LONDON: Despite what was said last September there are other moments in recent history when “the world changed for ever”. One was July 1973 when, during the televised Watergate hearings, a minor White House official, Alexander Butterfield, blurted out that the president’s office had been bugged (by order of the president) for the past two years.

There were 3,000 hours of tape. Within weeks a large tranche was published. For the first time in history Americans saw their leader as he really was. “I am not a crook,” Nixon famously proclaimed. The tapes showed him to be a slimy, paranoid, foul-mouthed, bigoted, scheming bastard. Hail to the (expletive deleted) chief. The recordings stopped. No subsequent president has repeated Nixon’s blunder.

Some of the most sensitive material was destroyed by Nixon’s aides. Other material has been withheld for reasons of state. On March 1 Nara (the federal archive) released 500 hours’ worth of hitherto embargoed tapes.

They contain an illuminating exchange between the president and his religious ally, Dr Billy Graham. The 90-minute conversation took place after a prayer breakfast, on Feb 1, 1972.

Graham begins by advising Nixon on campaign strategy. The evangelist has been invited to lunch at Time magazine. “You better take your Jewish beanie” (yarmulke), Haldeman jokes. Nixon is in darker mood. He broaches something that “we can’t talk about publicly” - Jewish influence in the media. All the big news organs are “totally dominated by the Jews”. Graham agrees, adding, piously, that it is the Jews “who are putting out the pornographic stuff”.

The three men concur that “the best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews”. The American Jews are traitors (the Vietnam war was still raging). Nixon contends that “every Democratic candidate will owe his election to Jewish people”.

The released tapes have been edited and pruned. But Haldeman kept a diary of the conversation. After Graham left, Nixon told his henchman: “You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across . . . the Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.” As Haldeman records, Graham had earlier observed that “the Bible says there are satanic Jews and there’s where our problem arises”. That problem was “the total Jewish domination of the media . . . this was something that would have to be dealt with.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.