The ‘deep state’ goes mainstream: Trump, Nixon — and Bob Woodward

It may not have gone mainstream until now, but the deep state concept has been around a long time — there are even hints of it in President Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech in 1961 in which the legendary commander of Allied forces in World War II warned of the “undue influence” of the “military-industrial complex.” While deep state has different meanings to different people, AlterNet’s Jefferson Morley offers a good description for its most common use in America:

The deep state is shorthand for the nexus of secretive intelligence agencies whose leaders and policies are not much affected by changes in the White House or the Congress. ... [It] includes the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency and components of the State Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and the armed forces.

Morley thinks what’s going on now is a big deal.

Trump vs. the deep state ... is the death match of American political power and it will determine the fate of Trump’s troubled presidency.

Doyle McManus, writing in the Los Angeles Times, isn’t buying this ominous view.

Trump’s problem isn’t the deep state; it’s the broad state. He’s facing pushback not only from intelligence agencies, but from civilian bureaucracies, too.

When his White House staff drafted an executive order to reopen CIA “black sites” and reintroduce torture, it leaked — and the decision was promptly put on ice.

When they drafted another order to repeal protections for LGBT federal employees, that leaked too — and the president’s daughter and son-in-law blocked the idea.

But Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Intercept, sees an overt attempt by deep state officials to undermine a leader who is a threat to their power.

Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss ... are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry, and damaging those behaviors might be.

Greenwald and others see prescience in the early January warning to Trump that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, made on MSNBC: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. ... So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

But if we’re going to take the deep state theory seriously, then a logical place to start is with Richard Nixon — the president who was actually forced to resign from office in 1974 after official investigations triggered largely by leaks to The Washington Post. The most famous of the leakers — a government official who the Post’s Bob Woodward famously called Deep Throat — was eventually revealed to be Mark Felt, then the top deputy to FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III. Woodward said Felt was motivated by what he saw as the Nixon administration’s corruption of the Justice Department. But a 2012 book — “Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat,” by Max Holland — made a compelling case that cast “Deep Throat as an avenger and not a patriot,” in the words of media critic Jack Shafer. The book argued that Felt’s leaks were motivated by the hope that Nixon would fire Gray and put him in charge of the FBI. “Nixon’s downfall was an entirely unanticipated result of Felt’s true and only aim,” wrote Holland.

That’s not deep state manipulation. That’s bureaucratic infighting. But before anyone jumps to conclusions about the deep state laying off Nixon, there’s a twist.

In December 1971, Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger were furious over leaks to columnist Jack Anderson about covert U.S. support for Pakistan in its war with India. Suspicion focused on young Navy Yeoman Charles E. Radford — a stenographer who had been working for the White House national security staff — because it had been confirmed that Anderson and Radford, both Mormons, had met. Radford strenuously denied leaking anything to Anderson. But then, as James Rosen recounted in The Atlantic in 2002, Radford ...

... confessed to a Department of Defense interrogator that for more than a year he had been passing thousands of top-secret Nixon-Kissinger documents to his superiors at the Pentagon. Radford had obtained the documents by systematically rifling through burn bags, interoffice envelopes, and even the briefcases of Kissinger and Kissinger’s then-deputy, Brig. Gen. Alexander Haig. According to Radford, his supervisors — first Rear Adm. Rembrandt C. Robinson and then Rear Adm. Robert O. Welander — had routinely passed the ill-gotten documents to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and sometimes to Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of naval operations. It was, in short, an unprecedented case of espionage that pitted the nation’s top military commanders against their civilian commander in chief during wartime.

Now that’s some serious deep statesmanship. Tapes showed that Nixon called the military’s spying “a federal offense of the highest order.” He kept the wraps on the scandal for years, instead using Moorer’s dark secret to manipulate him.

This isn’t meant to suggest that the deep state is now in fact seeking to mount a silent coup against Trump. It’s just that history suggests strongly that Eisenhower was very much onto something in his farewell speech, and that every president should be leery of the “undue influence” of the military.

Now for a final twist to complicate the Nixon picture: Before going to work for the Post, Woodward was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy, where Welander was once his commanding officer. His last Navy job was as an aide to Moorer.

Let a million (more) conspiracy theories bloom. A Bob Woodward type needs to investigate Bob Woodward.

Reed is the deputy editorial and opinion editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune. If you have suggestions for topics that could benefit from this format of excerpts and comments, please email him at chris.reed@sduniontribune.com.

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