Nixon Called Indira Gandhi an 'Old Witch' On Tapes
Richard Nixon is still making headlines from the grave…this time via some new tapes in which he calls India’s later-assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi an “old witch.”
It’s a delightful look at what REALLY lurks underneath the fixed teeth-showing smiles of heads of state when they meet. And Secretaries of State, too: in the tapes Henry Kissinger calls Indians “bastards.”
In a tape that will perhaps turn Jerry Springer Show viewers onto foreign affairs fans, the words fly fast and furious, according to the Washington Post:
President Nixon referred privately to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as an “old witch” and national security adviser Henry Kissinger insulted Indians in general, according to transcripts of Oval Office tapes and newly declassified documents released Tuesday.
Nixon and Kissinger met in the Oval Office on the morning of Nov. 5, 1971, to discuss Nixon’s conversation with Gandhi the day before.
“We really slobbered over the old witch,” Nixon told Kissinger, according to a transcript of their conversation released as part of a State Department compilation of significant documents involving American foreign policy.
Nixon’s remark came as the two men speculated about Gandhi’s motives during the White House meeting and discussed India’s intentions in the looming conflict with neighboring Pakistan. The United States was allied with Pakistan and saw India as too closely allied with the Soviet Union.
“The Indians are bastards anyway,” Kissinger told the president. “They are starting a war there.”
Kissinger also told his boss that he had bested Gandhi in their meeting.
“While she was a b****, we got what we wanted too,” Kissinger said. “She will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn’t give her a warm reception and therefore in despair she’s got to go to war.”
Other documents chart U.S. contacts with China, as facilitated by Pakistan, and U.S. concern that India was developing nuclear technology. The archive covers U.S. policy in South Asia in 1971 and 1972.
The documents, many declassified only earlier this month, generally cover old ground, several Cold War scholars said. Still, the particulars are intriguing, including rosters of who was in various meetings and quotes from conversations among Nixon, his aides and foreign leaders.
WebIndia has a transcript of some of the controversial remarks, which includes this gem of an exchange:
Nixon: The Indians need – what they need really is a-
Kissinger: They’re such bastards.
Nixon: A mass famine. But they aren’t going to get that. We’re going to feed them – a new kind of wheat. But if they’re not going to have a famine the last thing they need is another war. Let the goddamn Indians fight a war [unclear].
Kissinger: They are the most aggressive goddamn people around there.
Nixon: The Indians?
Kissinger: Yeah.
Nixon: Sure.
Gandhi was unavailable for comment (she was cremated years ago).
PERSONAL NOTE: This tape was made some months before I went over to India as a student on a senior year independent study project while at Colgate Unversity. My main task was to intern on New Delhi’s Hindustan Times newspaper.
I arrived there in January 1972 and was shocked at the bitterness and disappointment of Indians who at all levels (on the newspaper, when I’d visit a village and when I met some upper-class elites) would talk about how the U.S. was “tilting” to Pakistan and how Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger disliked India. Most of us Americans (except diplomats) dismissed it as paranoia at the time. But these tapes would suggest they were correct.
A complicating factor in those days was the fact that as the United States drew closer to Pakistan, India would edge closer to Moscow — a factor which didn’t endear the Indian leadership to American policymakers.
Plus, Mrs. Gandhi was a piece of work. In 1973 I returned after journalism school, this time to work as a freelance foreign correspondent. I wrote for the Chicago Daily News. I attended a meeting of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association at which Mrs. Gandhi was to speak. The officers said that I would have to be first in line, since the most junior member was at front. So Mrs. Gandhi came in and did her “namaste” to me first. The camera lights went on and she smiled at me, clasping her hands. The lights went off, the picture taken. Her smiled dropped immediately, she looked virtually through me and moved on.
“Did you see that?” I said to a British journalist.
“Hey,” he said, “she didn’t want to waste it…”
http://themoderatevoice.com/3221/nixon-calls-indira-gandhi-old-witch-on-tapes/
