By Douglas M. Bloomfield
Richard Nixon wouldn’t have been surprised that Deep Throat, the Washington Post anonymous source who helped bring down his presidency, turned out to be the number two man at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as was recently revealed. He had suspected W. Mark Felt early on.
But when his top aide, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, told him incorrectly that Felt was Jewish, he played to Nixon’s suspicion that Watergate was a plot by those “Jew boys” in the U.S. Attorney’s office.
“Christ, [the bureau] put a Jew in there? It could be the Jewish thing. I don’t know. It’s always a possibility,” Nixon was heard saying on one of his secret recordings.
Nixon’s career-long anti-Semitism has been well documented, most notably by the man himself in hours of Oval Office conversations he clandestinely, and, it turned out, self-destructively taped.
But, in one of history’s fascinating paradoxes, many Jews remember him more for his critical support of Israel in 1973 than for his vehement Jew-hating.
His abhorrence of Jews was generic, not personal, say his defenders. While he may not have had any Jewish friends, he did have many Jewish close advisors, including National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, White House counsel Leonard Garment, speechwriter William Safire and Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns.
Most, like Stein, have said they never experienced Nixon’s anti-Semitism personally. Yet his bigotry is well documented.
“The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards,” he once said. Washington “is full of Jews” and “most Jews are disloyal,” he told Haldeman. “But, Bob, generally speaking you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”
A Cold War-friend
A disproportionate number of Jews appeared on his lists of enemies. He ordered an aide to count all the Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like their reports.
Nixon wasn’t fond of blacks either and wondered why “so few of those who engage in espionage are Negroes.” Haldeman replied they’re “not smart enough to be spies.” To which Nixon responded, “The Jews — the Jews are, are born spies.”
So how can some people consider such a paranoid anti-Semite a great friend of Israel? Two Israeli prime ministers and an Israeli president have praised his support as critical to Israel’s victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
A case can be made that Nixon’s support for Israel had little or nothing to do with it being the Jewish homeland. Perhaps it was even in spite of that fact.
While Nixon was fighting for his political survival at home, he might have felt coming to Israel’s aid at such a critical time could prompt some of his opponents — including the “Jew boys” prosecuting him in government and the media — to go soft. But a more plausible explanation might be Cold War rivalries.
The Middle East was one region where the United States and the Soviet Union persistently fought through surrogates. Their latest weapons and military doctrines were tested, and both sides had economic and political interests at stake.
Israel was America’s closest ally in the region, and its survival was threatened by powerful Arab armies armed, backed and encouraged by the Soviet Union. American support for Israel was a strategic move to counter Soviet intervention.
Moscow mounted a massive re-supply of its Arab clients by air and sea, and there were even reports that elite Soviet paratroops had been put on alert to help the Egyptians.
Yet the Nixon administration waited eight days to airlift weapons and spare parts to Israel, despite urgent appeals from the Israeli ambassador, because Secretary of State Kissinger wanted Israel to “bleed just enough to soften it up for the post-war diplomacy he was planning,” the New York Times reported.
Nixon defenders say he admired Israel as a tough and resourceful pro-American, anti-Communist democracy standing strong against Arab and Soviet threats.
Nixon himself might have disagreed. In a Nixon Library document quoted in Slate, the on-line magazine, Nixon told Haldeman, “If anybody who’s been in this chair ever had reason to be anti-Semitic, I did.”
And Nixon continues: “And I’m not, you know what I mean? Accepted. I’m not pro-Israel; I’m not going to let Israel’s tail wag the dog.”
“Nixon viewed his support for Israel as proof that he was not an anti-Semite,” wrote longtime aide John F. Rothmann, but he added, “Nixon’s magnificent support for Israel cannot excuse the anti-Semitic attitudes that he held. His abuses of power must never be excused by history. Nixon will be judged harshly by history and deservedly so.”
Whatever Nixon’s rationale for helping Israel in 1973, his action was a mitzvah. But it does not excuse a career stained with bigotry and hatred.
Douglas M. Bloomfield is a Washington, D.C.-based syndicated columnist and a former chief lobbyist for AIPAC.
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