Nixon: Tally the Jews at BLS; Free Hess!

Today in released Nixon document/transcript news: First, Slate's Tim Noah highlights a handful of newly released transcripts related to Nixon's paranoia that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was teeming with perfidious Jews of questionable, perhaps even dual loyalties. The key passage, from a previously released tape:

Nixon: The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a [White House Counsel Leonard] Garment and a [National Security Adviser Henry] Kissinger and, frankly, a [White House speechwriter William] Safire, and, by God, they're exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?

Haldeman: Their whole orientation is against you. In this administration, anyway. And they are smart. They have the ability to do what they want to do-which-is to hurt us.

As Noah explains, Nixon's rant to Haldeman resulted in the purge of those with "Jewish sounding names" from the BLS.

Speaking of Nixionian anti-Semitism, over at the Guardian Maev Kennedy reports that documents released today from Britain's National Archives suggest that our worst president took pity on imprisoned Nazi and amateur pilot Rudolf Hess:

In 1974 Richard Nixon, the US president, was ready to support the release on humanitarian grounds of prisoner number 7, but his efforts were thwarted by unwavering Soviet opposition. So Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, dubbed "the loneliest man in the world" as sole occupant of Spandau prison, remained locked up, according to secret documents released today by the National Archives at Kew.

In his defense, perhaps Nixon was referring not to the Deputy Reichsfuehrer Rudolf Hess, but his patsy body double.