Nearly 40 Years Later, Kissinger’s Words Stir Fresh Outrage Among Jews

December 16, 2010
Nearly 40 Years Later, Kissinger’s Words Stir Fresh Outrage Among Jews
By CLYDE HABERMAN
The New York Times

Richard M. Nixon has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in your bones that he is destined to keep returning.

Sure enough, though dead 16 years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the Irish, Italians and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”


But Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”

“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

In New York, the epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not back in place after dropping to the floor.

Bad enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding, raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this city — the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights — he might have ended up in a gas chamber himself.

“Despicable,” “callous,” “revulsion,” “hypocrite,” “chilling” and “shocking” were a few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.

Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about Jews.

Even some who deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous,” but said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger,” including his support of Israel. The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been at least partly to blame.

“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.

There was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew.” And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”

Now 87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”

Back then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.

In his statement, Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while anyway.

Still, that “gas chamber” line is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days.

Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Maybe, the man said.