Reagan tossed slur at Africans in angry phone call to Nixon
It was October 1971, and the United Nations had just voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China.
Then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan was infuriated that delegations from Africa did not align themselves with the U.S. position — that the U.N. should recognize Taiwan as an independent state — and wanted to get President Richard Nixon on the phone. He was apparently disgusted after watching delegates from Tanzania celebrate the U.N. decision to support Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan.
“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Reagan said.
Nixon replied with a big laugh.
“Well and then they — the tail wags the dog, doesn’t it? The tail wags the dog,” Nixon said.
The conversation between Reagan and Nixon was published in The Atlantic. Tim Naftali, a history professor at NYU and the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, worked to get the tape released and wrote the subsequent article for The Atlantic.
The National Archives withheld the racist comments in the recording’s first release in 2000, which Naftali says was apparently in protection of Reagan’s privacy. But after Reagan’s death in 2004, Naftali was successful in getting the full conversation released.
“It was worse than I expected,” Naftali told the Washington Post, referring to the audio on the tape. “It was the combination of the slur by Reagan and then Nixon’s repeating it, not once but twice in later conversations. This was not just revealing about what Ronald Reagan thought about Africans in 1971, and arguably later, it was also a reminder of how Nixon could hold racist views but not think of himself as a racist.”
After the call with Reagan, Nixon phoned Secretary of State William Rogers and then employed the same language Reagan used as he described the frustrations over the U.N. decision.
“As you can imagine, there’s strong feeling that we just shouldn’t, as (Reagan) said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these — these, uh, these cannibals on television last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on,” Nixon said in the recorded phone call.
Naftali said he hopes his research encourages others to plum the voluminous records available on all presidents. The Reagan audio also should spark new conversations about presidential views on race, he said, and how it impacts real world policy.
“Understanding how our presidents think about race is not a matter of character assassination, it’s about understanding what drives their decision making,” he said. “It’s not partisan gamesmanship, it’s about how these people with the power we gave them as result of an election have used it. If their minds are poisoned by prejudice, we need to know.”