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"Gee, I wonder what Rush is going to talk about tomorrow?"

this:

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Precise details of what transpired in Washington during the first week of the Yom Kippur War are hard to come by, due mainly to conflicting accounts given by Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger regarding their respective roles.

What is clear, from the preponderance of information provided by those who witnessed or were involved with the unfolding events, is that Nixon – overriding inter-administration objections and bureaucratic inertia – implemented a breathtaking transfer of arms. During a 32-day period beginning October 14, jumbo U.S. military aircraft touched down in Israel 567 times, delivering some 22,300 tons of material. This enabled Israel to reverse its earlier setbacks, surround the Egyptians in the Sinai, and advance deep into Syrian territory.

This was accomplished, as Walter J. Boyne noted in an article in the December 1998 issue of Air Force Magazine, while "Washington was in the throes of not only post-Vietnam moralizing on Capitol Hill but also the agony of Watergate, both of which impaired the leadership of Richard M. Nixon. Four days into the war, Washington was blindsided again by another political disaster – the forced resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew."

According to those with firsthand knowledge, it was Nixon's stubborn insistence that propelled the massive arms transfer, code-named Operation Nickel Grass.

"Both Kissinger and Nixon wanted to do [the airlift]," said former CIA deputy director Vernon Walters, "but Nixon gave it the greater sense of urgency. He said, 'You get the stuff to Israel. Now. Now.'"

Boyne, in his book The Two O`Clock War, describes a high-level White House meeting on October 9:

As preoccupied as he was with Watergate, Nixon came straight to the point, announcing that Israel must not lose the war. He ordered that the deliveries of supplies, including aircraft, be sped up and that Israel be told that it could freely expend all of its consumables – ammunition, spare parts, fuel, and so forth – in the certain knowledge that these would be completely replenished by the United States without any delay.

Alexander Haig, who at the time was White House chief of staff, writes in his memoir Inner Circles:

As soon as the scope and pattern of Israeli battle losses emerged, Nixon ordered that all destroyed equipment be made up out of U.S. stockpiles, using the very best weapons America possessed....Whatever it takes, he told Kissinger...save Israel.
Leonard Garment recalled:

It was Nixon who did it. I was there. As [bureaucratic bickering between the State and Defense departments] was going back and forth, Nixon said, This is insane....He just ordered Kissinger, Get your [behind] out of here and tell those people to move. "
When Schlesinger initially wanted to send just three transports to Israel because he feared anything more would alarm the Arabs and the Soviets, Nixon snapped: "We are going to get blamed just as much for three as for 300...Get them in the air, now."

Haig recalls that Nixon, frustrated with the initial delays in implementing the airlift and aware that the Soviets had begun airlifting supplies to Egypt and Syria, summoned Kissinger and Schlesinger to the Oval Office on October 12 and "banished all excuses." The president asked Kissinger for a precise accounting of Israel`s military needs, and Kissinger proceeded to read aloud from an itemized list.

"Double it," Nixon ordered. "Now get the hell out of here and get the job done."

Later, informed of yet another delay – this one because of disagreements in the Pentagon over the type of planes to be used for the airlift – an incensed Nixon shouted at Kissinger, "[Expletive] it, use every one we have. Tell them to send everything that can fly."

Nixon acted despite threats of reprisal by Arab oil producers – indeed, the day after Nixon asked Congress for an emergency appropriation of $2.2 billion for Israel, Saudi Arabia's King Faisal announced an embargo of oil to the U.S. – not to mention Europe's overwhelming opposition to aiding Israel.

"European allies," writes historian Melvin Small in The Presidency of Richard Nixon, "fearful of the Arab oil threat, would not permit the United States to use [America`s] own bases on the continent to refuel any cargo planes flying from the United States to Israel. At the same time, NATO allies Turkey and Greece permitted the Russians to overfly their countries on their way to the Middle East. Under pressure from the Arabs, Exxon even instructed [its subsidiary] Esso of Germany to stop delivering oil to American bases. Washington finally strong-armed NATO ally Portugal into permitting U.S. planes to refuel in the Azores on the way to the Middle East."

"Miracle of the Planes"

There are those, like the historian David Greenberg, author of Nixon`s Shadow: The History of an Image, who argue that Nixon's actions during the Yom Kippur War – specifically the airlift and the placing of U.S. forces on worldwide alert when the Soviets threatened to intervene on behalf of their Arab clients – were inspired, not out of real concern for Israel, but in Greenberg`s words, "from a real politik-based gambit to thwart Soviet allies."

Whatever his motives, the fact remains that Nixon, as J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Left-leaning Forward, acknowledges in his book Jewish Power, "create[d] the now familiar U.S.-Israel alliance."

"It was Nixon," wrote Goldberg, "who made Israel the largest single recipient of U.S. foreign aid; Nixon who initiated the policy of virtually limitless U.S. weapons sales to Israel. The notion of Israel as a strategic asset to the United States, not just a moral commitment, was Nixon`s innovation."

Addressing the question of Nixon's anti-Semitism, the late Israeli president Chaim Herzog wrote:

[D]id his personal attitudes have any effect on his dealing with Israel and with Jews? None. He supplied arms and unflinching support when our very existence would have been in danger without them. Let his comments be set against his actions. And I`ll choose actions over words any day of the week.
Veteran radio host Barry Farber put it this way:
Give me a Nixon who curses Jew boys over in Treasury but resupplies Israel...over a Franklin D. Roosevelt who professes great love for the Jews but lets all those Jewish refugees aboard the S.S. St. Louis be returned to the death camps of Europe rather than land in the U.S. even though they were close enough to see the lights of Miami Beach.
Golda Meir, who until the end of her life referred to Nixon as "my president," told a group of Jewish leaders in Washington shortly after the war: "For generations to come, all will be told of the miracle of the immense planes from the United States bringing in the materiel that meant life to our people."

Wrote Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose: "Those were momentous events in world history. Had Nixon not acted so decisively, who can say what would have happened? The Arabs probably would have recovered at least some of the territory they had lost in 1967, perhaps all of it. They might have even destroyed Israel. But whatever the might-have-beens, there is no doubt that Nixon...made it possible for Israel to win, at some risk to his own reputation and at great risk to the American economy.

"He knew that his enemies...would never give him credit for saving Israel. He did it anyway."

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19025