• March 25, 1974
• Vol. 1
• No. 4

A Rabbi with Faith in the President

"We came down to Washington," says Rabbi Baruch Korff, chairman of the National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency, "so we could see the whites of the eyes of the President's detractors—and fire more accurately." Operating out of a small headquarters in Providence, R.I., the retired rabbi has already fired his initial volleys, underwriting 10 advertisements in 30 major newspapers across the country, each entitled "An Appeal to Fairness." He paid for the first—a $5,700 full page in last July's New York Times—by foregoing a vacation and borrowing from friends. Subsequently, he has raised more than $550,000, which has been plowed back into more ads. His committee has swelled to 210,000 members in 212 chapters. This month, with the possibility of impeachment growing stronger, Korff opened a modest, sixth-floor office in Washington, D.C., just five blocks from the White House.

Though the 60-year-old rabbi might seem to be an unlikely defender of President Nixon, he is no stranger to activism. During World War II, Korff helped round up $1 million which was paid to Nazi SS boss Heinrich Himmler to "buy" freedom for imprisoned Jews at $26 apiece. Later Korff became a militant supporter of the creation of Israel and was once arrested for attempting to "bomb" London with Zionist leaflets. He was also active in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Korff is only recently a Nixon supporter, having voted for John Kennedy in 1960 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He was won over by Nixon's foreign policy, he says, and voted for the President in 1972. But he insists his real commitment is to the presidency as an institution.

"In a nuclear age, with threats hovering about us, a strong President is indispensable to our survival," he says. "Without sounding paranoiac, I believe that there is a vindictive conspiracy, led by McGovern and his supporters and supported by much of the mass media, to impeach Nixon on the basis of un-proven allegations."

President Nixon, recognizing a friend in need when he sees one, has thanked Korff twice by letter and twice in person, most recently at a $100-a-plate luncheon last month. For his part the rabbi has not hesitated to bestow advice upon the President.

At one meeting he took Mr. Nixon aside to give him some man-to-man advice. "I told him," the rabbi recalls, "that he should have burned all the White House tapes as soon as their existence was disclosed, before anyone had a chance to subpoena them."

Korff doesn't smile as he tells how the President reacted to that ex post facto suggestion:

"The President said to me, 'Rabbi, where were you when I needed you?' "