When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone by Gal Beckerman

Author:Gal Beckerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Henry Kissinger thought he had all the proof he needed to convince the senators to back off: two letters from the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin definitively affirming that the diploma tax would be suspended. On April 18, Nixon invited Jackson, Ribicoff, Javits, and three other, more accommodating senators to meet with him at the White House. The president opened harshly, practically berating Jackson. His amendment would not only obliterate future Soviet-American trade but also jeopardize Brezhnev's upcoming trip to Washington. Kissinger dramatically pulled out Dobrynin's two communications and read them to the assembled senators. Jackson listened carefully and then told Nixon, "Mr. President, if you believe that, you're being hoodwinked." Ribicoff added that "there's nothing new in this. We have known about the suspensions for several weeks. But that in no way diminishes the need for passage of the Jackson amendment." The meeting ended. This was the senators' final word. As Jackson put it in a one-sentence press release following the meeting, "I am standing firm on my amendment, period."

With the senators unmovable, Nixon and Kissinger resorted to plan B: strip Jackson of his Jewish support. If the two men had really understood the popularity of the amendment, they would have realized the futility of this tactic. But they didn't. Nixon imagined threats could work, yelling that "a storm will hit American Jews if they are intransigent." Instead of employing scare tactics, Henry Kissinger preferred a combination of flattery and pressure. And there were two prominent Jewish leaders in particular who were ripe for influencing: Max Fisher and Jacob Stein.

A retired multimillionaire who had devoted his life to Jewish philanthropy and the Republican Party, Fisher was a strange kind of Jew, anti-intellectual and plainspoken. The son of a storeowner, he had grown up in the decidedly un-Jewish Salem, Ohio, and went on to Ohio State University on a football scholarship. When he graduated, he joined his father's new venture, a small oil-reclaiming business in Detroit. In a few years, he turned it into one of the biggest gas station chains in the Midwest; it was worth $40 million when he sold it, in 1959, and he invested most of that money in lucrative real estate. Fisher's affinity for the GOP led to his becoming the financial chairman for Michigan governor George Romney's presidential run in 1968. When Nixon beat Romney in the primaries, Fisher joined the national campaign and was responsible—as the new administration saw it—for lifting the Jewish Republican vote from Barry Goldwater's dismal 10 percent to Nixon's 17 and then 37 percent. Fisher had a tendency to imply that he was speaking for the whole community, and he became a sort of unofficial Jewish adviser to the president, given incredible access. His sidekick was Jacob Stein, a millionaire who had made his money developing shopping malls in Long Island and had recently become the head of the Presidents Conference, the powerful umbrella organization charged with preserving a united voice on Israel. He was less doctrinaire than Fisher but still had deep ties to the Nixon administration that he didn't want to jeopardize.

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