Declassified tapes reveal Nixon’s hateful, racist and sexist comments after meeting with Indira Gandhi
Washington:
The recently declassified White House tapes reveal former US President Richard Nixon speaking disparagingly about Indians and reveal the fanaticism that he and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger claimed influenced American policy toward India and South Asia under their leadership. presidency.
“As Americans grapple with issues of racism and power, a recently declassified trove of White House tapes provides startling evidence of the bigotry expressed by President Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser,” wrote Gary Bass. , professor at Princeton. in an op-ed ‘The Terrible Cost of Presidential Racism’ in The New York Times.
“The full content of these tapes reveals how American policy toward South Asia under Mr. Nixon was influenced by his hatred and sexual revulsion toward Indians,” Bass, author of ‘The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide ‘ ‘, writes.
Richard Nixon, a Republican, was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974.
Bass says the declassified White House tapes reveal an “impressive” conversation between Nixon, Kissinger, and then-White House Chief of Staff HR Haldeman in the Oval Office in June 1971, in which Nixon states in an “poisonous tone” that Indian women are “without a doubt, the least attractive women in the world.”
Nixon also calls Indians “sexiest,” “nothing,” and “pathetic,” according to the tapes.
“On November 4, 1971, during a private hiatus from a controversial White House summit with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, a rare woman at the time, the president harangued Mr. Kissinger about his sexual dislike of the Indians, “Bass writes. .
Referring to the Indians, Nixon tells Kissinger, “For me, they tune me out. How the hell do they turn other people on, Henry? Tell me.” Bass writes that while Kissinger’s response is inaudible on the tapes, it “did not discourage the president from his issue.”
In November 1971, in the middle of a discussion about the tensions between India and Pakistan with Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers, after Rogers mentioned reprimanding Gandhi, the president blurted out: “I don’t know how they reproduce!”
Bass writes in the NYT article that while Kissinger has presented himself above the racism of the Nixon White House, the tapes show “that he joined the bigotry, although the tapes cannot determine whether he really shared the prejudices. the president or he was not. ” just pleasing him. “
For example, on June 3, 1971, Kissinger was “outraged” with the Indians as the country was hosting millions of Bengali refugees who had fled the Pakistani army. Kissinger blamed the Indians for causing the influx of refugees and then condemned the Indians as a whole, as he said: “They are a people looking for garbage.”
In one pint, Kissinger had said that Indians are “excellent flatterers” and “masters of flattery. They are masters of subtle flattery. This is how they survived 600 years. They suck: their great ability is to please people in key positions.” . . “
Nixon had even been furious with his ambassador to India Kenneth Keating, who two days earlier had confronted Nixon and Kissinger in the Oval Office, calling Pakistan’s crackdown “almost entirely a matter of genocide.” Bass says that Nixon and Kissinger had “firmly supported” the military regime in Pakistan when it killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, with 10 million refugees fleeing to neighboring India.
Expressing his prejudices about Pakistanis, Kissinger had told Nixon in August 1971 that “Pakistanis are good people, but they are primitive in their mental makeup.”
He added: “They just don’t have the subtlety of the Indians.” “These emotional displays of prejudice help explain a foreign policy debacle,” Bass says, adding that the Nixon and Kissinger policies toward South Asia in 1971 “were not just a moral disaster but a strategic fiasco in their own right. terms of the Cold War.
While Nixon and Kissinger “had some reasons to favor Pakistan, an American ally who was secretly helping to achieve its historic openness to China, their prejudices and emotions contributed to their excessive support for Pakistan’s murderous dictatorship through its atrocities. Bass said. “For decades, Nixon and Kissinger have presented themselves as brilliant practitioners of realpolitik, leading a foreign policy that dispassionately served America’s interests.
“But these declassified White House tapes confirm an entirely different picture: racism and misogyny at the highest levels, cloaked for decades under ridiculous national security claims. A fair historical assessment of Nixon and Kissinger must include the whole truth, without bleeding, “says Bass. In December 2012, Bass had filed a legal request for a mandatory declassification review with the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Nixon archivists released some tapes without bleeding in May 2018, July 2019 and this May “after considerable discussion.”
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