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A batch of newly revealed grand-jury testimony from 1975 has again pulled back the curtain on what Richard Nixon called a “can of worms” inside his own government, exposing a wartime espionage operation that funneled White House secrets to senior military commanders. The reporting makes clear this was not petty bureaucracy — it was an organized channel of classified material that subverted the president’s authority at the height of the Vietnam conflict.
At the heart of the scandal was Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, a White House liaison who rifled burn bags, copied documents and even rifled briefcases for material he secretly shipped to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Radford-Moorer affair involved thousands of pages of National Security Council papers leaving the White House and ending up in the hands of Admiral Thomas Moorer and other senior officers, an unprecedented betrayal of civilian control.
Contemporary investigators and later historians described how Radford operated with the blessing of Pentagon officers and a liaison chain that treated White House secrets as raw intelligence to be hoarded, not guarded. This was wartime conduct: the Joint Chiefs were actively collecting the president’s own diplomatic and military plans and using them to undermine policies they disliked. The scale and brazenness of it should make every patriot uneasy.
Nixon confronted the matter and wanted it prosecuted, but Justice Department advisers and political strategists counseled containment — partly because exposing the plot risked blowing up delicate backchannel diplomacy, including the opening to China. In plain terms, national-security tradecraft and the need to protect secret operations were offered as reasons to sweep a constitutional crisis under the rug rather than punish the perpetrators.
What this episode teaches us is simple and bitter: the so-called deep state is not a modern myth invented for headline-grabbing podcasts, it has precedent in the way institutions behave when they believe they know better than elected leaders. When uniformed officers and permanent bureaucrats decide policy by leaking, copying and sabotaging, the Constitution loses and the country pays. That historical lesson matters as much today as it did in 1971.
Patriots should demand accountability and transparency, because loyalty to country means loyalty to the rule of law and civilian leadership — not anonymous whisper campaigns from inside the bureaucracy. If we cherish the republic, we must insist that no office, uniform or agency be allowed to operate above the people’s president; our security depends on it, and our honor as a free people requires nothing less.
