The Book of Bastards (16 page)

Remember Thomas Jefferson, the great sage and enlightened thinker who secretly fathered several children with one of his slaves? Or Woodrow Wilson, the enlight-ened president who was also not so secretly a bigot?

Well, meet James Strom Thurmond, a noxious combination of the two. The Southern racist supported segregation well into his sixties. And apparently Thurmond wanted to keep the races separate because he was afraid that more white people might do what he had done himself: have children with black people.

Thurmond grew up in a family of well-to-do farmers in South Carolina. In 1925, shortly after he graduated college at Clemson, Thurmond fathered a daughter with the family's fifteen-year-old maid, Carrie “Tunch” Butler. The baby's name was Essie Mae Washington.

Thurmond sent Essie to live with relatives of her mother in Pennsylvania, but she had no idea who her father was until the late 1940s, when her mother took her to secretly meet Thurmond in Washington, D.C. Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his daughter. Instead he paid for Essie's upkeep and education. He put her through school and helped her become a teacher as he had briefly been before turning to politics. Thurmond and Essie met many times. She later recalled that she attempted to talk to him about his antediluvian views on segregation in Southern society on several occasions. Thurmond, the same man who owns the record for the length of a filibuster by a single senator (at just over twenty-four hours) while singlehandedly trying to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957, didn't have much of an answer. He brushed off her questions, saying that it wasn't personal.

After all, Thurmond was the poster boy for segregation. He led a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats embittered by President Truman's racial integration of the U.S. Armed Forces after the war and Truman's attempts to rid the country of racially motivated “poll taxes.” Thurmond became the presidential candidate of these “Dixiecrats” — known officially as the States Rights Democratic Party — in the election of 1948. Thurmond received thirty-nine electoral votes and won four states, all of them in the Deep South.

As the Democratic Party continued to become more liberal over the course of the twentieth century, Thurmond felt more and more out of step with the party. He crossed the aisle and joined the Republican Party in 1964. He served in the Senate continually from 1956 until shortly before his death in 2003. During that time he moderated his views on race, but never once acknowledged his biracial daughter Essie.

Perhaps he didn't think the time was right. Perhaps he didn't think people would understand. Perhaps he felt he'd done the best he could.

But surely the man who stormed ashore in Normandy on D-Day didn't fear public opinion. Thurmond lived to be one hundred. By the time he was in, say, his seventies, and his daughter in her fifties, he had made a career for himself several times over. What, really, was there left to fear?

The grandson, nephew, and brother of three different U.S. secretaries of state, Allen Dulles felt from an early age that he was born to make a difference. This former Wall Street lawyer and diplomat had starkly contrasting sides. He was, by turns, engaging and cruel; he was possessed of rock-solid moral certitude and a habitual womanizer. And as director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, he betrayed everything he supposedly stood for.

At Dulles's behest, the CIA in the 1950s toppled two legitimate, democratically elected governments; coups d'état brought down and replaced Iranian Mohammed Mossadeq and Guatemalan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. And the most relevant question is “why?” Simple: the specter and threat of potential nationalization.

Both Iran and Guatemala had long histories of serving as economic colonies of the West. In Iran's case the British Empire had exploited its vast oil reserves and paid the Iranian government a mere sixteen percent of the
net
profits it enjoyed.

By the 1950s the Iranian economy was so bad that President Mohammed Mossadeq considered nationalizing Iran's oil industry. Though the change would save Iran, it would also effectively cut the British off from their sweet profits and force them to pay fair market prices for their oil and gas. The British sought and got the help of the CIA. Mossadeq was denounced by a ruthless and well-funded propaganda organization as a despot who had misled the electoral process. Just like that, he was ousted, and the son of a British-deposed shah took over Iran.

In Guatemala's case the bone of contention was land. An American corporation called the United Fruit Company owned most of the land in the country in the early 1950s, as it had for decades. United Fruit had a long history of interfering in the internal affairs of Central American countries, and the corporation frequently requested and received assistance from the U.S. government. United States troops intervened in the interest of keeping United Fruit's operating costs as low as possible. These low costs included the bribes that greased corrupt Guatemalan government officials into agreeing that United Fruit should only have to pay about $3 per acre in taxes on “unimproved” tracts of land. Of course, the land was actually worth many times more than that.

So when Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was elected president of Guatemala in 1951, he decided to nationalize the company's holdings in his country. He seized the land and goods, and redistributed them to the peasants so that they could feed themselves. To add insult to injury, Guzmán even offered to reimburse United Fruit, but only at the rate at which they had valued their lands for the purpose of taxation assessment: $3 per acre!

That was the beginning of the end of Guzmán. Both Dulles and his brother secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were major stockholders in the United Fruit Company; when corporation officials went to them in a panic, Dulles acted with alacrity. Within months the CIA had been called in and backed yet another coup of an elected leader. By 1954 their efforts had (pardon the pun) borne fruit. This time the deposed president fled into exile in Mexico and was replaced by a military junta willing to continue to “tax” United Fruit at the agreed-upon $3 per acre.

Bastards.

The “last boss” was the guy who delivered the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy; he was the man who ordered out riot police and asked for help from the Illinois National Guard to suppress protestors picketing the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The “Last Boss” Richard J. Daley once said that there was no partisan way to ensure that the garbage got picked up on time. He would have known. No one — not even gangsters like Al Capone — so completely controlled the levers of power in the Windy City before or since Daley took office in 1955.

Daley was one of the last of the machine politicians that defined big city politics in America throughout much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Born in the shadow of the stockyards on Chicago's infamous South Side, Daley went to law school at night while working as a clerk. Although he briefly hung out his shingle in 1933, Daley's career was in politics.

Daley worked his way up through the city's ward system. When he first ran for office in 1936, he won a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives as (of all things) a Republican. A lifelong Democrat, Daley switched parties only so he could get elected, and quickly switched parties again in 1938 when he was elected to the Illinois State Senate.

For the next seventeen years Daley held a succession of posts. He learned the ropes and forged alliances that helped him build a power base within the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. In 1953 he was elected its chairman. Two years later he became Chicago's mayor, a post he would hold for the rest of his life.

During his formative years as an Irish-American politician, Daley made friend-ships and political alliances with like-minded Irish-Americans across the country. The most prominent of these was Joseph Kennedy of Massachusetts.

When Kennedy's senator son John ran for president in 1960, Old Joe Kennedy depended on Daley to help bring Chicago, and by association the rest of Illinois, to his son's electoral tally. Daley did deliver, to the everlasting outrage of the Republicans, by stuffing the voting roll sheets with thousands of names taken from the city's cemeteries. All of the forged ballots safely “voted” for Kennedy and the rest of the Democratic Party ticket. Kennedy won Illinois by eight thousand votes.

When Chicago was tapped to host the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention, Daley intended to use the national stage to showcase how well his machine ran the city. He forgot to consider the “Yippies” and their allies in the Antiwar Movement. Their protests began spinning out of control on August 23, 1968.

Fearing that anarchy would result from this raft of demonstrations, Daley okayed the use of force in shutting down the dissenters, including orders to shoot to kill anyone caught with a gun. Things got heated and eventually the governor called out the Illinois State National Guard to help restore order.

Daley didn't lose his office, but he did pay a price politically. As his power base eroded, Daley's health also began to decline. In 1976 he died suddenly as a result of his second heart attack in as many years at seventy-four. According to many historians, Daley's time in office wasn't without benefit for his constituents. He worked to renew Chicago's downtown and made its walking suburbs livable and attractive to the city's middle classes; Daley's work kept them (and their tax dollars) from fleeing the city limits for the suburbs as they had in nearly every other large American city over the past two decades.

No book on the subject of “bastards” (political or otherwise) would be complete without the inclusion of that opportunistic train wreck “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy, Republican senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957. A falsehood-spewing, grandstanding gasbag of the first order, McCarthy's meteoric rise to public celebrity was equaled only by his precipitous fall from grace.

Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1908, McCarthy dropped out of school while very young to help work the family farm. At age twenty he completed the entire local high school curriculum over the course of a single year, then went to college and settled on the law as a vocation. By 1938 he had passed the bar and gotten himself elected to a nonpartisan judgeship.

McCarthy joined the Marine Corps at the outset of World War II, and was immediately commissioned as an officer because of his status as a judge. He served in a noncombat role with a Marine aviation unit as their intelligence officer. By the end of the war he had earned the rank of captain.

After the war McCarthy prepared to run for the U.S. Senate and lied his ass off about his war record in furtherance of his political aspirations. He succeeded in getting elected as a senator from Wisconsin in the 1946 elections and maintained a low profile for his first three years in the Senate.

All that changed in a February, 1950, speech given at Wheeling, West Virginia: McCarthy claimed that the State Department was riddled with Communists, many of them spies. Over the next four years McCarthy set out on a witch hunt, seeking to rid first the federal government and then the entertainment industry of people who might be either spying for or sympathetic to the Soviet Union. With the Cold War just starting, people were frightened. The time was ripe for the rise of a demagogue willing to play on that fear to his advantage.

In speech after speech, McCarthy went after “secret Communists” and “Soviet agents” that always seemed to be just around the corner. And although his allegations were invariably filled with bombast, they were equally light on proof.

McCarthy's fall was just as spectacular as his rise. In 1953 he began investigating rumors of a spy ring that reportedly infiltrated the U.S. Army. In these “Army– McCarthy Hearings,” McCarthy met his match in Army lead counsel Joe Nye Welch. He also made a fatal mistake: he allowed the proceedings to be recorded for a documentary film. He came across as a bully. It all came to a head when the soft-spoken, unassuming Welch (who seemed downright fatherly on TV) called America's Witch-Hunter-in-Chief out:

His power broken, McCarthy continued to serve in the Senate, but his political career was over. The bully had been faced down. Within three years he was dead of hepatitis at the age of forty-eight.

Bastard.