Nor did Americans learn until a decade after his death that John F. Kennedy, a much less devoted family man than Life magazine let on, shared a mistress (sequentially if not concurrently) with the Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana, whom the CIA recruited in one of several harebrained plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Then there’s Richard Nixon. Americans knew many shameful things about Nixon thanks to the Watergate investigation that prompted his resignation. But only after he left office did we learn, for instance, that Nixon ordered an aide to compile a list of Jews who worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics so he could demote some of them.
Nixon represents the gold standard in postpresidential shockers. Decades after he left the Oval Office, gasp-inducing revelations from his White House tapes and other documents continue to stream forth. As recently as September, the Princeton political scientist Gary Bass revealed that the president who engineered a 1971 tilt in U.S. foreign policy away from India and toward a repressive junta in Pakistan told aides that he found Indian women sexually repellent.
India at the time was the rare nation led by a woman, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Gandhi had angered Nixon by strengthening India’s ties to the Soviet Union as she prepared to go to war with Pakistan to support a rebellion in East Pakistan, which later became the independent nation of Bangladesh. At the time, it was abundantly clear that Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, judged Pakistanis’ slaughter of Bengalis to be a Cold War sideshow. But Americans had to wait half a century to discover the psychosexual component of Nixon’s cold-blooded realpolitik.
“Undoubtedly, the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women,” Nixon can be heard saying in a tape recording from June 1971 that the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum released in response to Bass’s declassification request. “The most sexless, nothing, these people. I mean, people say, ‘What about the Black Africans?’ Well, you can see something, the vitality, there. I mean, they have a little animallike charm. But God, those Indians, ack, pathetic.”
This was no momentary lapse. During a break in a November, 1971 summit with Gandhi, Nixon returned to the topic, saying, “To me, they turn me off. How the hell do they turn other people on, Henry? Tell me.” And finally this gem worthy of serious historical analysis: “They are repulsive and it’s just easy to be tough with them.” (Kissinger, who’s always maintained, falsely, that he discouraged Nixon’s bigoted rants, can be heard in these tapes egging on his boss.)
Tim Naftali: Ronald Reagan’s long-hidden racist conversation with Richard Nixon
Don’t blame yourself if you missed this shocking bit of Nixonia when it surfaced a couple of months ago. Odds are you were distracted by some other real-time outrage. When a public man is known to say bigoted things out in the open, it’s near certain that he’s saying even more bigoted things in private. Will we hear about these after Trump leaves office?
Comments
Post a Comment