The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,”
Reagan said. “Yeah,” Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “
To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”.
This October 1971 exchange between current and future presidents is a reminder that other presidents have subscribed to the racist belief that Africans or African Americans are somehow inferior.
The exchange was taped by Nixon, and then later became the responsibility of the Nixon Presidential Library, which I directed from 2007 to 2011.
...Had the story stopped there, it would have been bad enough. Racist venting is still racist.
But what happened next showed the dynamic power of racism when it finds enablers. Nixon used Reagan’s call as an excuse to adapt his language to make the same point to others. Right after hanging up with Reagan, Nixon sought out Secretary of State William Rogers.
Even though Reagan had called Nixon to press him to withdraw from the United Nations, in Nixon’s telling, Reagan’s complaints about Africans became the primary purpose of the call.
“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.”
Nixon couldn’t stop retelling his version of what Reagan had said. Oddly unfocused, he spoke with Rogers again two hours later and repeated the story as if it would be new to the secretary.
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.” Like Nixon, Rogers had not seen the televised images. But Rogers agreed: “
Apparently, it was a terrible scene.” Nixon added, “
And they cheered.”
Then Nixon said, “
He practically got sick at his stomach, and that’s why he called. And he said, ‘It was a terrible scene.’ And that sort of thing will have an emotional effect on people … as [Reagan] said, ‘
This bunch of people who don’t even wear shoes yet, to be kicking the United States in the teeth’ … It was a terrible thing, they thought.”
Nixon didn’t think of himself as a racist; perhaps that’s why it was so important to him to keep quoting Reagan’s racism, rather than own the sentiment himself. But
Reagan’s comment about African leaders resonated with Nixon, because it reflected his warped thinking about African Americans.
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.
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.”
Fifty years later, the one fact that we should have in mind is that our nation’s chief executive assumed that the nonwhite citizens of the United States were somehow inferior. Nixon confided in Moynihan, who had been one of his house intellectuals, about the nature of his interest in research on African American intelligence: “T
he reason I have to know it is that as I go for programs, I must know that they have basic weaknesses.”
As these and other tapes make clear, the 37th president of the United States was a racist: He believed in treating people according to their race, and that race implied fundamental differences in individual human beings. Nixon’s racism matters to us because he allowed his views on race to shape U.S. policies—both foreign and domestic. His policies need to be viewed through that lens.
...His comment on African leaders, however,
sheds new light on what lay behind the governor’s passionate defense of the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa later in the 1970s.
During his 1976 primary-challenge run against Gerald Ford,
Reagan publicly opposed the Ford administration’s rejection of white-minority rule in Rhodesia.
These new tapes are a stark reminder of the racism that often lay behind the public rhetoric of American presidents.
As I write a biography of JFK, I’ve found that this sort of racism did not animate President Kennedy—indeed, early on he took political risks to help African leaders, most notably Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah.
But his reluctance to do more, sooner for African Americans cannot be separated from the paternalism he brought to the Oval Office or the prejudice held by parts of his Boston inner circle.
Kennedy, at least, learned on the job that securing civil rights for all was a moral imperative.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a symptom of a sickness that dwells in American society, sometimes deeply and weakly, sometimes on the surface and feverishly...it remains an ineluctable part of American culture, nonetheless.
Nixon never changed his mind about the supposed inherent inferiority of Africans.
At the end of October 1971, he discussed the UN vote with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo. Bebe delighted Nixon by echoing Reagan: “
That reaction on television was, it proves how they ought to be still hanging from the trees by their tails.” Nixon laughed.
These days, though Trump’s imagery is less zoological, it is pretty much the same in spirit. And this president, unlike Nixon, doesn’t believe he needs to hide behind anyone else’s racism.