Looking Back
Edith Cook
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Published August 16, 2024. Editor’s Headline: Problems in the White House.
When I emigrated from Germany as a young woman I landed in Santa Clara, a town 35 miles south of San Francisco, where Hippies flocked to Haight Ashbury with flowers in their hair, staged love-ins, smoked pot, and burned brassieres. In adjoining Oakland, the Black Panthers tested their mettle. Students jumped on buses for Freedom Rides into the South to help Black Americans secure the vote, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Supreme Court rulings had expanded civil rights and civil liberties.
Silicon Valley consisted of two teenagers, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who experimented in a garage with building a personal computer; their creation would become the first Apple product. California and, by extension America, struck me as a combination of possibility, growth, and, yes, love: I moved to California to marry the man I met two years earlier, on a cruise down the Rhine.
So I was dismayed when, in 1969, California sent a president to the White House who I felt was an outright fascist. Of course, no one knew the details until resourceful writers demanded the release of the Nixon tapes.
“The declassified White House tapes confirm a picture of racism and misogyny at the highest levels, covered up for decades under ludicrous claims of national security,” writes Gary J. Bass, Professor of World Politics at Princeton University, in his 2013 “Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide.”
“The tapes are about one of the grimmest episodes of the Cold War, which brought ruin to Bangladesh in 1971,” observes Bass.
At the time, India tilted toward the Soviet Union while a military dictatorship in Pakistan sided with the United States. Pakistan flanked India on two sides: West Pakistan and the (mostly Bengali) East Pakistan.
In March 1971, after Bengali nationalists won a democratic election in Pakistan, the dictator’s junta pursued a merciless crackdown on Bengali citizens.
President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, supported the dictatorship in Pakistan as it killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, with 10 million refugees fleeing into neighboring India. The crisis culminated in December 1971, when India defeated Pakistan in a short war that resulted in the creation of an independent Bangladesh.1
Already in June ’71 Nixon and Kissinger expressed their displeasure at India’s sheltering millions of traumatized Bengali refugees fleeing the Pakistani army. They blamed the government of India for causing the refugee flow. Nixon in particular condemned the women of India.
Following a White House summit with the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, in November 1971, the president unloaded his disgust on Kissinger.
“Undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women,” he said. “Undoubtedly,” he repeated “with a venomous tone,” adds Bass.
Kissinger’s staff had warned that his one-sided approach would hand India the opportunity to demolish Pakistan, which indeed happened. India first sponsored the Bengali guerrillas, and then went to war against Pakistan, which resulted in a Cold War victory for the Soviet regime.
Other tapes, examined by Washington Post writers George Lardner Jr. and Michael Dobbs, reveal a troubling anti-Semitism on Nixon’s part, who is heard lashing out repeatedly at the Jews he considered a government problem.
"The Jews are all over the government," Nixon complained to his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, in an Oval Office meeting, recorded on a set of White House tapes released at the National Archives. The two journalists published their findings on October 6, 1999.
I was stunned by the claims in Steven J. Ross’s 2017 book, “Hitler in Los Angeles,” which provides evidence of Friends of New Germany and other groups loyal to the Hitler regime receiving directives, Nazi agents and saboteurs, and money sent from Berlin. No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles with its “greatest propaganda machine in the world,” Hollywood. Among Nazi plans was the assassination of twenty prominent entertainment figures, among them Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Samuel Goldwyn, not to mention the planned putsch to topple President Franklin D. Roosevelt. More on this in my next column.
Patti Sherlock
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Floyd Watson
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Susan Marich
I love history! It's too bad people don't look at the actions and hear the words that are obnoxiously and clear.
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Paulette Gadlin
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