Nixon the Spy Victim??

I'm reading the excellent new book by historian Robert Dallek called Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. It's been over thirty years since Nixon resigned from office and historians are getting enough distance to have perspective. Guess what? Even time won't heal these heels. Nixon and Kissinger did indeed conspire to drag out the Vietnam War to ensure that South Vietnam would not collapse before the 1972 re-election campaign, they routinely lied and spied.

However, in one startling and lesser known episode Nixon was actually the victim of spying by the highest levels of the military - the US military. The Joints Chiefs of Staff (JCS) instructed Navy yeoman Charles Radford, the JCS liaison to Kissinger's NSC, to steal documents from the burn bag and relay them to the Joint Chiefs who felt that Nixon had gone soft on Communists because of his moves toward China and detente with the Soviets. Dallek only briefly touches on this incident. Other sources more detail like this story in Counterpunch and this story from Time magazine. Whether you view this incident was 'just' the military getting information it felt it rightly needed, but was excluded from by Nixon and Kissinger, or something more sinister, it's a pretty shocking episode.

The April 2o02 issue of The Atlantic Monthly contained a lengthy article published just after the Nixon White House tapes concerning this episode were released. Most interesting is Nixon's reaction to the discovery that his own military was spying on him: cover it up and keep Admiral Moorer around for another year. (You can access this article free through the library's Linkcat online catalaogue. Or you can to the Atlantic Monthly web site and sign up for a subscription.)