Quote of the Day (Richard Nixon, on the Irish)

“The Jews have certain traits. The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”—President Richard Nixon, giving vent to some of his unique views on American ethnic/racial groups, quoted in Adam Nagourney, “On Nixon Tapes, Disparaging Remarks About Ethnic Groups,” The New York Times, December 11, 2010

During the Watergate scandal, it was a point of pride for a number of people to make it onto Richard Nixon’s enemies list. (Bob Hope joked that Joe Namath landed on the latter because he hadn’t used any of the plays suggested to him by the President, such a diehard football fan that he had considered naming the Democrat Vince Lombardi as his running mate in 1968.)

For the last two decades, a kind of collective amnesia has aided revisionists hoping to remove the blemishes from the image of Nixon. But their efforts are continually undermined by what Alexander Haig, in another context, called “a sinister force”—the President himself, giving vent to his demons on his Oval Office tapes.

Now not just individuals, but entire ethnic groups, will be vying for pride of place in the Nixon hate sweepstakes. African-Americans (whom Nixon thought might be able to strengthen America “in 500 years”) and American Jews (draft-dodgers, according to a rather unscientific survey conducted solely in his own mind) are the leaders in this regard, with Italians running far, far back. (The latter, though they “don’t have their heads screwed on tight,” are disqualified because, he acknowledges, they’re “wonderful people.”)

Irish-Americans, however, are a special case. It’s too simplistic to think that this was a carryover from his thinking that the Kennedys and Chicago’s Richard Daley stole the 1960 Presidential race from him.

How, for instance, to account for the fact that Nixon’s ancestry was Irish Quaker? Or that a favorite pet of his, King Timahoe, was an Irish setter? I mean, don’t these last two items indicate an element of self-hatred in all of this?

You have to wonder what some of Nixon’s most diehard loyalists would have thought at the time of their boss’s feelings about them and their compatriots--whose long-time loyalty he had been trying to erode as part of a strategy of peeling away from the Democratic Party the votes of urban ethnic Catholic groups. I'm talking about people such as:

* Col. Jack Brennan, the aide who gave up a career in the military to follow his chief into exile in San Clemente in 1974;

* John McLaughlin, the speechwriter who left the priesthood because of his involvement with politics (and who since then has become even more famous for that stentoring voice, hectoring panelists on his political talk show);

* Pat Buchanan, another speechwriter who defended Watergate as merely “political hardball” (and who has since gone on to his own form of dubious fame in leading "the pitchfork brigade" of the GOP); and

* Rose Mary Woods, granddaughter of an Irish stowaway, who willingly demonstrated a preposterous move that supposedly caused an 18 1/2-minute gap on the Watergate tapes.

Despite their Republican leanings, these and other Irish figures in the Nixon White House displayed the same kind of fierce political loyalty that sustained Democratic political machines founded by the Irish. They had long had to set aside questions about his paranoia, his lies and his corruption. Had they known of the President’s darker musings, these aides could only have been stung by a prejudice so engrained that, for all their selflessness toward him, he would fundamentally not be able to reciprocate their loyalty because he could not be able to think of them beyond a hoary stereotype.