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.”