Nixon's 7-page gap finally revealed

Politics & Elections
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After Nixon resigned, he had to testify to a grand jury. A portion of it, seven pages of testimony, was so scandalous that it was marked Classified and never released, not even to insiders, until now

Don’t expect a bombshell reveal of Nixonian mendacity. Just the reverse. Nixon was actually the victim. His foreign policy dealings were being spied upon. By the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The whole insane story was detailed in the New York Times by a conservative reporter who is a Watergate historian. Here’s a gift link to the full article.

Very briefly, the secret Nixon thought was too explosive to go into involved a leak of his plans around the 1971 India-Pakistan war. He favored Pakistan because they were intermediaries to his opening of China. The military favored India, and were furious because Nixon and Kissinger cut them out of foreign policy decisions. Nixon put the Plumbers to investigate the leak.

They thought they found the leaker, a brilliant yeoman stenographer with a photographic memory, Chuck Radford. Working indirectly for the “arch-conservative” Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer, and assigned to assist Gen. Alexander Haig on trips to the region, Radford stole National Security Council documents and passed them to the military. Thousands of them, some that he memorized if he couldn’t take them physically.

Kissinger wanted to send everybody involved to jail. Nixon thought that the revelations would destroy the military, already reeling from Vietnam. He ordered that the whole affair be buried. Moorer retired with full benefits, Radford was merely transferred to a nice berth on the West Coast.

The outrageous fantasy political backstage back-stabbing shown on tv shows like The Diplomat is a pale reflection of the reality in Washington. This ancient revelation is historically relevant today in a Washington where the President is at war with everybody in government who isn’t a craven loyalist. He’s right in a twisted way. Nixon never trusted anybody except for a few goons. Trump has a similar paranoia. The difference is that Nixon was capable of larger interests than just his ego. That’s as far as I’m willing to praise him, since being capable of doing something didn’t mean he always did that.

The revelations from future grand juries will haunt us for decades.

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One wonders why they cared. Was it ideological or strategic?

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Fascinating. Thank you for this.

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So they favored India over Pakistan, the country that sheltered Isama bin Laden – looks like the military was right!

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Also - Pakistan was then and still is politically unstable, and plays fast and loose with China as a counterweight to India.

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Not defending Nixon, but: Don’t you understand that the military is not supposed to follow its own foreign policy, but carry out the policy of the elected government? It’s kind of Civics 101.

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Alas, military leadership has opinions, and sometimes esteems those opinions above those flash-in-the-pan politicians who could be gone next election.

But in most cases, they really don’t do anything with those opinions other than offer them when asked.

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Because to do otherwise, is called a coup. As if I needed more evidence that America was never much of a democracy to begin with.

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Seven Days in May, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, was a huge bestseller in 1962 and made into a hit movie in 1964. Its plot was “about a military–political cabal’s planned takeover of the United States government in reaction to the president’s negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.”

Yeah, a rogue military, barely held in restraint by Eisenhower, and later by Johnson, would stroke Nixon’s paranoia every day.

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bin Laden was decades later