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.”
Chris Bray, “The Nixon Library Is Wrong About Nixon And The Deep State”, The Federalist, 2026-02-13.
June 6, 2026
QotD: Richard Nixon – more sinned against than sinning?
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