President Nixon a bigot: What did you expect?

The late-President Richard M. Nixon taped himself by 
accident on October 7, 1971 in a conversation with 
sociologist-turned New York Senator Democrat Patrick 
Moynihan, who was known for the idea that emasculation of 
Black men caused problems in the Black family which led to 
crime and other social problems. At the time that Moynihan 
spoke with Nixon he was at Harvard and helping out George 
Bush (Sr.) at the United Nations. Still alive, Moynihan was 
unwilling to speak to the Chicago Tribune about the secret 
tape that turned up and published in 2001.(1)

The tape was apparently an accident because Nixon said 
repeatedly that no one should know of their conversation. 
Nixon said he admired Black Senator Edward Brooke, a 
Republican in Massacusetts but that generally, minorities 
and Catholics did not have the intellectual power to be 
equal. He pointed to the pseudo-science of Herrnstein and 
Jensen which he said "'is probably very close to the 
truth.'" Herrnstein and Jensen claimed that some "racial" 
groups were "smarter" than others, on the basis of their 
genes. The infamous "Bell Curve" tried to rehabilitate many 
of their arguments.(2)

Even in front of Moynihan, Nixon insulted the intelligence 
of the Irish whose war he found to be a result of lack of 
intelligence. "'I'm not saying 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.'"

In the same quote, Nixon shows that he knows the government 
of Chile is the only one that is not a dictatorship by his 
own standards -- the one under Salvador Allende, which 
Nixon called "elected but communist." Of course, Allende 
was never a communist, just a mushy "socialist," but Nixon 
was the one to send the troops to help assist or carry out 
the killing of Allende after wrecking the economy 
internally and imposing an embargo. It shows that Nixon was 
not the Reagan type who could claim not to know what was 
going on. Nixon knew Allende was the only elected official 
leading a Latin American country. As a result of the U.$.-
sponsored coup, the U.$. military, intelligence and a 
faction of the Chilean military killed 30,000 people to 
make Chile safe for U.$. business. The example of Chile 
shows why elections are not the road forward: if Uncle Sam 
does not win, he does not respect the outcome. It takes a 
People's War against U.$.-led imperialism for a people to 
seize its own destiny.

Nixon said: "'The Italians aren't any good at government. 
The Spanish aren't any good at government. . . '[Moynihan: 
'Yuh.'] The French have had a helluva time and they're 
half-Latin, and all of Latin America is not any good at 
government. . . [Moynihan: 'Ah, huh.'] . . . 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. . 
. [Moynihan: 'Sure.'] 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."

After saying that and referring to supposedly innate 
intelligence again and getting a "right, damn right" from 
Moynihan, Nixon says "the responsibility of a president is 
to first know all these things . . . I must do everything 
that I possibly can to deny that" [in reference to general 
group differences] and "but nobody must ever say that" [in 
reference to why Blacks would not add anything to a 
political ticket running for office]. Nixon was the 
inventor of pc liberalism. He says he will point to equal 
opportunity and Black geniuses without ever saying he 
believes the group as a whole is inferior.

Once again, we see the political agenda of science to such 
an extent that pseudo-science gets support at the highest 
level of government, contrary to the myth that bourgeois 
pseudo-science is neutral or value-free in its production 
and use. We also see Democrats and Republicans united in 
white supremacy, the real basis of the U.$. political 
system.

Notes: 
1. Chicago Tribune 10June2001. 
2. See Stephen J. Gould's book, The Mismeasure of Man and 
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin et. al., Not in Our 
Genes for a refutation of Herrnstein and Jensen.