A Question Of Anti-Semitism

In July 1971, Richard Nixon was furious. Angry that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had released embarrassing unemployment numbers, the president orders his special counsel--and hatchet man--Charles Colson to investigate the officials who leaked the figures. "They are all Jews?" Nixon asks. "You just have to go down the goddam list and know they are out to kill us," Colson replies.

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 Yet it is hard to excuse these conversations as simply outdated language.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.