5 white U.S. Presidents who used the n-word

President Barack Obama made headlines Monday for using the n-word while describing how far the U.S. still has to go to tackle racism. Speaking on comedian Mark Maron’s WTF podcast, the president said:

Of course, as the nation’s first black president, Obama has an unprecedented license to use the n-word in such situations. He was talking publicly about the nation’s history of racism, not using the slur behind closed doors to denigrate his fellow African-Americans. But many of the white men who preceded him in office used the n-word in private, history shows. In their cases, the context was invariably ugly.

President Richard Nixon

Nixon didn’t limit his racism to African-Americans: he was recorded making anti-Semitic remarks, insulting Italians, Irish and others. Still, his comments about black people would have caused outrage had they been known at the time. As Kenneth O’Reilly reported in a 1995 book, for example, after his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger commented on the favorable press Secretary of State William Rogers received for a trip to Africa, Nixon was recorded responding:

President Lyndon Baines Johnson

Johnson pushed through landmark civil rights legislation, and often spoke movingly of the plight of black America. In private, though, he could be shockingly racist. For example, according to biographer Robert Dallek, when Johnson appointed the well-known Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, he told a young attorney that he had passed over a potentially better-qualified but obscure African-American candidate for the job because:

And biographer Robert Caro wrote in 2002 that Johnson once told a chauffeur:

While those accounts are based on interviews, Johnson’s used of the slur elsewhere is documented on tape.

President Harry Truman

Later in life, Truman openly used the n-word and anti-Semitic slurs in conversation with his biographer. As a young man, he in 1911 wrote a racist letter to his future wife, telling her:

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

FDR’s record on race was most visibly damaged by his internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But biographers have also detailed his casual racism toward African-Americans. As Geoffrey Ward wrote in his 1989 biography of FDR:

President Woodrow Wilson

An apologist for Southern racism, Wilson had a rotten record on race. As president of Princeton University, he wrote, “The whole temper and tradition of the place [Princeton] are such that no Negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems unlikely that the question will ever assume practical form.”

In a letter he wrote to a friend in 1901, he described an article he was wrote for Harper’s magazine in which he supported the Jim Crow policies of the South in the aftermath of reconstruction. He wrote: