Report Nixon, Agnew Praised Notorious Anti-jewish Editor

A report published here today by syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, that President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew had “paid high tribute to a notorious anti-Jewish editor in Pittsburgh,” drew a denial of anti-Semitism from the White House and an angry retort from Agnew’s press secretary. Anderson reported in the Washington Post that “effusive accolades” from Nixon and Agnew were published last May by “the proud editor Geno Szebedinsky in the same newspaper where he touted such scandalously anti-Semitic tracts as the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and ‘Myth of the Six Million.'”

Anderson Identified the paper as the Hungarian-language “Magyarsag,” in which, he added, Szebedinsky had printed charges that Jews “put to death thousands of the best Hungarians” and that “the Talmudic way of thinking” celebrates “orgies of lies, fraud and deception.” After Szebedinsky published the Nixon and Agnew letters, Anderson pointed out, the World Federation of Hungarian Jews charged that he had once worn the Nazi SS uniform and that the tributes to him were “deeply offending to the victims of Nazi barbarism.”

The Federation, Anderson reported, wrote to Nixon about the matter, but he did not reply. Anderson said he had “found no record” of Szebedinsky or of a second name he allegedly had used in Hungary, Janos Hortobagyl, in his examination of “extensive but incomplete archive files of SS officers.”

TRIBUTE WILL NOT BE RETRACTED

In a telephone interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Agnew’s press secretary, Victor Gold, declared that the Vice President associated himself with the White House statement and that “we are not going to retract our wire,” which was “handled in a routine way.” “Any implication of any sort of anti-Semitism in this is ludicrous,” said Gold, who is Jewish.

He declined to name the “reputable source” who had solicited the tributes, observing: “This happened six months ago.” Disclosing that he