Schools Of Watergate

Richard Nixon's operatives -- especially Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Dwight Chapin, and Don Segretti -- are the southern California angle on Watergate, having learned their dirty tricks in their pretend politics at USC and UCLA. Clancy Segal, then a left-wing editor at UCLA's Daily Bruin, writes about a primitive era of gentile and Jewish fraternities; getting beaten up by frat boys for dating the wrong women, just like in "Animal House"; his jailhouse interview with Haldeman, when the disgraced former chief of staff candidly admitted his festering resentment of "Jewish liberals" on campus; and a fascinating moment when Alexander Butterfield, another Bruin, chose for whatever reason not to deny that he was a CIA plant in the White House, ordered to protect the agency from Nixon's interferences:

Tall, handsome and bronzed, Alex gave me that old Sigma Nu smile while refusing to deny, "Write it the way you see it, Clancy. Remember, there was nothing personal." Meaning, he played the game and Bob and John simply were collateral damage to a larger scheme.

Gingrich's "Anti-Semitic Diatribe"

Richard Silverstein didn't like the sound of Newt Gingrich's South Carolina victory speech:

We are going to argue American exceptionalism, the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American federalist papers; the founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers and people who don’t like the classical America.

Silverstein:

Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is replete with multiple references to the Founding Fathers and American constitution as the embodiments of liberty and democracy. But note how he sets up Alinsky as a radical who is alien to America. The final nail in the coffin is his reference to “classical America.” Who or what is classical America? It is of course white Christian America, everything that Saul Alinsky and many of you out there reading this are not. This is a classic anti-Semitic diatribe gussied up in Tea Party rhetoric.

An Order Better Not Followed

According to notes kept by his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, on July 3, 1971 President Nixon let his suspicions about Jews and liberals in the civil service get the better of him. He believed they were purposely manipulating economic data to hurt his administration. Historian Maarja Krusten offers reflections on the politics of scapegoating (which comes from Torah, ironically enough -- Lev. 16:8,10):

The segment [of notes] covered Nixon’s directive to Haldeman to have [White House operative Fred] Malek [shown below] check “sensitive areas,” uncover “Jewish cells,” and to put a “non-Jew in charge of each.” Haldeman, who occasionally dragged his feet on orders from Nixon, didn’t blink an eye. And so the Nixon White House sent Fred Malek off to count Jewish civil servants.

Nixon may have been uncomfortable about some of the things recorded on his tapes or recorded in White House documents. I sympathize with that to some degree. His records were seized and the rules changed on him. But trying to take out the people at NARA who worked and still work with those materials only demonstrates the same acculturation that led Nixon and Haldeman to send Malek off to count Jews at BLS. Nixon didn’t like the way the bureau was handling the release of unemployment figures. Instead of directing James Hodgson, Secretary of Labor, to work through the timing issues, he went nuclear. And sent Malek off to do some things Malek and Haldeman should have resisted, in my view. This set up a situation where Malek later had to confront, or not, what he had done.

It was a classic example of not liking an outcome and personalizing the issue based on assumptions, rather than working out a rational and fact-based solution. Just like assuming Fred Graboske and his staff were biased against Nixon and trashing their reputations (“incompetent clerical level archivists.”). Or calling for Tim Naftali to find an Alger Hiss library to head, when he sought to put up an historically sound exhibit about “abuses of governmental power.” There couldn’t be a clearer demonstration of the management culture within the Nixon White House that resulted in those abuses than observing what NARA has faced since the 1980s.

Jesus And The Other Jews

Benedict XVI is getting high marks for reinforcing the Roman Catholic Church's post-Holocaust and therefore all-too-recent corrective about Jews and the death of Jesus:

While the Catholic Church has for five decades taught that Jews weren't collectively responsible, Jewish scholars said Wednesday the argument laid out by the German-born pontiff, who has had his share of mishaps with Jews, was a landmark statement from a pope that would help fight anti-Semitism today.

"Holocaust survivors know only too well how the centuries-long charge of 'Christ killer' against the Jews created a poisonous climate of hate that was the foundation of anti-Semitic persecution whose ultimate expression was realized in the Holocaust," said Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.

The pope's book, he said, not only confirms church teaching refuting the deicide charge "but seals it for a new generation of Catholics."

Nixon's Best And Worst Ex-President's Days

Richard Nixon's best recent ex-president's day may have been the Feb. 2 Metropolitan Opera premiere of "Nixon In China." There's no doubt about his worst: The December 2010 opening of a secretly recorded White House conversation in which he and Henry Kissinger talk about whether it would've been an issue for the United States if the Soviet Union decided to murder all its Jews.

Reconciling the grand and tawdry in Nixon's complicated legacy should be the business of both historians and his dwindling cohort of intimates. Instead, Nixon's operatives chose to fight the battle of Yorba Linda over the contents of a Watergate gallery in which some of them play starring roles alongside 37. Here's hoping future Presidents Days will see that matter settled, at least, and historians hard at work in the Nixon library reading room, sifting through the immense record of the most copiously documented public person in the history of humankind.

As that record will show, Nixon was a great man, for good or ill. Being the subject of an opera makes him a grand one as well. In 1987, when I was his chief of staff, John Adams' "Nixon In China" was premiered in Houston and then in New York, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I conducted a reconnaissance by attending one of the BAM performances. I'd bragged to Nixon that I'd gone to prep school with the director, Peter Sellars, the infant phenomenon of 1980s international opera. But attending Sellars' one-man "Winnie-the-Pooh" in the Andover theater lab hadn't prepared me for the moment when a big, flat Air Force One glided onto the stage to thrilling orchestral fanfares and Nixon (baritone James Maddalena) stepped through the door and began to sing.

While I didn't care for the way the Nixons and especially Henry Kissinger were portrayed, I figured that having an opera written about you had to be a net plus unless your name happened to be Othello. But Nixon received my report with even more of his studied reserve than usual. He assumed his enemies were up to something, and besides, as he understood better than anyone, nothing could beat the drama of the real Nixon going to the real China in the real airplane.

At least to me, he never expressed any interest in seeing it himself. When his last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, was serving as acting executive director of the Nixon foundation in 2009, she also took a pass when the foundation was offered the opportunity to collaborate with a Long Beach Opera production. She feared that those closest to the Nixon family would appear to be blessing the opera's sometimes cartoonish characterizations. In particular, Kathy said the producers would have to be willing to change portions of the third act, in which Pat Nixon appeared to be drunk. The Nixon family had long battled against allegations that the first lady drank heavily in the White House during Watergate. One of my own first decisions as Nixon library director in 1990 was to remove the Nixon library cocktail glasses a marketing consultant had ordered for the gift shop.

Kathy's decision on the Long Beach production proved to be final. But some at Nixon's foundation still craved the spotlights, greasepaint, and mao tai (a fiery rice wine used by the Chinese for toasts that Nixon, as I saw during a 1985 trip to China, couldn't hold). They finally got the chance to raise their glasses in New York two weeks ago when assorted Nixon factotums, and even members of the Nixon family, attended the glittery Met premiere and were photographed backstage with Maddalena, who reprised his role as Nixon, and other cast members.

One especially knowledgeable guest, former Kissinger aide and ambassador to China Winston Lord, was deeply offended by what he saw. Like my theater critic father and godfather used to do, he was taking detailed notes on his program. Lord later found a sympathetic ear in journalist Gay Talese, who described his views in a "New Yorker" article:

[M]aking Kissinger a lecherous, cruel character is beyond the pale. It turns a heroic figure into a cardboard monster. There is no artistic rationale that explains this. One can only suspect a personal vendetta by the creators.

Lord stuck up for Kissinger where I'd failed to in my 1987 report to Nixon. Kissinger, in turn, had far more advocates than Nixon in December, when both attracted international condemnation for their taped remarks about Soviet Jews in 1973, in the midst of debates about Soviet emigration policy. Kissinger is heard saying that a Soviet holocaust would have been at best a humanitarian concern and by no means a U.S. interest; Nixon replies that it wouldn't be worth a thermonuclear war.

Their conversation was gross but not impossible to explain. Kissinger's friends weighed in, but no one now running Nixon's foundation stepped up to the plate to say that the Nixon they'd known and served wouldn't have permitted such a a foul genocide.

He wouldn't have. That the tapes make it appear otherwise pinpoints the greatest problem for Nixon's legacy and the greatest opportunity for scholars who are willing to open their minds to the ambiguity bequeathed to them by Nixon's tapes and temperament.

His taping system was the worst idea in the history of the modern presidency. He either had no idea how his private discourse would play publicly or no conception of ever losing control of the tapes. For someone who was so careful about his public persona, it was the ultimate nightmare. In the early 1990s, I got a call in Yorba Linda from Carlos Narvaez, who worked for Nixon in the National Archives. "The tapes must never come out," he said. "His reputation will never recover." After Nixon died in 1994, I prayed our friend Carlos was wrong as I negotiated a deal under which the tapes were opened beginning in 1996 and were supposed to be fully opened by 2000.

It now looks as though it will take the National Archives until at least 2012 to complete the laborious process. That's too bad. The battering Nixon's reputation takes from each successive tapes opening -- Watergate reporter Bob Woodward called it the gift that keeps on giving -- keeps a balanced view of his legacy under wraps. So does history's failure to appreciate his deeply introverted temperament, which made each of his public appearances a trial, each meeting with associates an intricate minuet of conflict avoidance, and each conversation with the few people he really trusted an opportunity to release all the tension and anger of being a wartime INTJ.

Nixon's toxic theories and statements about race are especially problematical. It will take scholars decades to sort it all out. When they do, I remain hopeful that they'll understand that he was a far more serious, diligent, and gracious person than history now remembers. For 37, there should be countless better Presidents Days ahead. In the meantime, remember that Nixon went to China, and they're still singing about it.

Above left: Nixon in Hangzhou, China in 1993 with his chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor. Behind them is a tree he planted during his historic 1972 visit.

Bob Woodward, Me, And Nixon's "Nonsense"

As she writes this morning at NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten was still working at the National Archives' Washington-area Nixon Project in 1988 when journalist Bob Woodward came looking for details about the investigation President Richard Nixon had ordered years before into how many Jews were working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It was the last year of the Reagan administration. The Nixon aide who received and followed the order, Fred Malek (above), was up for a top GOP job. I was then Nixon's post-presidential chief of staff. After the story by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague, Walter Pincus, was published, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Times accusing the Post of recycling a story that Woodward and Carl Bernstein had first reported many years before in their book The Final Days.

The afternoon my article appeared, Woodward called me. While he said that he hadn't recalled the reference to White House Jew-counting in The Final Days until he read my article, he insisted that Malek's prominence in party circles made it news once again. He also questioned my labored contention that Nixon's obsession with Jews could be entirely accounted for by his obsession with liberals.

When I asked Woodward if he thought Nixon was anti-Semitic, he said, "I don't know." As for Malek, he told the Post in 1988 that Nixon's fears about a cabal of Jews manipulating economic statistics to his detriment were "ridiculous" and "nonsense." But more recently, as Krusten notes, Nixon library director Tim Naftali couldn't get Malek to repeat his criticisms on camera:

Malek comes across better to me in what he told Woodward in 1988 than in Ben Stein’s “Leave Fred Malek alone” column in 2010 (shades of “Leave Britney Alone”) or in the oral history interview he later gave [to Naftali] on the BLS matter. (I’ve described Malek’s stance in the latter as “no harm, no foul.”) Yet Malek had more at stake, as he was being considered in 1988 for chairman of the Republican National Committee.

According to an on-line catalog at nixonlibrary.gov, Malek's interview with Naftali is among those to be included the new Nixon library Watergate exhibit. It also features convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin's dramatic charge that Nixon was present when Chapin (right) was ordered to set up a dirty tricks operation for the 1972 presidential campaign.

So far, the new exhibit at the federal Nixon library has evidently been blocked by friends and former White House colleagues of Malek and Chapin who now control Nixon's foundation.

Anti-Semitism And The Attack On Rep. Giffords

Information emerges about some troubling "far-right" associations of Jerod Lee Loughner. I put far right in quotes not to minimize that element by any means but because among his passions, at least according to this initial information, is anti-Zionism, a sentiment which is also sometimes associated with the left.

The possibility of an anti-Semitic dimension to the attack on Rep. Giffords hadn't occurred to me before now. Obviously that would dramatically complicate any effort to associate Loughner with any one political bloc, as many of us seem driven to try to do. If you want to read thoroughly uncivil and even bloodcurdling rhetoric, go to any blog where the Middle East is discussed, such as Matthew Yglesias' (I refer not to his language but to that of some of those who leave comments).

Bashing Nixon To Build Up Reagan

On Tuesday, Michael Gerson used the distasteful Nixon-Kissinger conversation about a hypothetical Soviet holocaust against Jews to promote the ideology that Ronald Reagan brought about the fall of the Soviet Union. He goes so far as to imply, outrageously, that Nixon really would've let Soviet Jews be gassed:

[F]rom this historical episode, it is clear that repeated doses of foreign policy realism can deaden the conscience. In President Nixon's office, a lack of human sentiment was viewed as proof of mental toughness - an atmosphere that diminished the office itself. Realists are often dismissive of Manichean distinctions between good and evil, light and darkness. But in the world beyond good and evil, some may be lightly consigned to the gas chambers.

Gerson's comment is especially appalling in view of an historical reality which he neglects to mention, namely that Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union reached its Cold War apogee as the direct result of Nixon's policies. That means Russia's Jews were safer because of Nixon, and yet Gerson claims to have gotten a whiff of gas. While the taped Nix-Kiss exchange is impossible to defend on its merits, it's nothing but hot air.

Since the tape was opened earlier this month, Kissinger's friends have defended him strenuously. No word yet from Nixon's men -- except, now, Kissinger himself. Knowing him, I'd say his response became inevitable after Gerson used the opportunity of the tapes opening to suggest that the Jackson-Vanik amendment (which tied U.S.-Soviet trade relations to rates of emigration and ended up making it far harder for Jews to get out than it had been under Nixon) somehow helped end the Cold War. In response, Kissinger took to the Washington Post op-ed page on Christmas Eve. He began by apologizing for his loose talk in the White House and then took aim at his Reagan-boosting critic:

Gerson ascribes the collapse of the Soviet Union in part to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The amendment played no significant role in what resulted from imperial overstretch, incompetent economic management and the determined resistance of a succession of presidents from both parties, culminating in the Reagan period.

Gerson sneers at detente as if it were a kind of moral abdication. Memories are short. The conversation under discussion occurred on March 1, 1973. The Vietnam War had just ended; prisoners had not yet returned.

An effective global strategy was in place with the opening to China, a broad dialogue with the Soviet Union, and major progress in Egypt and on emigration. It was to preserve that policy that the conversation in the Oval Office took place, and it is in that context that it must be viewed.

Nixon And Race

Conrad Black speaks up for Richard Nixon, accused of racism and anti-Semitism as a result of newly-opened White House tapes:

Richard Nixon was a Quaker who had African-Americans home to dinner as a child, who famously befriended them all his life, who was a civil-rights advocate long before the voting arithmetic of it achieved the grace of conversion for the Kennedys. Nixon fought hard as vice president, against Eisenhower and Speaker Sam Rayburn, for aid to the Hungarian refugees in 1956. He resented that the great majority of American Jews voted against him, but his ethnic slurs, on Jews and others, were not as severe as those of Harry Truman (who was instrumental in founding the State of Israel) or other presidents speaking about non-WASP groups. Richard Nixon saved Israel by virtually giving it a new air force in the midst of the Yom Kippur War, and went to a state of war alert with the Soviet Union to do it, during the greatest crisis of his political career.

Asleep Again

The self-styled friends of Richard Nixon's legacy have still said nothing about his controversial exchange about Soviet Jews with Henry Kissinger in May 1973, whereas Kissinger's friends, including Mort Zuckerman, wrote as follows to the New York Times on Tuesday:

Just several weeks before this conversation, Mr. Kissinger and Nixon agreed to provide Israel with 100 advanced aircraft and to remove Israeli issues from the State Department to the White House, something strongly sought by Golda Meir, who was then prime minister.

Earlier, in 1969, when only approximately 700 Jews were allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union, Mr. Kissinger, then the national security adviser, broached the issue with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly F. Dobrynin. As a result of this conversation, among others, the Soviets allowed the number of émigrés to increase to almost 40,000 by 1972.

Mr. Kissinger consistently played a constructive role vis-à-vis Israel both as national security adviser and secretary of state, especially when the United States extended dramatic assistance to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel’s very existence was at stake.

Over the decades, many of us have heard Mr. Kissinger speak out forcefully on behalf of the security and independence of Israel, and never have we heard him speak in a disparaging way about the Jewish community.

The critics of Mr. Kissinger should remember the context of his entire life and ask whether that judgment is fair. We think the answer is obvious.

In Need Of One Good Book

It's easy to understand people's revulsion at the racial and ethnic commentary on the newly opened Nixon White House tapes, especially the exchange between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger about a hypothetical Soviet holocaust against Jews. As his chief of staff, library director, and legal co-executor, I cringe myself.

That being said, during thousands of hours of conversations with me over a 15-year association, he rarely if ever talked this way. Even as a former president, he devoted most of his time and energy to substance -- articles, books, and speeches, as well as his voracious consumption of and commentary about political and policy news.

Having spent plenty of time with the Nixon tapes, my sense is that their 4,000 hours embody a comparable disproportion between substance and triviality. But today's snarling editorial in the New York Times goes out of its way not to take a balanced view. Again, anger about racism and anti-Semitism is understandable. But I'm sure the Times also realizes that Nixon was a serious person of considerable accomplishment whose legacy of foreign policy innovation and domestic pragmatism can still teach us a lot in our era of terrorist threats from abroad and ideological warfare at home.

But frankly, I really shouldn't be picking on the Times, which has been left a clear field. With the exception of the measured insider's perspective at Maarja Krusten's new NixoNARA, it's astonishing how few people have piped up for 37 since the new tapes were opened. Pleased finally to find some relatively friendly commentary about Nixon on another, unfamiliar blog the other day, I went to the home page and realized it was operated by white nationalists. The Nixon White House aides who have devoted so much effort to trying to block the Nixon library Watergate exhibit in which some of them play starring roles appear to have gone home for Christmas now that the tapes beg for friends and associates to stand up and say, "That's not the totality of the man I knew."

One Nixon family member who was especially prone to defeatism repeatedly expressed a fear to me that Nixon's reputation would never recover from the rancor of his times and racism on the tapes. With each new records opening, I can see why someone could feel that way. The Times notes the devastating irony of tapes Nixon thought would cement his reputation instead having the effect of cement wingtips, dragging his historical standing further down. Having helped negotiate a three-party settlement that envisioned all the tapes being opened by 2000, I regret that the National Archives has taken this long to open the whole collection. The library now says it will take until 2012. Scholars used to blame us Nixonites for holding up the tapes. But we waved the white flag in 1996. Why will historians have had to wait at least more 16 years?

And yet all is not lost. The Nixon Center in Washington continues to promote Nixon's living principles of enlightened national interest as the foundation of the U.S.'s role in a changing world. Not only the thousands of hours of opened tapes but all the records are finally housed or available at the Nixon library -- the richest presidential collection about one of the most momentous eras in modern history. Thanks to my elder daughter Valerie, last Monday I had dinner with a young scholar from Italy who's studying relations between the U.S. and Brazil during 1971-73. She said there were four other readers working at the library last week alone.

If Nixon were still here and I could call to buck him up, I'd actually be the first to mention the Jews. I'd remind him that they wandered in the wilderness for at least 40 years. I'd say, "Mr. President, you've still got a shot at the promised land. All you need is a few historians and biographers who are willing to take the sweet with the bitter. Just one good book from an independent voice: Manna from heaven."

Kissinger Alone

Henry Kissinger's most relentless critic, Christopher Hitchens, on the latest Nixon tapes:

Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he'd be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

With Friends Like These

Rick Moran at the conservative "American Thinker" castigates the left for its obsession with Richard Nixon and then adds:

A crook, a weak and venal man who enriched himself at taxpayer expense, Nixon was perhaps the most unlovely of our presidents. His spying on Americans and electoral shenanigans placed him beyond the pale. Resignation was too good for him. He should have been impeached, tried, and convicted.

He says the left's being harsh? Moran actually misses the point about yesterday's New York Times article, which was its acknowledgment that Nixon appeared to despise liberal U.S. Jews while admiring Israelis. The political nuance doesn't excuse his anti-Semitic statements, but it puts them in a different category compared to those of his aide Bob Haldeman and friend Elmer Bobst.

Moran's epitaph mentions none of Nixon's accomplishments, though some leaving comments on his post do. And "enriched himself at taxpayer expense" is a bum rap. As co-executor of Nixon's estate, I can assure you that if he had been stealing, it was the greatest of his incompetencies. With the exception of a disallowed tax deduction on the donation of his pre-presidential papers (which he took because his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, suggested it), Watergate exposed no evidence of personal corruption. Based on working with him for 14 years, I'd say the idea that people thought otherwise may have been what stung him most of all. It's the main reason he made such a show of giving up his Secret Service protection in 1985 and announcing that he would pay for his own security. He also refused to take honoraria for speeches or sit on corporate boards.

Moran amply proves Nixon's dictum that his friends on the right were always tougher than his enemies on the left.

What He Said And What He Did

The New York Times figures out that Richard Nixon thought differently about Israelis and predominantly liberal American Jews. Back in May 1994, when former chief of staff Bob Haldeman's White House diaries were published, I ventured the politics-based argument myself, as I had on other occasions. It got to be a bit much in the spring of 1997, when Nixon's son-in-law Ed Cox and former speechwriter Ken Khachigian, a loyal Cox water carrier, attempted to designate me as official Nixon foundation spokesman on the anti-Semitic statements of Nixon family friend Elmer Bobst, whose widow was a library contributor and Cox legal client. I told Cox I wouldn't be on the wrong side of anti-Semitism for him or anyone else and hung up the phone.

I still believe the preponderance of Nixon's unpleasant racial commentary had to do with his being born in 1913. As for the rest, it will be up to history to balance his loose talk -- which he made the massive error of tape-recording between February 1971 and July 1973 -- with his pro-Israel, pro-African-American, pro-Native American policies. To paraphrase John Mitchell, don't just pay attention to what he said. Remember what he did.

Kathy, No More Meetings With People, Please

From the Wall Street Journal's anthology of items from yesterday's release of documents and tapes by the Nixon library in Yorba Linda:

A five-page memo by Mr. Nixon describes his personal habits for dissemination to “friendly columnists and authors,” and sets out the president’s loathing for social breakfasts, social lunches, social cocktails and social dinners, because they take time away for “long-range, broad-scope thinking,” and that he doesn’t feel he can afford to spend five hours playing golf for the same reason.

So Nixon didn't like people? On the contrary. But social interactions, except for those that made almost no demands on his emotional energy, were exhausting, as with all strong introverts. This listing ranks Nixon as an ENTJ on the Myers Briggs scale, but that can't be right. RN was definitely INTJ:

[M]any INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals; for instance, they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk...

And then there's small-minded talk. The Journal and others interpret a page of chief of staff Bob Haldeman's notes as a presidential order that the administration's Jews be banned from working on Middle East issues. Nixon's passions about Jews and their politics are well-documented and not pleasant to behold. And he was at his worst when talking with Haldeman. In this case, it sounds like Nixon was sounding one of his leitmotifs, which was that his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who was Jewish, couldn't be objective about the struggles and negotiations between Israel and the Arabs. Unless someone can dig up evidence of an order being issued and carried out, it's probably just hot air, plus an additional insight about the fascinating collaboration-cum-rivalry between the two towering strategists of detente.

As these releases continue, and we get further away from Nixon days, reporters will need to brush up on their history. Here's what the Journal says about the newly released page of Haldeman notes. Note that they have the personnel all wrong. Haldeman was chief of staff; Alexander Haig was Kissinger's aide:

Mr. Nixon ordered his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, to exclude all Jewish-Americans from policy-making on Israel, according to formerly classified notes taken by White House aide H. R. “Bob” Haldeman on a meeting with the president in July 1971. “No Jew can handle the Israeli thing,” the notes read. Later in the one-page excerpt, Mr. Haldeman writes, “Forget the Jews — they’re against” the administration.

They should check this stuff with Rupert Murdoch. He knows.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Couple Hallmarks Stand Out, Right Off The Bat

The lead headline on the New York Times web site reads, "Bomb Plot Is Said to Contain ‘Hallmarks of Al Qaeda'." Exactly: They hate and want to murder Jews. The reporter who did the story for LA's NBC affiliate last night had picked up a hint locally that one of the two Chicago synagogues the bombs were headed for has a predominantly gay and lesbian congregation. If so, that would be an al-Qaeda twofer: Murdering Jews and homosexuals at the same time.

Time To Get Watergate On The Way

After the Nixon foundation's war over Watergate became public on Aug. 6, National Archives officials said final decisions about the Nixon library's new exhibit, due to have opened on July 1, would be made in a few weeks. But thanks to Wikipedia, one learns that the background for the new exhibit already appears on on the Nixon library website, complete with photos, White House tape snippets, and even a memo disclosing that Nixon's aides had conducted an investigation into whether one of their own, Fred Malek, was Jewish (see "Higby to Haldeman, July 8, 1971"). President Nixon had wanted his staff to find out how many Jews were working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where he believed liberal opponents were skewing data. White House personnel chief Malek was in line for the assignment, hence the theological exploration by chief of staff H.R. Haldeman's aide, Larry Higby. Malek gives more details in an oral history interview with library director Tim Naftali.

Rooting around, you can get a pretty good idea of the contours of the exhibit. Included, for instance, are details on the White House's attempts to intimidate the late Daniel Schorr, then a CBS correspondent. According to NPR's 1994 interview with Schorr, in 1971 Higby called J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, looking for dirt. Instead, Hoover launched a full-field investigation. When Schorr naturally found out about it, the White House pretended that it planned to offer him a job, which Haldeman and Nixon discuss in this tape segment (which also reveals that they'd sicced the IRS on him). Finally, in December 1971, Hoover, laying one more lie on the pile, wrote a letter to the White House saying the investigation had been completed:

Mr. Schorr indicated surprise at being considered for a Federal position but, nevertheless, furnished the necessary background data.

It ain't pretty. It wasn't going to be. As a foreign affairs visionary, Richard Nixon made the world safer for billions of people in his own time and in generations to come. His positive legacy will ultimately withstand Watergate. But that doesn't mean the story doesn't need to be told. At Fox News, Sean Hannity loves to say about any scandal involving liberals, "If we were caught doing something like this..." Imagine if Obama's aides were caught engaging in shenanigans such as these. If prior administrations did things that were just as dark, as some argue, then let Watergate be fully illuminated in the hope that powerful men and women will at least hesitate to do it again.

To those who still insist that it's unfair to Nixon that presidents get kid glove treatment at some other taxpayer-operated museums, they've got a point, of course. It's an inevitable consequence of a president resigning, not that I ever want to see that proposition tested again. Maybe the lesson is that, after a decent interval, which is to say the first generation after a library opens, all the gloves should come off. Maybe striking a blow for curatorial objectivity at presidential libraries will be Nixon's last historic first.

Augustine And The Jews

In her book Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, BU's Paula Fredriksen credits Augustine of Hippo (354-430) with being enlightened enough about Jews that he may have saved Jewish lives.

The fourth and fifth centuries witnessed vicious anti-semitism. Bishop John Chrysostom of Constantinople, patron of the church I serve, compared Jews to animals who were unfit for work and ready for slaughter, while Augustine's contemporary Ambrose defended priests who burned down a synagogue. In contrast, Augustine's relatively enlightened view was that Jews should be protected so that their existence would affirm the validity of the Hebrew testament while their tenuous lives in the diaspora continuously demonstrated the perils of failing to come to Christ.

That doesn't sound very enlightened, of course. While Augustine is given due credit by Fredriksen's reviewer in the "New Republic," David Nirenberg, his catalog of of anti-Jewish polemic from the church's ancient, medieval, and modern eras is uniformly discouraging (an echo of Constantine's Sword by James Carroll). Only in the 1960s did the Vatican stop requiring congregations to pray each Sunday for the salvation of the poor Jews. With anti-anti-semitism having such a weak hold on the institutional church, Benedict XVI's equivocation or inattentiveness about a Holocaust-denying priest was especially discouraging.

No doubt mindful of the Benedict-Williamson episode, Nirenberg writes, "Are Christian teachings essentially anti-Jewish?" without offering a direct answer. He does fault Fredricksen for failing to try to document how many lives Augustine's "slay them not" directive (invoking Psalm 59) may actually have saved. As for how many died at the hands of a Nazi regime which, Nirenberg writes, worked carefully "to establish a resonance between its own anti-Semitic ideology and the religious teachings of the Christian confessions" -- that number, we know.

Most faithful people, except for those in denominations or sects explicitly rooted in some kind of universal salvation, must grapple with whether their confessions and creeds spell doom for anyone who doesn't believe them. For us Abrahamic people -- Jews, Christians, and Muslims -- the mystery began early, when God gave to Abram's band the land over Jordan that already belonged to someone else and called one group Chosen, the other Canaanite.

Reading scripture literally, some Jews (though not many) say that means no Palestinian state. Reading scripture literally, some Christians (how many? I'm not sure) say no salvation for Jews. If one then says that reading scripture literally is the problem, what's left of the faith? For Christians, at least for me, it's in the perfectly loving mind of Christ itself. We seek it continually.