Wasn't Henry Kissinger Jewish? I don't understand why Nixon would appoint him as Secretary of State if he disliked Jews so much.
Harry Truman had a Jewish business partner and a Jewish film biographer. Neither was allowed in his home, which was his personal realm. They're products of the first half of the last century who can't be judged based on incidents as related to todays standards, rather the totality of their actions.
Kissinger was Nixon's Head of National Security Affairs for 6 years, For two of those years he was also Secretary of State.
Henry Alfred Kissinger was the 56th Secretary of State of the United States from 1973 to 1977, continuing to hold the position of Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs which he first assumed in 1969 until 1975.
Wasn't Henry Kissinger Jewish? I don't understand why Nixon would appoint him as Secretary of State if he disliked Jews so much.
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Nixon disliked the liberal establishment much of which he saw as controlled by jews. However, he gave jobs to jews who'se politics he liked --like Kissenger--just as he gave jobs in government to non jews in government whose politics he liked. He distinguished between his private opinions and his public behavior and responsibilities.
Judging by the tapes of Nixon --he resented the liberal establishment jews because they treated him not as a political enemy --which he was --but rather as a tribal enemy--which he wasn't.
The Rosenburg trials came too soon after the shoah of WWII and about the same time that Joe Stalin was gearing up for the doctors plot. A lot of Jewish communists were familiar with both russian show trials and antisemitism. The McCarthy trials and The HUAC over which nixon presided looked like both. It looked like a set up for a pogrom. So Nixon was stamped as a tribal enemy of the jews -that is, an antisemite-- by liberal establishment Jews because of the events of the early 50's.
(The sad truth was that an american shoah was never in the cards and --as the venona cables and kgb files showed in the 1990's--there were a lot of Russian spies in Roosevelts & truman's administrations.)
The hatred for Nixon was about on par with the swift boat veterans hatred for John Kerry. It was strong enough and visceral enough to carry over for a generation.
The moral of the story is -- don't run for president if you piss off a lot of people in your youth. They won't forget.
an addendum to this-- is the reason that Ronald Reagan was called a teflon president was because he saw from the inside how the media was shaped by the McCarthy era having been black listed by hollywood for his anticommunist views during the McCarthy era. Reagan always understood the subtext/spin of the media of his time. not so nixon.