file, the General Counsel for CIA told the Watergate Special Prosecutors, in essence, stuff it, and we will fight a subpoena to the death before we turn over Martinez's files, because it would breach the trust of an agent, the exact words the agency used. CIA had its own agent on the Watergate breaking team, on the burglars. They had detailed Howard Hunt to the White House, James McCord to the Committee to Re-elect the President, and even CIA personnel were detailed to the Technical Services Division of the U.S. Secret Service, which was the unit within Secret Service that was responsible for the maintenance and operation of President Nixon's taping system. As the agency itself admitted in 1975, it had placed its personnel in components intimately associated with the office of the President. So Nixon was infiltrated and spied on from a variety of angles, the military, the intelligence community, the law enforcement community. His entire presidency was indeed a struggle between Nixon and Kissinger on the one hand, and the national security state or what we might call the deep state on the other. Following up on my Church and Pike Committee's comment, I know you're a journalist and researcher on these, so if you don't want to prescribe policy, that's fine. But do you think we're overdue for a redo of some serious investigation, especially in light of the Russiagate stuff and the surveillance of President Trump as he came into office in the first term? Are we overdue for a reassessment of the role and authority and complicity over the years of our... The Joint Chiefs, of course, have been at odds with Trump in the form of Mark Milley and his ouster after the Biden administration. But it seems like the intelligence community is still, and maybe even parts of the FBI, are still somewhat out of control. Are we overdue for some reforms or at least the discussion of the reorganization of some of these things in the executive branch? Ryan, given that it took 50 years for that grand jury testimony to surface, I wouldn't say we're overdue in this context of the Trump administration, which after all is alive and pending. I would say probably we're just due. And this has been the subject, as you've seen, of some declassification activity on the part of ODNI, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. They declassified recently, for example, a document, a memorandum, in which the Director of National Intelligence at the time, James Clapper, told the FBI Director, James Comey, and the CIA Director, John Brennan, that where the conclusions concerning Trump and Russia in 2016 were concerned, quote, that's our story and we're sticking with it, and that this is a team sport, and that we may have to compromise our normal modalities. And that's a pretty damning document because it refers to the tradecraft that the intelligence community practiced, abandoning their, quote, normal modalities and sticking to their story as a team sport when they were arriving at their conclusions about the alleged relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. I know for a fact, as a reporter, that that declassification effort remains underway, and I fully expect that we'll see more disclosures as a result of it. I mean, those of us who've been following the twists and turns of the story of the rise of the permanent bureaucracy and its often interests and activities at odds with various presidencies, this is just the latest piece of that. And of course, the deep state, you might consider kind of the intelligence and law enforcement wing of this larger administrative apparatus, but it's certainly something that presidents of both parties have to contend with. It's maybe a little more of an asymmetric war when Republicans are in office because of maybe the ideological pre-commitments of a good portion of the bureaucracy, which are at odds with the modern Republican party or conservatism. So, I mean, this is a fascinating revelation. I want to remind everyone that you're chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax. They should read everything you write. You and a few others, I would say, are in special possession of this long history. You've been immersed in it for decades. So, I encourage everyone to read your work as they try to grapple with this problem, which I think all concerned citizens should grapple with. We also want to talk about your new book on justice near and dear to the heart of a lot of folks at Claremont and around the conservative movement, that is Antonin Scalia. The book was released just last week, February 10th, Scalia, The Supreme Court Years, 1986 to 2001. This is a sequel to your first book on Scalia, Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986. And you'll have a third volume. But tell us about this middle book, volume two, The Supreme Court Years. So, thank you very much, Ryan. The book is called It covers the first half of Justice Scalia's nearly 30 terms on the Supreme Court, literally starting his first day. What was it like to walk into the Supreme Court as a new justice? What was it like to assume those duties and don the robe? In his previously unpublished correspondence, which I had a chance to review for this book, Scalia said that when the justices first turn to him to speak in conference, which is the meeting that is attended only by the nine justices in their great conference room at the Supreme Court, it's where they decide, usually two days after oral argument has been heard, how they're going to vote on a given case. And the chief justice speaks first, and then they go in order of seniority. And when they got to the new junior justice, Antonin Scalia, he wrote to a friend in a private letter that it felt like he was a character in a Woody Allen movie. But so it tracks his first half of his tenure, literally from his first day there up through the national trauma of Bush v. Gore. Bracing it was, Ryan, for this reporter to realize that there sits on the Supreme Court today only one justice who sat on Bush v. Gore, and that's Clarence Thomas, who I interviewed for this project. And this includes, I want to stress, this book is not just for lawyers. I'm not a lawyer, and I wrote it. And when I read it prior to getting into hardcovers, when I reread what I had written, I found myself cracking up because Scalia was such a funny man and such a lively, witty character. So this book is for everyone. It's not just for lawyers. Yes, it deals with his judicial philosophy, which makes him one of the most important Americans of the last hundred years. Scalia, through his force of personality, the genius of his intellect, and his dazzling literary skills, changed forever the way the law is crafted, enacted, debated, argued, interpreted, and ultimately decided by the federal bench. When he came along, there was something that prevailed, a liberal notion called the living constitution. The idea that today's judges should be allowed to read meanings into the constitution that weren't literally there in the text when it's enacted in 1788. But rather, they should have a broad latitude to conclude that the constitution lives and breathes and expands like an organism to account for phenomena that the founders never anticipated, nuclear weapons or the internet. Scalia stood athwart all that. His view was called originalism. And originalism held and holds that the meaning that the constitution or any law enacted since then was widely understood to have at the time it was enacted is the meaning it should have for judges today, and that we shouldn't allow judges to graft their latter-day policy preferences onto an enduring legal text. And the way you find the original meaning of that clause or provision is the text. So he was an originalist who used textualism to find the original meaning. By the time Scalia died, no less a figure than Supreme Court Justice Eleanor Kagan, appointed by President Obama, pronounced publicly that, in effect, as a result of the Scalia Revolution, quote, we are all originalists now. And so this makes him someone who not only changed the way the law is discussed in this country, but his individual rulings on specific cases, such as Bush v. Gore and a host of others, have made it so that Americans today, in every phase of their life, feel the impact of Antonin Scalia. So as I like to say, if you want to know where we are, where is modern America, how we got here, read this book, read Antonin Scalia's story, and you'll understand. It's also, I should point out, a story of great spiritual faith. His Catholicism really was, I call it, the rocket fuel that propelled him to the pinnacle of his profession. And there's a lot in this book about how Scalia's Catholicism did and did not inform his work on the Supreme Court. Yeah, and quite a legacy, too. He had many children, two at least of whom are at some of the top echelons of political and religious authority in and around Washington, D.C., and many grandchildren, the greatness of which we'll have to watch expectantly. An extraordinary man. Indeed. And since you mentioned the nine Scalia children, all nine remain devout Catholics, eight of them with the exception of Father Paul Scalia, who was the vicar of clergy for the Arlington Archdiocese, a very high-ranking and well-regarded priest. The other eight all raised very large families with a minimum of four kids and a maximum of seven, producing 41 grandchildren in all. And this gives us an opportunity to pay appropriate respects and credit to the other figure in the rise of Antonin Scalia, without whom his rise would have been impossible, and that is Maureen Scalia, who really is a brilliant woman in her own right, every inch is equal as an intellect, certainly gave him the what-for and a run for his money on many occasions. And we list a few of those in the book. We show a few of those anecdotes. And as Eugene Scalia, the justice's son, of course, was a leading lawyer and is a leading lawyer and was a cabinet member in the first Trump administration. He said to me, you're writing a book about my father. There are lots of brilliant and important Supreme Court justices. You're not writing a book about my mother, but I really can't think of another person in history who could have done what she did. So Maureen Scalia is a very special part of this story and integral to the legacy that Justice Scalia was able to leave behind. All honor is due to the, not just in Washington, but the wives of Washington and around the country who, especially with a family as large as that, I mean, to say it's a full-time job to take care of nine children is an understatement, to say the least, while the justice was doing his great work. So that's an excellent point to end on, I think. So I encourage everyone to go read James Rosen's new books, Scalia, Supreme Court Years 1986 to 2001. And then the first bulk of this episode, go read everything James writes on Nixon. It's edifying and helps us to understand how we got to some of our recent controversies with the executive and various other parts of the government and put it in a larger context in the post-war era. So James Rosen, thanks for joining us. We really appreciated this. Ryan, thank you. It was an honor.