Friday, September 30, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt twelve)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The political zeitgeist, as reflected by the Ford administration’s Justice Department, also compelled the government to bring Patricia to trial. By that fall, the legacy of the 1960s had grown even more toxic; San Francisco was crazier than ever. When Patricia was arrested, there had already been fifty bombings in California alone in 1975. After-hours explosions at power plants, government offices, and corporate headquarters became so routine that they scarcely received any news coverage. And it wasn’t just bombings. On September 5, 1975, two weeks before Patricia was arrested, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pointed .45-caliber handgun at President Ford as he walked through a park to the state capitol in Sacramento. A member of Charles Manson’s crime “family,” Fromme was wrestled to the ground by a Secret Service agent before she could get off a shot.

Then, on September 22, just four days after Patricia was arrested, Sara Jane Moore came a great deal closer to killing the president. The matronly bookkeeper volunteered to become an FBI informant while working with Randy Hearst’s food giveaway the previous year. Still obsessed with the Hearst case, she circulated among the activists she had met in the China Basin warehouse and then provided leads to the FBI. Moore purchased a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and waited for President Ford outside the St. Francis hotel, in the heart of downtown San Francisco. As Ford walked from the hotel to his limousine, Moore fired a shot that just missed the president’s head. She tried to get off a second round, but a Vietnam veteran named Olver Sipple knocked her down, potentially saving the president’s life. (In the ensuing publicity, Sipple was outed as a homosexual. He came to feel that this disclosure ruined his life, an illustration that San Francisco, in the mid-1970s, had yet to become a fully welcoming haven for gay people.)



Thursday, September 29, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt eleven)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Between bombings, the comrades achieved something close to a normal life. They were regulars at the drive-in movies that still dotted the region, and on one occasion the Harrises prevailed upon Patricia to go to an anti-Vietnam War documentary. Bill made a spectacle of himself in the theater, bellowing encouragement to the Vietcong forces on the screen. “Eat lead, pigs!” he shouted at the sight of American troops. Even in disguise, Patricia felt compelled to sink down in her seat, out of both embarrassment and fear of being discovered. Still, she had the fortitude to refuse the Harrises’ perverse summons to another film.

“Ask me to do anything, ask me to rob a bank with you,” Patricia told them. “But don’t ask me to go to a movie theater and get arrested watching Citizen Kane.”



Wednesday, September 28, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt ten)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The comrades took to the task with enthusiasm. In particular, the female comrades made a special effort to show that they could contribute as much to the action as the men. Wendy Yoshimura, who had learned to make bombs with her former flame Willie Brandt, took the role of lead designer. She envisioned simple pipe bombs, which would consist of gunpowder stuffed inside two-inch pipes, attached by wires to a battery for a spark and an alarm clock as a timing device. Kilgore and Kathy Soliah spent a day driving around Marin County buying the components.

True to form, Bill Harris had a different approach. Based on his study of the cookbook, he decided he could improve on Yoshimura’s design. Bill and Emily worked on his idea at Geneva Avenue—which paralyzed Patricia with fear of an accident—and then experimented with detonation devices on some old mattresses in the tiny backyard. Bill’s test resulted in a small, smoldering fire and a summons to the fire department. According to Patricia, Emily told the firefighters that local kids smoking cigarettes had started the little blaze.



Tuesday, September 27, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt nine)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Jack Scott was born in 1942 and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father ran a prosperous family tobacco business until his alcoholism drove the operation into ruin and his family into near destitution. Jack found a refuge from his chaotic home on the playing fields of his high school, where he captained the football team and set records as a sprinter. He was offered athletic scholarships to Villanova and Stanford. He spent a year at each school before a foot injury ended his athletic career and cost him his scholarship. The stark reality of college sports, where an injury could cost a student his education, left him with a sour impression. Scott spent a year in Greenland, graduated from Syracuse, then went west to Berkeley to study for a Ph.D.

Even before he received his doctorate, Scott made a national name for himself. He founded the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society, which aimed to capture and focus national attention on the exploitation of athletes in the college and pro ranks. Scott’s group challenged the authority of coaches, denounced racism in sports, and questioned the medical treatment of athletes. Scott helped write Dave Meggyesy’s 1970 best-selling insider’s account of playing in the NFL, which described rampant drug use and violence against women. As sports editor for Ramparts, a counterculture magazine based in San Francisco, Scott made exactly the enemies he wanted. Spiro Agnew, the vice president of the United States and a great sports fan, denounced Scott by name for questioning the verities of the national pastimes. The most famous visitor to Scott’s institute in Berkeley was Bill Walton, the UCLA center who was at the time the best college basketball player in the country; later, Walton and Scott would become close friends.



Monday, September 26, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt eight)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Cinque also wanted to hide the two vans that brought the comrades to Fifty-Fourth Street. Freeman showed him the secluded alley about a block away that was frequently used as a temporary home for stolen vehicles. DeFreeze and the man hustled the two vans into the alley, but the SLA leader would soon recognize the folly of relying on a drunken stranger for advice on operational security. The police knew about the stash in the alley, and that was where the uniformed officers discovered the vehicles around noon. They radioed in the information, which prompted the arrival of the SWAT team, with its dozens of backups. The vise was tightening.

By early afternoon, the scene inside the house had turned increasingly surreal and crowded. Minnie’s children returned from school to find Nancy Ling making Molotov cocktails in the kitchen. One of the children, who was eleven years old, recognized DeFreeze, who introduced himself as Cinque, from television. When the boy asked him his name, DeFreeze repled that the boy should go into the bathroom and lie down in the tub if he didn’t want to get killed. The boy fled out the back door instead. An older man named Clarence Ross settled in with a pint bottle of whiskey. At another point, Christine Johnson and a woman named Brenda got into a fistfight. Impressed with the seventeen-year-old Brenda’s skills, the comrades asked if she wanted to join the SLA. A male friend of hers arrived, and DeFreeze asked him to go buy them a car. He gave the fellow $500 in cash, and he never returned with a car or the money. More than a dozen people passed through the house over the course of the day, and DeFreeze disclosed his identity to virtually all of them.



Sunday, September 25, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt seven)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Events moved so quickly on May 16 that the news media never caught up. But the shoot-out at Mel’s and the chase that followed gave local television stations the chance to mobilize the following morning. In those days, most local stations sent out camera crews to shoot film that had to be developed back at their studios. But KNXT—which stood for “experimental television”—possessed a new technology that allowed it to broadcast live from the field through a microwave transmitter attached to the top of a small truck. The technology was so new that the team at KNXT is said to have invented its name: the Minicam.

KNXT (later renamed KCBS) would become a national prototype for local news in America. This happened, in part, because Mary Tyler Moore’s aunt happened to work as the business manager of the station, and she shared tales of the station’s lead anchor, Jerry Dunphy—who served as the model for the hapless Ted Baxter. But the station was also a journalistic and ratings leader, with a strong institutional commitment to securing scoops. For KNXT, the Minicam was a not-so-secret weapon. Bill Deiz, a thirty-year-old correspondent for KNXT, wanted to deploy the new technology when he showed up for work on the morning of May 17 to cover the biggest story the city had seen in a long time: the sudden, thunderous arrival of the Symbionese Liberation Army.



Saturday, September 24, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt six)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The three SLA vehicles linked up later in the morning. DeFreeze appeared in his red-and-white van, which had the odd feature of dainty curtains on the windows. Nancy Ling was deputized to find the group a place to live, and she returned to report that she had located a house at 822 West Eighty-Fourth Street, in South Central, for the modest sum of $70 a month. When the comrades assembled there, they saw why the price was so low. Even by the modest standards of the comrades’ living conditions in San Francisco, the place was a wreck—a three-room shack with no electricity and thus no hot water, in the heart of the ghetto. Even with the big score at the bank, the comrades couldn’t help but notice the downward trajectory of their living conditions. They had gone from a comfortable suburban house in Concord, to a modest home in Daly City, to a pair of seedy apartments in San Francisco, to this hovel in Los Angeles. The dismal regression offered a vivid counterpoint to DeFreeze’s promises of imminent victory.

There was no furniture, no stove, no refrigerator, no cooking utensils. Emily Harris and Camilla Hall snuck out to a grocery store and returned with canned spinach and okra, which they attempted to flavor with another purchase, canned mackerel. The comrades who could stomach the mixture ate it cold. Patricia, her weight already below a hundred pounds, lived on crackers and Kipper Snacks, a different kind of canned fish. As in San Francisco, the black neighborhood made it difficult for anyone but DeFreeze to leave the house without drawing attention. Mostly, they stayed inside, doing their military drills and calisthenics in desultory compliance with their established custom. DeFreeze added instruction in knife fights to their daily ritual.



Friday, September 23, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt five)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The exhilaration over the bank robbery passed after a few days, replaced by DeFreeze’s paranoia as well as the claustrophobia created by nine bodies in a small apartment. This time, DeFreeze had a new idea about how he was going to advance the cause. He would begin recruiting new members by ringing doorbells and introducing himself to strangers as General Field Marshal Cinque of the SLA.

Even by DeFreeze’s standards, this was a lunatic notion. He was perhaps the most wanted man in America, and his photograph had been all over the news. Still, it galled DeFreeze to fancy himself a leader of black people when all of his followers were white. Now, he thought, it was time to reach out to African Americans, and most of the neighbors in the Western Addition neighborhood happened to be black. He believed he could build on the outlaw sensibility he had cultivated with the food giveaway and the bank robbery. DeFreeze told Angela Atwood and Bill Harris to accompany him on his rounds and stand behind him as he made his pitch to whoever happened to open the door. (Harris, characteristically, thought DeFreeze’s idea was madness, though he did comply with the order to tag along.)



Thursday, September 22, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt four)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

After Steven Weed moved out of the Hearst family mansion, he continued his quixotic, independent investigation of the kidnapping. In early April, Weed tried to make connections in the radical exile community, hoping to find a country that might grant asylum to the SLA, if they freed Patricia. One of his contacts suggested that Régis Debray, the originator of the foco theory (whose books had been found in the Concord house), might be willing to help. As a bonus, Debray had known the original Tania and could speak about her character and motivations. Weed’s acquaintance called the singer Joan Baez, a friend of Debray’s, who agreed to contact the Marxist theoretician, who was living in Mexico. Debray indicated some interest in trying to help. Weed then ran the idea by Randy Hearst.

“We need a goddamn South American revolutionary mixed up in this thing like a hole in the head,” Randy replied.



Wednesday, September 21, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt three)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

In their communication demanding the giveaway, the SLA had listed more than a dozen community and political groups that were to participate in and monitor the process. This proved to be a savvy move. The groups ranged from the Black Panthers and the United Farm Workers to local operations like the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Several of these organizations, like the Panthers and the UFW, immediately refused to be associated with the SLA because of its responsibility for the assassination of Marcus Foster. But most of the others, including the American Indian Movement and the United Prisoners Union, agreed to take part, mostly be contributing members to assist in the distribution of food. Most important, the participating groups helped validate the operation. Their involvement marked a turning point in the brief history of the SLA—a crucial step in the laundering of its reputation.

The Berkeley Barb, the alternative weekly that served as the unofficial paper of record for the Bay Area counterculture, reflected this change in the SLA’s public image. Following the kidnapping, and the demand for the food giveaway, the Barb heaped praise on the SLA. The group has “pulled off a devastatingly successful action, underscored the extent of poverty in this state, and written a few pages of American history,” one article noted. “Terror has always been a tool of government and has a legitimate use in actions taken by guerilla groups against repressive governments . . . . The life of each Vietnamese peasant is just as valuable as the life of Patty Hearst, who is another non-combatant caught up in a war.” Barb headlines from this period included “SLA, We Love You” and “How Can I Join?” In this way, the kidnapping of Hearst, and especially the food giveaway, became such important, high-profile national events that they pushed the SLA’s involvement in the Foster murder from the public consciousness. After only three months, this heinous event, amazingly enough, was on its way to being forgotten.



Tuesday, September 20, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt two)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

On the way, DeFreeze’s group referred to each other only by code names, and Cinque—DeFreeze—took the lead in establishing discipline. “Shut up or we’ll kill you!” he shouted from the front passenger seat as soon as they took off. Bill Harris, on the other hand, was impressed with Patricia’s composure, especially compared with the panicked reaction of her fiancé, and he wanted to comfort her. Bill was in the backseat, with Patricia curled up and silent behind him. As Cinque bellowed, Bill Harris—Teko—reached under the blanket and held Patricia Hearst’s hand. She was threatened and reassured at the same time.

The unplanned juxtaposition of terror and kindess in the station wagon would prove typical of Patricia’s time in captivity. The SLA comrades lacked the skills, or even the inclination, to attempt anything as ambitious as a brainwashing. Their schizophrenic treatment of Patricia reflected the muddled thinking within the SLA. Literally and figuratively, the comrades didn’t know what they were doing. But this non-strategy turned out to be a strategy itself, and so the body and the mind of their captive were whipsawed accordingly.



Monday, September 19, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt one)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The kidnapping of Patricia Hearst is very much a story of American in the 1970s, not the 1960s. From the vantage point of nearly half a century, the two decades sometimes merge in historical memory as a seamless epoch of idealism and change. Generalizations about eras are necessarily imperfect, of course, but these two decades actually look very different in retrospect. The 1960s were hopeful, the 1970s sour; the 1960s were about success, the 1970s about failure; the 1960s were sporadically violent, the 1970s pervasively violent.

There were assassinations and riots in the 1960s, but the vast majority of protests were peaceful and even, occasionally, successful. After an extraordinary public outpouring from African Americans and their allies, official racial segregation, which had plagued the United States since its inception, faded in the 1960s. Men walked on the moon. The economy boomed. Much of the discontent in the 1960s emerged from a sense of possibility—that blacks and whites could live in harmony, that the Vietnam War could end, that there could be a better future for all. Those hopes, for the most part, were dashed by the 1970s. Ricahrd Nixon became president in 1969 and did not end the war. An oil embargo in 1973 led to gas lines. The economy stagnated. The stock market lost almost half its value between 1973 and 1974. Inflation hit 12 percent a year. Watergate confirmed every cynical expectation about American politics.



Sunday, September 18, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt fourteen)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

Lyndon Johnson, in Austin, was more vigilant. He was on the phone with Bill Moyers constantly, gorging himself with good news. At 5:45 p.m. he asked about Kentucky (final total: LBJ, 64 to 36), Indiana (65 to 33), New Jersey (66 to 34), and Oklahoma (56 to 44). At 5:52 he learned, unsurprisingly, that Goldwater was winning South Carolina (final total: 59 to 41), but that the Democratic ticket was on a pace toward carrying Ohio, whose governor had offloaded his convention delegates to Goldwater certain that the backlash would carry the Republican to victory, by a million and a half votes. At 6:22 the President looked into Maryland (65 to 35), Connecticut (68 to 32), Vermont (66 to 34, Democratic for the first time ever), North Carolina (a border-state landslide for LBJ, 56 to 44), Minnesota (64 to 36), and Georgia (Goldwater, 55 to 44). The news wasn’t enough to cheer him. “I’m afraid of Vietnam,” he told Moyers in between returns. “We’re in trouble in Vietnam, serious trouble,” he repeated to Hubert Humphrey. Congratulating his former attorney general on his projected New York Senate victory, Johnson, sounding perhaps a bit more pleading than he had intended, asked: “If you get any solution on Vietnam just call me direct, will you?”



Saturday, September 17, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt thirteen)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

It took physical courage for Lady Bird to do what she did—arrange a campaign tour for herself through eight Southern states. The original idea was to co-host a reception in the rotunda of each statehouse. The Secret Service nixed that proposal: closed circular spaces were a sniper’s heaven. Hers would surely be the first whistle-stop in history to travel with its own minesweeper: a second train engine, traveling fifteen minutes ahead of the first, to detonate any bombs placed in its path.

The planning had been painful. Lady Bird spent eleven-hour days in September working the phones asking politicians for their participation. For the most part, only those not up for reelection offered hospitality. The Democratic nominee for North Carolina’s governorship didn’t return her calls. A Virginia senator scheduled a convenient hunting trip. Senator Byrd had been “jovial and courteous and darling,” she reported to her husband—until she mentioned the purpose of her call, whereupon “an invisible silken curtain fell across his voice.” Louisiana’s governor John McKeithan embarrassedly explained that he “was working for the Democrats, you understand”—just after his own fashion. Strom Thurmond mumbled that “a really basic decision within the next two weeks” precluded his participation. As for George Wallace, she thought it would be rude even to bother.

She was unfazed. No candidate’s wife had taken such a tour without her husband before. But she knew her people needed to hear some hard truths. Her husband could not do the job if he wanted to: the assassination threat was too great. But Southerners, she knew, would never shoot a lady off her pedestal.



Friday, September 16, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt twelve)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

Johnson started in Providence, Rhode Island, which suited his purposes well. It was Kennedy country, its soul divided between the martyr's two most loyal constituencies: a proud Irish-Catholic proletariat and the eggheads at Brown University. Stewart Alsop reported that Oliver Quayle, whose polls the President now carried in his pocket like a lucky rabbit's foot, found that Kennedy's "fading but much-revered memory" was LBJ's "second-greatest asset" in the campaign. (The first was "the nervous and uneasy feeling Senator Goldwater imparts to a great many voters.") Johnson was determined to show that there was so much more to his popularity than that--to show that he was loved. Although he was not exactly sure that he was.



Thursday, September 15, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt eleven)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

Strom Thurmond was perhaps the most conservative legislator in the Capitol. He was also Barry Goldwater’s friend; when Thurmond broke the filibuster record during the 1957 civil rights debate, Goldwater was the only senator who spelled him for bathroom breaks. Like most of the South’s politically alert demagogues, by 1964 Thurmond had stopped shy of directing scorn at blacks themselves; he proclaimed himself a constitutionalist, pure and simple. Goldwater had no compunctions about asking for Thurmond’s endorsement. It was freely offered. Goldwater then dared Thurmond to go one better and become a Republican. That would make history: the only Republican senator from any state in the old Confederacy was John Tower.

Thurmond asked his cronies about the idea. They told him he was crazy. He polled South Carolina voters. They told him he wasn’t crazy. A third voice tipped the decision: Roger Milliken, Thurmond’s biggest benefactor. And so, in a statewide TV address on September 16, in front of a “Goldwater for President” poster bigger than he was, Senator Thurmond acted as if he had hardly given the decision a second thought. If Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats prevailed, he said, “Freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed.”



Wednesday, September 14, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt ten)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

The future would embarrass the 1964 World’s Fair. One pavilion “demonstrated” the safe harnessing of nuclear fusion. The fair’s megalomaniacal promoter, Robert Moses, gutted many a peaceful Queens neighborhood to lay down his new Van Wyck Expressway in time for the opening (though the streets had been less peaceful since Parents and Taxpayers began agitating in the vicinity against the board of education’s latest busing plan). Architect Philip Johnson was given free rein to commission pieces by exciting young artists outside the New York State pavilion. A funny little man called Andy Warhol contributed Thirteen Most Wanted Men, a mural consisting of old FBI mug shots, mostly of men who had since been exonerated. No one expected that spitting on J. Edgar Hoover’s good name (instead of producing, say, sweeping, high-gloss, colorful abstract shapes) was something exciting young artists would care to do. Moses ordered the mural whitewashed. Though the Unisphere, the enormous stainless-steel globe at the center of the grounds, was not dismantled when its patron, United States Steel, was convicted in a price-fixing scheme.



Tuesday, September 13, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt nine)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith’s admirers had been approaching her to run for President ever since she issued her courageous 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” condemning Joseph McCarthy. With the Kennedy assassination the cries increased. At the podium of a January meeting of the Women’s National Press Club, Smith listed all the reasons that a woman could never realistically run for President. She concluded, “So, because of all these impelling reasons against my running, I have decided”—long pause—“I shall.” The first female major-party presidential candidate brought down the house.

She had begun her career by taking up the House seat of her husband when he died, in the days when congressional wives were expected to spend half the week calling on embassies, the homes of Supreme Court justices, and the White House—a thrilling exercise consisting of leaving calling cards on a silver tray at the East Gate. After she served out her husband’s term she was reelected by greater margins than her husband ever was. In 1948 she became the first woman to win a Senate seat in her own right; in 1960 Democrats decided to no avail that their only chance to beat her was to nominate a woman. (It was the first time two women faced off for a Senate seat, and the last until 1986.) The “Conscience of the Senate” was a bracingly unpredictable voter, a foe of both COPE and HUAC; whenever a colleague asked for her vote on an issue, she automatically voted the other way. She answered all her mail by hand, never took a dime of campaign contributions, and once held up Jimmy Stewart’s promotion to brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve because “there are others more deserving.”



Monday, September 12, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt eight)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

Vietnam may have been on these Democrats’ minds. Through September and early October, a flurry of cables between Washington and Saigon wrestled with a contradiction at the heart of the Pax Americana. American power wanted to be innocent. But once it became clear that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem would not be cowed into moving toward American-style democracy by threats of losing $1 million a day in U.S. subsidies, arrangements were made with a cabal of Vietnamese generals for a “totally secure and fully deniable” coup—to advance the cause of democracy, of course. Usually the CIA carried out such orders at a remove from the presidential gaze; this coup, however, was directed from the White House. On November 1, a group of South Vietnamese generals secured Diem’s surrender by promising him safe passage out of the country. Then they shot him in the back. Kennedy, incredulous, almost convinced himself to believe the generals’ story that Diem had killed himself. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy brought him back to earth by reminding him of the photographs of the corpse with his hands tied behind his back—“not,” he quipped, “the preferred way to commit suicide.” It haunted the President’s conscience, what had happened there, what he had not been able to control. Soon a New York Times investigation revealed American involvement in the plot. Now it was a political problem.



Saturday, September 10, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt seven)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

The country would have been lucky to get through the week. Governor Wallace was now standing in the doors of his state’s elementary and high schools. If integration went ahead, he said, he didn’t want any bloodshed—although if it happened, he said, civil rights agitators would be held responsible. Klansmen in Birmingham took the hint. The explosion inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15 was heard for two miles. Four little girls died in their Sunday school dresses. King wired Kennedy during the tensions that ensued: only the President’s intercession could prevent the “worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen.” Ten days later another incendiary device exploded on Dynamite Hill, then a second, a shrapnel bomb intended to wound police if they investigated first. The Klansmen who were responsible copped pleas for misdemeanor possession of dynamite.



Friday, September 9, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt six)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

Sunday morning the snarlingest dog of them all showed up on Meet the Press and proved he could look as winsome as a puppy when occasion demanded. “I will stand in the schoolhouse door,” George Wallace responded confidently when asked what he would do on June 11, registration day for new students at the University of Alabama. He proceeded to make it sound like the most reasonable thing in the world. He pulled out a card from his pocket and began reading: The Supreme Court had “improperly set itself up as a third house of Congress, a superlegislature.” FDR said that in 1937, Wallace explained with a grin. “I concur in it.” Editorial pages around the country on Monday morning rang with praise for the governor’s position. Declared the Winona (Kansas) Leader, “The very people who have the greatest stake in preserving the constitution”—Negroes—“are doing the most to destroy it” with their intemperate protests. Such editorials only made the Kennedys more determined in their belief that if they could only give the protesters what they were demanding, they could stop the George Wallaces of the world in their tracks.



Thursday, September 8, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt five)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

The press was still ignoring King’s protesters. Four days later, an eccentric white postman from Baltimore embarked on a quixotic walk from Chattanooga, across Alabama, to Mississippi, wearing a signboard and pushing a shopping cart full of civil rights literature. He got as far as a roadside near Attalla, Alabama, before he was shot twice through the head. The President’s press conference the next day was unburdened by questions about the killing or about the twenty-one unbroken days of demonstrations in Birmingham. No one seemed to care.



Wednesday, September 7, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt four)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

To its white citizens, Birmingham, Alabama, was a proud and grimy symbol of the South’s industrial future, presided over by United States Steel Company’s dwarfing works on its outskirts and a fifty-six-foot statue of Vulcan, Roman god of fire, in its bustling downtown—“Magic City,” they called it, in wonderment at its population’s doubling since the war. To its black residents, who could hardly be called citizens, Birmingham was an everyday hell of quiet humiliation and frequent terror. No segregation code was stricter (“It shall be unlawful for a Negro and a white person to play together … in any game of cards of dice, dominoes or checkers”); nowhere were the consequences of transgression more terrifying. In 1957 a local black minister named Fred Shuttlesworth announced his intention to send his children to white schools. In retaliation, the Klan abducted a black man at random, castrated him, and poured turpentine on the wound. Blacks lived on the east side of Center Street in Birmingham, whites on the west, and not for nothing were the borderlands in between nicknamed “Dynamite Hill.”



Tuesday, September 6, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt three)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

His speech was shrugged off as a puzzlement. Evidence supporting its wisdom piled up that week. But because America was seized by a wartime mentality, much of that evidence was secret. The Central Intelligence Agency was training Cuban exiles deep in the Guatemalan bush for an invasion to overthrow the Castro government; on January 17 the files were closed on a completed CIA mission in which rebels led by a military officer named Joseph Mobutu hunted down and killed the Republic of the Congo’s Soviet-leaning prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, on the country’s 203rd day of independence. The next day Adlai Stevenson denounced the coup at the UN. And the Kremlin officially declared “the only way to bring imperialism to heel” was through the “sacred struggle of colonial peoples, wars of colonial liberation.” On January 19, the American nuclear program suffered its thirteenth “broken arrow” when a B-52 exploded in midair in Utah, luckily without any of the missiles armed; the fourteenth was ten days later when a B-52 flying a routine Strategic Air Command training mission out of Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base crashed near a North Carolina farm. The aircraft’s two nuclear bombs jettisoned, and five of their six safety mechanisms were unlatched by the fall.



Sunday, September 4, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt two)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

Rockefeller was a Cold War hawk almost to the degree (if not exactly the kind) of Goldwater. An early proposal he put forward as governor was to assess each New York family the over $300 it would require to build a bomb shelter for every household in the state. The argument was the same as in Conscience: whichever side was able to render nuclear war less unthinkable had the advantage. “Are we going to arrive at a point some day,” he asked at a civil defense seminar in March, “when the president will say: ‘Well, how can we afford to stand for freedom? With the people exposed, can we run that risk?’” He introduced a new phrase to the American lexicon that summer: “missile gap”—the assertion that the Soviets had hundreds more nuclear projectiles than did the United States. He based the charge on one of his Rockefeller Brothers Special Studies Fund reports. Then he amplified it to revive his presidential bid.

In fact, data from U2 spy planes had demonstrated that the USSR’s arsenal of bombers and missiles that could reach the United States was nearly nonexistent. But that intelligence was top secret, unknown even to a New York governor—a rule of espionage being that you can’t let your enemy know what you know about them. (“I can’t understand the United States being quite as panicky as they are,” Eisenhower once said, forgetting that he was one of only a handful of people who knew that the empire that threatened to bury us could in fact do no such thing.) Republican leaders scurried to shut Rockefeller up. Nixon leaked that the governor was first choice for vice president; Kentucky senator Thruston Morton, chair of the Republican National Convention, offered him the keynote speech in Chicago. Rocky rebuffed them. “I hate the thought of Dick Nixon being president of the United States,” he told confidants.



Saturday, September 3, 2016

the last book I ever read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, excerpt one)

from Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein:

The ideal politician, it has been written, is an ordinary representative of his class with extraordinary abilities. Goldwater wrote as a member of an imaginary republic of beneficent businessmen-citizens just like himself. It was not for him to observe that the operating deficits brought on by the Goldwater’s stores’ generous benefits package were covered out of interest generated from his wife’s trust fund. (Indiana-born Peggy was an heiress of the Borg-Warner fortune. Her family vacationed in Arizona, where they socialized with the most prominent local family—the Goldwaters—as a matter of course.) Goldwater’s approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes—an attitude most visible in his views on discrimination. “There never was a lot of it,” he recalled of the Phoenix of his youth. Yet when he was eleven the chamber of commerce took out an ad boasting of Phoenix’s “very small percentage of Mexicans, Negroes, or foreigners.” Barry Goldwater delighted in, and journalists delighted in repeating, his corny put-downs of anti-Semites. Why couldn’t he play nine holes, he was supposed to have responded when kicked off a golf course, since he was only half Jewish? They reported how when he took over as president of Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he said if they didn’t allow his friend Harry Rosenzweig to join he would blackball every name. Rosenzweig became the first Jew the club ever admitted. Left out of the tale was that another Jew wasn’t allowed in for a decade.



Friday, September 2, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt twelve)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

“What’s that noise?” the pilot asked.

“That’s Frank,” I said. “I think he just bit a chunk out of his own liver.” I looked back to make sure Mankiewicz was still strapped into his seat—which he was, but his face was grey and his eyes seemed unable to focus. He was sitting with his back to the window, so he couldn’t enjoy the view. And our engine noise was so loud that he couldn’t hear what we were saying up in the cockpit, so he had no way of knowing that our sudden, high-speed power-drive straight down at the vortex of Manhattan Island was anything more or less than what anybody who has spent a lot of time on commercial jetliners would assume it to be—the last few seconds of an irreversible death-plunge that would end all our lives, momentarily, in a terrible explosion and a towering ball of fire in the middle of Broadway.



Thursday, September 1, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt eleven)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

The “ABM Movement” (Anybody but McGovern) was a coalition of desperate losers, thrown together at the last moment by Big Labor chief George Meany and his axe-man, Al Barkan. Hubert Humphrey was pressed into service as the front man for ABM, and he quickly signed up the others: Big Ed, Scoop Jackson, Terry Sanford, Shirley Chisholm—all the heavies.

The ABM movement came together officially sometimes in the middle of the week just before the convention, when it finally became apparent that massive fraud, treachery, or violence was the only way to prevent McGovern from getting the nomination… and what followed, once this fact was accepted by all parties involved, will hopefully go down in history as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Democratic process.