Former President Richard Nixon advocated for immigration and racial integration during the racially heated late 1950s, evidence of the GOP’s embrace of former President Abraham Lincoln’s fight for equality, according to a newly surfaced letter.
Written in 1959 when he was vice president but readying a run for the presidency, Nixon also expressed a concern that if the U.S. was viewed as “racists,” most of the world would back the Communists and “leave us disastrously isolated in a hostile world.”
In the letter written on vice presidential stationary, Nixon explained to a North Carolina woman his reason for supporting school integration with a much broader endorsement of treating everyone equally.
“Basically, I believe in working for full opportunity for all our citizens, regardless of race, creed, or ancestry,” he wrote on September 29 in a letter set for auction on Tuesday May 9 by Alexander Historical Auctions in Maryland.
Mary Todd Lincoln’s mourning parasol.
The auction includes several other rare documents and artifacts, including an application to the Communist Party by former President John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln’s mourning veil and parasol.
Nixon’s letter was in response to a letter asking about the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court integrating public schools.
Nixon acknowledged that the decision was a tough one for many to accept, and “presented to the South a particularly difficult problem.”
Photo of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald being shot signed by the officer leading Oswald through Dallas Police HQ.
But he explained that equality was important, and he expressed concerns that if segregation continued, the U.S. would lose the war against communism because other “colored” nations would join Russia, seeing America as “racists.”
Typed but signed by Nixon, he wrote, “I am deeply concerned with the impact of racial division in terms of world power. Most of the people of the world belong to the colored races. They deeply resent any slurs based on race. If we of the United States are considered racists, then we may lose to the Communist camp hundreds of millions of potential friends and allies. That would leave us disastrously isolated in a hostile world.”
Nixon lost his first chance at the White House, but eventually won in 1968 and famously visited Communist China and met with the leaders of the Soviet Union.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
