Historians now have new evidence from which to judge the depth and importance of Richard Nixon’s private antipathy toward Jews. In newly released White House tapes, Nixon singles out Jewish Americans as natural political enemies and potential traitors. “The Jews are all over the government,” he says, insisting that the only way to control bureaucrats of the Jewish faith is to put someone “in charge who is not Jewish.” Was the 37th president guilty merely of letting off steam, as his defenders insist, or was Nixon an anti-Semite who allowed his prejudices to influence him on the job? Officials of the Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation dismiss the slurs as “terminology from an earlier time.” Yet it is hard to excuse these conversations as simply outdated language. Nixon says things that never would have occurred to two other Republican presidents of the same generation, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
The tapes released by the National Archives–445 hours from February to July 1971–are full of troubling moments. Exempting three Jewish staff members (national-security adviser Henry Kissinger, speechwriter William Safire and presidential counselor Leonard Garment), Nixon insists that “most Jews are disloyal… You can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.” Chief of staff H. R. Haldeman agrees: “Their whole orientation is against you… And they are smart. They have the ability to do what they want to do, which is to hurt us.”
Told of Daniel Ellsberg’s role in leaking the Pentagon Papers, Nixon says, “I hope to God he’s not Jewish, is he?” (Ellsberg was.) “I hope not. I hope not,” Nixon goes on. “It’s a bad thing for us.” Recalling, as he often did, his Red-hunting days, the president insists that “the only two non-Jews in the communist conspiracy were [Whittaker] Chambers and [Alger] Hiss. Many felt that Hiss was. He could have been a half, but he was not by religion. The only two non-Jews. Every other one was a Jew. And it raised hell with us.”
Nixon usually restrained himself in Garment and Safire’s company, but what did the Jewish members of the inner circle make of what they knew of their president’s views? He was “a champion hater,” Garment wrote in his memoirs– but was “an equal opportunity hater.” According to Garment, the president despised the left, especially the journalistic left, and people who supposedly had injured his family–“and many of these people were Jewish.” In the new recordings, the president also derides anti-Vietnam protesters as “a bunch of goddamned rabble.” Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall is “an old fool and a black fool.” Justice William Brennan is “a jackass Catholic.” Justice Potter Stewart is “a weak bastard.”
Nixon’s defenders point to his Jewish appointments in his administration to his support for Israel. The president did indeed hire Kissinger, and named him secretary of State in 1973. Nixon also put Safire, Garment and Arthur Burns (Federal Reserve chairman) and Herb Stein (chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers) in top jobs. And he did give Israel crucial support, especially during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when he ordered foot-dragging aides to send the Israelis “everything that can fly.” He admired the Israelis’ guts and independence and considered the Jewish state a strategic asset. The Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, once said that “Israel never had a better friend in the White House.”
All the same, Nixon’s private views do appear to have played a role in some policy decisions. In his memoirs, Kissinger recalls that Nixon threatened to punish Israel in his final days in office–perhaps to punish him. Hours after the secretary of State advised his boss to resign for the good of the country, the president ordered him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Nixon added that he “regretted not having done so earlier,” and said his successor, Gerald Ford, would “thank” him.
Kissinger suspected Nixon’s command was “retaliation for our conversation of a few hours ago–on the president’s assumption that my faith made me unusually sensitive to pressures on Israel.” Like others in Nixon’s entourage, Kissinger felt he knew when the president gave an order merely to vent and when he really meant it. The documents to cut off Israeli aid were prepared, but never signed. All these years later, however, the voice on the tapes rankles still.
is a presidential historian and author of “Taking Charge,” the first volume of a trilogy on the Lyndon Johnson tapes. He is also writing a history of the Lincoln assassination.
title: “A Question Of Anti Semitism” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-15” author: “Mary Pectol”
But not an anti-Semite. In this case, skull thickness is a mitigating factor. The virus of true anti-Semitism is so strong in so much of the world–where synagogues are burned and people cheer suicide bombers–that garden-variety stupidity doesn’t rate, even for the Anti-Defamation League.
Yet suddenly the old Howard Stern game–“Who’s a Jew?”–has been replaced by “Who’s an anti-Semite?” (defined by Webster’s as hatred of Jews, not Arab Semitic peoples). Daniel Pipes, a Mideast expert, created a furor last week when he posted a Web site (campus-watch.org) to monitor what he calls anti-Semitism in Middle Eastern Studies programs on campus. Or how about Amiri Baraka, the black activist and poet laureate of New Jersey, who recently read a poem repeating the intercontinental lie that 4,000 Israelis stayed home from the World Trade Center on September 11? Baraka’s excuse was that he wasn’t anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel, thereby proving the limitations of that oft-used distinction.
But that’s an easy case. The harder calls are in the thick of the policy debate, where some people sincerely believe their positions don’t amount to anti-Semitism, and others sincerely do. Take the issue of divestment. In a recent speech, Harvard president Lawrence Summers upbraided those who signed a campus petition that calls for universities to divest their endowment portfolios of any company doing business with Israel. You’ve got to respect Summers’s guts in moving past the namby-pamby neutrality of most college presidents and actually saying something. But how about his argument itself? Summers posits that “serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”
Intent and effect. Summers’s distinction is critical. Most of those who sign the divestment petitions at Harvard and several other campuses aren’t anti-Semites. (Some are even Israeli professors.) They see a divestment strategy as a way of pressuring Ariel Sharon to change his policy in the West Bank. On one level, this is well within the bounds of legitimate debate. Criticism of Israeli policies is not anti-Semitic; in fact, it is arguably philo-Semitic–an upholding of noble Jewish traditions of scrutiny and self-examination.
But there’s a dark side to divestment. In the case of Israel, the movement suffers from a careless use of analogy and a poor reading of the Middle East. The analogy used by signers of the divestment petitions is, of course, South Africa. You can understand why Jews might resent the comparison. The apartheid regime was a pariah state recognized by almost no one. Israel–lest we forget–was recognized even by the Palestinians in 1998. South Africa was the source of moral evil in the region; the good guys and bad guys weren’t hard to sort out. In the Middle East, blame is more evenly shared, and more recently attributable to the Palestinians, who have rejected the homeland offered them two years ago at Camp David and repeatedly send suicide bombers to kill the innocent and provoke Sharon. Divestment directed against Israel when it was so clearly wrong in invading Lebanon in the 1980s might have made sense. Today it’s just strange, and suspicious.
Some argue that the blindness to Palestinian blame is merely misplaced romanticism, not anti-Semitism. The students and professors on campus with a weakness for this kind of politics also champion other oppressed peoples fighting entrenched power, and overlook their abuses. But at a certain point, persistent double standards start to smell of something more malignant. Funny how campus activists never seem to mention, say, Syrian occupation of Lebanon. They bemoan capital punishment in the United States but say nothing when the Palestinians routinely execute suspected collaborators, including the mothers of young children. They single out Israeli human-rights abuses that pale next to those of their Arab neighbors, which we know less about because of press restrictions. Anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism–until it reaches a certain pitch.
Divestment may be only a fall fad on college campuses, but it’s political nitroglycerin. It raises unrealistic hopes that Palestinians might eventually get all of Palestine with the help of sympathizers in Europe and the United States. It under mines any progress toward a two-state solution, the only practical and moral path to peace. It displays a willful obtuseness about the world that, anti-Semitic or not, is clearly something else. Call it Armey-esque.
