This latest leak of him telling his secretary Rose Mary Woods that Jews behave a certain way to “compensate for an inferiority complex…” He put down both Jewish advisors William Safire and Henry Kissinger for “insecurity.” He said, “It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.”

These to me are the words of an empathic man. No one was more socially insecure and awkward than Richard Nixon. I think that is why many people really did not like him. He was so uncomfortable in his own skin he made those who looked upon him and watched him uncomfortable in theirs.

But because of that he seems to have been sensitive to others and their social insecurities.

He also said this: “Anybody who is Jewish cannot handle Middle East policy,” meaning it was impossible for them to be objective. “Henry might be as fair as he can possibly be, but he can’t help but be affected by it. Put yourself in his position. Good God…His people were crucified over there. Jesus Christ. Five million of them popped into big ovens. How the hell’s he feel about all this?”

These are the words of a man capable of empathy for the Jewish people, which the true antisemite is not.

And when it came to re-supplying a desperate Israel in 1973, which Henry advised against, Nixon did not stand by but vigorously took action.

Dick Nixon called Henry his Jewboy perhaps because he acted like one. But in any case, Nixon’s spoken contempt for Jews and their allegedly offensive behavior was no more than what one hears at the golf club by a guy who tells a Jew-joke or two. It is light years away from the serious antisemitism of an Abbas or an Ahmadinejad, an Adolf Hitler or Haj Amin al-Hussein who harbored these satanic fantasies of Jewish evil. Dick Nixon did not.

On the surface he was a country-club antisemite but when the chips were down for Israel, the real, better angels of Dick Nixon’s essence took over.

Leila tov miEretz Yisrael.