Notes on the Nixon Remix

For a lot of people Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. On the other hand, it's often forgotten that a lot of people are assholes. The more sensible among us know that the yuletide season is not just a pain in the ass, it's an expensive and noisy pain in the ass.

The more reflective of us wait until the release of a new series of Nixon tapes. Few things bring as much joy to the historically-minded misanthrope than that. To sit in one's study wearing nothing but an ascot and a set of high-end headphones and letting ancient hatreds wash over you is something every modern gentleman should experience regularly.

The 37th President of the United States managed to fuck himself over twice with his tapes. First, they placed him directly in the center of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice that cost him his office and life's ambition. Then they were slowly released over the course of 35 years, unfairly ruining him in the eyes of history.

I use the word "unfairly" advisedly. Imagine if almost every word that you privately uttered over the course of two and a half years was recorded, but only the very worst parts were released to the public. I suspect that very few of us would fare well in the eyes of future generations under those circumstances. And Richard Nixon's utterances were regularly sparkling with his contempt for everything and everyone that surrounded him. One of the things that makes Nixon one of history's more fascinating characters is that he was a politician and statesman that actively and unmercifully despised the human condition.

More importantly, what the late Bill Safire called "those goddamned tapes" have obscured much of an admirable record, particularly in regards to race. For all of his much-publicized ranting about the Jews, Nixon appointed more of them to higher positions than any of his predecessors, naming both a Jewish Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Secretary of State.

Oh, and he single-handedly saved the State of Israel from being overrun during the Yom Kippur War. Without Nixon's resupply effort (sending "everything that would fly"), which no previous president had done for the Jewish state, the war could have gone either way. People forget that, focusing instead on the choicer parts of the goddamned tapes.

An indication of Nixon’s complex relationship with Jews came the afternoon Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit on March 1, 1973. The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And 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.”

While invoking the gas chambers is a deeply unfortunate choice of words, Kissinger and Nixon were right if you look at the issue dispassionately. Fighting wars to stop genocides is a very recent phenomenon, and a wildly inconsistent one at that. Does anybody really think that anyone would risk nuclear annihilation to stop a genocide? Even Hitler's Holocaust was rarely mentioned as a war objective by the Allies and nothing was done to stop it as it occurred.

Moreover, Nixon and Kissinger were incredibly effective on the issue of the Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. They linked it to other things Moscow wanted, secretly, so that Moscow didn't lose face. And thousands of Soviet Jews were able to go to Israel until the political godfather of the neocons, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, decided to grandstand and demand that the Russians release Jews publicly - at which point it stopped.

In his discussion with Ms. Woods, Nixon laid down clear rules about who would be permitted to attend the state dinner for Meir — he called it “the Jewish dinner” — after learning that the White House was being besieged with requests to attend.

“I don’t want any Jew at that dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign,” he said. “Is that clear? No Jew who did not support us.”

Do you mean to tell me that Richard Nixon was actually a politician who privately noticed that a certain ethnic group supported Republicans at even lower levels than it does even today? Wherever is my fainting couch? I do believe I'm getting the vapours!

Then there's the blacks ...

At another point, in a long and wandering conversation with Rose Mary Woods, his personal secretary, that veered from whom to invite to a state dinner to whether Ms. Woods should get her hair done, Nixon offered sharp skepticism at the views of William P. Rogers, his secretary of state, about the future of black Africans.

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “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.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

I'll grant you that that rant is downright bizarre. But in focusing on Nixon shooting the shit with his secretary, it lacks the context of what he actually did as president.

This isn't something that Republicans don't tend to brag about because they're stupid, but Nixon created America's very first affirmative action program: the Philadelphia Plan.

Liberal horseshit aside, government contractors and northern labor unions were, in the late 60s and early 70s, made entirely of racism. Nixon and George Schultz's Philadelphia Plan forced anyone working on a federal construction contract to hire African American workers. After it was affirmed by the courts in Contractors' Association of Eastern Pennsylvania v. Schultz, et al., it remained the law of the land.

School segregation was common when Nixon took office in 1969, some 15 years after Brown v. Board Education. It was largely a bad memory when he resigned in 1974. While Nixon hated busing, he managed to uphold the Supreme Court's order and often worked around it and achieved even greater things.

Nixon said a lot of crazy shit in private that was directly repudiated by his public record. The Goddamned Liberal Media never points that out because, frankly, a bigoted and paranoid president ranting in the White House is more fun to write about. I get that, I just don't believe that I'm out of line for expecting better from them, especially renowned newspapers. If I wanted to be a mongoloid, I'd learn everything I discuss from cable news.

Having said all of that, the lines about the Irish and Italians are pretty funny.