James Rosen writes for the New York Times:
Radford enlisted in the Navy in 1963. Skinny and mustachioed, he possessed “a gift for disarming people and collecting information,” according to “Silent Coup,” a groundbreaking book about the Watergate scandal. Stationed at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, he had grown passionate about India. He began working at the Pentagon and the White House in 1970 as a stenographer, typist and courier. He was, like Anderson, a Mormon; the Radfords and Andersons had grown friendly after meeting at church.
In the Old Executive Office Building, Radford worked for the liaison office that connected the Pentagon’s senior military brass, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the N.S.C. His superiors included a pair of admirals who reported directly to Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a 59-year-old archconservative from Alabama and a highly decorated former naval aviator.
As the Vietnam War worsened, Moorer complained publicly that the country’s civilian leaders paid only “lip service” to the needs of frontline troops. Shortly after Nixon selected him as the chairman, Moorer expressed dismay at America’s trajectory. “As I pass into what one might call the twilight of my career,” he wrote for a Navy publication in 1970, “I often wonder if everything my generation has attempted to do has been worth the effort.”
From their fortress across the Potomac, the Joint Chiefs watched a problem grow under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and become acute under Nixon: the exclusion of the president’s military advisers from policymaking. Worse, their exclusion served to advance policies they abhorred, including rapprochement with the Soviet Union and China and budget cuts that left military spending at its lowest level, as a percentage of federal outlays, since 1950.
Nixon, for his part, held the Pentagon brass in low regard. “Goddamn it, the military, they’re a bunch of greedy bastards!” the commander in chief railed on an April 1971 tape. “They want more officers’ clubs and more men to shine their shoes! The sons of bitches are not interested in this country!”
The discovery of these seven sealed pages from Richard Nixon’s 1975 grand jury testimony provides a rare, documented instance of what modern political discourse calls the deep state. Through the lens of Alliance Theory, this revelation shifts the understanding of Watergate from a singular narrative of presidential corruption to a broader, more complex struggle between competing power centers within the American government.
Alliance Theory suggests that political stability relies on the cohesion of elite factions. When these alliances fracture, the resulting friction creates the leaks, investigations, and scandals that eventually reach the public eye. The Moorer-Radford affair, as detailed in the unsealed transcript, shows a fundamental break in the alliance between the executive branch and the military leadership. While the public focused on Nixon’s plumbers and the break-in at the Democratic National Committee, a far more significant breach occurred within the National Security Council. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, feeling excluded from the shift toward détente with China and the Soviet Union, used Yeoman Charles Radford to systematically steal thousands of classified documents from Henry Kissinger’s briefcase and the mailroom.
This internal espionage highlights the biological reflex of entrenched bureaucracies. When an administration threatens the interests or the relevance of a specific agency, that agency often acts to protect its own power. In this case, the military brass functioned as a rival faction rather than a supportive arm of the executive. Nixon’s decision to bury the scandal rather than prosecute the admirals involved demonstrates his attempt to preserve the outward appearance of institutional unity. He feared that exposing a military spy ring would further damage the reputation of the armed forces during the Vietnam War and reveal the secret diplomatic channels he used to exit that conflict.
The unsealed testimony also clarifies why the Plumbers existed in the first place. History often treats the unit as a tool for partisan political sabotage. However, the Radford project confirms that their initial, most critical work involved tracking internal leaks that threatened the administration’s core foreign policy objectives. This does not excuse the illegality of their later actions at the Watergate complex, but it places their origin in the context of a genuine constitutional crisis between the President and the Pentagon.
Using Alliance Theory to reassess this era reveals that Watergate was not merely a crime and a cover-up. It was the visible symptom of a total collapse in trust between the President and the permanent bureaucracy. Nixon correctly identified that the hard right and the senior military commanders were as much his adversaries as the anti-war left. By keeping these seven pages secret for fifty years, the government effectively obscured the depth of the institutional warfare that defined the 1970s. This new evidence suggests that the modern concept of an entrenched deep state acting against an elected leader is not a recent invention but a recurring feature of the American political structure when elite alliances fail.
ChatGPT says: Using Alliance Theory, Watergate looks less like a morality play about press heroism and more like a coalition war that spun out of control.
Watergate as alliance fracture, not singular corruption
The standard story treats Richard Nixon as uniquely criminal. Alliance Theory reframes it as a breakdown between overlapping power blocs. Nixon tried to centralize authority in a tight White House alliance while sidelining other entrenched coalitions. Those excluded coalitions responded defensively and offensively.
The real axis of conflict
The decisive conflict was not president versus press. It was White House versus national security bureaucracy. The Moorer Radford affair shows the Joint Chiefs of Staff running an internal intelligence operation against the president’s own national security staff. That is a classic alliance reflex when a group believes its interests and status are threatened.
Why the Plumbers existed at all
From an Alliance Theory lens, the Plumbers were not random thugs. They were an improvised counterintelligence arm created by a besieged alliance leader. Nixon faced leaks from multiple directions. His response was clumsy and illegal but strategically intelligible. He was trying to reassert boundary control after losing informational sovereignty.
Why Nixon buried the worst scandal
The newly revealed sealed testimony matters because it explains Nixon’s otherwise puzzling restraint. He covered up Watergate aggressively but buried the Moorer Radford affair almost completely. Alliance Theory predicts this. Exposing the Joint Chiefs would have detonated a far more powerful alliance and shattered public trust in the military during wartime. Nixon chose coalition preservation over personal vindication.
The press as a secondary alliance actor
Journalists like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not neutral referees. They were aligned with a broader elite coalition that had already turned against Nixon. The press amplified certain scandals and downplayed others based on alliance incentives. The Pentagon spying story stalled because no dominant coalition wanted it fully aired.
The myth of the lone deep state
Alliance Theory rejects a single unified deep state. What existed were rival institutional alliances. The FBI. The CIA. The Pentagon. The White House. Each spied on the others. Each leaked selectively. Nixon was not wrong that he was surrounded by hostile forces. He was wrong to think he could fight them with burglars and tape gaps.
Why Watergate became the symbol
Watergate endured because it was safe to expose. It punished a weakened alliance leader without threatening the legitimacy of stronger institutions. The Moorer Radford scandal cut too close to the bone. So it was sealed, minimized, and eventually forgotten.
Revised understanding
Watergate was not the moment America cleansed itself. It was the moment one alliance lost and others consolidated power. The lesson is not that secrecy breeds evil. It is that excluding powerful coalitions without managing their incentives invites sabotage.
Forward looking implication
Alliance Theory suggests that future presidents will face the same structural problem. Centralize power too aggressively and you trigger bureaucratic immune responses. Ignore that reality and scandals are not an accident. They are a predictable outcome.
Tell it straight. Nixon fell not because he was uniquely bad, but because he misread the alliance map and fought the wrong war with the wrong tools.
