Given that there’s currently a racist in the White House, should we be shocked that former American presidents were also racists?

Still, hearing this October 1971 exchange between the then-current American president and a future president is pretty jarring.

In the audio, the then-California Governor Ronald Reagan calls up the then-president, Richard Nixon, and lets loose with his frustration at Tanzanian delegates who voted against the United States at a United Nations meeting the previous day, and then later danced in celebration.

The Atlantic reports:

 “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said. “Yeah,” Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon gave a huge laugh.

Yup, that happened.

From the 35-second mark, through to the 58-second mark:

Authorities have previously tried to prevent the taped call going public, and managed to do so for many years

The exchange was taped by Nixon, and then later became the responsibility of the Nixon Presidential Library, which I directed from 2007 to 2011. When the National Archives originally released the tape of this conversation, in 2000, the racist portion was apparently withheld to protect Reagan’s privacy.

A court order stipulated that the tapes be reviewed chronologically; the chronological review was completed in 2013. Not until 2017 or 2018 did the National Archives begin a general rereview of the earliest Nixon tapes. Reagan’s death, in 2004, eliminated the privacy concerns.

Last year, as a researcher, I requested that the conversations involving Ronald Reagan be rereviewed, and two weeks ago, the National Archives released complete versions of the October 1971 conversations involving Reagan online.

Like a terrible informercial – but wait, there’s more:

Had the story stopped there, it would have been bad enough. Racist venting is still racist. But what happened next showed the dynamic power of racism when it finds enablers. Nixon used Reagan’s call as an excuse to adapt his language to make the same point to others. Right after hanging up with Reagan, Nixon sought out Secretary of State William Rogers.

Even though Reagan had called Nixon to press him to withdraw from the United Nations, in Nixon’s telling, Reagan’s complaints about Africans became the primary purpose of the call.

“As you can imagine,” Nixon [above] confided in Rogers, “there’s strong feeling that we just shouldn’t, as [Reagan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these—” Nixon stammered, choosing his words carefully—“these, uh, these cannibals on television last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.”

I think we can conclude that Nixon, the 37th president of America, was a racist, and these calls don’t paint Reagan, the 40th president, in a very flattering light.

As for the 45th – well, that was never in doubt as far back as the 1970s.

[source:atlantic]