Who's Afraid of Nixon's Anti-Semitism?
By Steven Philp
As governments process the information illicitly made public by Wikileaks, the legal release of conversations recorded during the Nixon administration may seem irrelevant. Many of the recorded conversations released this week by The Nixon Presidential Library and Museum were recorded shortly before the Watergate scandal. Yet these tapes have come to public attention for their racist and anti-Semitic content.
According to The New York Times, after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told President Richard Nixon that if the Soviet Union sent its Jewish citizens to the gas chambers, it would not be an American concern. Responding to Meir’s request that the United States pressure the Soviet government to allow the emigration of Russian Jews, Kissinger says, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union...