Richard Marius - Al Gore-Israel Controversy

Al Gore-Israel Controversy

In 1995, Vice President Al Gore personally offered Marius a White House speechwriting position heading into the 1996 presidential campaign. Marius had previously written, without pay, several speeches for his fellow Tennessee native, including a 1993 Madison Square Garden oration for the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and parts of Gore's 1994 Harvard commencement address attacking the "culture of cynicism." Marius accepted the offer to join the White House, took an 18-month leave of absence from Harvard, rented out his home, and prepared to move to Washington, DC. But Gore rescinded the offer after New Republic editor-in-chief and part-time Harvard social studies lecturer Martin Peretz pressured the vice president to reverse Marius' hiring.

In a favorable 1992 review of the book A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village by Helen Winternitz, Marius had written this in Harvard's alumni magazine:

Many Israelis, the Holocaust fresh in their memory, believe that that horror gives them the right to inflict horror on others. Winternitz's account of the brutality of the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, is eerily similar to the stories of the Gestapo ... —arbitrary arrests in the middle of the night, imprisonment without trial, beatings, refined tortures, murder, punishment of the families of suspects.

Peretz, a passionate supporter of Israel, sent Gore a copy of the 1992 review, accusing Marius of anti-Semitism. He told Gore, his former student when Gore was an undergraduate at Harvard, to reverse the hiring. Gore complied. According to press accounts, a Gore staffer called Marius and asked him to announce that he had changed his mind about accepting the position. But when reporters called him, Marius declined to pretend that the decision had been his.

Peretz told the Washington Post:

It's a very simple matter. What Richard Marius wrote did not go unnoticed in Cambridge and beyond, because it was the Harvard alumni magazine. When you make the Nazi analogy, it cannot be tossed off as, 'Oh, how silly of me to have done this.' When you write that, you believe it. So, once the vice president knew, he had to figure out if he wanted someone who believed that on his staff.

Marius allowed that his Gestapo-Shin Bet comparison may have been "a little bit extreme," but he refused to disavow it, insisting that he was criticizing only the harsh tactics of the secret police and otherwise supported the state of Israel. Marius said he "never had an anti-Semitic thought in his life" and that he was "just floored" by the turn of events: "I'm just sorry about it because I believe I could have helped the vice president."

Many observers have said that Peretz's charge of anti-Semitism on the part of Marius—who castigated figures such as Martin Luther for their anti-Semitic writings in his scholarly work—was false. Marius claimed that Peretz had seen Marius as a rival ever since 1993, when Gore largely chose to use Marius' image-rich Holocaust speech for the Warsaw Uprising event, keeping only a paragraph from an alternate, statistics-laden speech Peretz had submitted to Gore. University of Tennessee historian Milton Klein, whose European relatives were murdered during the Holocaust in Hungary, said that he and Marius had often argued about the Israel-Palestine issue during their 26 years of friendship, but Marius had never said a single thing that indicated any anti-Semitic feelings. In Gore: A Political Life, ABC News correspondent Bob Zelnick wrote that Marius had no history of anti-Semitism and that "most felt that Marius had been wronged and that the vice president had acted to keep Peretz happy rather than to protect his office."