Americans took a break from their partisan vituperation in February to mull over newly revealed testimony that Richard Nixon gave to grand jury investigators in 1975, a year after the Watergate scandal drove him from power. James Rosen, a veteran Washington journalist and the biographer of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, revealed the episode in the New York Times. Nixon had argued that his program of wiretaps had been made necessary by another spying operation that senior American military commanders were carrying out against him and his top aides.

The outline of this story has been known to historians since James Hougan laid it out in Secret Agenda (1984): a brilliant young sailor named Charles Radford memorized, photocopied, and purloined classified documents from Nixon’s National Security Council, sometimes even emptying Henry Kissinger’s briefcase, and delivered them to a hawkish group of high military officers led by Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Alarmingly intimate accounts of arguments over military strategy began showing up in the syndicated columns of journalist Jack Anderson.

What Watergate did was to separate the Oval Office from the political choices of the American people

What Watergate did was to separate the Oval Office from the political choices of the American people

What is new in Rosen’s account is the context in which Nixon places the crisis. It came to a head in the last weeks of 1971, as his administration was planning the great strategic surprise that arguably won the Cold War – namely, America’s “opening to China,” the secretly negotiated rupture in the Sino-Soviet alliance. It happened at the height of the bloody war between India and Pakistan over Bangladeshi independence, and Pakistan, then a pariah state, had been the “bridge to China,” Nixon revealed. Kissinger, accompanied by Radford on a trip to Pakistan, had feigned illness to secretly visit China, and was offering extraordinary American support to Mao Zedong: “If India jumped Pakistan and........

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