Nixon, Reagan, Africa and the Long Arm of the Past Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Nixon, Reagan, Africa and the Long Arm of the Past
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 6h

I wanted to draw your attention to this article Tim Naftali published yesterday in The Atlantic. It’s based on a newly released portion of Richard Nixon’s presidential tapes of a call between Nixon and then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan. The short version is this. Reagan is calling Nixon about televised footage of the United Nations General Assembly voting, in opposition to the United States, to seat a delegation from the People’s Republic of China to replace the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the official representative of China. After the vote members of the Tanzanian delegation celebrated by dancing. Reagan, who was a fierce supporter of Taiwan, was outraged and told Nixon: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon chuckles in response and passively affirms him.

Anyone who finds either man’s role in the call surprising is in deep denial about both. Naftali frames the revelation as a contrast and analog to President Trump: there’s a long history of coarse presidential racism. What strikes me is more the contrast. There’s a lengthy list of presidential racists. By current definitions really every President until a few very recent ones was deeply racist. But what strikes me here is hypocrisy as the compliment vice plays to virtue. Even half a century ago, these two President didn’t and wouldn’t talk this way publicly.

Trump hasn’t, at least publicly or at least yet, called black people “monkeys” but his entire politics is about bringing the coarse and angry racism which has always roiled through American politics, with varying degrees of explicitness, and bringing it entirely into the open – indeed, using the very transgressive boldness of bringing it into the open as a signature part of is political brand.

But none of this is what really fascinated me about this article. The tape itself is far from shocking. From his tapes and his politics we know Nixon was a pretty intense racist, though he probably would not have thought of himself as such. Nixon was a curious guy. He was also very anti-Semitic (we know this from the tapes), though he employed a number of Jews in critical and very high profile positions. We don’t have Reagan tapes. So we lack a transcript in most cases. But what is in the tape fits the man, the politics and the times. Reagan was a self-appointed foe of “welfare queens”, a diehard supporter of white minority governments in Rhodesia and South Africa, the man who cemented the exodus of the white South into the GOP. It fits.

But again, none of this is what fascinated me about the piece.

As Naftali goes on to explain, a chain of events unfolded after the call. Nixon first spoke and related the Reagan conversation to his blue blooded Secretary of State William Rogers. And then a bit later he related it to presidential crony Bebe Rebozo. The tapes remain – apart from their role in the Watergate scandal – a fascinating historical document. Nixon was an extraordinarily complex, damaged, talented, malevolent, insecure figure. With the tapes we really see it all. They are a sort of Pepsysian diary of awfulness.

Nixon has the conversation with Reagan and then feels rather licensed or empowered to relate it (as what Reagan said) to basically everyone else – but with different inflections. With the blue blood Rogers, he ever so slightly tones it down. “Monkeys” become “cannibals”. There’s an element of gauging Rogers’ response. This is a call immediately after the Reagan call and even though Reagan was really talking about withdrawing the US from the UN Nixon just wants to talk about the Africans. He’s careful to couch it as Reagan speaking for racist Americans and that their views needed to be respected and responded to.

Here’s Naftali’s rendition of the exchange …

“As you can imagine,” Nixon confided in Rogers, “there’s strong feeling that we just shouldn’t, as [Reagan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these—” Nixon stammered, choosing his words carefully—“these, uh, these cannibals on television last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.”

The president wanted his patrician secretary of state to understand that Reagan spoke for racist Americans, and they needed to be listened to. “You know, but that’s typical of a reaction, which is probably”—“That’s right,” Rogers interjected—“quite strong.”

Nixon can’t stop. He actually calls Rogers back a couple hours later and goes over the Reagan stuff a second time as though they hadn’t already discussed it. “Reagan called me last night,” Nixon said, “and I didn’t talk to him until this morning, but he is, of course, outraged. And I found out what outraged him, and I find this is typical of a lot of people: They saw it on television and, he said, ‘These cannibals jumping up and down and all that.’ And apparently it was a pretty grotesque picture.”

With his pal Rebozo, another coarse Nixonian figure far different from Rogers, he is more open. They chucked about Reagan’s comments and Rebozo echoed them. “That reaction on television was, it proves how they ought to be still hanging from the trees by their tails.” Nixon laughs in response.

Naftali explains that only three weeks before the Reagan call Nixon had sat down with his Harvard mandarin-advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan to explain that he’d reluctantly concluded that recent work by Richard Herrnstein (later coauthor of The Bell Curve with Charles Murray) was right and that African-Americans were genetically inferior to other races. When I first read this article I mistakenly thought the Moynihan conversation was also after the Reagan call and about it. It’s not. It’s before. But even though he wasn’t talking about the Reagan call he is still talking about race, presenting himself and giving us an implicit window into his own self-conception and how he talked about race to different sorts of people.

Here’s Naftali’s description of the conversation with Moynihan, where the United Nations and its African member states again comes up …

In the fall of 1971, the Nixon administration was engaged in a massive welfare-reform effort, and was also facing school busing. These two issues apparently inspired Nixon to examine more deeply his own thinking on whether African Americans could make it in American society. Only three weeks before the call with Reagan, Nixon had revealed his opinions on Africans and African Americans in a conversation with the Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had briefly served in the Nixon administration. Nixon was attracted to the theories of Richard Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen, which linked IQ to race, and wondered what Moynihan thought.

“I have reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me … that what Herrnstein says, and what was said earlier by Jensen, is probably … very close to the truth,” Nixon explained to a quiet Moynihan. Nixon believed in a hierarchy of races, with whites and Asians much higher up than people of African descent and Latinos. And he had convinced himself that it wasn’t racist to think black people, as a group, were inferior to whites, so long as he held them in paternalistic regard. “Within groups, there are geniuses,” Nixon said. “There are geniuses within black groups. There are more within Asian groups … This is knowledge that is better not to know.”

Nixon’s analysis of African leadership reflected his prejudice toward America’s black citizens. This is, at least, what he told Moynihan. “Have in mind one fact: Did you realize there is not, of the 40 or 45—you’re at the United Nations—black countries that are represented there, not one has a president or a prime minister who is there as a result of a contested election such as we were insisting upon in Vietnam?” And, he continued, a little later in the conversation: “I’m not saying that blacks cannot govern; I am saying they have a hell of a time. Now, that must demonstrate something.”

This conversation came as Nixon was pushing welfare reform, both engaging with and aggressively politicizing the politics of school integration and busing and more. There was both a complex policy agenda and a chained together politics of what we now know as ‘the Southern strategy’, stoking white racial resentment not only in the South but also in the North to bring disaffected Democrats into Nixon’s Republican coalition. As he explained to Moynihan his interest was more than academic: “The reason I have to know it is that as I go for programs, I must know that they have basic weaknesses.”

Nixon’s racism isn’t merely of academic or biographical interest. It was central to his politics and the politics of his presidency. Here we have a deep view into not only Nixon’s racism but his own understanding of it and himself, his efforts to justify it, to ground it in the sophisticated languages of social science, to distance himself from its coarser affirmations and also his eagerness to partake in it.

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