LIKE MOST bigots, the 37th president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon, didn’t think he was prejudiced at all. That’s what Nixon told a senior adviser, Charles Colson, in a conversation recorded by his secret Oval Office taping system in February 1973.
"I've just recognised that, you know, all people have certain traits," Nixon told Colson in 265 hours of recordings just released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Excerpts from the tapes have been published by the New York Times.
“The Jews have certain traits,” Nixon said. “The Irish have certain – for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. It’s sort of a natural trait. Particularly the real Irish.”
Italians “don’t have their heads screwed on right”, Nixon said, but he reserved his most poisonous discourse for blacks and Jews.
Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, had “somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon told his secretary, Rose Mary Woods.
“He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart’. So forth and so on.”
Nixon told Woods that blacks might become valued members of society “if you’re talking in terms of 500 years”, but he thought “it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years”. He seemed to imply that progress would come only if blacks were “inbred” with whites.
Nixon’s anti-Semitic remarks became known as early as 1999, when White House tapes from 1971 were released. Nixon had told his adviser HR Haldeman that Washington was “full of Jews”, who were disloyal, except for his Jewish aides. “But, Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?” Nixon asked.
The newly released tapes add more evidence of Nixon’s anti- Semitism. “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality,” he said in the same conversation in which he maligned the Irish.
Nixon saw Jews as draft dodgers. “I didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those [casualty] lists; I don’t know how the hell they avoid it,” he said.
“If you look at the Canadian- Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately Jewish. The deserters.”
Nixon said his Jewish advisers, including Henry Kissinger, who was then national security adviser, and William Safire, who later became a New York Timescolumnist, suffered from inferiority complexes. "Most Jewish people are insecure. That's why they have to prove things."
In one of the more shocking episodes in the tapes, Nixon conferred with Kissinger after a meeting with then Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.
“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger said. “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”
“Tricky Dick” Nixon, the only US president to resign from office, inspired as much venom as he spewed. “Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddam liar and the people know it,” former president Harry Truman said in 1961.
Margaret Mitchell, the wife of then attorney general John Mitchell, said in 1973 that Nixon “bleeds people. He draws every drop of blood and then drops them from a cliff. He’ll blame any person he can put his foot on.”
The existence of the tapes was revealed in July 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal. It was never clear why Nixon taped the Oval Office conversations, which eventually led to his downfall.
The Supreme Court ruled the tapes had to be given to the special prosecutor. Four days before Nixon’s resignation, the “smoking gun tape” proved he knew of the Watergate cover-up and tried to stop the FBI investigation into the break-in at Democratic party headquarters.
The Nixon Library will release the last 400 hours of Nixon tapes by 2012. Presidential libraries are usually dedicated to the glory of the leaders they memorialise, but the Yorba Linda library has apparently decided to pass Nixon on to posterity, warts and all.
Harsh words: Nixon on . . .
IRISH
“The Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks.”
JEWS
“Generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?”
BLACK PEOPLE
Might become valued members of society “if you’re talking in terms of 500 years”.
ITALIANS
“Don’t have their heads screwed on right”