Tapes Reveal Nixon’s View of Abortion
That’s the New York Times headline for the article about the latest batch of released tapes from the Nixon White House. The tact is all on the part of the Times, not Nixon.
Nixon:
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white.”
Beautiful. He said stuff about Jews too:
“It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”
That’s in the article’s next-to-last paragraph. Context: Billy Graham had been saying that the Jews were chapping his butt about what the NYT calls “efforts to promote evangelical Christianity.”
In other revelations, a National Security Council brief discussed Israel’s secret nuclear program, and Nixon aides said Reagan was really happy about Nixon’s firing of the fellow who was looking into Watergate. Good old Reagan.
UPDATE: The headline The New Republic used: “Nixon: Abort Interracial Babies.”
UPDATE 2: I’m listening to the tape (available here) while I type changes into my Alan Moore column. A lot of murk and buzzing, but phrases surface here and there: “a black and a white” and “Stick it to the goddamn Left.” Horribly, it’s such a pleasure to hear his voice again. I guess that’s the power of nostalgia.
UPDATE 3: It turns out there are good Jews and bad Jews. The bad kind put out pornography and are known as the “Synagogue of Satan” (also the name of a biker gang — it gives Hebrew lessons in the afternoon, after regular school). The good kind are “God’s Timepiece” (also the title of a book that attempts to reconcile young Christians to the existence of earth’s fossil record).
I missed all that, but it’s what Billy Graham had to say when he and the President were talking. He was responding to this thought voiced by Nixon:
… this anti-Semitism is [???] strongly than we think, you know. It’s unfortunate, but this has happened to the Jews, it happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it’s happening—now it’s going to happen in America if these people don’t start behaving.
Start behaving, you people. (Via Atrios at A Tiny Revolution.)
It shows we'd come along way, even then, if you consider how Margaret Sanger promoted the idea of getting rid of not just mixed race babies, but the plain ol' black ones too.
-And poor whites too, of course. Not sure how she felt about Jews, but the medal she received from Hitler might indicate something or other..
Sanger is a problematic figure…but she seems to have actively disliked abortion; she preferred to purify the race through birth control. As a result, she seems to have really disliked where the Nazis went with eugenics. And she doesn't seem to have been an anti-Semite. Wikipedia quotes her:
"All the news from Germany is sad & horrible, and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right. The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews & the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here & is far more dangerous than the aggressive policy of the Japanese in Manchuria.."