WASHINGTON If politics is the art of the possible, it was also for Richard Nixon the submersion of "the unspeakable." [by James Warren]
Unfortunately, Nixon's secret White House taping system betrayed him often, including on the morning of Oct. 7, 1971, when he unspeakably broached the subject of race with a man he trusted on matters convulsing America, the ever-provocative Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In a previously undisclosed 26-minute phone conversation, an unguarded Nixon skewers blacks, Italians, Latinos, Jews, Catholics, women and entire continents, but mostly blacks, while an influential social scientist strikes a solicitous tone.
But it's also a conversation as weird as Nixon, egregious stereotyping mingling with ringing declarations for equal opportunity. He offers a politically incorrect overview of government worldwide, even as he warns that "we must never tell anybody" certain deeper thoughts, such as the inability of Africans to govern themselves, while still making clear his belief that even the disadvantaged can thrive.
"We've got to proceed on the assumption not that everybody is equal but that everybody should have an equal opportunity and anybody might go to the top. And, God knows, he might. A Brooke could, you know," he says, referring to black Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.).
"Exactly!" Moynihan declares with the air of a football cheerleader.
Moynihan, of course, was no flunky. The future ambassador and senator from New York was a jack-of-several trades Harvard academic, government servant and "neoconservative" who mixed social liberalism with skepticism about social policy changing society.
Moynihan's writings
He helped draft the Kennedy administration's anti-poverty program, co-wrote a pioneering study on the growing role of ethnicity in society and a government report suggesting that factoring in instability in the black family was critical to understanding inequality. His writings caused a stir, especially among liberals and black leadership, but are now seen as prescient.
By the time of the chat, Moynihan was both back at Harvard and assisting the U.S. delegation at the United Nations, headed by Ambassador George Bush. But, as the chat and letters at the National Archives in College Park, Md., make clear, he was in regular touch with Nixon, who had sent him a controversial article by Harvard's Richard Herrnstein.
The article linked heredity and IQ, making a case that social standing is partly based on inherited differences and that IQ is correlated with success in later life. These were views similar to those of Arthur Jensen, a California psychologist who gained notoriety by asserting that many public programs to help the poor were doomed because they could not affect a heritage of low intelligence.
Nixon `was two persons'
Shown the transcript of the full conversation on Friday, Moynihan said he did not recall it and was leery of speaking about Nixon's ethnic and racial stereotyping. He said that, "Clearly, he was two persons," then noted that his own hero, Woodrow Wilson, was responsible for segregating federal lunchrooms. He then lauded Nixon ("Our last liberal president") for his intellect and a string of concerns, proposals and achievements in the public policy realm, including immersion in the plight of urban America and pushing for a guaranteed income for all citizens.
Nobody will know about their discussion on Herrnstein, Nixon assured Moynihan in the 1971 conversation.
"Nobody must think we're thinking about it and, second, if we do find out it's correct, we must never tell anybody."
"I've reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me, and I don't base it on any scientific evidence, that what Herrnstein says, and what was said earlier by Jensen, and so forth, is probably very close to the truth."
Sensing the treacherous waters he's in, Nixon offers that he could conquer criticisms of such a view "by saying something the racists would never agree with, that within groups, there are geniuses. There are geniuses within black groups. There are more within Asian groups."
He brings up suggestions that the Irish have inherent intellectual deficiencies but, he says, amid Moynihan chortling, it's another example of what one should not say publicly. "Good God, it would cause another war; they're having damn problems in Northern Ireland now."
"Exactly!" Moynihan says.
They discuss the impact of classroom integration on achievement, Nixon wondering whether placing blacks with whites "raises the blacks and does not bring down the whites. Is that clear?"
Moynihan says, "Yes, up to a point," but is interrupted by Nixon, who flatly wonders whether any black who graduates even from a "good black college in the South" can teach English. "I dunno. I just don't know," Nixon says during one of the 3,700 hours of conversations he taped.
Moynihan doesn't respond directly but downplays the role of teachers and classrooms per se, indicating that "the main thing that matters is the other students that child is with. . . . The kids set standards for each other." There's no evidence school expenditures improve achievement, he says, and contends that if you put "middle-class kids in with a majority of lower-class kids, you lower the middle-class achievement without raising the lower class."
They are soon discussing macro racial politics, Nixon telling his friend at the UN, "Did you realize that, of the 40 or 45 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?"
"My God, you're absolutely right," Moynihan says. "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
"I'm not saying that blacks cannot govern," Nixon says. "I'm saying that they had a helluva time. Now that must demonstrate something. Now, having said that, let's look at Latin America. Latin America has had 150 years of trying at it and they don't have much going down there, either. Mexico is a one-party government; Colombia, they trade it off every two years, Venezuela is tipty toe, and the rest are dictatorships, except for [President Salvador] Allende [of Chile], which is a communist dictatorship. Elected but communist."
A late-night conversation
He recalls a boozy late-night conversation in 1958, when he was vice president, with Luis Munoz Marin, the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, in which the Puerto Rican allegedly said that his people had many fine qualities but that Latins generally weren't good at governing.
Nixon: Let's look at that. The Italians aren't any good at government. The Spanish aren't any good at government . . .
Moynihan: Yuh.
Nixon: The French have had a helluva time and they're half-Latin, and all of Latin America is not any good at government. They either go to one extreme or another. It's either a family, ah, three extremes: family, oligarchy, or a dictatorship; or a dictatorship on the right, or one on the left, very seldom in the center. Now, having said all that, however, as you compare the Latin dictatorships, governments, etc., and their forms of government, they at least do it in their way. It is an orderly way which works relatively well. They have been able to run the damn place. Looking at the black countries, of course, there are only two old ones--Haiti is an old one and Liberia is a very old one.
Moynihan: Ah, huh.
Nixon: Ethiopia is a very old one. But they have a helluva time running the place.
Moynihan: Pretty miserable world.
Weighing in on Asia
Nixon: Now you look at Asia and you can say, well, what about there, you don't have democracies. Of course, you don't, except Japan, where we imposed it, and the Philippines, and it's a helluva mess. But, on the other hand, Thailand with its oligarchy has the right kind of government for Thailand. And we have to say, too, that Iran, with the benevolent shah, with the benevolent shah, that's the right thing for those folks.
Moynihan: [They] do pretty well!
Nixon: What I'm getting back, the long way around, is this: I think something that is eventually going to come out here is this, and it's right beneath the surface, this whole black-white deal, is going to come out is the fact that Asians are capable of governing themselves, one way or another. We Caucasians have learned it after slaughtering each other in religious wars and other wars, including in the last century.
Moynihan: Sure.
Nixon: The Latins do it in a miserable way, but they do it. But the Africans just can't run things. That's a very, very fundamental point, in the international scene.
Moynihan: Oh, boy, you sure see it around this place.
Nixon: Of course you do. You see them. I have mixed feelings. I receive their ambassadors, they change all the time. I love 'em. They're so kind and so nice, and they're children! They're children!
Moynihan: Yeah, yeah (chortles). And they always want something, like children.
For sure, Nixon says, a lot of them are crooks. "But we have a lot of crooks too." And then there are areas, notably athletics, "where they can beat the hell out of us."
On sports
Nixon: You look at the World Series, for God's sake, and what would either of these teams, what would Pittsburgh be without a helluva lot of blacks? And music, and the dance. Are these things just to be pissed upon? Hell, no. They are important. And in certain areas, poetry, etc., they have a free-and-easy style that adds enormously to our culture. But on the other hand, when you get to some of the more profound, rigid disciplines, basically, they have a helluva time making it. . . . In terms of good lawyers, even though a lot of them go to law schools, it really is not their dish of tea. See?
Moynihan: Uh huh.
Nixon: Now that's a fact.
Moynihan: Uh huh.
Nixon: We've got Brooke and we've got that thin fellow that heads equal opportunities, that thin fellow from Philadelphia . . .
Moynihan: Bill Brown (EEOC Chairman William Brown III).
Nixon: He's got it. He's got it . . .
Nixon tells Moynihan that it's his theory "that the responsibility of a president is to first know all these things," alluding to innate differences in intellect, prompting Moynihan to chime in, "Right, damn right!"
But it's also "my theory," Nixon says, "that I must do everything that I possibly can to deny them."
"Yes, sir," Moynihan says.
"Because you cannot tell," Nixon says. "You cannot tell the world that you know that a black would not add anything, and in fact probably detract, from a political ticket." Same thing with a Jew, he says, or a Catholic running in a place like Oklahoma.
"But nobody must ever say that," Nixon says.