World Statesmen: Their Slurs and Innuendoes Quiz

Answer: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Within 20 years of his death we had a Catholic president (however questionable those Texas and Illinois election returns might have been). Indeed, but for the nonsense in Palm Beach County a couple of years back (the ballots were so incomprehensible that Pat "Amen Corner" Buchanan got high numbers in a heavily Jewish county), we would now have a Jewish VP.

Answer: Charles De Gaulle

The quotation in the original French is "un peuple d'elite, sur de lui-meme et dominateur." The meaning of the last word seems to be a key issue; "dominateur" can be interpreted to mean "dominating" or "overbearing," leaving up in the air the question of whether DeGaulle was a philo- or anti-Semite. DeGaulle often spoke in riddles, but it should be noted that the statement was made after Israel's '67 victory in the six-day war, and the surrounding context suggested that the onetime leader of the Free French was not greatly overjoyed about Israel's sudden military prominence in the Middle East.

Answer: Napoleon Bonaparte

Shopkeepers like Shakespeare, Churchill, Dr. Johnson, Dickens, Hogarth, Turner, Montgomery, etc., etc., etc. That noted shopkeeper, the Duke of Wellington, had an interesting little er, "mercantile exchange" with the Corsican in Belgium, at Waterloo.

Answer: Konrad Adenauer

Some are tougher on their own. Adednauer, who rebuilt West Germany after its moral and military collapse in the 40's, was a crusty and cynical student of human nature who despised "blood-and-soil" German nationalists and spared no epithet in condemning them. He was in many ways the antithesis of the stereotypical humorless German.

Answer: Richard Milhous Nixon

This from what was arguably the most pro-Israel president in history!
Nixon, a bundle of contradictions at every turn, even had a Jewish secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The slur was part of a long, rather paranoid discussion Nixon had with Billy Graham, in which Graham himself did not exactly come off as a paragon of religious tolerance, either.

Answer: Ronald Reagan

It was said prior to a press conference; supposedly Reagan was doing a sound check of a microphone. The Great Communicator may well have been our funniest president (sometimes unintentionally); this rather rash bit of impromptu black humor did little to diminish his popularity. Much easier to laugh now, of course, in light of the subsequent disintegration of the "Evil Empire."

Answer: George Herbert Walker Bush

This not terribly veiled shot at the Israeli lobby, with its attendant implications, probably ended up hurting Bush politically; observers, writer J.J. Goldberg preeminent among them, have suggested that this ended up costing Pa. Republican Dick Thornburgh a seat in the Senate shortly thereafter. Characterizing the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces as "one lonely little guy" does seem to strain credulity just the tiniest bit. (!)

Answer: Abraham Lincoln

Sadly, it was the Great Emancipator. The remainder of the quote is
eloquent: "...but in the right to eat the bread without leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he is my equal... and the equal of any other man," but the statement as a whole was of a piece with others he made during his campaign against Douglas. It is unfair to judge Lincoln by today's standards, but the statements did come from his mouth, and historians will no doubt continue to argue to what extent these expressed sentiments diminish Lincoln's standing as an American secular saint.

Answer: Franjo Tudjman

Former Croatian President Tudjman came off sounding like a Nazi apologist, but he had actually fought AGAINST Ante Pavelic's murderous pro-Nazi Ustashe regime in Croatia during WWII. What's more, the guy was a history professor! Tudjman did take care to
(re)distance himself from the Nazis before his death in 1999, but he had already made himself into a bit of a pariah, and no major European leader showed up at his funeral.

Answer: Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay

Most prominently by Sri Lankan president Junius R. Jayewardene, but others, both on and off the subcontinent, said it as well. Mrs. Gandhi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, was castigated by political opponents (with much justification) as an elitist Brahmin autocrat and fair-weather secularist who muzzled the press and persecuted religious minorities.

She was murdered by two members of her own bodyguard in 1984.