Nixon's Downfall: Redford or Radford?
Was Richard Nixon overthrown more by the left or the right?
Although the overthrow of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal was carried out publicly by the left, it’s finally clear that much of the Deep State machinations against Nixon came from the right.
For instance, Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat turned out to be Mark Felt, a J. Edgar Hoover loyalist and #3 at the FBI who was mad at Nixon for not letting the Hoover faction retain complete control of the FBI after Hoover’s death on May 2, 1972.
Similarly, one of the White House Plumbers’ big projects for plugging leaks was to stop the extremely anti-Communist Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, from having his mole Yeoman Charles Radford continue to spy on the Nixon-Kissinger rapprochement with China.
The Moorer-Radford affair has been public since 1974, but almost nobody paid any attention to it. Personally, I can’t recall hearing the name “Radford” before.
In contrast, I’ve heard the name “Redford” plenty of times in regard to Nixon’s downfall:
From the New York Times opinion section on Sunday:
Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now.
Feb. 8, 2026
By James Rosen
Mr. Rosen is a reporter based in Washington, D.C., and a historian of the Watergate era.
Rosen works for the conservative Newsmax.
… Over two days, the ex-president’s [Nixon’s] grand jury testimony [in 1975] consumed 11 hours. Then came an interview by the prosecutors, undisclosed until now, that lasted another two. …
The transcript was placed under the protective seal of the grand jury and ordered withheld even from top officials at the Justice Department. In the White House counsel’s office, General [Brent] Scowcroft determined that one seven-page segment, focused on the very subject that Nixon had warned about, was so incendiary that it needed to be withheld even from the rest of the grand jury.
According to a previously unpublished memo by a Watergate prosecutor, Peter Kreindler, who was present, General Scowcroft stamped “CLASSIFIED” on each of the seven pages. Kreindler placed them in an envelope and stapled to its front a judicial order sealing the contents. General Scowcroft placed that package in another White House envelope, sealed it, dated it and scrawled: “Do not touch, to be opened only by Brent Scowcroft.”
Not until 2011 — 36 years after Nixon’s testimony and 17 years after his death — did the National Archives release the grand jury transcript. A few journalists, including me, reported on it, but the vast majority of the contents was ignored. And the seven pages remained withheld, until now.
In the avalanche of official disclosure that defined the 1970s, what remained so sensitive that even the special prosecutors wouldn’t touch it?
The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own. The classified portion of the grand jury transcript, obtained by Times Opinion, bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the “deep state.”
Seated in a small Coast Guard station in June 1975, Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but that he himself, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim. …
As the second session wound down, another prosecutor, Jay Horowitz, opened a surprise line of questioning. Horowitz said he needed to broach “this other electronic surveillance project which I will dub the Radford project.” Promising to ask only a few questions, the prosecutor said the project included surveillance of a number of people, among them a Yeoman Radford, from December 1971 to June 1972.
Who was Yeoman Radford? Among all the era’s scandals, what made his case, virtually unknown today, the most sensitive of all?
Nixon recalled it vividly: “This project was the most highly sensitive that we had while I was president.”
“I understand that,” Horowitz replied. “And I understand ——”
Nixon cut him off. Apparently the framing was too goddamned important to be left to this kid.
“I am going to describe the project,” the ex-president declared.
War between India and Pakistan broke out on Dec. 3, 1971.
From 1947 to 1971, Pakistan was this weird non-contiguous country comprised of current Pakistan in the west and what’s now Bangladesh in the east, the Muslim portions of what had been the British Raj. The west was more warlike, so they dominated the government. But East Pakistan had more voters, so it won the election of 1970, which took place a month after an incredibly lethal cyclone had hit East Pakistan and Bangladeshis were unhappy with their distant government’s efforts.
The dictator of Pakistan, based in the west, attempted to put down the uprising in the east with mass slaughter and rape, especially of East Pakistan’s Hindu minority. (George Harrison’s August 1971 “Concert for Bangladesh” raised money for the victims of these disasters.)
Colossal numbers of Bangladeshi refugees fled into India. War tensions mounted. Pakistan struck first, attacking Indian bases in the northwest on December 3, 1971. The Indians quickly gained the upper hand, and the Pakistani military surrendered East Pakistan on December 16, 1971, which became the independent state of Bangladesh.
The White House convened the Washington Special Action Group, an elite cell of the National Security Council.
“This was a regional Cold War issue,” Gen. Alexander Haig, a deputy to Henry Kissinger at the N.S.C., told me in 2000. “We had firm evidence that the Russians and the Indians were colluding” against Pakistan. Indeed, the Kremlin and India had signed a strategic treaty that summer.
Beyond wishing to check Soviet aggression, Nixon distrusted Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India. He also had reason to support the Pakistani president, Yahya Khan, despite his abysmal human rights record: Islamabad had hosted Nixon’s back-channel diplomacy that would lead, in 1972, to his historic visit to China, the president’s foreign-policy masterstroke. Publicly, however, the U.S. remained neutral.
On the whole, the Pakistanis (Western) were the Bad Guys and the Indians the Good Guys in 1971. I generally resist Good Guy vs. Bad Guy framing, but it’s hard to resist in this context. George Harrison was right. An independent Bangladesh is better than it being ruled from Islamabad.
Still, Nixon inherited a particular hand to play in the Cold War and he played it. In this case in December 1971, Nixon had an ace up his sleeve — rapprochement with China — for which Pakistan had been playing a key intermediary role.
“I am getting hell every half-hour from the president that we are not being tough enough on India,” Kissinger told the N.S.C. group on Dec. 3. “He does not believe we are carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan.” Without consulting the Navy, Nixon ordered a task force, led by the nuclear carrier Enterprise, to the Bay of Bengal.
All this and more surfaced 11 days later when the investigative reporter Jack Anderson published excerpts from top-secret memorandums and, more alarming, minutes taken at the N.S.C. meetings. It would win Anderson a Pulitzer. With their timely contradiction of official narrative, observed Theodore H. White, Anderson’s columns “stripped bare the essential privacy of national-security planners as never before.”
The task of determining how Anderson had obtained the material fell to the White House Plumbers, a secret unit formed in June 1971 to plug news leaks. It didn’t take long for the investigation to zero in on a 28-year-old, Navy Yeoman First Class Charles Radford.
Charles Radford, who apparently is Forrest Gump with a 135 IQ, is one of the more mysterious and remarkable characters in American history.
Paywall here.
