When Richard Nixon's presidential library this week released tapes of him making bigoted remarks about blacks, Jews and various ethnic groups, major American news outlets jumped at the juicy details, recounting them on NBC's Nightly News, in the New York Times and elsewhere.
Which is all well and good. It was also worth knowing that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, himself a German-born Jew, would express nonchalance at the prospect of the Soviet Union putting its Jewish population in gas chambers.
"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy," Kissinger remarked in a taped conversation on March 1, 1973. "And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern." (Maybe?)
"I know," President Nixon responded. "We can't blow up the world because of it." [See NYT, Dec. 11, 2010.]
But the Nixon-Kissinger Realpolitik wasn't limited to such an unlikely prospect as the Soviets undertaking a Jewish extermination campaign. More shocking was the powerful evidence released two years ago by Lyndon B. Johnson's library corroborating long-held suspicions that Nixon and Kissinger conspired to sabotage the 1968 Vietnam peace talks to ensure their ascension to power.
In that case, however, the major U.S. news media looked the other way. Except for a brief reference to an Associated Press dispatch, the New York Times and other leading news outlets apparently didn't regard as newsworthy that Nixon and Kissinger had consigned more than 20,000 American soldiers and millions of Indochinese to their deaths in order to win an election.
By extending the Vietnam War for those four years, Nixon and Kissinger also ripped apart the social and political fabric of the United States turning parents against their children and creating hatreds between the American Left and the Right, which continue to this day.
One might have thought that the LBJ Library's evidence, which included a dramatic pre-election confrontation between President Johnson and then-Republican presidential candidate Nixon over what Johnson had termed Nixon's "treason," would be worthy of some serious attention. But none was forthcoming. (It fell to us at Consortiumnews.com to provide a detailed account of these exchanges.)
As has happened with other high-level scandals such as the CIA's admissions about cocaine trafficking by Ronald Reagan's beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels the major U.S. news media shies away from evidence that puts the national Establishment in too harsh a light or that suggests the preeminent U.S. news organizations have missed some monumentally important story.
For the mainstream media, it's safer to focus on the foibles of an individual like Nixon than to accept that respected members of the ruling elite in the United States are so corrupt that they would sacrifice the lives of ordinary citizens for the achievement of some political or foreign policy goal.
So, we get to learn from the new Nixon tapes that he made bigoted assertions about "abrasive and obnoxious" Jews, Irish who get "mean" drunk, Italians without "heads screwed on tight," and blacks who would need "500 years" and have to "be, frankly, inbred" to become useful contributors to the nation.
The Peace Talk Gambit
As offensive as those remarks are, however, they pale in newsworthiness to the now unavoidable conclusion that Nixon, aided by Kissinger, struck a deal with South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu in fall 1968 to block Johnson's negotiated end to the Vietnam War.
The significance of Nixon's "treason" was that while 500,000 U.S. soldiers were serving in Vietnam Nixon's campaign assured Thieu that Nixon would, as U.S. president, continue the war to get a better deal for Thieu. That left Nixon little choice but to extend the war and expand the fighting because, otherwise, Thieu would have been in a position to expose Nixon's treachery to the American people.
Yet, what was also stunning to me about the "treason" tapes when the LBJ Library released them in December 2008 was how much Johnson knew about Nixon's sabotage and why the Democrats chose to keep silent.
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