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“Don’t turn the delegates into robots”: A History of Conventions9/5/2008
“Don’t turn the delegates into robots”: A History of Conventions

In this final segment to my History of Conventions series, I sit down with journalist Elisabeth Drue.  Ms. Drue is known affectionately as the “Dean” of election reporting.  She has spent the last 40 years documenting the many swerves and u-turns of the campaign trail. 

Q: Let’s start in the beginning.  There weren’t political parties in the early days of the Republic, correct?  So, no political conventions.  What did the founding fathers think of political parties?

Elisabeth Drue: George Washington opposed political parties.  Thomas Jefferson opposed political parties.  There was this overwhelming feeling among the founding fathers that political parties would lead to division and factionalism.  Guess what?  They were right.  Alexander Hamilton – I kid you not – Alexander Hamilton thought that political parties were “akin to yeast infections.”

Q: Yeast infections?  What did Alexander Hamilton know about yeast infections?

Elisabeth Drue: Some say he picked one up from Maria Reynolds, his mistress.  Not only did the Hamilton/Reynolds affair become the first sex scandal in American history, with Reynolds’ husband blackmailing Hamilton, but Alexander Hamilton caught the fungus.

Q: And fungi are akin to political parties?

Elisabeth Drue: In Hamilton’s estimation.

Q: When was the first convention and why did the idea catch on?

Elisabeth Drue: You have to go back to 1832.  There was a movement known as the freemasons, still around today of course.  Many citizens accused the freemasons of being a secret society that acted as a shadow government.  There actually was some truth to the accusation.  Henry Clay, for instance, the great senator from Kentucky, led the freemasons.  Secretly, of course.  The freemasons of the 19th century were like the Bohemian Grove of modern day America.
     Anyway, the anti-Masons formed a political party to counter the freemasons.  They held a convention.  Why did the idea catch on?  There was democracy at the convention.  On the floor of the convention you had delegates from all over the country, from the West – Illinois and Kentucky in those days – from Congress, from the East.  It was very much a representation of the overall distribution of power in America.  The anti-Mason convention illustrated the electoral topography of the growing and expanding United States.

Q: Interesting.  No wonder why the convention system caught on.  It actually gave democracy a more blue-collar feel than the caucus system.  What happened to the anti-Masons?

Elisabeth Drue: The anti-Masons convened a convention for the 1940 presidential elections.  The anti-Masons elected William Henry Harrison for president.  The Whig Party then came along and nominated the same man.  The anti-Masons couldn’t compete with the Whigs, so rather than nominating another candidate the party folded into the Whigs.  The Whigs of course would fold into the Republicans.

Q: And William Henry Harrison would die a month into his administration.

Elisabeth Drue: Yes, but here’s where things get interesting from a historical perspective.  The anti-Masons nominated Daniel Webster to be Harrison’s vice president.  The Whigs nominated John Tyler.  John Tyler was from Virginia and supported the slaveocracy.  Daniel Webster was from New England and had abolitionist leanings.  Had Webster become president following Harrison’s untimely death, who knows how events would have swung.  Webster might be the name we venerate today, rather than Lincoln.

Q: Fascinating.  Let’s get back to something you touched on.  The convention system in your estimation offered greater democracy.  That’s not the image we have of party leaders meeting in smoke-filled back rooms to decide nominees.

Elisabeth Drue: True.  And there’s no doubt, party leaders did indeed meet in smoke-filled back rooms.  Major decisions were made there.  At the Republican Convention of 1920, for instance, the delegates were deadlocked.  Party leaders then retreated to a back room, smoke-filled.  The leaders compromised and threw their votes to a senator from Ohio.  He’d been a dark horse in the days leading up to the convention.  But that’s how Warren Harding got his party’s nomination.

Q: Is that more democratic than the caucus system?

Elisabeth Drue: I would argue yes.  In the caucus system party leaders – mainly congressmen and the monied elite – would gather and appoint the nominee.  In the convention system there were floor votes.  Yes, there were back room dealings.  But, concurrently, there were ballot votes, sometimes hundreds of them.  So there was simultaneous democracy and oligarchy, and that is what defines American democracy. 

Q: But what about meritocracy?  Shouldn’t the definition of American democracy include quality of candidate?  Sarah Palin is the most recent example of our lack of meritocracy, but what about Warren Harding?  He looked the part of the president.  His portrait suggested presidentiality.  Is that enough?

Elisabeth Drue: He also ran on a promise of normalcy, which after the First World War was exactly what the country wanted.

Q: How many ballots did it take for the Republican Convention of 1920 to elect Harding?

Elisabeth Drue: Ten.  But that’s nothing.  It took 49 ballots to elect Franklin Pierce in 1852.  It took a stunning 103 ballots for the Democrats to elect John Davis in 1924.

Q: Who?

Elisabeth Drue: John W. Davis.  He was a congressman right before World War I and President Wilson’s ambassador to England during the war.  An important diplomatic post.  He might have been America’s best diplomat.  In the 1924 presidential election he lost to the incumbent Calvin Coolidge, who took over from the deceased – perhaps poisoned – Warren Harding.

Q: All I know about Calvin Coolidge is that he was Ronald Reagan’s favorite president.

Elisabeth Drue (laughing): Let me tell you a little known Ronald Reagan/convention story.  In 1976, President Gerald Ford went to the Republican Convention in Kansas City not sure who would be his vice president.  The main reason for this was that the Republicans hadn’t definitely decided that Gerald Ford would be their presidential nominee.  Ronald Reagan was very much in the mix.  In fact, when the Republicans gathered on the floor for the ballot, they elected Ford by less than 100 votes.  To unify the party Ford went to Reagan to help him select his vice president.  Reagan chose John Wayne. 

Q: Really?

Elisabeth Drue: Yes, and Ford chose Bob Dole.  Maybe John Wayne would have helped Ford win the election.

Q: I’ve read that Ford lost the general election not because of Jimmy Carter but because of Ronald Reagan.

Elisabeth Drue: Reagan exposed Gerald Ford during the primary season.  But Ford didn’t lose because of Reagan.  Ford lost because he pardoned Nixon. 

Q: That’s not what Gerald Ford believed.  Gerald Ford blamed the Reagan challenge.

Elisabeth Drue: Well, certainly a case can be made.  But if that’s the case, we might blame Ted Kennedy for challenging and exposing Jimmy Carter.  In 1980, there was a movement by Kennedy to release the Carter delegates from their pledge to vote for Carter.  At the convention in New York there were delegates who wore buttons.  The buttons had a picture of a robot with a slash through it.  “Don’t turn the delegates into robots,” the buttons read.

Q: “Don’t turn the delegates into robots,” that’s terrific.  I don’t remember that.

Elisabeth Drue: You’re too young to remember.  But Americans like yourself have become very skeptical of conventions, of delegates, of politicians.  With good reason, of course.  But before the skepticism, the convention system acted as a screening process, what today we call the vetting process.  In the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries delegates were mainly party leaders, party workers, officeholders.  That meant that they worked with the candidates.  They knew the candidates.  Their likes and dislikes, their personalities, their loyalties.  Today, we don’t know the candidates.  We know commercials.  In the old system, the delegates screened the candidates for the electorate.  There was public trust in that relationship.  There’s no public trust in the relationship today.

Q: Can you pinpoint when the change actually took place?  When did the system begin to put forth candidates who shouldn’t qualify for the presidency?

Elisabeth Drue: Well, that’s a tough question.  Remember, Harry Truman entered the White House with little experience, a senator in his second term, a vice president in his second month in office.  And look how that turned out.  Truman became a top-notch president.  What we wouldn’t do for another Truman today.  But, to answer your question, I think you have to take a look at 1960.  You had a very popular candidate in John Kennedy.  Popular among the American electorate, I should say.  Delegates however distrusted Kennedy.  These were the old school delegates, party leaders, officeholders.  Kennedy served in congress for a total of 14 years and he was basically an absentee congressman.  He didn’t take his job seriously.  His legislative record was abysmal…. 
     1960 saw one of the first influential primary seasons.  John Kennedy ran in seven Democratic primaries.  That’s it.  He won them all.  And that’s how he made his case to the Democratic Party.  But, you had these competing forces: the old school delegates from the old convention system meeting the new system, the electorate participating in the primaries.  Kennedy wouldn’t have won in the old convention system.  The delegates who knew Kennedy from working with him in the congress would have put forth Lyndon Johnson.  But in the new system, the primary system, the electorate went Kennedy. 

Q: I wonder if Bill Clinton would have fallen into the same category.  Would he have won in the old convention system?

Elisabeth Drue: No way.  In 1992, the old school delegates had no interest in Clinton.  An Arkansas governor with a reputation as a playboy?  He was very much in the mold of Kennedy, very much an affectation of the primary system.  If the old convention system reigned in 1992, the Democrats would have put forth another name.  Al Gore.  He was by far the most respected man among the old school delegates.

Q: And today?  What would the old convention system do with Barack Obama?

Elisabeth Drue: I think Hillary would have made her case.  Much like Kennedy in 1960, Hillary won the major primaries.  Both Kennedy and Hillary won California, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the states needed in November.  The old convention system would have elevated Hillary based on that compelling record.

Q: Isn’t the Democratic Party’s conception of superdelegates a throwback to the convention system?

Elisabeth Drue: Yes it is.  But the superdelegates are there to support the primary system, to enforce the primary system.  It’s not like the old days.

Q: Did you support Hillary during the primary?

Elisabeth Drue: I did.  Vociferously.

Q: Will you vote for Barack Obama in November?

Elisabeth Drue: You know, up until last week I hadn’t decided.  I wouldn’t vote for McCain but I thought I might leave my ballot blank.  Now, I’ll vote for Obama.

Q: What happened last week?

Elisabeth Drue: McCain named his running mate.  Sarah Palin is to politics what Katie Couric is to journalism.  It’s fine to have her on an early morning talk show, or stashed away up there as governor of Alaska, but you don’t want her running the evening news…

Q: Or the nation’s business.

Elisabeth Drue: Or the nation’s business.  The appointment of Palin is an embarrassment to women.  Women should be nauseated by the Republicans’ obvious tokenism.  It’s paternalism all over again.  What was the feminist revolution about with this sort of gut rot?

Q: You sound like a voter, not an objective journalist.

Elisabeth Drue: Journalism has changed, Brian.  Just look at the anchor on the CBS evening news.  It’s all about lights, camera, sensuality.  Who will smile wider for the camera when Katie Couric interviews Sarah Palin?

Elisabeth Drue is an award-winning reporter and author.  She has covered every election for the Washington News from 1968 to the present.  She has written books on many of the elections, including 1968: Hubert Horatio Humphrey and the Losing of the White House and There You Go Again: the Coming of Ronald Reagan.  She also is the author of books on two presidents, Reagan’s World: The Unmasking of the 1980s and Bill and Hillary: Turbulence and Zeal, and one vice president, Dick: the Life and Lust of a Vice President.  All of her books are available at amazon.com and many of her articles are available in the archives of the Washington News.

(To celebrate the summer of 2008, a summer of conventions after all, I am writing a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century.  To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below.  You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.)
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“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?": A History of Conventions, 20048/28/2008
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?": A History of Conventions, 2004

Senator John Kerry stood on the raised podium.  The date was Thursday, July 29, 2004.  Below Kerry, on the floor of the Fleet Center in Boston, the Democratic delegates went exuberant.  “Kerry, Kerry, Kerry,” the delegates chanted.
     The exuberance lasted.  Senator Kerry had to put up his hands, asking for quiet, once, twice, three separate times.
     The exuberance lasted.  Senator Kerry had to say “thank you,” in another attempt to quiet the crowd, once, twice, thrice – actually 17 consecutive times.
     When the delegates quieted, finally, Senator Kerry lifted his right hand to his forehead as a salute.  Behind him, on the huge video screen, Kerry’s behavior could be viewed in quadruple size.
     “I’m John Kerry,” the Senator began his nominating speech, “and I’m reporting for duty.”
     The delegates went exuberant.  “Kerry, Kerry, Kerry,” the delegates chanted.  But right there, according to Elisabeth Drue, a journalist known affectionately as “Dean Drue” for her books on many of the national conventions of the 20th and 21st centuries, John Kerry “lost the election.”
     Drue continued, “The Vietnamization of the 2004 Democratic Convention made Kerry into a hypocrite.  It didn’t take George Bush to do that.  It didn’t take Karl Rove and his swiftboat reeducation.  John Kerry did it all on his own.  And his surrogates didn’t help matters, either.”
     In fact, every major speechmaker at the Convention (with one exception, Ron Reagan and his plea for stem cell research) – from President Carter to the Clintons to Al Gore to Ted Kennedy – mentioned Kerry in terms of Vietnam.
     In his speech Bill Clinton said, “When they sent those swiftboats up the river in Vietnam and they told them their job was to draw hostile fire, to wave the American flag and bait the enemy to come out and fight, John Kerry said: Send me.”
     In his vice presidential nominating speech John Edwards said, “When John Kerry graduated college, he volunteered for military service, volunteered to go to Vietnam, volunteered to captain a swiftboat, one of the most dangerous duties in Vietnam that you could have.  As a result, he was wounded, honored for his valor…  They saw him reach into the river and pull one of his men to safety and save his life.  They saw him in the heat of the battle make a decision in a split second to turn his boat around, drive it through an enemy position, and chase down the enemy to save his crew.  Decisive, strong: Is this not what we need in a commander in chief?”
     “YES!” the delegates screamed.
     However, Elisabeth Drue argued, that message didn’t jive with John Kerry’s overriding theme on Vietnam.  “In 1971 John Kerry went in front of a Congressional committee,” she explained.  “By then, he’d returned from the war and become an invaluable voice in the Vietnam protests.  He called for cut and run.  His message to the congressional committee was clear: wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Kerry railed at the president of the United States, Richard Nixon.  In 1968, Nixon had campaigned on a platform called Vietnamization: the slow withdrawal of troops, with the last soldier coming home by the end of Nixon’s first term in office.  ‘How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?’ Kerry asked the congressional committee.  His question took their breath away.  His question exposed the Vietnamization policy for what it was: a façade, a fraud.  Covertly, quietly, Nixon wanted to keep the war going.  He believed in the policies of containment.”
     Flash forward to 2004.  In his nominating speech at the Convention, Kerry called Iraq, “The wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  His plan for Iraq, however, mirrored Nixon’s stated plan in Vietnam: the slow withdrawal of troops, with the last soldier returning home by the end of Kerry’s first term in office.
     “What John Kerry did is the Vietnamization of Iraq, or Iraqization,” Elisabeth Drue argued.  “What John Kerry did is Vietnam, part II.  Never mind the almost daily suicide attacks in Iraq in 2004, including a pick-up truck laden with 500 kilograms of explosives crashing into the main gate at the U.S. headquarters.  Never mind Condoleezza Rice admitting that the intelligence used to identify weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq may have been wrong.  John Kerry did not argue for cut and run, as he did in 1971.  That might have been politically effective and ethically consistent.  It might have showed his moral compass – something he spoke a great deal about at the Convention.  Instead he offered the Vietnamization version, the Iraqization.  It didn’t take Bush and Rove long to realize that Kerry had morphed into Richard Nixon.”
     “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”  Such a salient question.  Someone in the Kerry camp should have asked the candidate that question before the Democratic Convention of 2004.  Nobody did and one of the most vigorous voices of the Vietnam protest of the early 1970s began to sound a lot like Tricky Dick.  By the end of the campaign the Bush camp had taken the magnetism out of Kerry’s moral compass.  And John Kerry, the most self-congratulatory of senators, was forced to congratulate George Bush on his reelection.

(To celebrate the summer of 2008, a summer of conventions after all, I am writing a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century.  This is the penultimate column.  To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below.  You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.)
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Roosevelt the Byzantine: A History of Conventions, 19448/20/2008
Roosevelt the Byzantine: A History of Conventions, 1944

In this convention series I’ve purposefully tried to stay modern.  The definition for the modern convention has to do with the encroachment of the primary system.  Various states held primaries throughout the first two hundred years of our democracy but the system took hold in 1968.  The tug-of-war between Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, with some delegates remaining loyal to the deceased Bobby Kennedy, turned the tide from convention system to primary system.
     That tug-of-war is a story for another day.  In today’s column I’m breaking my own rules.  I’m going back to an earlier time before the primary system governed.  With both Senators McCain and Obama certain to appoint their running mates any day now (I've published this column early, on Wednesday, August 20, apparently hours before Obama makes his choice known), I thought it would be useful to look back on how the greatest president of the 20th century chose his running mate, who would become the second greatest president of the 20th century.
     In today’s column, I’m going back to 1944.
     President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a man who couldn’t say no to anyone and that led, in the words of the great Roosevelt historian, James McGregor Burns, to “a Byzantine course” in selecting the man who would be his third and final running mate.
     As the savage success of June and D-Day turned into July and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Roosevelt encouraged a number of candidates to politic for the vice president position.  The President encouraged the candidacy of the sitting Vice President, Henry Wallace.  The Vice President was an ardent New Dealer and his support emanated from the essential Roosevelt coalition.  Northern urban liberals, blacks, organized labor.  Wallace however brought with him the baggage of the liberal idealist.  In the conservative South, his candidacy was viewed as a liability.  The Bronx’s Ed Flynn, arguably the most powerful political boss in the country, cautioned Roosevelt that renominating Wallace might mean a loss of two to three million votes.
     Simultaneously, the President encouraged the candidacy of James Byrnes.  Byrnes, a former Senator from South Carolina, a former Supreme Court Justice and the Coordinator of War Mobilization, was known as the “Assistant President.”  His résumé overshadowed Vice President Wallace and marked him as the front-runner.  Of that status, Byrnes remarked, “Now, partner, let’s not get too excited on this vice president business.  I know that man [FDR] more than anybody else.”
     Byrnes himself didn’t know how true his words were.  While publicly encouraging Byrnes, Roosevelt received a report from political boss Ed Flynn.  Byrnes satisfied the conservative southern requirement.  Byrnes however came with racial undertones.  In 1938, he led the fight against proposed federal anti-lynching legislation (championed by Eleanor Roosevelt).  On the senate floor he’d said, “The Negro has not only come into the Democratic Party, but the Negro has come into control of the Democratic Party.”
     Ed Flynn cautioned Roosevelt that nominating Byrnes might mean a loss of “200,000 Negro voters in New York alone.”  Perhaps even more injurious to the candidacy of James Byrnes, labor found him unacceptable. 
     Simultaneously the President encouraged the candidacy of House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, the candidacy of Illinois Senator Scott Lucas, the candidacy of Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky, the candidacy of Paul McNutt, the High Commissioner to the Philippines. 
     All of these men wanted the job.  The reason was readable on the face of Roosevelt.  “He was a dying man,” according to the great Roosevelt biographer, Frank Freidel.  “In March of 1944 the President consulted with a cardiologist.  After a thorough investigation, the cardiologist reported that given proper care Roosevelt might live another year.”
     That didn’t stop Roosevelt from encouraging all candidates.  He claimed Vice President Wallace was indispensable because of his knowledge of international affairs.  Simultaneously, he told Byrnes, you are “the best qualified man in the whole outfit” and “you must not get out of the race.  If you stay in, you are sure to win.”
     Simultaneously, he encouraged the candidacy of Supreme Court Justice William Douglas.  Douglas however believed that campaigning for a political seat was beneath the stature of a sitting justice.  In addition, his backers were aiming at a presidential run in 1948.  Secretly, Douglas wanted to be drafted at the 1944 Convention. 
     All of this commotion came to a head when Vice President Wallace confronted Roosevelt.  On July 12, while out campaigning for Roosevelt, he called the President.  “I am looking ahead with pleasure to the result of next week and the Convention,” Wallace said.
     Roosevelt replied, “While I cannot put it just that way in public, I hope it will be the same old team.”
     Roosevelt received another phone call.  James Byrnes heard a rumor that Roosevelt favored Justice William Douglas.  To Byrnes, Roosevelt responded, “That is all wrong.  Will you go on and run?  After all, Jimmy, you are close to me personally…”
     A few days before the Convention, Roosevelt endorsed Douglas.  Simultaneously, a Gallup poll asked Democratic voters for their choice.  Sixty-five percent favored Vice President Wallace.  Seventeen percent favored Senator Barkley.  Three percent favored Byrnes.  Two percent favored Justice Douglas.
     Of all the candidates up for vice president, only one man had taken his name out of the running.  His name was Harry Truman.  “The Vice President,” Truman said, “simply presides over the senate and sits around hoping for a funeral.  It is a very high office which consists entirely of honor and I don’t have any ambition to hold an office like that.”
     Told of Truman’s ambivalence, James Byrnes phoned the Senator and asked if Truman would give his nominating speech.  Truman immediately accepted.  Not more than five minutes later, Alben Barkley phoned the Senator and asked if Truman would give his nominating speech.  Truman declined.
     Then came the note.  Roosevelt wrote to Bob Hannegan, an ardent Truman supporter and the chairman of the Democratic Party, “Dear Bob, You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas.  I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.”
     As the Democratic Convention began on July 19, the note was leaked to the press.  So was a story, perhaps apocryphal.  Historian James McGregor Burns wrote, “In the original note, according to the rumors, Roosevelt had mentioned Douglas’s name before Truman’s and only after some fervent convincing by Hannegan had the names been switched.”
     To view the note, located at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, is to see a rather clean piece of paper.  No cross outs and additions.  No eraser marks. 
     Truman seemed to be the model candidate.  He came from a border state and he enjoyed good relations with Southern Democratic Senators.  He was the favorite of Party bosses.  In the past, he’d supported many of Roosevelt’s New Deal measures.  He was attractive to labor.  And for a physically enervated president like Roosevelt, Truman’s reputation as an energetic campaigner carried great weight.  Perhaps best of all in Roosevelt’s mind, Truman was the least bothersome.  Roosevelt wasn’t looking for the best man to succeed him; he wanted the least amount of trouble.
     While the delegates on the first night of the Convention overwhelmingly nominated Franklin Roosevelt for president, the real politics occurred in a hotel room.  Harry Truman sat on one bed.  Bob Hannegan, speaking by phone to Roosevelt in Hyde Park, sat on the other.  “Whenever Roosevelt used the telephone,” Truman later said, “he always talked in such a strong voice that it was necessary for the listener to hold the receiver away from his ear to avoid being deafened, so I found it possible to hear both ends of the conversation.”
     “Have you got that fellow lined up?” Roosevelt roared.
     “No,” Hannegan replied.  “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.”
     “Tell the Senator,” Roosevelt said, “that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party by staying out, he can.  But he knows as well as I what that might mean at this dangerous time in the world.”  Roosevelt then hung up the phone.
     Privately to Hannegan, Truman exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!  But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place.”
     Good question.  Roosevelt’s tactics put a lid on the ability of any one person to rise.  In that way, nobody could oppose him.  His tactics, biographer Frank Freidel wrote, “incited charges that he had been a treacherous, aged tyrant lopping off the heads of those who might dare challenge him.”
     In the end, though, Roosevelt made the right choice.  Roosevelt died nine months after the Democratic Convention of 1944, and thirteen months after a cardiologist predicted he would live another year.  Truman went on to a presidency that redefined America, both internally and abroad.
     Of course, Truman’s presidency ended in talk of impeachment and the lowest approval rating in the history of presidents, thanks to Korea and the firing of General MacArthur, and a president forced to abandon his reelection campaign after losing to a fellow Democrat in the New Hampshire primary.  But that’s a story for another day.
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“Duty, Honor, Country”: A History of Conventions, 19888/14/2008
“Duty, Honor, Country”: A History of Conventions, 1988

Late morning.  Tuesday, August 16, 1988.  Two men met at the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station twenty miles south of downtown New Orleans.  Their meeting took place in the air condition, to avoid the aluminum foil-like grip of Louisiana humidity.
     The meeting couldn’t have been any more scripted.  Ronald Reagan, in a dark suit with an American flag pin stuck to his lapel, grinned for the many cameras present.  His deputy for the last eight years, George H.W. Bush, waved in Bush fashion.  He stretched out an arm.  He aimed the arm in the direction of the crowd.  He held his hand there for a moment.  The Bush wave was a study in stop sign stiltedness.
     The many television cameras and the many print journalists didn’t pay attention to Bush.  This was President Reagan’s last moment on the world stage.  The evening before, on the first night of the Republican Convention, Reagan gave the crowd more of what they wanted: Reagan Teflon.  After eight years in office, he stated, it was “time for a change.  Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are the change.”  Rather than explaining that leap of judgment, Reagan, being Reagan, then told the crowd to “go out and win one for the Gipper!”
     His speech to the convention was more than just affectation.  According to Elisabeth Drue, author of Reagan’s World: The Unmasking of the 1980s, Reagan “was in the throes of the dementia that accompanied Alzheimer’s.  He thought he was the Gipper.  Of course, most of America thought Reagan was the Gipper too.”
     At the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station President Reagan and Vice President Bush shook hands.  The television cameras caught the Vice President, and Republican nominee for president, whispering into his boss’s ear.  “George Bush whispered the name of his running mate into Reagan’s ear,” revealed Elisabeth Drue, an eyewitness at the air station and a journalist known affectionately as “Dean Drue” for her books on many of the national conventions of the latter half of the 20th century.  “Bush hadn’t told anybody yet, including the running mate.  The look on Reagan’s face was priceless.  It can be summed up with one word: Who?”
     Another eyewitness, James A. Baker, a loyal cadre of both Presidents Reagan and Bush, disagreed with Dean Drue’s assessment.  He asserted, “Ronald Reagan smiled, patted his friend George on the shoulder and said, ‘Good choice.’”
     The video of the moment has been forever preserved.  A copy exists at the Museum of Broadcast Communications.  According to the video, Reagan did not smile.  Reagan did not pat his friend on the shoulder.  Reagan did not offer any words.  Reagan, to judge from the tape, had never heard of the man just whispered.
     Elisabeth Drue explained, “Vice President Bush whispered the full name into the President’s ear: James Danforth Quayle.  The name threw Reagan for a loop.” 
     Dan Quayle, as of the summer of 1988, had been in the House of Representative for two terms (1977-1981) and the senate for eight years (1981-1989).  In those twelve years, Quayle had not attached his name to a single piece of legislation.  Ronald Reagan knew only the most visible and distinguished legislators.  Quayle wouldn’t have entered his lexicon.
     Reagan of course had a unique ability to cover for his ignorance.  He did what he normally did in the given situation.  He smiled broader.  He created a smile that could light up the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi to New Orleans.
     As Reagan boarded Air Force One for the ride back to the capital, Vice President Bush took a steamboat called the Natchez down the Mississippi.  The 90-minute cruise would arrive at Spanish Plaza, the gateway to downtown New Orleans.
     James Baker, then simultaneously Reagan’s Treasury Secretary and Bush’s campaign chairman, was on the Natchez.  “George told his inner circle of his desire to nominate Dan,” Baker wrote in his memoirs.  “I remember being impressed by Quayle’s positives.  He was young, handsome, and conservative, and he came from the heartland.”
     While these characteristics of Quayle certainly sound accurate, they were “banal,” to quote Elisabeth Drue, “and unremarkable.  Why did George Bush nominate the jejune Dan Quayle?  The reasons were purely instinctual.  Dan Quayle reminded George Bush of himself at an earlier age.  Like Bush, Quayle came from a prominent family, and yet he’d gone on to make a name for himself.  Like Bush, Quayle was a competitive fighter.  He’d taken on an incumbent senator, the liberal icon Birch Bayh, and knocked him out.  Bush was impressed.  He thought he could groom Quayle to be the new Bush, the legacy.  At that time of course he didn’t know that his son George would amount to anything other than a failed oilman.  James Baker, it should be noted, completely disagreed with Bush on Quayle.  And he voiced his displeasure on the Natchez.”
     According to Dean Drue, Baker thought Quayle was too green, politically.  “He argued for another name on the short list,” Drue stated.  “Bob Dole.”
     For explanation’s sake, I emailed James Baker through the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.  I received an anonymous response, from a “James Baker spokesman.”  “The Secretary has nothing to say,” the spokesman wrote, “except what’s in his books.”
     Baker wrote two books, the tedious The Politics of Diplomacy and the insensate Work Hard, Study… and Keep Out Of Politics!  (Not only does the second book lack reason and insight but consider the awkward title.  What was the publisher thinking?  I emailed this question to G.P. Putnam’s Sons.  I received an anonymous response, from “the editors.”  “James Baker’s a powerful man and what James Baker wants, James Baker gets,” the editors wrote.  Then the editors went a little catty.  “Personally, I think it’s an unwieldy, extremely amateurish title that essentially killed sales.  If a reader doesn’t have the time to pronounce the title, how can you expect the reader to buy the book?”  Good question.)
     In the book with the “unwieldy, extremely amateurish” title, James Baker recalled Bush’s actions after announcing his running mate to his inner circle: “George soon called Dan and told him that he was his first and only choice…  Our schedule that day called for us to take the Natchez down the Mississippi to the Spanish Plaza...  Quayle was instructed to meet us at the dock.”
     Senator Quayle was not the only person waiting at the dock.  Spanish Plaza, according to eyewitness Elisabeth Drue, was “overflowing with reveling Republicans.  They were led by one guy who carried a sign.  The sign was for the Vice President’s eyes and it concerned his vice presidential running mate.” 
     “Dad,” the sign read, “you can tell me!”  George W. Bush held the sign. 
     James Baker described George W.’s behavior as “ever-playful.”
     Elisabeth Drue described George W.’s behavior as “puerile… for a teenager.  And W. was 42-years-old.”
     According to Drue, the Quayles – Dan and his wife Marilyn – had to push through the crowd to get to the stage.  “Catastrophe was averted only because the Secret Service parted the crowd like the Red Sea,” she explained.
     Dan Quayle described his feelings that day.  According to his autobiography, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir, he felt “absolutely giddy with happiness” and “a load of adrenaline.”  That mixture apparently accounted for his behavior. 
     Eyewitness Elisabeth Drue described the scene in the Washington Post the next day.  Quayle “jumped up on the stage.  He circled the Vice President like a young warrior doing a war dance around his chief.  He then grabbed his benefactor by the shoulder and repeatedly hugged his arm, gamboling around the platform like the jackpot winner on a television game show.  Bush looked on a bit thunderstruck at the display of juvenile enthusiasm he had unleashed.”
     Another eyewitness to the event, James Baker, wrote, “I was surprised by, but only mildly concerned about, Dan’s excess exuberance.  Would that Quayle’s enthusiasm had been our only problem.”
     Within hours a story came out on Quayle.  Did he use his family connections to join Indiana’s National Guard and thus avoid possible combat service in Vietnam?  Quayle himself fanned the flames.  Asked why he had opted for the Guard, Quayle innocently answered that he wanted to get married and go to law school.  He then added, “I did not know in 1969 that I would be asked this question today.”
     Dan Quayle made this statement in the late afternoon.  A few hours later, a Vietnam veteran addressed the Republican Convention.  “I was born into a family with a long military tradition,” he began his speech.  “My grandfather attended the United States Naval Academy.  My father attended the Naval Academy.  And I attended the Naval Academy.  Even as a Navy man, I will never forget my first visit to West Point and how impressed I was at its beauty, especially the Chapel.  I vividly remember seeing a plague on the wall of the Chapel inscribed with 156 names.  These are the names of the young men who graduated from West Point in 1950.  That year, North Korea attacked South Korea, and these young men gave their lives in combat, in the defense of someone else’s freedom.  At the bottom of that plague is the West Point motto: ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’  ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’ let’s reflect on those words and how they apply to us…”
     The man’s name was John McCain.  In 1988, McCain was a senator two years into his first term.  He was also on George Bush’s short list for the vice presidential nomination.  According to Scott Selly, a McCain aide at the time, “Before Dan Quayle came popping out on the dock in New Orleans, the last name eliminated for consideration by the AP wire was John McCain.”
     Further, according to Selly and revealed here for the first time, the Bush campaign made an emergency phone call to the McCain camp as the senator spoke to the convention.  Scott Selly recalled the gist of the phone call: “Would McCain accept the vice presidential nomination if Bush dropped Quayle.  Well, I didn’t have to interrupt the Senator’s convention speech to ask his opinion.  ‘Yes,’ I cried.  ‘Of course.’”
     Scott Selly never notified his boss of the phone call.  According to John McCain, he clearly made the AP wire’s short list, but the Bush campaign never contacted him about the running mate job.
     When asked who in the Bush campaign made the emergency call to the McCain camp, Scott Selly responded with one name, “Baker.”
     Is Selly credible?  Soon after the Republican Convention of 1988, Selly lost his position within the McCain camp.  It seems that Scott Selly was moonlighting for Charles Keating.  Selly served as Keating’s right-hand man at Lincoln Savings and Loan in Irvine, California.  In 1989, after seeing its assets rise from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion, Lincoln Savings went bankrupt.  A California court convicted Keating of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy.  He served four years of a twelve and a half year sentence.  Scott Selly served two years of a five-year sentence for collusion.
     Scott Selly apparently introduced Charles Keating to John McCain.  During the 1980s Keating contributed over a million dollars to five senators known as the Keating Five.  John McCain was among them.  Include that detail in McCain’s “Duty, Honor, Country.”
     As for McCain becoming Bush’s running mate, James Baker offered a double denial.  “Dropping Dan from the ticket,” Baker wrote in his memoirs, “was never in the cards.”  In addition John McCain’s name, according to Baker, never made the short list.
     Baker’s stock answers in his memoirs didn’t satisfy my investigation.  I emailed James Baker a question: Did Baker make an emergency phone call to the McCain camp while the senator addressed the Republican Convention of 1988?  A “James Baker spokesman” replied, “The Secretary has nothing to say, except what’s in his books.”

(To celebrate the summer of 2008, a summer of conventions after all, I am writing a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century.  To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below.  You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.)
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A History of Mao and Yao8/7/2008
A History of Mao and Yao

Yao Zhisui (pronounced Zee-Swee) originally named his Chinese restaurant after its best dish.  The year was 1965.  Moo Shu pork was making a name for itself in America.  Food and Wine Magazine in fact named Moo Shu “the dish of the year.”
     Bouillabaisse came in second.
     Yao’s Moo Shu’s, located on the upper Upper West Side, on Broadway and 99th, did not bring in the customers.  The reasons are not known for the lack of traffic. The restaurant business is a tricky one.  If it’s too sunny, customers don’t come in.  If it rains, customers don’t come in.  If it’s one block removed from a good location, customers don’t come in.  If it’s called something unremarkable, customers don’t come in. 
     In the 1960s Broadway and 99th wasn’t such a good location.  Back then Broadway and 99th was a heroin den.
     Yao had to do something he hadn’t planned on: he had to open for breakfast.  He didn’t want to serve eggs and bacon and toast, however.  That was diner food.  Yao wanted to have a Chinese character.  He served donuts and coffee and lychees.  Moo Shu’s became known for its apple fritters.  Maybe that’s not exactly the dish a Chinese restaurant wants to be known for, but there could be worse things.  Like not making the rent, for instance.
     Even with the famed apple fritter, Moo Shu’s barely made the rent.  Through the turbulent 60s and the economic downturn of the 70s and the cocaine warzone of the 80s and the police state of the 90s, Moo Shu’s stayed afloat.  Narrowly.
     When gentrification came to the upper Upper West Side in the early 21st century and rents skyrocketed, Moo Shu’s had to do something drastic to remain in business.  Yao Zhisui decided on one last-ditch effort, one last attention-grabbing, unconventional ploy.
     He renamed his restaurant.  He chose one of the top three tyrants of the 20th century, a tyrant, unlike the other two, whose genocidal exploits have been shoved under the carpet.  The Chinese themselves have refused to unearth the internal demolitions of Chairman Mao’s reign.  And besides, nobody on the upper Upper West Side, with a Jewish orthodox community equivalent to Crown Heights, would have frequented a restaurant called Hitler’s or Stalin’s.
     Turning Moo Shu’s into Mao’s proved to be a brilliant stroke.  The residents on Broadway (and Columbus and Amsterdam and Riverside and even up to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and Lenox Ave) ate it up.  Business shot through the roof.  In the months following the name change Yao Zhisui sold more rice than he had in the previous ten years of business combined.  And more apple fritters too.  New York Magazine named Mao Tse-tung’s as “the best Moo Shu/apple fritter establishment in the five boroughs.”
     Yao Zhisui had himself a success story, nearly 45 years after opening.  But this isn’t the story of Yao’s success.  Rather, this is the preamble to the success.  This is a story of desperation.  If the policies of your leader, and your government, wipe out millions of citizens, including your own young family, what would make you name your business establishment in that leader’s honor?  Delving into that question, with the world’s attention focused on Beijing and the XXIX Olympiad beginning this weekend, and with Chairman Mao’s body lying in state in the Hall of Reverence at Tiananmen Square, seems appropriate.
     Yao Zhisui was born in Anhui Province in the lower Yangtze River region in the early 1930s.  Yao, like the generations before him, was a subsistence farmer.  He had a wife and a young family and a small plot of arable land.  He had enough rice to feed his dependents.  He was illiterate.  As the decade of the 1950s began, he was over halfway to his life expectancy.
     All of that would change.
     In the mid-1950s a revolutionary who had led the communists through a decade of war with the Japanese came to power.  His name was Mao Tse-tung.  Chairman Mao made his name on the backs of his class, the peasant class.  One of his first campaigns as Chairman was to eradicate his own class.  He did this through two Five-Year plans.  The second plan had a spruced up name: the Great Leap Forward.  “The Leap,” historian Jeb Barlow wrote in The Chinese Century: The Evolution of a Modern Nation, “had its basis in land reform and industrial advance.  All private food production was banned.  All farms fell under the jurisdiction of the collective.  To push the peasantry to the cities and the massive infrastructure projects there, Chairman Mao ordered his soldiers to confiscate the country’s grain production.”
     In the rural provinces, nothing replaced the lost grain.  Starvation took hold.  The death toll soared.  Over a two-year period tens of millions of people died.  In Anhui Province an estimated eight million people perished.  Eight million people represented a quarter of Anhui’s population.
     Yao Zhisui couldn’t keep his family alive.  The soldiers had confiscated his grain.  In the starvation he lost his wife, his young children, his parents, his wife’s parents.  To make matters worse, he watched the suffering.  He saw muscles shrivel (his included) and kidneys distend and entire bodies shut down.  Worse yet, he was helpless to reverse the effects.
     Meanwhile, Chairman Mao made a public announcement.  In recognition of the suffering of his people, Mao temporarily gave up meat.  That was his solution.  Six months of vegetarianism.
     As Mao returned to meat, Yao began a long walk.  The year was 1959.  Yao joined the remaining peasants of Anhui and walked to the nearest city.  The nearest city was Nanjing, in the province of Jiangsu. 
     As luck would have it, Mao crossed the province by rail simultaneously.  Yao couldn’t have known it but when Mao traveled by train, he shut down the entire grid in that province.  So if he was traveling from the city of Yangzhou to the city of Nanjing, no other trains traveled in Jiangsu Province.
     That didn’t stop the masses from walking, of course.
     As his traditions dictated, Mao kept company with young girls during the crossing of Jiangsu Province.  Chairman Mao was a pedophile.  According to historian Jeb Barlow, the number of young girls Mao slept with “must have been in the tens of thousands.”  The parents of these girls were “only happy to assist.”  “Think about it,” Barlow continued, “their daughters were screwing the Chairman.”  Screwing the Chairman became a status symbol.
     As his traditions dictated, Chairman Mao rarely bathed and he never brushed his teeth.  Instead he rinsed his mouth with tea, in the tradition of his peasant upbringing.  Screwing the Chairman must not have been too tasty.
     Yao, by the way, had just lost his young daughter to starvation.  What would he have thought had he known about the company kept in Chairman Mao’s train?
     Yao and Mao arrived in Nanjing simultaneously.  In Nanjing Mao did something he rarely did.  He boarded an airplane.  Mao hated to fly and in those few instances when he did, he shut down Chinese airspace.  Alone over China, Chairman Mao flew to Shanghai.
     Yao walked to Shanghai.  When he arrived in Nanjing, he found a city unable to accommodate the massive peasant immigration.  Nanjing, in one year, had doubled in size.  There was no work to be found.
     Yao followed the procession of other peasants.  Shanghai, in the words of historian Jeb Barlow, was “the Shangri La of mainland China.”  In Shanghai one could find work (in the fishing industry) and a place to live (shanty towns mainly) and enough food to exist (rice predominantly).
     Shanghai was also a major embarkation point.  Chairman Mao, in a stunning proclamation, announced that for the right price he would allow his peasants to leave the country.  The right price was fifty dollars per head.  In time, Yao saved enough money to leave.  In 1962 Yao boarded a boat bound for San Francisco.
     Eventually Yao made his way to his distant cousins living in New York City.  Eventually he opened up a restaurant on the upper Upper West Side.  When the customers didn’t line up for Yao’s Moo Shu, he opened for breakfast.  He served apple fritters and lychees.
     I met Yao Zhisui over apple fritters.  I walked into his restaurant one morning because of Mao Tse-tung.  A photograph of the Chairman gazed out on the pedestrians on Broadway.  I wanted to see what a restaurant named Mao’s looked like.
     I walked into a crowded restaurant.  A waiter told me that it was always busy, from morning to night, from fritters to Moo Shu.  In one corner of the restaurant sat the proprietor.  When I met Yao, he was 83-years-old.  We talked about his business.  We talked about a restaurant named Mao’s.  He shared his family history. 
     I asked Yao Zhisui a question, “How does a man with your history name your restaurant after Mao Tse-tung?”
     Yao smiled.  Yao had outlived his teeth and his smile was all gums.  Like Mao, Yao had never brushed his teeth.  Instead he rinsed his mouth with tea, in the tradition of his peasant upbringing.
     “Mao and Yao,” Yao answered, “a yin and yang.”  He then gummed into an apple fritter.
     This Chinese philosophy is interesting.  In the history of Mao and Yao there is opposition.  There is also complementation.   The two must be in harmony for the story to be complete.
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“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad”: A History of Conventions, 19727/31/2008
“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad”
A History of Conventions: 1972

Richard Nixon placed a glass on the counter.  He filled the glass three-quarters full with his favorite scotch whiskey.  Nixon drank Famous Grouse.  He then, as his tradition dictated, added a scoop’s worth of ice cubes to his drink.  Nixon liked to crunch into frigidity.  Nixon liked the hard edges in his mouth.  Nixon liked the breakage and shattering effect.
     The President filled a second glass in the same manner.  He then poured a healthy helping of a different scotch whiskey into a third glass.  He walked that drink over to his wife, sitting on the floral-patterned sofa.  Pat Nixon drank Chivas.  Unlike her husband, she drank her whiskey neat.  Pat Nixon didn’t like the hard edges in her mouth.  She didn’t like the breakage and shattering effect.  She drank her whiskey neat because she was arguably the neatest (as in tidy) woman ever to live in the White House.  Pat Nixon cleaned her own toilets.  The hired help, she believed, didn’t do the job right.  The hired help didn’t understand how to wield a toilet bowl cleaner with the precise muscle.  Pat Nixon wielded a Rubbermaid with utter craft, cunning and strength.
     Richard Nixon returned to the counter and grabbed the two glasses of Famous Grouse.  He walked over to his fuzzy haired guest.  Henry Kissinger wore a “Jew Afro,” according to the final person in the room, Joseph Brine, Pat Nixon’s longtime personal assistant.  “He even combed it with a pick.”
     Joseph Brine’s remembrance of the Nixon/Kissinger meeting can be found in the Oral History of Joseph Brine at the Nixon Presidential Library.
     According to Brine, the Nixon/Kissinger meeting took place at the top of the Miami Beach Convention Center.  “There was a series of offices up in the rafters,” Brine recalled.  “There was a great deal of noise coming from the crowd down below.  ‘Four more years,’ the crowd was chanting.  ‘Four more years.’”
     The date was August 23, 1972.  Four years earlier, at the Republican Convention of 1968, held in the very same Miami Beach Convention Center, there was a hint of surprise.  Richard Nixon was not a lock for the Republican nominee.  Two governors, Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Ronald Reagan of California, led late charges.  There were floor skirmishes before the nomination vote.
     The Republican Convention of 1972 had none of those theatrics.  According to the “dean” of convention reporting, journalist Elisabeth Drue (known affectionately as “Dean Drue” for books on many of the national conventions of the latter half of the 20th century, and into the 21st century), “The Republican Convention of 1972 was predetermined.  President Nixon, in his reelection bid, was the nominee and there wasn’t even a hush of opposition.  What made the convention noteworthy, though, was its scripted timeline.  Nothing was left to chance.  Now we expect scripted conventions, but 1972 was the first of its kind.  From the various politicians across a broad spectrum – from Goldwater and Reagan on the right to Gerald Ford in the middle to Nelson Rockefeller on the left – endorsing the President to smoothly edited film tributes of Pat and Dick to a taped endorsement by a teary Mamie Eisenhower, the entire show provided tidy television fare.  Tidy and boring.  Even the Republican Rat Pack came off as unexceptional.”
     The Republican Rat Pack included only one member from the famed Frank Sinatra-led Hollywood Rat Pack.  His name was Sammy Davis Jr.  The Republican Rat Pack also included John Wayne, James Stewart, Pat Boone and Charlton Heston.  On the evening of August 23, as an introduction to President Nixon’s nomination speech to the convention, the Republican Rat Pack performed an Oval Office skit.  With a script ghostwritten by Pat Buchanan, the skit featured Heston as Nixon, Wayne as Vice President Agnew, Jimmy Stewart as Al Haig and Sammy Davis as Henry Kissinger. 
     Only Sammy Davis received accolades for his portrayal.  “He did a pretty good Kissinger,” journalist Elisabeth Drue elucidated.  “Garrulous, pedantic, relentless, all in a booming baritone.  Like Kissinger, he spoke in non sequitur.  Of course, because it was Sammy, he smiled the entire time.  Kissinger only smiled when the television cameras, and the ladies, were around.”
     In the skit, Sammy Davis as Henry Kissinger baritoned some lines, all in non sequitur, “America doesn’t have friends, America only has interests…  Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac…  Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”
     “Four more years,” the delegates in the Convention Center responded.  “Four more years.”
     In the office high above the floor, President Nixon met with the man whom he always turned to in times of trouble.  Eyewitness Joseph Brine explained, “There was a small demonstration going on outside the Convention Center.  Some Vietnam veterans on a perfunctory protest.  The national media hadn’t as yet made news of the demo and Nixon wanted to keep it that way.  How would it look if, while the President gave his nomination speech, the news split the television screen, with the President’s speech on the left and coverage of the protest on the right?  Nixon wanted to stop the protest.  So he called in Kissinger.  He asked Kissinger to go outside and speak to the protestors.  To reason with them.”
     Why did Nixon ask Kissinger to go out and speak to the Vietnam veterans?  “Kissinger had legendary status in America,” journalist Elisabeth Drue explained.  “In a Gallup poll taken in 1972, he ranked fourth on a list of ‘most admired’ Americans, after Nixon, Billy Graham, and Harry Truman.  The next year, after the death of Truman and with Nixon in his Watergate quagmire, Kissinger ranked first.”
     According to eyewitness Joseph Brine, Kissinger responded to Nixon in his typical baritone, “If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”  He then swallowed some whiskey and lifted himself from the chair.  As he left the office he baritoned, “Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”
     In the skit down below Sammy Davis as Henry Kissinger baritoned some lines, all in non sequitur, “A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone…  The illegal we do immediately.  The unconstitutional takes a little longer…  Even a paranoid has some real enemies.”
     “Four more years,” the delegates in the Convention Center responded.  “Four more years.”
     Joseph Brine’s characterization of “some Vietnam veterans on a perfunctory protest” smacked of denigration.  In fact these Vietnam veterans were all wheelchair disabled.  On the evening of Wednesday, August 23, they gathered outside the Convention Center and chanted, “Stop the bombing (of Vietnam and Laos)!  Stop the bombing!”
     The chanting coming from inside the arena drowned out the veterans’ chanting.  “Four more years,” the delegates chanted inside.  “Four more years.” 
     Sammy Davis as Henry Kissinger had just baritoned, “We perhaps deserve some credit for holding together the sinews of America at a time of fundamental collapse.”
     The real Henry Kissinger stood before the wheelchaired Vietnam veterans.  The leader of the veterans, Conrad Rovic, reflected on the moment in his autobiography, Disabled on the Fourth of July, “We didn’t know what to expect.  How would the Republican Party deal with our protest?  Who would play MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton?  Who would play Eleanor?”
     Rovic’s mention of “MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton” harkened back to 1932.  Then, World War I veterans camped outside White House grounds.  Protesting for the bonus promised to them by Congress back in 1924, the veterans became known as the “Bonus Army.”  President Hoover sent the military triumvirate out to greet the veterans.  General MacArthur, ignoring Hoover’s orders to peacefully move the protestors, cleared the camp by dispersing DM gas, an arsenic used paradoxically by the Allies during World War I.  In the melee that followed MacArthur’s forces opened fire.  Two veterans died from gunshot wounds.  Hundreds were injured.
     A year later, when the veterans returned to protest for their bonuses, new president Franklin Roosevelt sent out his wife Eleanor, with coffee and cookies.  Eleanor persuaded many of the veterans to sign up for a new work relief program called the Civilian Conservation Corp.  Many members of the Bonus Army built the highway to the Florida Keys, the southern most route of U.S. Route 1.
     In his autobiography Disabled on the Fourth of July, Conrad Rovic continued, “In our wildest imagination, we never dreamed that Henry Kissinger would play the Eleanor role.  Henry Kissinger, the war criminal.  Henry Kissinger, the sociopath.  I have come to believe there is nothing in the lives of human beings more terrifying than war and nothing more important than for those of us who have experienced it to share its awful truth.  In concise terms, that’s called a social conscience.  And what of Henry Kissinger?  Where was his social conscience?”
     Unlike Eleanor, Kissinger did not appear with coffee and cookies.  “He held a whiskey glass in his hand,” Rovic reflected.
     Kissinger, in his basic baritone, growled at the protesting veterans, “While we should never give up our principles, we must realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.”
     Rovic did a double take.  “What did that mean?” he wrote in his autobiography.  “Just more Kissinger mumbo-jumbo.  Kissinger was King Mumbo-Jumbo.”
     To Kissinger, Rovic replied, “War is not the answer.  Violence is not the solution.  A more peaceful world is possible.”
     Behind Rovic, his fellow veterans broke into their chant: “Stop the bombing!  Stop the bombing!”
     Inside the Miami Beach Convention Center Sammy Davis as Henry Kissinger baritoned, “I would rather like to think that when the record is written, one may remember that perhaps some lives were saved and perhaps some mothers can rest more at ease.  But I leave that to history.”
     “Four more years,” the delegates inside the Miami Beach Convention Center responded.  “Four more years.”
     The television camera caught an interesting sight just off stage: the chuckling of three politicians.  A little over a year later one of those politicians, Spiro Agnew, would resign the vice presidency.  He would plead no contest to the charge that he had failed to report $29,500 of income.
     The second chuckling politician, Gerald Ford, would replace Agnew as Nixon’s vice president.  A year after that he would be sworn in as the 38th president of the United States.
     The third chuckling politician, Ronald Reagan, would essentially doom President Ford’s reelection campaign in 1976.  Ford believed, to his dying day, that he lost his reelection to Reagan, not to the Democrat Jimmy Carter.  According to Ford, Reagan exposed all of Ford’s weaknesses during the primary season.  Carter merely repeated them during the general election. 
     Gerald Ford would never forgive Ronald Reagan.  In the 1976 primary campaign he accused Reagan of “disloyalty.”  He lashed out, characterizing Reagan as “intellectually thin with a penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems.”  Spiro Agnew, a Ford supporter, took the accusation further.  In his typical alliteration he called Reagan “that purveyor of pusillanimous perfidy.” 
     The television camera, interestingly enough, did not swing from the skit or the chuckling politicians to the scene outside the Convention Center.  The television camera missed Kissinger addressing the wheelchaired Vietnam veterans.  “Not surprisingly,” noted Conrad Rovic.  “The head of NBC news, David Brinkley, received a vote for vice president at the convention.  There were delegates wearing ‘Brinkley for Vice President’ buttons.  Why would Brinkley want to harm his own cause?”
     According to the dean of convention reporting, Elisabeth Drue, the Brinkley buttons “were a joke.  Yes, Brinkley did receive a vote for vice president, but Spiro Agnew received the rest of the votes.  Rumor is, Roone Arledge, the chairman of ABC, led a whispering campaign for Brinkley as a V.P. candidate.  ABC of course was NBC’s competitor and if Brinkley somehow became vice president, well, ABC would be better off.  Of course, Arledge would later hire Brinkley away from NBC.”
     Outside the Convention Center Henry Kissinger offered a major concession to the protesting veterans, at least at first glance.  “I believe it’s high time for a ceasefire,” Kissinger baritoned.  “You have my word, I will work toward ending the war and restoring peace.”  In 1973, in fact, a ceasefire broke out in Vietnam.  For his role in the negotiations Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.
     Kissinger’s next remarks to the veterans, however, hinted at a war that would continue well after the ceasefire, and make a mockery of his Nobel Prize.  “What is wrong is when you lose,” he baritoned, “not getting up off of that floor and coming back and fighting again.”
     Conrad Rovic did a double take.  “What did that mean?” he wrote in his autobiography.  “How far would Kissinger go with his double-talk?  King Mumbo-Jumbo was at it again.”
     King Mumbo-Jumbo’s words, however, had an effect.  The veterans were stunned into silence.
     Meanwhile, inside the Miami Beach Convention Center, the delegates responded with noise.  The skit performed by the Republican Rat Pack ended with Charlton Heston as Richard Nixon assuming a Moses-like pose at the parting Red Sea.  The lights faded on Moses.  When the lighting resumed seconds later, there was President Nixon in his V-for-Victory pose.

(To celebrate the summer of 2008, a summer of conventions after all, I am writing a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century.  To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below.  You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.)
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A Requiem for Frances7/24/2008
A Requiem for Frances

My grandmother died last week.  She was four months shy of her 98th birthday.  She was born in 1910, at the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  She was born a subject of Franz Josef.  Had Franz Josef been an immigrant and passed through Ellis Island, he would have undergone a spelling change.  His name would have been Francis Joseph.  Had the immigrant Franz Josef coughed or cleared his throat after uttering his family name at Ellis Island, he would have been Francis Josepher.
     My grandmother’s name was Frances Josepher.  Well, eventually.  She married into the Josepher family.  She spent her life in New York City.  She gave birth to two children.  She lost a child.  She raised a family.  She opened her home to her aging parents.
     Franz Josef lost a child too, his son allegedly from suicide.  Josef also lost his wife, who was stabbed to death by an anarchist in that era of anarchy-inspired assassination.
     My grandmother lost her husband in the mid-1970s to brain cancer.  The death of her “beloved Paul,” as she always referred to him, created a chasm for my grandmother.  My grandmother, like the women of her era, went from being a daughter to being a wife.  Suddenly, she was a widow.  Suddenly, she was the only person sleeping under her roof. 
     My grandmother went to work.  She was a bookkeeper by training.  She knew how to use an abacus.  She found a job south of the southern edge of Central Park.  The job gave her freedom, independence.  She had a second life of sorts. 
     There was no escaping the presence of her “beloved Paul” but my grandmother came to realize something remarkable.  She could build on that.  The Death of Paul wasn’t an end for her.  It wasn’t a beginning either.  It was a step in another direction.
     The computer generation revolutionized bookkeeping and my grandmother was phased out.  She retired.  She grieved the loss of her job.  My grandmother, after all, knew a thing or two about grieving.
     I did not know my grandmother well.  I grew up two thousand miles removed and I saw her once a year, on trips into New York.  On a few occasions, she came to Colorado.  She slept on a pullout cot during those trips.  She struggled with her breath in the Colorado altitude.  In the car, my grandmother used to hold onto her seat cushion.  Too tightly.  I remember seeing the veins pop out in her wrist. 
     The Frances that I knew lived a life of singularity.  Yes, she had her friends and her family, including her daughter and son-in-law nearby.  But she lived alone in an apartment not far from Coney Island.  She climbed a flight of steep stairs.  She entered into the living room of a two-bedroom flat.  There was a blue carpet in the living room.  There was a blue couch on the blue carpet.  There was a silver tea service on the coffee table in front of the blue couch.  From the moment I entered her apartment, sometime in the early 1970s, to the very last time, the room stood still.
     Time did not.  At some point in her aging process my grandmother began to suffer from the effects of dementia.  The effects robbed her of normal brain functioning.  She lost her memory.
     My most meaningful moment with my grandmother occurred at the last moment that it possibly could.  My grandmother, in the initial throes of the dementia, could not have marked the change.  I can pinpoint it.  October, 1999.
     I was in the throes of deep grief.  The break up of a romantic relationship had taken my breath away.  The thrust of my life pushed downward, not forward.  The break up created a chasm.
     I traveled from my home then in San Francisco to New York to get away from the grief.  The grief became more aggressive.  The distance created a choking effect.  I couldn’t swallow.
     One afternoon I traveled out to my grandmother’s apartment, not so far from Coney Island.  As always with my grandmother, she stood on the landing above the street, connected by that steep staircase.  Like always, she waited for her visitor.
     That landing, or the big window in her living room that looked over the street, became the perfect widow’s perch.
     I walked up the steep flight of stairs.  We went inside.  She offered refreshments and I sat down on her blue couch.  My grandmother soon sat beside me.  In my memory, we didn’t talk.  In my memory, I didn’t explain what was going on.  My grandmother, in my memory, was struggling on that day with her mind and she wouldn’t have understood.  So we sat there, on her blue couch, on the blue carpet, with the silver tea service positioned on the coffee table.  We sat there in silence.
     My grandmother moved closer to me.  She did something then that she’d never done before.  Maybe I’d never allowed her to.  She touched my hair.  She put her hand on the top of my head and slowly she worked her way down the back of my head.  She did this again and again. 
     On some level my grandmother clearly understood my state of mind.  After all, she’d experienced her own chasms, her own recoveries, her own steps in different directions.  In her gesture, I think, she was showing me the way.  She was smoothing out a period, for me, of thorny knots.
     The tears welled up and spilled down my face.  Big tears, as I remember.  Not the small fast tears that sprint down the skin and fall to the floor.  The big tears that kind of meander.  Unsolicited.
     She didn’t wipe my tears.  I didn’t wipe my tears.  She smoothed my hair. 
     I sat there, in great grief, in great warmth.  In my memory, the moment went on for minutes, more, a half hour, more.  Neither of us had any place to go.

Frances Josepher: born November 15, 1910, died July 18, 2008.
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“We believe in Dick”: A History of Conventions, 19687/17/2008
“We believe in Dick”
A History of Conventions: 1968

Richard Nixon placed a glass on the counter.  He filled the glass three-quarters full with his favorite scotch whiskey.  Nixon drank Famous Grouse.  He then, as his tradition dictated, added a scoop’s worth of ice cubes to his drink.  Nixon liked to crunch into frigidity.  Nixon liked the hard edges in his mouth.  Nixon liked the breakage and shattering effect.
     He did not pour a drink for his guest.  He did not particularly like his guest.  Politics was a game of needing, not liking, and no man knew that more than Dick Nixon.
     Nixon’s guest did not like his host.  Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, was the consummate glad-hander.  The man oozed sincerity insincerely.  The man oozed warmth with frigidity. 
     Nelson Rockefeller, being Nelson Rockefeller, wanted to be president without running for president.  He wanted the Republican Party to beg him to run.  He wanted the electorate to elect him in a landslide.  He didn’t want to be vetted.  He didn’t want to travel.  He didn’t want the sweat of the campaign.  He didn’t mind paying for advertising, and throwing money around in general.  He didn’t mind gossiping with the press.  The man was used to entitlement, not political pugilism.
     Richard Nixon was the ultimate political pugilist.  He could spar all night and go another twelve rounds the next morning.  While Rockefeller slept in, awoke in satin sheets, had his nails done by the hired help and nibbled on toast and marmalade (with yet another woman in his bed), Dick Nixon pushed his way through crowds, shook hands, forced a smile over his obsequiously tanned face.  Dick Nixon wanted your vote and would ask for it from morning to night.  Nelson Rockefeller wanted your vote but wanted it presented on a silver platter. 
     Nelson Rockefeller’s second wife had a nickname: Happy.  Imagine Dick Nixon with a wife with that nickname. 
     Pat Nixon attended the meeting between her husband and Nelson Rockefeller.  Like her husband, Pat Nixon held a glass of scotch whiskey.  Unlike her husband, she drank Chivas.  Unlike her husband, she drank her whiskey neat.  Pat Nixon would become arguably the neatest (as in tidy) woman ever to live in the White House.  Pat Nixon cleaned her own toilets.  The hired help, she believed, didn’t do the job right.  The hired help didn’t understand how to wield a toilet bowl cleaner with the precise muscle.  Pat Nixon wielded a Rubbermaid with utter craft, cunning and strength.
     While she wielded a Rubbermaid, Pat Nixon also smoked cigarettes.  There have been many first ladies who smoked cigarettes.  None smoked as many as Pat.  According to the fourth person present at the meeting of Nixon and Rockefeller, Joseph Brine, Pat Nixon smoked “throughout the meeting.  One after the other.  With gulps of whiskey in between.”  Brine then echoed an overriding sentiment, “Pat Nixon did not have an easy life.”
     Joseph Brine served as Pat Nixon’s personal assistant throughout her husband’s presidential years.  In 1968, he was a young college graduate.  He served by Pat Nixon’s side until her death in June 1993.  A year later, following the death of Richard Nixon, he offered his version of life with the Nixons.  His remembrance of the Nixon/Rockefeller meeting can be found in the Oral History of Joseph Brine at the Nixon Presidential Library.
     According to Brine, the Nixon/Rockefeller meeting took place at the top of the Miami Beach Convention Center.  “There was a series of offices up in the rafters,” Brine recalled.  “There was a great deal of noise coming from the crowd below.  Dick Nixon had a hard time hearing during the meeting.  That I specifically remember.  Also, he was sweating like crazy.  Perspiration dripped down his forehead.”
     Earlier that evening, while the heat and humidity of Miami in August reached the dripping sweat range, Republican delegates crowded into the Miami Beach Convention Center.  There had been a slight sense of surprise in the air.  The frontrunner, Richard Nixon, was not a lock for the nominee.  Although Nixon controlled the “Eisenhower Republicans,” or the moderates – the “forgotten Americans,” as Nixon claimed, “the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators, the dynamos of the American dream” – the Republican Party was split in three.  Nelson Rockefeller controlled the liberal side of the Republican Party, aptly called the Rockefeller Republicans.  (Imagine a side of the Republican Party that pushed for an outstanding university system, a network of hospitals, housing projects, mental health facilities, water treatment plants, parks, highways.  Yes, that side of the Republican Party existed pre-Reagan/George W. Bush.  That side of the Republican Party also bankrupted the State of New York.)  On the far right, the “Goldwater conservatives” lined up behind the governor of California, a 57-year-old actor named Ronald Reagan.
     In the weeks before the Republican Convention of 1968 Ronald Reagan’s popularity exploded.  Southerners, leaving the Democratic Party in droves, turned to the Reagan camp.  He represented what they most wanted: “an earlier era,” in the words of Herbert Parmet, the best biographer of Nixon, where “the state functioned – if it did at all – as a protector of national security and traditional values.”  The Goldwaterites-turned-Reaganites “had few reservations about drawing enemies in bold relief: the eastern Republican liberal establishment; the liberal media; the wishy-washy, compromising conservatism of the national Republican Party.”
     To the Goldwaterites-turned-Reaganites, Richard Nixon was the embodiment of compromising conservatism.  In the late spring of 1968, according to Parmet’s Richard Nixon and his America, a pollster found that “the biggest interest growing almost like a prairie fire is in Ronald Reagan.  Not one thing about his being an actor, or being a Right-Winger.  Just that he seems to have done a fine job as Governor of California, that he is not a ‘nut,’ and most of all, that he is tremendously appealing.  I am amazed at the depth and breath of deep, serious interest in Reagan.”
     In order to squelch the prairie fire, Dick Nixon turned to the great segregationist and unreconstructed powerbroker, Strom Thurmond.  In a meeting between Nixon and the senator from South Carolina two months before the convention, Thurmond handed Nixon a small piece of paper containing three lists.  For Thurmond’s endorsement, he wanted to be able to name the vice president.  On the acceptable list, he named Ronald Reagan, John Tower of Texas, George Bush, Howard Baker of Tennessee.  On the unacceptable list, he named two New Yorkers, the liberal side of the party.  Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller.  A “no objections” list contained a few names, including the governor of Maryland.  His name was Spiro Agnew.
     Governor Agnew was actually a protégé of Nelson Rockefeller.  He pushed for a progressive path on social causes.  He positioned himself against segregation.  He supported President Johnson’s Fair Housing Act contained in the Civil Right Act of 1968.  Through Governor Agnew’s pressure, the Maryland legislature rescinded an anti-miscegenation law.
     None of this mattered to Strom Thurmond.  The man who built a career on miscegenation laws, even while he was breaking them, wanted a vice president from the South.  Spiro Agnew, from a border state, fit the objective.
     To the three lists presented by Senator Thurmond, Nixon responded by pouring Famous Grouse into two glasses.  He added ice.  The two men clinked glasses.  Nixon crunched into frigidity.
     That meeting took place in Atlanta on the last day of May.  Nearly ten weeks later, on Monday August 5, Nixon won the Republican nomination by the slimmest of margins, winning 51 percent of the 1,333 votes.
     Later that evening, in an office above the floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center, Nixon met with the man who Nixon needed in the general election.  To win the Republican nomination, he’d turned to Thurmond.  To win the national election, and the “liberal” establishment of the Northeast, he sought out the governor of New York.
     Richard Nixon began to pace.  The pacing exacerbated his perspiring.  He held his glass of whisky up to his forehead.  The ice in the glass began to melt. 
     Down below on the convention floor delegates shouted his name: “We believe in Dick…  We believe in Dick…”
     Governor Rockefeller sat in an armchair.  He wore black-rimmed eyeglasses.  He oozed composure.  He wasn’t sweating.  He wasn’t pacing.  According to his autobiography, he expected an invitation from Nixon.  He didn’t necessarily want the vice presidency but he saw the title as a “springboard to the White House, following in the footsteps of Adams, Jefferson, Truman, Johnson and, of course, Richard M. Nixon.”
     Down below on the convention floor delegates shouted his name: “We believe in Dick…  We believe in Dick…”
     “Governor,” Nixon said, barely audible over the fray down below, “I’ve asked you here for one reason.  I know tonight’s results were disappointing [Rockefeller won 277 votes in the nominating process, or 21 percent].  But I want your support in the general election and as such I’m prepared to offer you…”
     Nixon hesitated.  That hesitation led to all sorts of historical wonderings.  “What was on his mind at the moment?” biographer Herbert Parmet asked rhetorically.  “Nixon needed the Republican center to win the election.  Rockefeller did not represent that constituency.  At the same time, Rockefeller was the ‘big play.’  He was the big name, the attention grabber.  Was Nixon fighting himself over his vice presidential choice?  We all know how it turns out.  The question is, how close was Nixon to going in another direction?  How close was Nixon to offering the position to Rockefeller?  Judging from the hesitation, perhaps closer than history portrays.”
     Eyewitness Joseph Brine expressed a different reason for Nixon’s hesitation.  “The noise down below on the convention floor was distracting.  Nixon hesitated because he couldn’t hear himself think.”
     “We believe in Dick,” the delegates shouted down below.  “We believe in Dick.”
     “Governor,” Nixon reconfigured his sentence, “you can name the vice president.  I have one requirement.  You cannot name yourself.”
     What Nelson Rockefeller felt at that moment remains a mystery.  He never recorded his immediate reaction in his memoirs.  He never told his good friend Henry Kissinger.  History shows that the governor remained stoic.  “His countenance didn’t change,” Joseph Brine recalled.  “He looked Lake Placid calm, unlike the Grand Central combustion of the Nixons.”
     While Rockefeller thought over the offer, Dick Nixon paced.  He paced back to the counter.  He dropped more ice cubes in his whiskey glance.  He held the glass up to his forehead. 
     Meanwhile, Pat Nixon sat on the floral-patterned sofa and gulped Chivas.  Then she inhaled a Marlboro.  According to Joseph Brine, “She finished both the whiskey and the cigarette in one big greedy breath.”
     Pat Nixon held out her glass for another round.  Her husband was too busy pacing the room to notice.
     Nelson Rockefeller spoke a name.  Richard Nixon, perhaps due to the noise coming from the delegates below, perhaps due to the ferocity of his pacing, did not hear the governor.  “What?” Nixon said.
     “We believe in Dick,” the delegates shouted down below.  “We believe in Dick.”
     Nelson Rockefeller again spoke a name.  Perhaps to trifle with Nixon, he spoke the name in a near whisper.
     “What?” Nixon said again.
     “We believe in Dick,” the delegates shouted down below.  “We believe in Dick.”
     “Ted,” Nelson Rockefeller said again. 
     Dick Nixon looked at the governor.  “His look conveyed total ignorance,” according to Joseph Brine.  “Who was Ted?  Nixon must have searched his mind, going down the list of possible vice presidents.  There was a George on the list.  There was a Ronald.  There were a couple of Johns.  There wasn’t a Ted.  Kennedy was clearly out.  Still, Nixon, being Nixon, he couldn’t admit his ignorance.  So he did what he always did in those circumstances.  He looked at his right-hand man.”
     In this case his right-hand man was a woman.  Pat Nixon, with her empty whiskey glass held out for seconds, asked the question on her husband’s mind.  “Who is Ted?”
     Rockefeller smiled.  “His only smile of the evening,” according to Joseph Brine.  “Spiro Agnew,” Rockefeller said.  “His family and friends call him Ted.  His middle name is Theodore.”
     Nixon responded by taking the empty whiskey glass from his wife’s hand.  He paced over to the counter.  He filled two glasses.  One with Chivas.  The other with Famous Grouse.  He added ice to the Famous Grouse.  He then crunched into frigidity.

(To celebrate the summer of 2008, a summer of conventions after all, I am writing a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century.  To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below.  You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.)
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A July 4th Poll: the Politics of Americans7/3/2008
A July 4th Poll: the Politics of Americans

During the week of June 22-29, 2008, the GJBJ conducted a poll via the Internet.  The GJBJ asked a series of questions regarding politics and history in questionnaire form.  Most of the questions were of the fill in the blank variety.  Some were multiple choice.  If a respondent did not know the answer, he/she was instructed to write, “Don’t know.”  Some ten thousand Americans responded.  Here are the findings:

When asked to name the longest serving president of the United States, over 50 percent of Americans named George W. Bush.  Over twenty percent named Bill Clinton.  Twelve percent named Ronald Reagan.  Five percent named George Washington.  Five percent named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When asked to name the three nations originally listed on President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” list, 14 percent accurately named North Korea, Iran and Iraq.  Over 40 percent of Americans included Russia on the list.  Thirty-five percent of Americans included China on the list.

As a follow up: When given the three countries on President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” list and asked to name what country remains on the list to this day, 60 percent named Iraq (even after the fall of Saddam Hussein).  Two percent named North Korea (to be fair, this poll took place as President Bush removed North Korea from the list).  The remaining 38 percent named Iran.

When asked to identify Karl Rove, and given four choices (a current pundit at the Fox network, a track star who won four gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, election campaign manager for President George W. Bush and others, a past boyfriend of Angelina Jolie), 16 percent chose a “current pundit” at Fox.  Fifteen percent chose the “track star” from the Los Angeles Olympics.  Four percent chose “election campaign manager.”  Sixty-five percent chose “past boyfriend of Angelina Jolie.”

As a follow up: The 65 percent who chose Karl Rove as a past boyfriend of Angelina Jolie were asked to identify Ms. Jolie.  With one exception, every respondent named Ms. Jolie as a movie star, or a celebrity.  One person even wrote, “The next Elizabeth Taylor.”  The one exception: One person named Angelina Jolie as “the Chancellor of Germany.”

When asked to name one head of state in Europe, 6 percent of Americans named Nicolas Sarkozy.  Four percent named Vladimir Putin.  Two percent named Tony Blair.  Prime Minister Gordon Brown received .5 percent.  Eighty-five percent of Americans checked, “Don’t know.” 

When asked to name on what continent (not what country) Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship reigned, 39 percent of Americans chose Asia.  Thirty percent chose South America.  Twenty-seven percent chose Africa.  Three percent chose North America.

As a follow up: The 3 percent who chose North America as the continent of Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship were asked what country he led.  One percent chose Jamaica.  Two percent chose Haiti.  Three percent chose Panama.  Four percent chose Nicaragua.  Five percent chose Cuba.  Zero percent chose the United States.  Zero percent chose Greenland.  Eight-five percent checked, “Don’t know.”

When asked to name the most successful secretary of state in this nation’s history, 60 percent of Americans answered, “Don’t know.”  Twenty-five percent of Americans named Condoleezza Rice.  Five percent of Americans named Thomas Jefferson.  Five percent named Henry Kissinger.  Two percent named George Marshall.  One percent named Dean Acheson.   One percent named John Hay.  One percent named Donald Rumsfeld.

When asked to identify Scalia, and given four choices (a disease of the esophagus, a Hollywood producer, a Supreme Court Justice, the Pope during World War II), 68 percent of Americans chose “a disease of the esophagus.”  Twenty percent chose a “Hollywood producer.”  Four percent chose the Pope option.  Eight percent chose Scalia as a Supreme Court Justice. 

When asked to name a political leader slain within the last year, over 80 percent checked, “Don’t know.”  Ten percent named Tim Russert.  Four percent named Benazir Bhutto.

When asked to name the president of Iran, 81 percent checked, “Don’t know.”  Fourteen percent named Ayatollah Khomeini.  Four percent named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  One percent named Salman Rushdie.

When asked to name the president of Afghanistan, 85 percent checked, “Don’t know.”  Ten percent named Ayatollah Khomeini.  Two percent named Hamid Karzai.  Two percent named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  One percent named Khaled Hosseini.

When asked to name one (of six) country that borders Iran, 65 percent of Americans wrote, “Don’t know.”  Seventeen percent wrote, “Saudi Arabia.”  Two percent wrote, “Israel.”

When asked to name one (of six) country that borders Afghanistan, 74 percent of Americans wrote, “Don’t know.”  Ten percent named China.

When asked to identify the Taliban, and given four choices (a British punk rock band from the 1970s, the last name of the quarterback-turned-criminal for the Atlanta Falcons, a Sunni Islamic movement that ruled Afghanistan, a nation of all-female warriors from Greek mythology), 72 percent of Americans chose “a British punk rock band.”  Sixteen percent chose a “nation of all-female warriors.”  Twelve percent chose a “Sunni Islamic movement that ruled Afghanistan.”  Zero percent chose the “quarterback-turned-criminal for the Atlanta Falcons.”

As a follow up: When asked to name the quarterback-turned-criminal for the Atlanta Falcons, nearly 95 percent chose Michael Vick.

When asked the skin color of senator and presidential aspirant Barack Obama, 38 percent said, “African-American.”  Thirty-eight percent said, “Black.”  Twelve percent said, “Other.”  Ten percent said, “Don’t know.”  Two percent said, “Kenyan.” 

When asked the skin color of senator and presidential aspirant John McCain, 69 percent said, “White.”  Twenty-four percent said, “Caucasian.”  Five percent said, “Other.”  Two percent said, “Vietnamese.”

When asked to name the current governor of California, 70 percent of Americans checked, “Don’t know.”  Nineteen percent named John McCain.  Eleven percent named Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

When asked to name the actor who played the terminator, 100 percent of Americans named Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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A History of Conventions: 1980 (the Democrats)6/26/2008
A History of Conventions: 1980 (the Democrats)

At the end of May I began a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century.  I began the series with the Republican Convention of 1980.  That convention took place in Detroit on July 14-17.  Four weeks later, August 11-14, the Democrats met in New York City.

9:02 p.m.  Jimmy Carter, under the extreme pressure of the most important speech of his career, did what came natural.  He tinkered with his speech in the minutes before giving it.  He stood in a private box off the main concourse of Madison Square Garden, pencil in hand, and crossed out a few sentences of his prepared speech.  He then wrote notes in the margin.  These particular notes focused on his accomplishments in office.  The notes read: “nine million new jobs added” and “inflation dropped from 18 percent first quarter to 7 percent” and “comprehensive energy policy – now importing 20 percent less oil, or 1 and 1/2 millions of barrels of oil less per day than the day I took office.”
     President Carter’s penchant for note taking was the stuff of legend.  “Jimmy Carter was the ultimate note-taker,” Douglas Brinkley, Carter’s sympathetic biographer, wrote in The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House.  “He took more notes in one day than the more hands-on presidents – Clinton, Kennedy, and Wilson – took in a month.  He took more notes in one month than the more detached presidents – Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Cal Coolidge – took in an entire administration.”  President Carter’s original convention speech, with all of his deletions and additions, can be viewed in the presidential library at the Carter Center, Atlanta, Georgia.
     The private box in which Carter tinkered with his speech belonged to the owner of the New York Knicks, David “Sonny” Werblin.  Pictures of great Knicks dominated the wall space.  There was a photo of Willis Reed.  There was a photo of Walter “Clyde” Frazier.  There was a photo of Vernon Earl Monroe.
     Not far from Sonny Werblin’s private box a podium had been erected.  The podium stood some twenty feet above the floor of Madison Square Garden.  The floor of the arena was jammed with delegates.  All the delegates at that moment, and anyone watching the event on television, were viewing a propaganda film entitled “The Vision of Jimmy Carter” on the big screen, located directly behind the raised podium.
     The film began with a helicopter view of monuments in Washington, from the Washington Monument in all of its verticality to the Jefferson Monument and its inspiration to the Lincoln Monument and its gravity.  A narrator spoke as the Lincoln Monument faded from view, “No one who’s not had the responsibility can really understand what it’s like to be the president.”
     In the next scene on film President Carter strolled into his office.  There was purpose in his stroll.  There was power.  There was poise.  This was the president, the film hinted, of self-assurance.
     9:03 p.m.  In Sonny Werblin’s box, the president of self-assurance wasn’t listening to the narrator.  He wasn’t watching the huge screen.  He continued to scribble notes into the margin of his speech.  These particular notes focused on his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.  The notes read: “promises to abolish the Departments of Education and Energy” and “will slash solar energy incentives – will abolish synthetic fuels program – will eliminate 55-mile speed limit – will gut the Clean Air Act.”  Carter then wrote a statement in capital letters: “WILL UNLEASH THE OIL COMPANIES – THAT’S THE TOTALITY OF HIS ENERGY POLICY.”
     Meanwhile, on the big screen located directly behind the raised podium, the propaganda film continued with photographs of past presidents.  There was a photo of Lincoln with a narrator quoting one of Lincoln’s contemporaries, “‘I never did see or converse with so weak and imbecile a man; the weakest man I have ever known.  If I wanted to paint a despot, a man with the perfect disregard for every constitutional right of the people, I would paint the hideous, apelike form of Abraham Lincoln.’”
     The Lincoln photographed faded and a photograph of Ulysses S. Grant came into view.  A narrator quoted the Republican platform of 1872, during Grant’s re-election campaign, “‘He has used the public service of the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence, and has interfered with tyrannical arrogance in the public affairs of states and municipalities.’”
     The Grant photograph faded and a photograph of Harry Truman came into view.  A narrator quoted a famous journalist of the Truman era, “‘Mr. Truman is not performing, and gives no evidence of his ability to perform, the functions of the Commander-in-Chief.  At the very center of the Truman administration there is a vacuum of responsibility and authority.’”
     Gerald Rafshoon, the filmmaker and President Carter’s communications director, explained the direction of the film.  His reflections can be found in the presidential library at the Carter Center, in the Oral History of Rafshoon, Gerald.  “We wanted to say to America: Hey, there’s the image, particularly the negative spin, and then there’s the reality.  We ended with the photo of Truman because, more than any other president, he epitomized this dichotomy.  His image in America, at the time of his re-election, was rock-bottom.  And yet the reality of his presidency is that he met crisis after crisis and succeeded on levels that we’re just now giving him credit for.”
     9:06 p.m.  In Sonny Werblin’s private box, Jimmy Carter continued to cross out sentences in his prepared speech and write notes in the margin.  These particular notes still focused on his Republican challenger.  The notes read: “his fantasy America – inner-city laborers do not exist, working women are ignored, the elderly do not need Medicare, the young do not need help in getting a better education.”  Carter then added a statement in capital letters: “IN HIS FANTASY AMERICA, ALL PROBLEMS HAVE SIMPLE SOLUTIONS – SIMPLE AND WRONG.” 
     Meanwhile, on the big screen located directly behind the raised podium, the propaganda film continued with Carter on the campaign trail.  A huge number of supporters, some 50,000 strong, filled a stadium in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  Off to one side, a dozen or so demonstrators wore the white sheets and hoods of the Klu Klux Klan.  The Klansmen held up a banner, “Reagan for President.” 
     According to the propaganda film (a copy of which can be viewed in the presidential library at the Carter Center), President Carter interrupted his campaign speech.  He pointed at the banner.  “There are still a few in the South, indeed around the country, who practice cowardice and who counsel fear and hatred,” he fumed.  “They say we ought to be afraid of each other, that whites ought to hate and be afraid of blacks, and that blacks ought to hate and be afraid of whites.  As a Southerner, it makes me feel angry.  As the first man from the Deep South in almost 140 years to be president of this nation, I say that these people in white sheets do not understand our region and what it’s been through, they do not understand what our country stands for, they do not understand that the South and all of America must move forward.”
     The crowd in Tuscumbia, according to the propaganda film, responded in a boisterous and extended ovation.  The crowd watching the film in Madison Square Garden did the same.
     Filmmaker Gerald Rafshoon explained, “This was made to be the highlight, the crux, of the film.  It was supposed to be President Carter identifying both himself and his American vision.”
     9:08 p.m.  In Sonny Werblin’s private box, Jimmy Carter continued to cross out sentences in his prepared speech and write notes in the margin.  He still, clearly, had Ronald Reagan on his mind.  One note read: “will enter America into unnecessary wars.”  He circled that statement.  Another note read: “The life of every human being on Earth can depend on the experience and judgment and vigilance of the person in the Oval Office.  The president’s power for building and his power for destruction are awesome.  And the power’s greatest exactly where the stakes are highest – in matters of war and peace.”
     Meanwhile, on the big screen located directly behind the raised podium, the propaganda film continued with a scene from Camp David, as the leaders of Egypt and Israel reached agreement.  The film zoomed in on President Carter smiling in between the scowling Menachem Begin and the anxious Anwar Sadat.  The narrator of the film asked, “Can you picture Reagan getting Begin and Sadat together?”
     Filmmaker Gerald Rafshoon explained, “These propaganda films – they're supposed to be feel good, warm and fuzzy.  Families and picnics and presidents in splendor.  Fine. We made that kind of film in 1976.  The Reagan people made that kind of film for their convention a month earlier.  With this one, I just thought to myself: Let’s talk some substance.  Let’s hit the people with a question.  Would Reagan have the magic to bring Begin and Sadat together?”
     Inside Madison Square Garden, a floor full of delegates offered an answer to Rafshoon’s question.  “NO!” thousands of delegates screamed. 
     Jimmy Carter did not hear the screaming delegates.  In Sonny Werblin’s box he wrote a final note in the margin of his speech.  The note read: “experience is the best guide to right decisions.  I am wiser tonight than I was four years ago.”
     At that moment in time, 9:09 p.m., two of Carter’s most trusted colleagues entered the private box.  Vice President Walter Mondale whispered a pep talk into Carter’s ear, “Go after Reagan.  His is a make-believe world, a world of good guys and bad guys, where politicians shoot first and ask questions later.”
     Rosalynn Carter did not offer a pep talk.  She offered a spirited kiss. 
     Seconds later, the band at Madison Square Garden played “Hail to the Chief.”  The screen up high went dark.  The lights in the Garden blazed in full splendor.  And there, standing at the raised podium, was the man of the moment, the president of the United States, with the first lady and the vice president a few steps behind.  The time was 9:10 p.m.

(To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below.  You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.)
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6/24/2008
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Seeking Asylum: Past and Present6/19/2008
Seeking Asylum: Past and Present

The year was 1939.  Hundreds of refugees arrived at the port of Havana, on board a ship called the St. Louis.  The St. Louis was a German luxury liner.  On this particular sailing across the Atlantic, one of the last before the Second World War broke out, the St. Louis carried Jewish refugees fleeing religious persecution.  Nazi Germany, of course, was not a good place to be Jewish.
     The refugees carried landing permits.  Unbeknownst to them, they did not carry official Cuban visas.  In fact, most of the refugees held American visas.  To the refugees, Cuba was considered a way station, a safe place to wait until their American visa numbers were called.
     The Cuban government turned the refugees away.  The St. Louis sailed north.  Off the coast of Miami, the passengers sent telegrams to high-ranking American officials, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt.  Their telegrams met the cold static of executive neglect.  There is no record of one high-ranking American responding to these telegrams.  The St. Louis, with no place to go and provisions running low, sailed back to Nazi Germany.
     You can perhaps imagine the frenzy that took place amongst the passengers.  Back to Nazi Germany.  For Jews, who had lived through the 1930s and the culture of rapidly disintegrating rights and growing concentration camps, these were intolerable words.  Near-riots began to take place on the St. Louis.  A passenger tried to commit suicide by throwing himself into the ocean.  Better death than Dachau.
     The story of the St. Louis did not end well.  True, the Jewish passengers never went