Transcript of No One Thought He Could Do It — But Nixon Won The Culture War

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Things.

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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, even merch, all aimed at Gen 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, D.C. bureau chief Tim Rice argues this isn't just a joke.

Younger Americans are starting to re-examine Nixon, and now new material is fueling that re-examination. 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. Daily Wire reporter 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.

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I am here with James Rosen. He's the chief Washington correspondent with Newsmax and the author of a just-released bestselling book about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia titled Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986 to 2001. 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, President Richard Nixon and Watergate. James, thank you so much for being on the show with us today.

It's great to be with you, Lyndon. Thank you.

Now, we're gonna 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 '90s, I think that everything, any controversy in America right now will have some type of gate on the end because of Watergate. You think of DeflateGate, 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. Uh, the article you're mentioning, uh, ran on February 8th in the New York Times, and, um, it was about 6,000 words long. So when you get to read it, and you can find it through my X feed, @JamesRosenTV, Just bring a very big cup of java with you and settle in. Watergate was so important. I call Watergate the birth of the modern. Because all of 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 because, after all, at the end of the 2-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 up 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, um, and determined prosecutors, uh, we were able to rid ourselves of the bad actor. In truth, Richard Nixon was an exceptional president, um, and he himself, um, after he left office, admitted in a famous set of interviews with the British journalist David Frost that were broadcast in 1977 that, uh, 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 aides rather than trying to help the authorities determine where, 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 a spy ring against President Nixon and his White House National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, for a year in wartime. Crime in which 5,000 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. The— 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, uh, office complex and installed wiretaps inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Uh, the cover-up of that, of the origins of that crime, was the Watergate cover-up that wound 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 7 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, uh, then 28-year-old yeoman, a Navy yeoman, now 82, who declined to be interviewed for this article, uh, yeoman Charles Radford, who had been attached to the Nixon-Kissinger National Security Council as a Navy-trained stenographer and courier and typist and body man, that he'd been secretly rifling through Henry Kissinger's briefcase, uh, through burn bags, wastebaskets, and basically five-fingering every document he could get his hands on., within a year's time, he delivered 5,000 documents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Back in 2000, when the Nixon tapes were released of the meeting in December 1971, 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 2000. I was the only researcher who showed up at the time to listen to them, and I published an article called Nixon and the Chiefs about how President Nixon Navigated That Crisis in The Atlantic Monthly in 2002. In 1975, 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 11 hours over 2 days. That was June 1975. Uh, that transcript stayed secret until the year 2011, 36 years after the grand jury examination and 17 years after President Nixon died. Uh, and in the year 2011, when that transcript was released, I and some other reporters covered it, but 7 pages were held classified. And finally, uh, gosh, uh, 15 years after that, I have now obtained those 7 pages that were classified from ex-President Nixon's grand jury testimony in 1975, 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 1974. That's why I call Nixon the most spied-on president in modern times. Uh, and these new documents place Watergate, the scandal that caused Nixon's resignation, in an entirely different light. And, um, I think, uh, 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.

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Why do you think that those 7 pages from that testimony were withheld for 50 years? Why would they not come out in 2011? Uh, they were still classified.

They hadn't been declassified. What I learned in, in obtaining these 7 pages was that in fact they were declassified in 2012, the year after the rest of the transcript, but no one until me last year ever asked for them. Um, and so there's some irony in that, but nonetheless, they were kept secret for 37— it was classified for 37 years after the fact, and the reason is because of the contents. Um, here you had ex-President Nixon testifying before, um, 8 Watergate prosecutors, 2 members of the Washington grand jury, and a stenographer, all of them flown out to San Clemente, California, where he lived, to take his testimony. This was the first time in 1975, this was the first time that 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, the 297 pages were mostly given over to 5 subjects. One of them, for example, the famous 18-and-a-half-minute gap that was found on one of the Watergate tapes. But near the end of the 11 hours over 2 days, near the end of the second day, a young special prosecutor opened up a new subject called the Radford Project, 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, uh, the president's description of why Yeoman Radford was wiretapped, uh, what all that Radford knew from his travels with Henry Kissinger and his theft of 5,000 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, of our fighting men and women was already under widespread cultural assault in the early 1970s. And Nixon, to his eternal credit, even when the Senate Republicans came to him, they found out about the Maura Radford scandal, and they said, "Hey, we know the Plumbers broke into Watergate and they broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, but they also did this legitimate national security work. Let us tell the story of the yeoman and the Joint Chiefs spying on you for a year.

This will place Watergate in an entirely different context." To his eternal credit, Nixon said no, because again, he did not want to damage the reputation of the armed forces. And he even said to Alexander Haig, 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 Haig facilitated the spying of the Yeoman. 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've 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've come out, let's say in the 1970s, I mean, What's the most likely consequence that Nixon would have that he was trying to avoid? Like, what— how would these 7 pages— would it change 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 he— that his actions could be considered an obstruction of justice in trying to shield his aides 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 1972. 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 120 years to find both of the houses of Congress controlled by the opposition. And of course, the news media hated Richard Nixon and had hated Nixon since, since he had helped secure the conviction of Alger Hiss., as a Soviet spy, although it was for perjury, uh, back in the '40s. So, um, the, the major components 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, by the, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, by the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the Pentagon, um, it seems to me that, uh, although it would have placed, um 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 to combat it all.

We had a not great economy in 1974 as well. So I don't know that earlier disclosure would have, would have spared Nixon 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've been an episode of great damage to the reputation of the armed forces. Only the passage of time sometimes can yield what really happened. And that, of course, is the ultimate duty of the historian, is to tell what happened.

Yeah, 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. Can 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— what 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 cadres 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. Um, you know, simple delay in the discharge of your duties, which isn't a crime necessarily, can, can cause the sabotage of a given policy. Um, now we can't imagine that the deep state today is the same exact deep state as it was in 1971 when the Plumbers discovered this military spying against President Nixon. Uh, there would have to be, um, a significant rate of generational attrition. Uh, but the way I put this, Lyndon, is that the deep state reminds me to a certain extent of the New York Mets and the State Department. The New— the New York Mets today are not the same New York Mets of 1969. We know this, okay? But yet, no matter what management has done over the course of the intervening 50-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 1969. There probably isn't a single person left who worked in the State Department even as early as 1980, 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 War 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 '80s 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 essaying two differences between the two men.

Even though, again, they have similarities. They both achieved success early on. They both came to resent 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 Moore-Radford scandal, with direct criminal insubordination. And the other big difference is that, at least as we sit here and speak today, Linden, 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, the 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 a spy ring against the civilian leaders in the White House, that individual, W. Donald Stewart, proclaimed, "This is a 7 Days in May." 7 Days in May was the name of a novel during the Cold War, uh, in 1962, made into a movie, very well-regarded film, 2 years later. And the plot was about, um, 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, uh, these concerns, uh, date back even beyond that, probably to President Eisenhower's farewell address, when he warned about the malign influence of a military-industrial complex. Uh, 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, Supreme Court Justice, about Antonin Scalia. It is titled Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986 to 2001. I love talking to people smarter than me, so this is a pleasure.

Well, you have to book someone because I know I didn't meet that standard, but thank you for hosting me, Linda. Awesome.

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.