Month: May 2008

Right from the start Nixon was a pain in the butt.

To begin with, Rick, the friend we had enlisted to help us kidnap him wanted us to help. Well, all he really wanted was for me or Scott to drive one of our cars. “I can’t put him in the Jag,” he told us, on the night of the snatch. “If he sits in the passenger seat I’ll never get past the checkpoint at San Onofre.”

I had thought Rick had a Special Ops background. That’s what he always implied when we were drinking after volleyball and that’s why we’d asked him to help us kidnap the president. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t have a decent car for the job. I pictured the silver XKE rolling up to the Customs stop, the President jauntily unconscious or blindfolded in the right-hand bucket seat. “So stick him in the trunk,” I said. I was already starting to regret this whole idea.

“He’ll suffocate in there. Anyway, he’s the President. It’s not dignified.”

Our plans for Nixon didn’t involve him keeping his dignity. Nonetheless, we didn’t want to kill him. Agnew was still Vice President at the time and giving every indication that he’d be worse than Tricky Dick himself. In the end I agreed to be the wheel man in my ’64 VW microbus. It was completely stock, with no hippie artwork on the outside and no McGovern bumper stickers, so we figured it wouldn’t get too hairy with the military types at the checkpoint.

I’m sorry I can’t tell you exactly how we pulled off the actual kidnapping. I wish I could say that it was a daring daylight raid on the San Clemente compound, involving helicopters and automatic weapons and a daring escape. In fact all I did was drive the VW down Interstate 5 to the beach at San Clemente, and park on a side road around sunset. Rick, Scott and I synchronized our watches, which is not as easy as it looks in the movies, and then Rick stepped out of the bus. We were near enough to the ocean to hear the breakers.

“This shouldn’t take long. If I’m not back in an hour, leave without me. You won’t see me for a while, but I’ll get in touch when I can.” Before we had a chance to register our discomfort with these extremely vague instructions he disappeared into the brush and and down the steep embankment, heading toward the sound of the surf.

Nixon had been famously photographed walking on the beach, trying to show the voters that he was not a stuffed shirt, which, of course, is what he was. But he wanted to be seen as a man of the people, a guy who likes sunsets, cute puppies and wet sand between his toes. Unfortunately he blew it by walking on the beach while wearing a dark blue suit, complete with white shirt and necktie, thus confirming our suspicions that he was a total phony who could not be trusted.

Maybe he was out on the beach that evening trying to get it right, practicing his “casual look” for the next photo session. Or maybe he really did like long walks on the beach. The world will never know, but at least I can confirm that he was out there on that beach that night, and that Presidential security has been tightened a lot since those days.

We sat in the VW bus for a half hour listening to AM radio and looking at our watches. It was not a good time for music on the radio. We heard “American Pie” by Don Mclean, “Candy Man” by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Gilbert O’Sillivan’s pukey “Alone Again, Naturally.” Roberta Flack came on, and she was about to sing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” when we heard shouting in the distance. We killed the radio and craned our necks toward the beach to see what the ruckus was. In a moment Rick emerged clambering over the top of the embankment, dragging himself up with his left hand.

With his right hand he had an iron grip on the blue-coated upper arm of a struggling figure, cursing violently and trying to pull away. Scott and I got out of the van and watched in disbelief. Rick was not a big man, but his commando training or whatever it was gave him the edge in this tug of war, and in a minute we were standing there in the fading sunlight, face to unshaven face with The President of the United States, the Honorable Richard M. Nixon.

“What’re you guys,” he growled. “Communists?”

_________________________________

NEXT TIME: Holding Dick.

We tried to beat Nixon fair and square, and he cheated to win.

It was a hard lesson, but one that has served me well for decades, even giving rise to Jones’ First Law: Bullies always win.

Clearly there was no honest and civil way to stop the bleeding. It looked as if we would be stuck with President Richard M. Nixon for — say it with me — FOUR MORE YEARS!! In the primitive opinion polls of the day, his popularity was plummeting due to his involvement in the Watergate affair, and yet there he was every day on television, pretending he was a cool guy, serving the people, doing his presidential duty, shepherding the nation through trying times, making sanctimonious speeches and looking so patriotic and American. History would later reveal that he was drinking heavily during this period, and directing various government employees in the coverup of his wrongdoing, paying little if any attention to matters of state. No one knew for sure of this at the time, but to some of us it was obvious. and maddening. It looked like he’d gotten away with it. He had cheated in the most important contest in the world, and he was the leader of the free world (as we used to say in the days before The Patriot Act), and was going to get away with it.

“Fuck him,” Scott said one night as we were watching Cronkite on The CBS Evening News. There was footage of Nixon and Pat boarding Air Force One for California, where he had a home in San Clemente. “We can’t let this happen. There has to be a way to neutralize him.”

I nodded, passing the roach to him. I was holding a charge, so couldn’t agree verbally, but in truth I couldn’t have agreed more. The asshole had to be stopped.

We thought of ourselves as pretty radical guys. We smoked pot, which we called “grass,” dropped acid and marched in the streets. We and a couple million of our friends had brought down the Johnson Administration, but the victory was pathetically short-lived. Now we were saddled with the devil in a blue suit. We should have stuck with LBJ.

But there are radicals and then there are radicals. Some radicals, like the Weathermen or Patty Hearst, will actually take up arms. Some will plant bombs. Some will shoot to kill. We were not that kind of radical.

We had radical ideas. We believed in ideas. We thought that there was such a thing as Right and Wrong, and that reasonable people who might disagree could discuss these concepts and through the art and science of rhetoric and persuasion, resolve our differences. It was just a matter of communication. If a discussion ended in a shouting match, it was because we hadn’t found a way to communicate. If it ended in a shooting match, well, that’s not the kind of debate we wanted anything to do with. I hadn’t spent three years since graduation dodging the draft only to go out and kill someone, even the loathsome Dick Nixon.

So we agreed that we couldn’t kill him. To use his own words, “That would be wrong.” Not to mention that nothing gets the cops on your ass faster than assassinating a president. They take it personally, and just won’t let it go. We were young, and a life sentence would have really ruined things for us. We’d learned from our miserable failure in the McGovern campaign that just because you’re in the right doesn’t mean you’re going to prevail. Neither of us felt we’d gotten laid enough by that point in our young lives, and spending a lot of time in Leavenworth would have really cramped things.

I won’t take credit for the idea of kidnapping Nixon. In fact, it may have been me who said it first, but it also may have been Scott. The actual moment is lost. The reason for this is that my roommate was perhaps the best joint roller I have ever known. He could crank out perfect Brown and Williamson quality cigarette-like doobies in just a few seconds. It was easy to go overboard when there was a handful of perfect joints laying there in the fold of that Blind Faith double album, and when you knew that a return to reality meant facing more of the Nixon Era. We were probably on our fourth or fifth number that night when we hatched our plan.

We couldn’t kill the old bastard, but we had to take him out of circulation so he wouldn’t be able to do any more damage. Most of you probably don’t realize what it’s like to have a president who commits crimes in office, lies and cheats, divides the nation on fake “values” issues and keeps us perpetually at war with a country that has done us no harm and is no real threat to us.

Oh wait. I take that back. You do know.

In any case, our plan was pretty half-baked. Somehow we would take Nixon prisoner and keep him hidden away until the country could heal from the damage he was doing. We didn’t think it through much beyond that. To us, it seemed perfectly logical.

We had a friend with a mysterious past. He claimed he’d been a fighter pilot, but we weren’t sure which country he’d served. It might have been the Israeli Air Force. He had no visible means of support, but somehow managed to own a silver Jaguar XKE. We wouldn’t see him for weeks and then he’d show up for volleyball on a Sunday afternoon. Years later we discovered that he’d been financing the development of an automatic pistol to rival the Uzi, the gold standard of personal weaponry for 30 years and the Holy Grail of terrorists everywhere: lightweight, easily concealable, practically jam-proof and capable of firing its 40-round clip in four seconds. Apparently he was advertising a gun that could top the Uzi, and he had customers waiting, both in the Middle East and at the Pentagon. He’d already received millions in good faith prepayments, but the gun was never produced. He ended up in San Quentin,which was probably a better fate than the one his Arab customers had in mind for him. He was sentenced to seven years. The money was never recovered.

But in 1972, he was just that guy. You know the one. The one you think of when somebody says “You need a favor, I know a guy.”

Out of our minds (with concern for the Nation and the Constitution), we called him that night and told him what we wanted. Nixon was already aboard Air Force One and bound for California. He’d be at the San Clemente mansion by morning. We wanted him to take a detour. Half joking, half in earnest and half in terror over what we were getting ourselves into, we appealed to our friend’s sense of patriotic duty.

“Fuck that,” he said. “Where do you want him delivered?”

_________________________________________

Next time: Snatch!

Nixon had gone too far.

As always when a Republican wins the White House, I was blind-sided. I never expect them to win, no matter what the polls say, because I just can’t believe the electorate can be that willfully stupid. Those who truly benefit from Republican policies are such a tiny minority they could never win any national election on their own. They need big time help from The People, the very people they always stick it to as soon as they get in office. And somehow they manage to get it.

So I was flummoxed when Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, with his hunched shoulders and his navy blue suits and his “V” for Victory signs and his “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. But I rationalized the defeat by saying that Nixon and Humphrey were two sides of the same coin, that it wouldn’t have made much difference which f*cking representative of The Man got the job. Neither of them excited my young generation the way Gene McCarthy had, and then he was bumped out of the race by the even more romantic and thrilling Bobby Kennedy, who was then murdered on the night it became clear that he would win the nomination.

I was demoralized by all this, the backstabbing and the Chicago riots and the assassination and the backroom deals and the business as usual and Nixon seemed like the president we deserved. I had cast my vote that year, my first ever, for Eldridge Cleaver, who was actually on the ballot in California, so to hell with the Establishment.

But when George McGovern, a pencil-striped buttoned-down straight-arrow senator from South Dakota, stepped up to challenge Nixon in ’72, running almost entirely as an anti-war candidate, the “youth vote” was again electrified. By that time we were fed up with the war and the draft and the utter callousness of “our” government, and we were ready to mobilize to work for change. We were the baby boomers now of voting age in our first full-on battle with The Power. We were spoiled and spoiling for a fight, and we knew we couldn’t lose.

We couldn’t believe our good fortune — here was a mainstream Democrat and he wanted to end the war! He didn’t exactly speak our language, but he was a decent man and he wanted to end the war. What’s more, his people had infiltrated the party machinery from the grass roots and created the state-by-state primary season that we know today, a move that made it highly unlikely that anyone but George might win the nomination.

We joined the campaign, we hit the streets, we went door-to-door. We had the numbers, we had the energy and by God we had Truth and Righteousness on our side. And we were blindsided.

Nixon had wanted to be president at least since 1952, when Eisenhower picked him as his running mate. After twenty years he was willing to do whatever it took to keep the job. The Committee to Re-elect the President, known to us as CREEP, through old-style scorched-earth politics, dirty tricks and flat out illegal activity (can you say “Watergate”?) handed us and poor George McGovern our collective ass. We lost by an Electoral College margin of 520 to 17, carrying only the state of Massachusetts, bless their hearts. We weren’t just defeated, but humiliated, and worse, everyone knew Nixon had cheated!

Naturally we hated the corrupt old bastard.

_____________________________________

Next Time: A plan takes shape.

Remember when we kidnapped the President?

George Bush is an insufferable, smirking twerp, of course. His time in office has brought shame to our country, damaged the environment, staggered the middle class, looted the treasury, weakened our constitutional protections and killed hundreds of thousands of people on the other side of the world. These facts are not arguable, except by a tiny number of wild-eyed dittoeheads. Those in power — Bush’s handlers — are too smart even to pretend otherwise.

But before George II and his father, before the smooth-talking Bill Clinton, before that senile wholly-owned-subsidiary-of-General-Electric Ronald Reagan, in the days before most of you were born, there arose from the boneyard of washed-up, burned out, tossed aside and left-for-dead politicians perhaps the craziest dude ever to claw his way into the Oval Office: Richard Milhous Nixon.

Nixon’s fear-mongering, pandering, smearing, hypocritical Congessional campaigns in California after World War Two are the templates for Lee Atwater’s and Karl Rove’s, the “architects” of all the Bush victories, both father and son. In order to win, Nixon simply tried to destroy his opponent personally. Sound familiar?

He tried to disguise it with his safe blue suits and double-V-for victory arm signals, but his soul was tainted with a streak of craziness. It slipped out one day after Pat Brown (Jerry’s dad) kicked his ass in the 1962 California governor’s race. Nixon was convinced the press hated him and treated him unfairly, and in a famous rant told them that they were going to be sorry, because they “wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Good riddance, but it was not to be.

First John Kennedy went and got himself killed, taking a popular Democratic president out of the running. Then LBJ chickened out of the ’68 campaign, Bobby Kennedy had to drop out to spend more time underground, and next thing you knew, all the Democrats could think of was Hubert Humphrey. Nixon beat him by less than 1% of the popular vote, and suddenly, we did have him to kick around again — only now he was rested, ready, and The President.

Make no mistake — today’s neocons would see Nixon as a liberal. He went and talked to the commies in the USSR and China, negotiated nuclear test bans, started the Environmental Protection Agency, even appeared on “Laugh-In.” He’d probably be to the left of Hillary.

But there were millions of angry, disillusioned hippies, yippies and assorted radicals abroad in the streets of America. The Protest Train was in full runaway mode, and even though some of us had forgotten exactly why, we knew in our hearts that The Establishment was the enemy, no matter the problem. We were determined to pin our outrage on someone, preferably the smug face of The Man. Nixon.

My roommate, Scott, and I were beside ourselves every day. Each evening there he would be on the nightly news, making pronouncements, ignoring reality, shifty, sneaky, fucking entitled. Our marijuana intake, never conservative, ballooned out of control. We were going through a lid a week, just trying to make Tricky Dick, whom we saw as the embodiment of all that was wrong in the world, go away. What had we accomplished with our sit-ins, our marches, our activism, our Revolutionary Brotherhood, if this man could be the boss of us?

It was not a time for reflection. It was a time for action.

_______________________________________________

Next time: Something must be done.