American Pravda: Richard Nixon and the Jews • 49m 
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The stated purpose of our alternative media website is to provide convenient access to “interesting, important, and controversial perspectives largely excluded from the American mainstream media.” In fulfillment of this mission, we regularly cover highly-controversial topics only rarely presented in other publications, while also moderating the resulting discussions with a very light hand. As an inevitable consequence of these two related policies, we attract a very wide variety of readers and commenters, ranging from the extremely erudite to the totally deranged.
No better example of this exists than in our candid coverage of Jews and Jewish issues, widely regarded as deadly “third rail” topics, and therefore avoided or carefully circumscribed by the vast majority of other publications or websites. Since commenters with extreme or obsessive views on such Jewish matters tend to be banned almost everywhere else, they naturally gravitate to our relatively unrestricted platform, both for good and for ill.
This situation was illustrated a couple of weeks ago when I published a very long article mostly focused on the career of President Richard Nixon, his relationship with his rival and predecessor John F. Kennedy, and the Watergate scandal that ultimately drove him from office.
- American Pravda: JFK, Richard Nixon, the CIA, and Watergate
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 9, 2024 • 16,700 Words
Although my analysis ran nearly 17,000 words, there was barely a single mention anywhere of Jews or Jewish issues because I didn’t consider them at all relevant to what I was discussing.
Some commenters took strong exception to that appraisal, insisting that Nixon was known to have been a fiercely anti-Jewish political figure and as a result, “the Jews” had used the Watergate scandal to destroy him. I sharply disputed those claims and some of my critics responded with a vast amount of material in support of their conspiratorial thesis.
Few of those commenters held mainstream opinions on most issues, but in this particular case, their view of Nixon closely coincided with what was presented in leading mainstream media organs. For example, Googling the phrase “Nixon anti-Semitism” produces a huge outpouring of major articles led by a 1999 Washington Post story entitled “New Tapes Reveal Depth of Nixon’s Anti-Semitism” while an article in the New York Times took a similar position. A couple of years later, additional Nixon tapes were released, and a long article in Slate further denounced Nixon for the horrific views revealed by the secret tapes of his private conversations, with the first sentence indicating what followed in the remainder of the piece:
Richard Nixon’s reputation as a hateful, vindictive anti-Semite was reinforced late last month when the National Archives, which has been releasing the 3,700 hours of Nixon’s tape-recorded White House conversations in installments since 1996, dropped another batch.
On controversial subjects, Wikipedia usually reflects the official, establishmentarian view of reality, and another top link that came up in my Google search was a Wikipedia page describing Nixon’s plans to purge Jews from portions of the federal bureaucracy, which a writer in Slate described as “the last known act of official anti-Semitism conducted by the United States government.”
Although I only explored a half-dozen or so of those top search results, I’m sure that I could have easily found many scores or even hundreds of mainstream media articles taking that same position and denouncing Nixon as a vicious and notorious “anti-Semite.” Thus, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the rest of our mainstream media outlets fully agreed with the many fiercely anti-Jewish commenters on our website: Richard Nixon hated Jews.
If that had been the case, it’s hardly implausible that they hated him back and then used the Watergate scandal to drive him from power. After all, the two publications that had led the campaign to uncover the facts and oust him—the Post and the Times—were both Jewish owned and heavily Jewish-staffed, while the same was also true of many of the broadcast outlets that played such an important role, including the CBSand NBC television networks. Carl Bernstein and Seymour Hersh were merely two of the many Jewish journalists who spearheaded the media’s Watergate investigation.
However, despite the seemingly overwhelming mainstream evidence supporting this perspective, I believe that it is entirely mistaken.
One difficulty faced by those commenters is that many of them may be relatively young and therefore have an anachronistic notion of how Americans regarded Jews and Jewish influence in prior generations, or talked about that group. Therefore, they cannot imagine any mainstream political figures expressing sharp and critical concerns regarding Jews and naturally assume that anyone who did so even in private must have also shared their own obsessive hostility towards Jews, indicating that Nixon fell into that latter category. But although this situation may have increasingly become the case over the last two or three generations, it was certainly not true in the past, and Nixon’s highly critical private remarks regarding Jews in no way demonstrated that he was deeply antagonist towards all Jews or an “anti-Semite” in any meaningful sense of that term.
Similarly, although it is quite true that a large majority of politically-active American Jews probably disliked or even hated Nixon, that was mostly because they were liberals or leftists while Nixon was a strong anti-Communist. Nixon had begun his meteoric political career by successfully uncovering Alger Hiss as a Communist agent, resulting in the imprisonment of that prominent FDR official, a huge public scandal that for nearly two generations remained an important liberal cause celebre. Thus, I doubt that many of the Jews hostile to Nixon were aware of his private, rather mild anti-Jewish remarks or would have much cared if they had known. Our national regime of extreme censorship on that subject was not yet fully in place so that numerous important people still made anti-Jewish remarks in that era, sometimes in public rather than merely in private.
We should remember that sentiments considered ordinary or innocuous in one era may eventually become scandalous in another, and numerous cases demonstrate the fallacy of retroactively applying those later standards.
For example, in his own day author Mark Twain was considered a great racial liberal but because the white rural Southerners in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn regularly use the term “nigger” there have often been demands that his classic novel be banned or censored. For more than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, the hugely popular television series M*A*S*H was considered the height of progressive, anti-militarist advocacy both by liberals and conservatives, but one of its main characters Cpl. Klinger wore a dress and pretended to be a transvestite in hopes of earning a mental health discharge, often becoming the butt of jokes and ridicule as a result; in our own age of transgenderism, such humor would probably be considered extremely offensive and harshly suppressed.
Public attitudes concerning Jews have been especially likely to change over time. E.A. Ross was a leading Progressive intellectual and one of our greatest early sociologists, but decades after his death, his candid observations about Jewish behavior led him to be fiercely vilified as a fanatic anti-Semite. Even more absurdly, although Karl Marx’s grandparents were leading rabbis and he probably ranked as one of the most influential Jews who has ever lived, regarded as an ideological prophet by a vast number of Jewish socialists and Communists, he has sometimes been condemned as “anti-Semitic” for the bitter insults he directed towards greedy Jewish businessmen and members of the bourgeoisie.
Seen in this broader context, I think that the issue of Nixon’s alleged anti-Semitism recalls the famous quip made by the prominent conservative Joseph Sobran after he had been purged from National Review for being insufficiently deferential toward Jews and Jewish issues:
An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.
In my initial reply to those commenters claiming that Nixon was inordinately hostile towards Jews, I pointed out a few simple facts:
Nobody considered Nixon anti-Jewish. Chotiner, his first campaign manager, had been Jewish. Swifty Lazar, his agent, was Jewish. Kissinger, his top advisor, was Jewish. Many of the other top aides and speechwriters in his administration, such as Arthur Burns, Herbert Stein, Len Garment, and William Safire were Jewish.
Just off the top of my head, I noted the large number of Jews who had been among Nixon’s closest aides or whom he had appointed to top positions in his administration, which seemed to far exceed the total for any previous Republican president or even most Democratic ones. Indeed, although the overwhelming majority of Jews were registered Democrats, ten minutes on the Internet quickly confirmed my suspicion that with regard to high-ranking appointments, Richard Nixon’s administration had probably been the most heavily Jewish in all of American history, certainly far more so than those of his leading Democratic predecessors such as Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Cataloguing some of those names was not difficult:
- Henry Kissinger, America’s first Jewish Secretary of State and Nixon’s most important policy advisor.
- James Schlesinger, America’s first Jewish Secretary of Defense.
- Arthur Burns, America’s second Jewish Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the first Jew to hold that position since 1933.
- Herbert Stein, America’s second Jewish Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, after Burns.
- Casper Weinberger, Half-Jewish OMB Director and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
- Leonard Garment, Jewish White House Counsel and longtime close advisor.
- William Safire and Ben Stein, Jewish White House speechwriters, with Safire being one of the most prominent.
- Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s longtime Jewish campaign consultant and personal political mentor.
- Irving Swifty Lazar, Nixon’s personal literary agent.
I then decided to compare the roster of Nixon’s high-level Jewish appointments with those of his presidential predecessors, an effort greatly facilitated by a Wikipedia page listing all of America’s Jewish members of the Cabinet. Just as I had expected, prior to Nixon the number of Jews holding such top-level posts had been far more meager across previous administrations:
(*) America’s first Jewish member of the Cabinet had been Oscar Straus, appointed as Secretary of Commerce and Labor by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Herbert Hoover had appointed Eugene Meyer as our first Jewish Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1930.
(*) Franklin Roosevelt had replaced Meyer with Eugene Black, a Gentile, but later appointed his half-Jewish neighbor Henry Morgenthau Jr. as Secretary of the Treasury. Unfortunately, Morgenthau was an ignorant but wealthy dilettante, who had never graduated high school or college, and allowed his department to be run by his Jewish subordinate Harry Dexter White, a notorious Soviet agent.
(*) Harry S. Truman briefly kept Morgenthau in his Cabinet, while Lewis Straussserved as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. In addition, David Niles, a Zionist agent who also sometimes collaborated with Communist spies, served as a Jewish Cabinet advisor.
(*) Dwight Eisenhower kept Strauss as Chairman of the AEC, then briefly named him Acting Secretary of Commerce, while Maxwell Rabb served as Cabinet Secretary and Arthur Burns as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.
(*) John F. Kennedy named Abraham Ribicoff as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and Arthur Goldberg as Secretary of Labor. In addition, Kennedy appointed Republican C. Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury, but Dillon was only one-quarter Jewish and also the wealthy patrician heir to Dillon Read, one of the most prestigious WASP investment banks, so I doubt that anyone at the time regarded him as Jewish. Indeed, his decidedly Anglo-Saxon name was excluded from the Jewish Wikipedia listing.
(*) Lyndon Johnson kept Dillon on as Secretary of the Treasury, while later briefly naming Wilbur J. Cohen as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. He also appointed Goldberg as Ambassador to the United Nations and Walt Rostow as National Security Advisor.
Thus, Nixon appointed Jews as Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve, three of the half-dozen or so most important federal positions, and no previous president, Democrat or Republican, had made more than a fraction of those top-level Jewish appointments. So if the upper ranks of Nixon’s administration were clearly the most heavily Jewish in all of American history, it seems rather absurd to label him as anti-Jewish.
I suspect that the very considerable number of senior Jewish appointments by Nixon may have escaped modern notice because the total was still rather small by more recent standards, as the Jewish over-representation at the top of our government has become so extreme. For example, last year I noted that the highest ranks of the Biden Administration were almost entirely Jewish despite that ethnicity constituting only about 2% of our national population:
Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and National Security Advisor. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.
- President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)
- Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)
- Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (Jewish), replacing Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)
- Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)
- Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)
- Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)
- Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)
- National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (White Gentile, Yale)
- Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)
- Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)
There also exists important evidence of contemporary Jewish attitudes towards Nixon and his administration. The Jewish Virtual Library provides a handy chart showing Jewish voting patterns in every presidential election from 1916 onward, and Nixon’s 17% Jewish support against Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 was fairly typical for Republican candidates in the decades after FDR’s landslide 1932 victory produced a major Jewish political realignment. But when Nixon ran for reelection in 1972 against the very liberal Sen. George McGovern, his Jewish support more than doubled to 35%, one of the highest levels for a Republican in modern times.
Even more significantly, the early but rapidly growing Jewish Neocon movement decisively broke with the Democratic Party during that latter campaign and became enthusiastic Nixon supporters, largely because they viewed McGovern as far too weak on national defense, an issue that they considered critical to Israel’s security in the Middle East. Although Nixon had appointed many Jews to very senior positions, few if any of them were aligned with the Neocons, so I doubt that was much of a factor in the support he gained from the latter movement, although the important role he gave to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prominent Irish Neoconservative may have helped. But since the Neocons tended to draw their support from the most fiercely ethnocentric elements of the Jewish community, individuals often on hair-trigger alert for any signs of anti-Semitism, if Nixon had been perceived as especially anti-Jewish, it seems unlikely they would have abandoned their longstanding Democratic Party roots to support him.
Moreover, some of the later media articles castigating Nixon for his hostile private remarks towards Jews are foolishly parochial in their outrage as was pointed out at the time by columnist Alexander Cockburn. As one of America’s premier radical Left journalists, Cockburn felt more free to write on those sorts of matters, and in a March 2002 column, he noted the totally different media reaction to reports of two different private exchanges between President Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham, one of America’s most prominent Christian pastors.
In 1989 a secret Graham memo to Nixon was made public, in which the preacher had suggested that if Hanoi remained obdurate on Vietnam War negotiations, the president should bomb North Vietnam’s dikes and flood the country, an action that our government had estimated would kill a million Vietnamese civilians. Yet although Graham was advocating one of the worst war-crimes in human history, he received no significant media criticism, and Cockburn could only locate one small paper that even covered the story, the Syracuse Herald-Journal.
However, Cockburn then noted:
Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about Jewish domination of the media and Graham invoking the “stranglehold” Jews have on the media.
On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years in Nixon’s tapes, media, in this 1972 Oval Office session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham, the President raises a topic about which “we can’t talk about it publicly,” namely Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media.
Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who is executive producer of the NBC hit, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” as telling him that “11 of the 12 writers are Jewish.” “That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are “totally dominated by the Jews.” Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite “front men who may not be of that persuasion,” but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.”
“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s best-known preacher declares “You believe that?” Nixon says. “Yes, sir,” Graham says. “Oh, boy,” replies Nixon. “So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.” “No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,” Graham replies.
Magnanimously Nixon concedes that this does not mean “that all the Jews are bad” but that most are left-wing radicals who want “peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews.” “That’s right,” agrees Graham, who later concurs with a Nixon assertion that a “powerful bloc” of Jews confronts Nixon in the media. “And they’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham adds.
Later Graham says that “a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.” After Graham’s departure Nixon says Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across.” “It’s a shocking point,” Haldeman replies, “Well,” says Nixon, “it’s also, the Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”
Within days of these exchanges becoming public the 83-year old Graham was hauled from his semi-dotage, and impelled to express public contrition. “Experts” on Graham were duly cited as expressing their “shock” at Graham’s White House table talk.
Why the shock? Don’t they know that this sort of stuff is consonant with the standard conversational bill of fare at 75 per cent of the country clubs in America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree. Nixon thought American Jews were lefty peaceniks who dominated the Democratic Party and were behind the attacks on him. Graham reckoned it was Hollywood Jews who had sunk the nation in porn. Haldeman agreed with both of them. At whatever level of fantasy they were all acknowledging power. But they didn’t say they wanted to kill a million Jews. That’s what Graham said about the Vietnamese and no one raised a bleat.
It’s supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media. Since three of the prime founders of Hollywood, were Polish Jews who grew up within fifty miles of each other in Galicia, it’s reckoned as not so utterly beyond the bounds of propriety to talk about Jewish power in Hollywood, though people still stir uneasily.
It is undeniably true that Nixon regarded many liberal and leftist Jews as his political enemies. His infamous Enemies List contained twenty names, of which around one-third were Jewish, while Jews then constituted less than 3% of the American population. But if anything, his list may have considerably under-counted the percentage of his leading opponents who came from that background, perhaps reflecting Nixon’s efforts to avoid having it appear too heavily Jewish.
Nixon’s concerns along such lines were demonstrated by his remarks on a 1971 tape as described in a very hostile New York Times article, in which the beleaguered president lamented that such a large fraction of his leading political opponents were Jewish. This had also been the case with the Communist spies he had investigated as a Congressman during the last 1940s, thereby placing him in a very difficult predicament. These remarks led the apparently Jewish Times reporter to condemn Nixon for his anti-Semitism although the plain meaning of his words seemed exactly the opposite.
One person the White House suspected of supplying the Pentagon Papers was Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department analyst. Speaking of Mr. Ellsberg, Nixon says, ”Incidentally, I hope to God, he’s not Jewish, is he?”
Another, unidentified voice, answers: ”I’m sure he is. Ellsberg?”
Nixon then says, ”I hope not, I hope not,” adding, ”It’s a bad thing for us.” The President then turned the conversation to people targeted in anti-Communist investigations.
”The only two non-Jews in the Communist conspiracy,” he says, ”were Chambers and Hiss. Many felt that Hiss was. He could have been a half, but he was not by religion. The only two non-Jews. Every other one was a Jew. And it raised hell with us.”
Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, was convicted of perjury for denying that he was a Communist, and Nixon’s early reputation was built on his determination to win Hiss’s conviction.
Although the Times journalist and nearly all of the readers probably regarded Nixon’s statements as evidence of his anti-Semitic paranoia, the actual facts were very different. Six years ago this Tuesday, I published a lengthy article on this subject, noting the absolutely overwhelming role that Jews had played in the Bolshevik Revolution and their equally enormous presence in the ranks of the American Communist Party, facts that had been almost completely removed from our historical record but which were certainly known to Nixon and other knowledgeable individuals of his generation:
The extent to which established historical facts can appear or disappear from the world should certainly force all of us to become very cautious in believing anything we read in our standard textbooks, let alone what we absorb from the more transient electronic media.
In the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost no one questioned the overwhelming role of Jews in that event, nor their similar preponderance in the ultimately unsuccessful Bolshevik takeovers in Hungary and parts of Germany. For example, former British Minister Winston Churchill in 1920 denounced the “terrorist Jews” who had seized control of Russia and other parts of Europe, noting that “the majority of the leading figures are Jews” and stating that “In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing,” while lamenting the horrors these Jews had inflicted upon the suffering Germans and Hungarians.
Similarly, journalist Robert Wilton, former Russia correspondent of the Times of London, provided a very detailed summary of the enormous Jewish role in his 1918 book Russia’s Agony and 1920 book The Last Days of the Romanovs, although one of the most explicit chapters of the latter was apparently excluded from the English language edition. Not long afterward, the facts regarding the enormous financial support provided to the Bolsheviks by international Jewish bankers such as Schiff and Aschberg were widely reported in the mainstream media.
Jews and Communism were just as strongly tied together in America, and for years the largest circulation Communist newspaper in our country was published in Yiddish. When they were finally released, the Venona Decrypts demonstrated that even as late as the 1930s and 1940s, a remarkable fraction of America’s Communist spies came from that ethnic background.
A personal anecdote tends to confirm these dry historical records. During the early 2000s I once had lunch with an elderly and very eminent computer scientist, with whom I’d become a little friendly. While talking about this and that, he happened to mention that both his parents had been zealous Communists, and given his obvious Irish name, I expressed my surprise, saying that I’d thought almost all the Communists of that era were Jewish. He said that was indeed the case, but although his mother had such an ethnic background, his father did not, which made him a very rare exception in their political circles. As a consequence, the Party had always sought to place him in as prominent a public role as possible just to prove that not all Communists were Jews, and although he obeyed Party discipline, he was always irritated at being used as such a “token.”
However, once Communism sharply fell out of favor in 1950s America, nearly all of the leading “Red Baiters” such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy went to enormous lengths to obscure the ethnic dimension of the movement they were combatting. Indeed, many years later Richard Nixon casually spoke in private of the difficulty he and other anti-Communist investigators had faced in trying to focus on Gentile targets since nearly all of the suspected Soviet spies were Jewish, and when this tape became public, his alleged anti-Semitism provoked a media firestorm even though his remarks were obviously implying the exact opposite.
This last point is an important one, since once the historical record has been sufficiently whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of the original reality that survive are often perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, even today the ever-amusing pages of Wikipedia provides an entire 3,500 word article attacking the notion of “Jewish Bolshevism” as an “antisemitic canard.”
I remember in the 1970s the enormous gusts of American praise for Solzhenitysn’s three volume Gulag Archipelago suddenly encountered a temporary headwind when someone noticed that his 2,000 pages had included a single photograph depicting many of the leading Gulag administrators, along with a caption revealing their unmistakably Jewish names. This detail was treated as serious evidence of the great author’s possible anti-Semitism since the actual reality of the enormously large role of Jews in the NKVD and the Gulag system had long since disappeared from all the standard history books.
As another example, the Rev. Pat Robertson, a leading Christian televangelist, published The New World Order in 1991, his fiery attack on the “godless globalists” whom he considered his greatest enemy, and it quickly became a massive national best-seller. He happened to include a couple of brief, somewhat garbled mentions of the $20 million which Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff had provided to the Communists, carefully avoiding any suggestion of a Jewish angle and providing no reference for that claim. His book quickly provoked a vast outpouring of denunciation and ridicule across the elite media, with the Schiff story seen as conclusion proof of Robertson’s delusional anti-Semitism. I cannot really fault these critics since in pre-Internet days they could only consult the indexes of a few standard histories of the Bolshevik Revolution, and finding no mention of Schiff or his money, naturally assumed that Robertson or his source had simply invented the bizarre story. I myself had had exactly the same reaction at the time.
Only after Soviet Communism had died in 1991 and no longer was perceived as a hostile force were academic scholars in America once again able to publish mainstream books that gradually restored the true picture of that past era. In many respects, a widely praised work such as The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine, published in 2004 by Princeton University Press, provides a narrative quite consistent with the long-forgotten works by Robert Wilton but marks a very sharp departure from the largely obfuscatory histories of the intervening eighty-odd years.
In the most extreme example of this total expurgation of the historical record, it was widely known throughout the 1920s and 1930s that Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution had been heavily funded by Jacob Schiff, America’s most powerful Jewish Wall Street banker, and this fact was regularly reported in the mainstream media at the time. As late as 1949, a leading New York City newspaper had reported that Schiff’s grandson estimated that the elder Schiff had sunk the present-day equivalent of around $2 billion into achieving “the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia,” yet those facts soon disappeared from all our standard history books and media reports and had become merely “a crazy conspiracy theory” by the time I began studying that historical era in the 1980s:
When people casually used to joke about the total insanity of “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” no better example was ever tossed around than the self-evidently absurd notion that the international Jewish bankers had created the worldwide Communist movement. And yet by any reasonable standard, this statement appears to be more or less true, and apparently was widely known at least in rough form for decades after the Russian Revolution, but had never been mentioned in any of the numerous more recent histories that shaped my own knowledge of those events. Indeed, none of these very comprehensive sources had ever even mentioned Schiff’s name, although it was universally acknowledged that he had funded the 1905 Revolution, which was often discussed in enormous detail in many of those very weighty books. What other astonishing facts might they similarly be concealing?
When someone encounters remarkable new revelations in an area of history in which his knowledge was rudimentary, being little more than introductory textbooks or History 101 courses, the result is a shock and an embarrassment. But when the same situation occurs in an area in which he had read tens of thousands of pages in the leading authoritative texts, which seemingly explored every minor detail, surely his sense of reality begins to crumble.
In 1999, Harvard University published the English edition of The Black Book of Communism, whose six co-authors devoted 850 pages to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a total death toll they reckoned at 100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that the alleged body-count has been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I examine the 35 page index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names are surely unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the first place. Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden, who played such an important role in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the early years of their threatened regime, and even founded the first Soviet international bank.
- American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 23, 2018 • 6,900 Words
After publishing my very lengthy article on Nixon and Watergate, someone recommended to me a book that Roger Stone had released in 2014 entitled Nixon’s Secrets. Stone, a longtime Republican political operative, had joined Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign while still in college and over the decades he became quite close to “the Old Man,” passing along some of the latter’s inside information in his earlier 2013 bestseller LBJ: The Man Who Killed Kennedy. As a notorious practitioner of political dirty tricks, Stone was hardly an unimpeachable source, but I had regarded his claims in that book generally quite credible, and I therefore decided to also read his Nixon book, written with the same co-author, Mike Colapietro.
I was very impressed and found it a treasure-trove of important material, most of which I felt was probably true. Unfortunately, this book had apparently been rushed out in the wake of the unexpected success of his LBJ bestseller so it lacked an index and was not well edited, containing an abundance of typos and duplicated ideas or sentences, but the value of the contents far outweighed those irritating stylistic problems with the text. Despite his doubtful reputation, Stone came across as rather candid and honest, at times defending his old political mentor from accusations that he regarded as false or unfair, but also providing many, many negative or sordid stories that I had never seen mentioned anywhere else. So if Stone were lying on behalf of Nixon, he was doing so in an extremely shrewd manner, including so much personal and political dirt that no one would ever suspect a whitewashing.
Stone very strongly endorsed the historical reconstruction presented nearly a quarter-century earlier by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup. Those authors had argued that Nixon had largely been brought down by the secret machinations of the American national security establishment, including the Pentagon and the CIA, which strongly objected to his political opening to Communist China and his attempts to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Gen. Alexander Haig had served as the inside agent of this plot to destroy Nixon and was a leading element of Bob Woodward’s composite “Deep Throat” source. Stone also seconded the strong suspicions that the team of Nixon operatives who staged the Watergate break-in had been infiltrated by the CIA and therefore deliberately botched their burglary, ensuring that they were caught and setting into motion the forces that ultimately removed Nixon from the presidency. Meanwhile, another CIA man revealed the existence of the secret White House tapes, thereby dooming Nixon to impeachment.
Even more remarkably, Stone spent a few pages passing along explosive additional stories that he considered credible. According to a former CIA assassin and a top Congressional staffer, prior to orchestrating the successful Watergate plot, the CIA had also organized two attempts to assassinate Nixon for similar reasons, intending to blame the killing on anti-war activists. But the assassins had been recruited by being told that their mission was to execute a “Communist,” and they were shocked to discover that their intended target was President Nixon—a notorious anti-Communist—so they balked at carrying out what they regarded as a domestic political hit. These hardly seem the sort of stories that would be casually invented so I think they might be true.
My long Nixon article had compared and contrasted his career with that of President John F. Kennedy, his longtime friend and political rival, noting that both presidents had probably been removed from office by CIA operations, in the one case lethally and in the other politically. But if Stone’s account is correct, Nixon may have only narrowly avoided sharing Kennedy’s fate less than a decade after the Dallas assassination.
I had also emphasized that Nixon and Kennedy were not too far apart in their politics or ideology, but the American media always presented their images as polar-opposites. This certainly also applied to their standing among American Jews, with Kennedy as overwhelmingly popular as Nixon was disliked. Yet much of that latter situation seemed the result of a very selective media portrayal. For example, I have pointed out that just the year before he launched his political career by winning election to Congress, Kennedy recorded entries in his personal diary indicating his considerable admiration for Adolf Hitler:
A couple of years ago, the 1945 diary of a 28-year-old John F. Kennedy travelling in post-war Europe was sold at auction, and the contents revealed his rather favorable fascination with Hitler. The youthful JFK predicted that “Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived” and felt that “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.” These sentiments are particularly notable for having been expressed just after the end of a brutal war against Germany and despite the tremendous volume of hostile propaganda that had accompanied it.
Obviously, these facts would be enormously shocking to the American people and Kennedy’s many admirers, whether Jewish or not, if they became aware of them, but since the mainstream media has kept them obscure, that problem has not arisen. Meanwhile, Nixon’s occasionally harsh private remarks about his liberal Jewish political opponents have remained front-page news for most of the last half-century, firmly solidifying his reputation as a fierce anti-Semite.
There may even be a further irony in this regard. In 1956 the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket had won a very solid 40% of the Jewish vote, so Nixon was also widely expected to do quite well in his 1960 campaign against Kennedy, but instead his Jewish support dropped to a rather weak 18%, which might have made the difference in such a close race. Meanwhile, JFK’s 82% Jewish landslide was by far the strongest performance of any presidential candidate since FDR’s 1944 reelection and helped to permanently establish his public image as one of the greatest heroes of American Jewry.
Although there were certainly many different factors behind these voting results, one of these has never received any mention in our standard history books. Concerned over his son’s Jewish support, family patriarch Joseph Kennedy employed a deft political maneuver by enlisting the assistance of the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell. As I explained in 2020:
Although usually relegated to just a sentence or two in our history books and treated like a villainous clown, at times Rockwell had moved in important circles, and may have even helped influence some national events. In his autobiographical account, he describes his political education under a certain DeWest Hooker, a successful entertainment executive whom he regarded as a personal hero and mentor. Hooker was fiercely anti-Jewish and years later became a close friend of journalist Michael Collins Piper, who recounted a fascinating tale from the 1960 Presidential race in his book Final Judgment.
Jewish groups still had deep animosity for Joseph Kennedy over his strong opposition to American involvement in World War II, and the family patriarch feared that this lingering hostility would damage his son’s chances of reaching the White House. So he asked Hooker to have his friend Rockwell organize public Nazi Party demonstrations endorsing Nixon and attacking JFK, thereby solidifying Jewish support for the latter. These protests actually attracted quite a bit of media coverage, and probably helped the younger Kennedy win 80% of the Jewish vote, along with heavy campaign donations and friendly media support, perhaps tipping the balance in such a very close national election.
In an even stranger possible twist, Hooker years later reportedly explained that the original impetus for the creation of Rockwell’s American Nazi Party had actually come from the Jewish ADL, which believed that widespread media coverage of such an organization would greatly enhance their fund-raising efforts. So they allegedly approached Hooker and explained their proposal, offering to pay all the costs of publishing the Nazi literature and other materials, and he persuaded his protege to implement the idea. I think a story so bizarre is less likely to have been invented.
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