It’s not true, as his critics like to say, that the president who went to Cairo to tell the world his election heralded great new things for the Middle East now has nothing to show for it.
When the history books are written, they will credit Barack Obama for making Richard Nixon look like Moses.
Forty years ago this evening, in a televised address to the nation, Nixon told the American people that, effective noon the next day, “I shall resign the presidency.”
Since then the man’s failings have been exhaustively chronicled, and on this sorry anniversary they’ve once again been dragged out for a fresh round of condemnation.
Far less appreciated, however, is a success that showed Nixon — and the American presidency — at their best.
This was Nixon’s rescue of Israel in 1973.
It came after Egyptian and Syrian forces, with Soviet backing, chose the holiest night on the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, to launch a surprise attack on Israeli positions on the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.
The course set by our 37th president in that crisis has a resonance today, when Israeli troops have again been battling determined enemies.
It speaks to how a president treats a friend, especially in wartime. And at least on Israel, it underscores the profound differences between Nixon then and Obama today — almost all to the former’s advantage.
The sharp contrast starts at the voting booth. When he was elected president in 1968, Nixon won just 17 percent of the Jewish vote.
Four years later, running against George McGovern, who was regarded as more ambivalent about Israel, Nixon’s share rose to 35 percent.
Even so, Nixon’s support from American Jews never came close to Obama’s.
In 2008, the candidate of hope and change entered the Oval Office with 78 percent of the Jewish vote. Even the pronounced anti-Israeli drift of his first term didn’t stop him from being re-elected in 2012 with 69 percent support from American Jews.
There’s another contrast: Notwithstanding the public insults and harsh words directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so far as we know Obama hasn’t trafficked in the crude stereotypes Nixon indulged when he derided Jews in private conversations in the Oval Office.
Yet when Israel’s forces were in danger of being overwhelmed by the Arab armies, it was Nixon who gave them the wherewithal to prevail.
Some Jews weren’t surprised.
In 1972, Yitzhak Rabin, then serving as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, was accused of taking sides in the US election after he told an Israeli radio station that no president in American history had been more committed to Israel’s security than Nixon.
Plainly Rabin had sensed something real.
The next year, when Israel Defense Forces were set back on their heels in the first days of the 1973 war and Prime Minister Golda Meir begged for American help, Nixon delivered.
Not only that. When he learned the deliveries were being bogged down by bureaucracy, he called in his secretaries of state and defense.
As Henry Kissinger read out the list of what was being sent to Israel, Nixon replied, “Double it. Now get the hell out of here and get the job done.”
He further made clear to the Israelis not to worry about weapons and ammunition: America would replace whatever they’d lost with even more advanced equipment.
“Whatever it takes,” he told Kissinger, “save Israel.”
All this as Watergate dominated the headlines. In spite of the oil embargo the Arabs announced in retaliation. And even as his own vice president, Spiro Agnew, announced his own resignation over his own scandal.
Four decades later, the situation on the ground is different. Israeli forces are much stronger, fighting against a terrorist organization unpopular even among Arabs. Israel doesn’t need a massive airlift from the United States.
What it does need is public support in the larger war of which this is but one front: the effort to isolate the Jewish state by turning it into an international pariah.
Unfortunately, despite maintaining our military and intelligence ties, President Obama has only encouraged this drive with his language putting Hamas and Israel on the same moral plane.
In his memoirs, Chaim Herzog, Israel’s sixth president, said this of Nixon’s ugly outbursts:
“He supplied arms and unflinching support when our very existence would have been in danger without them. Let his comments be set against his actions. His words may have raised eyebrows but not his actions.
“And I’ll choose actions over words any day of the week.”
Something to think about on a Nixon anniversary dedicated almost exclusively to his faults, and at a moment when Israel could use a Nixon in the White House.