YORBA LINDA, California — Fifty yards from Richard Nixon’s grave, which sits not quite in the shadow of the modest home where he was born, a series of exhibits at his presidential library describe him as a psychologically unbalanced fool.
The Nixon White House, museum display panels announce, was consumed by “a climate of deep suspicion.” The infamous Plumbers took action against “perceived political opponents within the Federal Government.” A video display allows visitors to choose clips on the theme of Nixon’s “Conspiracy Thinking.” Paranoid, the president mindlessly lashed out at enemies that he hallucinated. This is still the official history, in museum exhibits curated by the National Archives and Records Administration.
On Friday morning, the consistently pro-Nixon docents hadn’t heard about the important Feb. 8 story in The New York Times that describes a plot within the government to spy on the Nixon White House, with Navy Yeoman Charles Radford stealing documents and sending them to the Pentagon as insurance against budget and policy meddling from the person serving as the president of the United States.
The revelation from a newly declassified document, longtime journalist James Rosen concluded, “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.’ … Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but also that he, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.”
It wasn’t Nixon’s first encounter with the deep state, since President Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president would also have witnessed that chief executive’s battle against a “colonels’ revolt” that sought to embarrass the president and undermine post-World War II military policy.
Nixon didn’t live long enough to watch the National Security Council officials Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill testify against President Donald Trump before a congressional committee, charging that he deserved to be impeached because he had improperly interfered with the policy choices of his subordinates — in Vindman’s words, with the “interagency consensus.”
Hill similarly warned that Trump was an example of someone who “impedes or subverts” national security, somehow mistakenly thinking that he was in charge of it. The cart has been trying to drive the horse for quite a while, and it hasn’t been above taking the occasional shot at the horse.
Nixon deserves better. We’ll see if he gets it.
