Well?
Richard Nixon's reputation as a hateful, vindictive anti-Semite was reinforced late last
month when the National Archives, which has been releasing the 3,700 hours of Nixon's
tape-recorded White House conversations in installments since 1996, dropped another
batch.
Whenever new Nixon tapes are released, the next-day stories invariably highlight the
most outrageous tidbits, which typically include some anti-Jewish slurs. This go-round was
no exception. Along with Nixon's apparently unserious threat to nuke Vietnam, reporters
pounced on this 1972 exchange about Jews in the media between Nixon and the Rev. Billy
Graham:
BG: This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the
drain.
RN: You believe that?
BG: Yes, sir.
RN: Oh, boy. So do I. I can't ever say that, but I believe it.
BG: No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do
something.
As the Chicago Tribune noted, Nixon, Graham, and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman also
cracked anti-Semitic jokes, discussed which journalists were Jewish, and lamented that
Washington reporting had deteriorated since Jews entered the trade. (As the National
Archives explains here, there are no complete transcripts of the tapes. However, historian
Stanley Kutler edited a valuable collection of transcripts relating to Nixon's Watergate
transgressions, entitled Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, and a University of
Virginia project is planning to publish volumes of additional transcripts.)
As in the past, the recent reports of Nixon's Jew-bashing were followed by professions of
shock. (The Anti-Defamation League's press release is here.) Such shows of indignation
are probably on balance a good thing, reaffirming as they do that the president shouldn't
be seeking revenge against a particular ethnic group. Yet they also betray either an
incredibly short memory or a measure of disingenuousness. Have journalists forgotten the
identical slurs heard on earlier tapes? Or the stories in 1994 reporting that, according to
Haldeman's then-just-published diaries, Graham spoke to Nixon of "Satanic" Jews? Nixon's
loyalists are no less opportunistic. For them the periodic disclosures serve as occasions to
pen op-eds explaining why their benefactor, despite the slurs, really wasn't a Jew-hater.
(The late Herb Stein, Nixon's [Jewish] chief economist, wrote one of these apologias in
Slate.)
Defending Nixon from charges of anti-Semitism has occupied his supporters for a
half-century. The accusations date to the postwar years, when the American right
remained closely tied to the unvarnished anti-Semites of the '30s who railed against the
"Jew Deal." Although Nixon never publicly voiced any of this old-fashioned bigotry, some
of his political kinsmen did, and his strident anti-communism played with the Jew-hating
fringe. (Extreme anti-communism always contained an anti-Semitic component: Radical,
alien Jews, in their demonology, orchestrated the Communist conspiracy.) In Nixon's early
campaigns, anti-Semitism was a latent theme.
When the Republicans nominated Nixon as their vice-presidential candidate in 1952, some
opponents accused him of anti-Semitism. Nixon had Murray Chotiner, his (Jewish)
campaign manager, secure the ADL's stamp of approval. Still, into the summer voters
inundated campaign headquarters with letters asking about Nixon's feelings toward Jews.
The candidate sometimes responded himself, with his characteristic earnestness. "I want
to thank you for … your courtesy in calling my attention to the false rumor that I am
anti-Semetic [sic]," he wrote in one reply. "I am enclosing a copy of a letter which Murray
Chotiner has sent to these people which, I believe, is self-explanatory." The questions
were kept alive by a brief flap over the revelation that in 1951 Nixon had bought a home
whose deed prohibited its resale or rental to Jews. And they haunted him in his 1956,
1960, and 1962 campaigns as well. The anti-Semitism issue loomed large enough in the
1960 presidential race that Newsweek's Raymond Moley devoted a column to defending
Nixon while New York's (Jewish) Sen. Jacob Javits did likewise on the Senate floor.
When Nixon was elected president in 1968, a general feeling existed, said his (Jewish)
aide William Safire, that "Nixon just doesn't like Jews." To combat this impression, Nixon
loyalists emphasized things Nixon did that were "good for the Jews." The main example
was his delivery of arms to a besieged Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That
argument was weak, since Nixon's support was both equivocal and contingent; he never
believed in the moral necessity of a Jewish homeland. On other issues, the politics of
Jews—overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic—and Nixon's remained far apart.
What rendered the apologias untenable was the public release of White House tape
transcripts during the 1974 Watergate endgame. Safire recalled that Arthur Burns, a
(Jewish) friend whom Nixon appointed Federal Reserve chairman, "felt especially incensed
about the ethnic slurs on the tapes. [Leonard] Garment, [Nixon's (Jewish) counsel], Stein
and I all felt that sinking sensation in an especially personal way. It simply did not fit in
with all we knew about Nixon's attitude toward Jews, and it fit perfectly with most Jews'
suspicions of latent anti-Semitism in Nixon, which all of us had worked so hard to allay."
Since 1974, the publication of aides' memoirs and the release of more tapes have shown
that Nixon made anti-Semitic references more often than Safire and others suspected.
Sometimes, he simply grouped all Jews together in an unseemly way ("[Supporters of] the
arts, you know—they're Jews, they're left wing—in other words, stay away"). Other times,
he was more explicit (calling supporter Robert Vesco, who later fled the country to escape
criminal charges, "a cheap kike"). Sometimes he chalked up nefarious behavior to Jews
("The IRS is full of Jews," he told Haldeman, when the IRS commenced an audit of the
Rev. Billy Graham. "I think that's the reason they're after Graham, is the rich Jews").
At least once the anti-Semitism appears to have had hard consequences. As Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein first reported in The Final Days, and as White House memos
later confirmed, Nixon feared that a "Jewish cabal" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was
skewing data to make him look bad, and he instructed his aide Fred Malek to tally up the
Jewish employees at the bureau—a count that probably resulted in the demotion of two
Jews. (It later forced Malek's own resignation from George Bush's 1988 presidential
campaign.)
Still, Nixon's loyalists haven't shied from defending him. Garment has argued that Nixon's
words on the tapes are just private mutterings, too fragmentary to allow the conclusion
that he was anti-Semitic. Others have used the "some of his best aides were Jewish"
rejoinder, pointing to Burns, Chotiner, Garment, Safire, Stein, and of course Henry
Kissinger (about whom Nixon privately made anti-Semitic comments). Still others,
including Nixon Library Director John Taylor in a 1999 letter to Slate, contend that when
Nixon said "Jews," he really meant something like "anti-war liberals," at whom he was
justifiably angry.
All these claims can be easily countered. To the dismissal of Nixon's remarks as just
"private," one could argue that private comments are actually more revealing than public
remarks of someone's true feelings, especially since overt anti-Semitism has become
taboo. And this response, like Taylor's, begs a key question: If he's not anti-Semitic, why
does Nixon vent his anger at anti-war liberals by focusing on their Jewishness? Making
their ethnicity central to his complaint, when their ethnicity is nowhere at issue is,
arguably, exactly what defines anti-Semitism. As for the prevalence of Jewish aides in
Nixonland, again one has to understand how prejudice works. Anti-Semites, racists, and
other bigots construct a definition of a group based on stereotypes and then direct their
hatred toward the group. When they encounter an individual who seems to defy the
stereotype—a friend, an aide, a Cabinet secretary—the negative view of the group as a
whole isn't called into question; rather, the nonconforming friend gets defined as an
"exception," allowing the hostile picture of the group as a whole to stand. On the tapes,
Nixon and Haldeman are often heard discussing exactly these sort of "exceptions."
Perhaps most important, all these apologias for Nixon seem aimed at keeping him free of
some permanent stigma, of being branded with a scarlet A. But this is ultimately just a
semantic concern. There's no way to settle whether Nixon was an anti-Semite—not just
because you can't peer into someone's soul, but also because there's no litmus test for
anti-Semitism. No, Nixon didn't hate all Jews personally, nor did he use unreconstructed
Henry Ford-style anti-Jewish appeals—though, of course, virtually no major public figure in
the last 50 years has. Yet clearly he thought and spoke of Jews as a group, more or less
united in their opposition to him, possessing certain base and malign characteristics, and
worthy of his scorn and hatred. You don't have to call that anti-Semitism if you don't want
to. But there's no denying it represents a worldview deserving of the strongest reproach.
hnn.us |
