Nixon revisited: Oy Vey

The New York Times published a story by Charlie Savage Tuesday detailing the contents of "more than 150 hours of tape and 30,000 pages of documents made public ... by the Nixon Presidential Library." Audio clips were posted online here, and document samples are here.

Pretty staggering shit coming from the President of the United States. Given the context of the times and his upbringing, I can't say I'm surprised, but here is one money quote about abortion:

There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white, or a rape.

Nine months after this tape, Nixon forced the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate affair. He also prompted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus. The next day, Ronald Reagan, who was then governor of California and would later be president, told the White House that he approved.

A tape of a phone call exists from February 1973 between Nixon and Billy Graham. Graham complained that Jewish-American leaders opposed his efforts to promote evangelical Christianity, like Campus Crusade. They agreed that the Jewish leaders risked setting off anti-Semitic sentiment. Nixon's words:

What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up.... It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

I really believe any efforts to canonize any Republican president or congressional leader, the way we've all seen with Reagan in particular, should be widely condemned. These two men were two of the worst leaders in US history -- although neither of them holds a candle to Bush and Cheney.