The federal judge who has dismissed a series of antisemitism cases—by the Trump administration against Harvard, by Jewish students at MIT, and by a Harvard Business School student, Yoav Segev, who was assaulted by anti-Israel protesters—turns out to have his own history as a student anti-Israel and anti-war activist.
The judge, Richard Gaylore Stearns, also found in a separate case that “Harvard failed its Jewish students.” Yet the new information puts these rulings in a fresh light, at least for some who remember the context. “So 54 years later, Richard Stearns finally gets his revenge on the Jews,” is the way a longtime New York Post editorial writer, Eric Fettman, put it.
In 1972, “Rick” Stearns was a campaign aide to Senator George McGovern, the Democrat who would go on to lose to Richard Nixon in a 520 to 17 Electoral College landslide. Stearns’s history as an anti-Israel activist erupted into a campaign firestorm. Delegates favoring other candidates at the Democratic convention circulated background information about Stearns. Stearns himself called in the press and attempted to disavow his past positions. Advocates for Nixon used the material in the general election to portray McGovern as anti-Israel.
In June 1967, as vice president of the United States National Student Association, Stearns signed an “Open Letter to President Johnson by Middle East Specialists” that appeared as an ad in newspapers nationwide. It voiced “alarm” about what the ad called the “disaster” of “America’s losing the Arab world.” The ad demanded Israel’s “total military withdrawal” from the territories it had won in the Six Day War.
Just as Israel’s enemies do today, the 1967 ad-signers framed the demand as if they really had Israel’s interests at heart. “It is no favor to Israel to allow her in the flush of short-term military victory to deepen the divisions and antagonisms which separate her from those neighbors amidst whom she must dwell,” the ad said.
Just as Israel’s enemies do today, the 1967 ad-signers accused pro-Israel advocacy groups of hurting America’s interests. “Pressure groups, wherever they may be and however vocal, cannot be permitted to obscure America’s larger interests and transcending issues of world imperatives,” said the ad, from the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Middle East.”
Israel eventually withdrew from the Sinai peninsula in the context of the 1978 Camp David Accord making peace with Egypt. A total Israeli withdrawal in 1967 would have eliminated Egypt’s incentive for peacemaking and would also have given the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem back to the Arabs and their Soviet sponsors, who had lost the war.
A second newspaper ad, from a group called The Cambridge Committee Calling for Respect and Humility, appeared in the November 22, 1967 New York Times. “We appeal to the Government of Israel to respect the mosques and shrines of Islam,” said that ad. “Our appeal is on behalf of the peoples of the Third World especially and is a fraternal one made by individuals who identify intimately and respectfully with their traditions and creative goals.”
In a 1972 interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Stearns said he did not regret signing the Ad Hoc Committee ad, though he acknowledged it was “embarrassing” to Senator McGovern. He told the JTA he was puzzled by the Cambridge Committee ad and that he was not a member of the committee. The interview came as Stearns was under intense pressure. The article noted: “Harriet Davis, a Bronx delegate, said that materials he had signed would be sent to every American Jew, and called for his dismissal from McGovern’s staff.”
The flap attracted extensive attention at the time in Congress and in the press.
A Republican congressman from Illinois, William Springer, introduced into the Congressional Record an August 10, 1972 article from the Washington Post about “McGovern’s Problem with Jewish Voters”: “There have been complaints about one of McGovern’s top aides, 27-year-old Rick Stearns. As a leader in the National Student Association in 1967, he signed pro-Arab ads that appeared in several newspapers. Stearns recently was put in charge of McGovern’s campaign in Western states. ‘That’s got to be a plenty stupid decision,’ one prominent California politician said.”
A Republican congressman from New York, Carleton King, introduced into the Congressional Record remarks by Nixon’s communications director, Herbert Klein: “In regard to Rick Stearns, a staff member known to have signed an anti-Zionist tract as a student, Senator McGovern informed some disgruntled Democrats that the staffer would definitely be out of the California campaign. At the same point in time, he told others on his staff that the matter would be left strictly to the conscience of the Western States Coordinator himself. He is on the McGovern staff.”
Time magazine reported on it in August 1972 under the headline “The Jewish Swing to Nixon”: “They do not like the idea that McGovern’s youthful Western campaign chief, Rick Stearns, signed pro-Arab newspaper ads a few years ago.”
News coverage at the time described the Hubert Humphrey campaign circulating a leaflet in Jewish neighborhoods in Los Angeles faulting Stearns for having signed the newspaper ad, which was called “viciously anti-Israel.” A column by John P. Roche that appeared in several papers quoted a thank-you letter that Stearns wrote in 1965 to what Roche called a “virulently anti-Zionist” rabbi, Elmer Berger. (Anti-Zionist rabbis widely detested by the Jewish community but beloved by far-left Democratic political operatives long predate the Zohran Mamdani campaign.) Stearns wrote, “Your speech made the largest single impact of any we heard, particularly among our Arab guests. It affirmed very graphically in their minds the distinction Arabs, I believe, have attempted to maintain between Zionism on the one hand and the Jewish people on the other. Agreement with your position on Palestine, I think, is 100 per cent.”
Roche commented that “there is nothing illegal about Richard Stearns’ addiction to anti-Israeli causes. But it is the kind of eccentricity that legitimately upsets a number of Jewish Democrats, who wonder where McGovern will turn, if elected, for counsel.”
A September 1972 article by Milton Himmelfarb in Commentary considered the issue: “though people like Senator Ribicoff tell us that Richard Stearns is not really all that close to McGovern, should we be reassured when Stearns, with his anti-‘Zionist’ and pro-‘Palestinian’ record, is quoted (in New York magazine, July 3) as saying: ‘I would like to have the most responsible job in this Administration that I could have. I didn’t go through this for the simple exercise of nominating and electing a President’? (In the press of the campaign a new Stearns now says he agrees with the new McGovern.)”
One person not so upset by Stearns, or not upset enough not to place him on the federal bench, was Bill Clinton. For all Clinton’s New Democratic fans who hoped he would bring the party out of the McGovernite wilderness on foreign policy, and for all of his “shalom, chaver” warmth toward the memory of his friend Yitzhak Rabin, there was an element of Clinton and his administration that was less New Democrat and more New Left—still in thrall to McGovern and to the anti-Vietnam War passion that animated that 1972 campaign.
David Maraniss’s 1995 biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, describes Clinton sleeping on a rollaway bed in Rick Stearns’s second-floor room during the second year of their Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. In the fall of 1969, Clinton was “freeloading” on Stearns while working as “a full-blown antiwar organizer.” The two of them showed up at an antiwar protest outside the American embassy in London in November 1969. According to the Maraniss account, at an antiwar prayer service the next day, Stearns recited a sermon by John Donne— “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde”—and, with Clinton, “marched over … carrying small white crosses, which they placed on the steps of the embassy.”
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