American Rhapsody (9 page)

[6]

Hillary, Barry, and Nixon

“Do you know what I have?” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “I hope I didn't throw it away. I have a picture of me from his birthday party but he's like bent over—just his butt—and it's me looking at his butt.”

H
illary's first political romance, back in her prom-flower sweet-sixteen years, was with the right-wing conservative Barry Goldwater. He was the perfect bridge to her New Left and movement politics of the sixties, even though the cowpoke Arizona senator voted against the Civil Rights Act and would have bombed North Vietnam into a moonscape. I understood Hillary's crush. In 1964, at Ohio University, I wore a Goldwater pin and was a member, like Hillary, of the Young Conservatives. Two years later, I was out in the streets breaking windows at an ROTC office, reading Marcuse and Fanon, and smoking dope.

Hillary and I had a crush on Barry Goldwater not because we shared his sometimes wacko political ideas, but because he was finally what we'd been dreaming about for our America. A politician who was honest. A politician who dared to reveal his humanity in public. A politician who didn't talk magnolias like Lyndon Johnson, or out of all of his orifices like the loathsome Nixon, or put us to sleep with mush-mouthed by golly–isms like Ukulele Ike. I interviewed and covered Goldwater as a young student reporter during his doomed 1964 campaign for the presidency and remembered the moment in Cleveland's Public Hall that defined him for me. Here were thousands of true-believing, wild-eyed zealots chanting first “Viva!” and “Ole!” and then “We want Barry! We want Barry! We want Barry!” and the candidate stood there watching them as if they were badly behaved orangutans at the zoo . . . and he finally put his arms up and growled, “Well, if you'd just shut up, you'd have Barry!” Talk about taking the wind out of sails; the orangutans gaped at him as if they'd been struck by a tranquilizer bullet, and Barry proceeded to laugh at them for twenty seconds in his deep, phlegmy baritone.

If you want to define politics within a rock and roll context, Goldwater, who would inspire Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott and Dick Armey and Tom DeLay to consider public service, was Bill Haley without the curlicue and the belly fat, a cowpoke in suits and horn-rimmed glasses. Some of his fellow senators called him “Senator Branchwater,” and before he began his campaign, he told a reporter, “You know, I don't really have a first-class brain.” When he was nominated, he said, “Christ, we ought to be writing a speech telling them to go to hell and turn it down and let somebody else run.” A thousand psychologists signed a petition saying he'd be “psychologically unfit for office.” He appeared on his campaign plane sometimes wearing a white sombrero with a yellow-and-white-striped Mexican blanket slung over his shoulder.

His enemies, solid LBJ Great Society liberals, many of them formerly JFK aides, feigned horror and shock at some of the cowboy's antics. How could he have waded into a crowd and snarled, “Get that damn baby away from me!” when some mother lifted the thousandth baby of the day to be kissed? How could he have put a sign on his campaign plane that said
BETTER BRINKSMANSHIP THAN CHICKENSHIP
? They dug up what they considered damning actions in his personal life, actions that I loved, like taking a minicamera to a party and trying to catch his friends in compromising positions without their mates; putting a microphone and a loudspeaker into the bathroom of his house and booming, “Hi there, honey!” as women guests did their business; floating for hours at the bottom of his pool, a weight bag across his stomach, a snorkel sticking out of the water because, he said, “I get damn tired of answering the damn phone.” There was also the matter of his behavior as a city councilman in Phoenix. He kept a toy set of windup teeth near him and when someone rambled on too long, Barry would set the teeth clattering (the perfect Christmas gift for future president Bill Clinton).

I was depressed when Barry Goldwater was decimated in the election, my mood brightened only by the comments made by his vice presidential running mate, the obscure and abysmally undistinguished New York congressman William Miller: “What we have said was apparently little noted by the electorate, and certainly will not be long remembered. But it is for us the living, and not the dead drunk, to here resolve: That this government, of the birds, by the birds, and for the birds, shall not continue on this earth.” Barry's response to Miller was typically right on point: “No campaign crew in history drank more booze, lost more laundry, or bet more money on card games than his.”

Yet, ultimately, through the years, I did remember, and so did many others, two things about landslide loser Barry Goldwater . . . even as I got involved in the movement politics of the sixties and seventies. He was right about Vietnam when in his nomination acceptance speech he said, “Yesterday it was Korea; tonight it's Vietnam. Make no bones of this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President . . . refuses to say . . . whether or not the objective over there is victory. And his secretary of defense continues to misinform and mislead the American people.” (It wasn't until 1997 that Robert McNamara would finally admit misleading and deceiving us. And he did it in a book—for which he was paid a lot of money.)

Barry was also right about Walter Jenkins, whose situation presented a relevant and somewhat analogous issue to ponder in the year of Bill Clinton's impeachment travail. In 1964, White House aide Walter Jenkins was Lyndon Johnson's closest adviser, his personal assistant. Married and the father of six children, Jenkins was arrested at the YMCA, a block from the White House, for committing a homosexual act—a month before the election. Reporters learned of the arrest and also of a previous arrest for the same act, in which the charge read “Pervert.” Walter Jenkins was a scandalous front-page story in the most fevered days of a presidential election. Against the counsel of his advisers, Barry Goldwater issued orders that Walter Jenkins's arrest not be used in the campaign. (Johnson, on the other hand, ordered a poll before he issued “a statement of sympathy” for his old friend.)

As much as Hillary and I loved Barry Goldwater, we loathed Richard Nixon, his successor as the Republican standard-bearer, with an equal fervor. “Richard Nixon,” Barry Goldwater had said, “is the most dishonest man I've ever met.” Harry Truman agreed. “Richard Nixon,” he said, “is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.” Yes, that was exactly right, and it was the basic reason my generation had such a visceral and deep distrust of him. Nixon literally was, as Barry had said, “a four-square liar.”

We had watched Tricky Dick as we grew up, a shadowy presence in a sharkskin suit on our evening news. His body language was stiff and stilted, like Ed Sullivan's or like Charlie Chaplin burlesquing Hitler in
The Great Dictator
. His Pinocchio nose seemed longer to us every day, the greasy mangrove of Brylcreem atop his head a nest of crawly things. His muscles moved independently of one another: the arms sweeping up as though jerked by puppet strings, stiffly held V-for-victory fingers thrust at us the way Nelson Rockefeller used to thrust his middle finger at reporters. His smile was the frozen, gleeful smile of the KGB or Gestapo torturer, about to turn up the current. His eyes were the black holes in a mossy Transylvanian graveyard where bats with furry wings cavorted among gorgons, Gothic crosses, and tombstones. His mouth was another, larger black hole, a mass grave tended by a serpentine tongue that spewed lies and (we later discovered) scabrous four-letter racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic words.

That's how I felt and that's how my generation felt. We loathed the man. We had seen him on television using his wife's “Republican cloth coat” to get himself off a hook we were certain he deserved to hang on. This was a man who was even willing to use his dog, Checkers, to elicit our sympathy. (Visually, Bill Clinton would use Buddy the same way.) This was a man willing to persecute Alger Hiss to further his own career. We thought him an empty, ambitious careerist. He had no heart. He was the personification of the word
phony
to a generation that had grown up believing itself armed with Holden Caulfield's shit detector.

When JFK beat him, we were . . . in rapture. We were rid of him, free finally of what seemed to have been a childhood disease, a dark-shadowed presence who was a daily depression. And JFK was ours, even though we weren't of voting age yet, a president with a sense of humor and a real, unstaged laugh, who talked about compassion and the rights of our fellowman, of loving one another, regardless of skin color. As Hubert Humphrey said, JFK “brought form to our amorphous yearnings.”

JFK offered us hope for an America without dark shadows and night creatures prowling the mossy graveyards.
The
Night Creature, meanwhile, was beaten in California even for governor, a loser in his own state. He said, “You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Yes,
rapture
! Nixon was in that hole in the graveyard himself now, politically dead and buried, and we busied ourselves trying to help build the golden place called Camelot.

And then, in one furious apocalyptic moment . . .
six gray horses, followed by the traditional riderless black horse
. The bats and demons and gorgons from the graveyard were back, and they took JFK from us. After a few years—LBJ and that surreal mink-trimmed ten-gallon Stetson—Nixon crawled out of his political grave. Two other bodies later (Martin and Bobby), Richard Nixon, the Night Creature, was president of the United States. (He beat Humphrey in 1968 with one of the earliest uses of negative television advertising: a shot of Hubert laughing over images of cities burning, protesters being beaten, and stacks of dead GIs in Vietnam.) We were of voting age by then. We were old enough to hurl bricks that broke windows. We were cynical enough to answer his four-letter expletives with our own shrill ones.

Everything he stood for was symbolized to us by the goofy uniforms he designed for the White House police. Double-breasted tunics trimmed with gold braid and gold buttons, worn with helmets that looked like they belonged in the Ukrainian army. Some of us even stopped watching “Laugh-In” when they allowed him on the show. “Sock it to me!” he said, and the sound of exploding TV sets was figuratively heard across the land. Considering the rage we felt toward him, Nixon was lucky some acid-burned, mind-blown one of us didn't frag him—
DICK NIXON BEFORE HE DICKS YOU
our signs said. Dick Tuck, our merry political prankster, even hired two obviously pregnant women to march outside the Republican National Convention with a sign that said
NIXON'S THE ONE
!

We chortled knowingly when novelist Robert Coover revealed the real Nixon to us in
The Public Burning
. Coover's Richard Nixon said, “I'm a private man and always have been. Formal. When I have sex I like to do it between the sheets in a dark room. When I take a shit I lock the door. My chest is hairy but I don't show it off. I don't even like to
eat
in public . . . .” And we absolutely rejoiced when Coover revealed the scar that made Nixon tick: a brutal anal rape committed by Uncle Sam himself. Nixon: “ ‘No!' I cried. ‘Stop!' but too late, he was already lodged deep in my rectum and ramming it in deeper—oh Christ! It felt like he was trying to shove the whole goddamn Washington Monument up my ass! . . . I lay there on the spare-room floor, gurgling, sweating, half-senseless, bruised and swollen and stuffed like sausage, thinking: ‘Well, I've been through the fire . . . . I recalled Hoover's glazed stare, Roosevelt's anguished tics, Ike's silly smile. I should have guessed.' ”

No dummy, Nixon knew how fervently we loathed him. He was our enemy and we were his. He described us as “bums” and “derelicts.”

We defined ourselves to be everything that Richard Nixon wasn't. We
were
sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We believed in the buttons that adorned our scrawny bodies:
TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT; DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY; BURN POT, NOT PEOPLE; MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR; STAMP OUT PAY TOILETS; IF IT MOVES, FONDLE IT
.

We traded in our neckties for beads and ankhs. Peace symbols dangled around our necks. We got rid of our blue button-down shirts and wore embroidered denim or denim jackets with an upside-down American flag on our backs. We wore fringed Wild Bill Hickok coats and navy-surplus pea coats. (Bill Clinton had a long one when he came back from Oxford.) Those of us who worked in offices where beards and mustaches were banned bought fake ones for the weekend. We wore no underwear, and the funkier our bell-bottoms looked, the hipper they were, especially if there was a copy of Chairman Mao's
Little Red Book
in the back pocket. We never read the book—it was in sync with yelling, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win”—but we kept it in our pockets the way we kept a rubber in our wallets. We were too zonked to read much of anything, although the more scholarly were memorizing passages from Tolkien and
Siddhartha
and Kahlil Gibran.

We swore by our genitals the way Nixon swore by his “old Quaker mother.” We were our own vast Bay of Pigs—roiled up and flooding the Berlin walls of Puritan resistance. The Stones'
Sticky Fingers
cover featured a real zipper with a bulge to the left of it. John and Yoko were naked on the cover of
Two Virgins
. Yoko made a movie called
Bottoms
, starring 365 naked ones. Andy Warhol painted with his willard, as did Tom of Finland, who said, “If my cock did not stand up when I was working on a drawing, I could not make the drawing work.” The Plaster Casters turned willards into art objects. One member of the troupe would get a famous rock willard interested; then another caster would quickly dunk the interested willard into a malt shaker of caulk. The plaster willards (Hendrix's reputed to be the largest) were exhibited as holy relics at underground art shows.