So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (18 page)
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Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
Thus it was that I rolled into the Fort McDowell reservation in my 1950 Chevy around 5:45 one morning, to be greeted by a group of the residents. The poverty at the reservation was appalling; it surpassed even some of the worst sites I later saw in Latin America. I had done my best, in downtown Phoenix, to find enough food “for fifty people or so” but could only, in an all-night café, round up maybe seventy or eighty egg salad sandwiches—all it had in stock.
The Indians fell upon the sandwiches as though they hadn’t eaten in days, and we started to talk. I had done some research on recall elections on Indian reservations, and I had learned, among other things, that even to hold one required the approval of the Secretary of the Interior. But the group was ready to go; they hired our firm—pro bono, on the promise that if they won the election, we could sign a contract for the following year. They wanted to elect five candidates to recall and replace the water company guys presently on the council, and I went to work.
In those days, life was simpler. I called the Department of the Interior, asked for the secretary, told his assistant what I wanted, and was speaking directly to Secretary Stewart Udall within a minute or two. He readily agreed to order a recall election once he had verified the facts I gave him, and my “clients” began their campaign.
Technically, it was a success; all five incumbents were defeated, but, alas, three of them were replaced by different employees of the water department. A new contract was entered into, this one for fifty thousand dollars a year, a pittance for a city the size of Phoenix, but at least an improvement over the old agreement. And, in one of those rare instances when a happy ending is ultimately added, I was pleased, a few years ago, watching a postseason baseball game from Phoenix on TV, to see—as the cameras panned the grandstand wall of local advertisements—a promotion for the Fort McDowell Casino, billed as the “Largest and Luckiest in the West.” I doubt they serve egg salad sandwiches.
My father had traveled from the East Coast to California, where he spent virtually his entire adult life being paid huge amounts of money for doing something he held in disdain. I reversed this. I went from California to the East Coast, where I accepted my first two job offers—from the Peace Corps and then from Robert F. Kennedy—without asking what my salary would be.
My ticket out of Hollywood came in part, curiously, from my training during World War II.
The inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961 was to me a sort of liberation day; there is no better word to describe the excitement. I had worked hard in the fall campaign in 1960, using my slim hold in the Democratic Party in Los Angeles County, where I had been reelected as a member of the party’s central committee, to speak for Kennedy in a number of local debates, and even on TV once or twice. I had become a Kennedy man almost by default, deserting most of my liberal comrades, who remained strong supporters of Adlai Stevenson, because of my conviction that Stevenson’s traditional 1950s liberalism, with its emphasis more on what had come to be called social issues rather than the simpler, and more muscular, economic ones tied to the New Deal, made him the natural prey of the Republican leader, Richard Nixon.
John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address was a big disappointment to me. “Hour of maximum danger”? Even JFK, I thought, did not believe it. There was never a serious threat from the Soviets. We were not even sure their missiles worked. How could a country that couldn’t get their toilets to flush be a threat to us? Much of the speech was about what you can do for your country. No mention of civil rights or health insurance.
But Kennedy’s early appointments and pronouncements, giving rise to the rubric of the New Frontier, inspired me to think of a career in politics, in Washington, rather than to be permanently, I feared, mired in my law practice in California. The good name and reputation of an English sexpot rival to Marilyn Monroe, and the precise placement in the screen credits of the name (and in what size of type) of Yul Brynner or Burt Lancaster, no longer—if they ever had—held much romance or promise for me, and the more I read of the appointment of fresh young men to posts in the JFK administration, the more I longed to be one of them.
So I wrote to everyone I knew who had moved into the Kennedy administration, urging them to find a place for me—as I put it, “as Secretary of State or, if that proves difficult, some obscure post in the Bureau of Mines.”
These probes had yielded no response until the early summer, when my family took a vacation at the ski resort of Squaw Valley, then largely deserted for the season but a pleasant retreat from the complicated independent movie production deals in which I was increasingly immersed. Our cabin had no phone—messages, if any, were relayed through the nearby forest ranger—and so I was very pleasantly surprised one evening, on our return from a day in nearby Virginia City, Nevada, to see a note from the ranger tacked to our door. “Mr. Mankowitz,” it read, with some charming innovations in spelling, “please call Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Peace Corps Director Sergeant Shriver, Ralph Dungan at the White House, and your mother.” Needless to say, I got to a pay phone quickly—and called my mother.
It was she who had originally taken the calls and then forwarded them to the ranger. She was much taken with Shriver, by then well-known as the president’s brother-in-law and the director of the new (and exciting) Peace Corps. I was dismissive, wanting to speculate more about the Department of Defense (was I to be offered the chance to be one of McNamara’s “Whiz Kids,” even at the advanced age of thirty-seven?) or even the White House, where I saw myself working alongside Ted Sorensen. I was even a bit contemptuous of the Peace Corps, seeing it as sort of a home for guitar players and other aimless young leftists. But I called them all and found I would be spending most of a morning with people at the Pentagon and an hour or so in the afternoon at the White House with Ralph Dungan. I told the Peace Corps I’d call when I got to Washington, D.C., if any time was left.
But the time at Defense was disheartening. Although they all spoke English, and I knew the words, the things they talked about were utterly foreign. “Throw weight,” “force levels,” all the talk of missiles and firepower were not in my world, and I found the lingo difficult to understand and somewhat unpleasant when I did. And Dungan was not much more promising; he even recommended the Peace Corps to me as an “interesting possibility.” “Sarge is putting a very special group together,” he said. So there I was with an hour or so to spare before returning to the airport, with not much to chew on except the possibility of an incomprehensible assignment at Defense or a vague staff job at the White House. So I headed over to the Peace Corps, eager not to offend but not terribly hopeful, either.
The scene that greeted me was almost as though I’d entered a new life. Energy and excitement were very present; the young men and women I met seemed just the sort I had expected from a Kennedy administration; everyone seemed interested in and appreciative of my background, and when it was discovered I was fluent in Spanish, I was offered a job. “You should be a country representative [director] in South America,” I was told, and was even urged to pick out a country in which to lead a group of volunteers. Peru was one of the possibilities, and I singled it out, not knowing exactly where it was on the map and knowing very little about the country except that it was the home of a hero of mine, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the leader of a left-socialist party, the APRA (standing for American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), elected more than once as president and denied the office by a military coup d’état supported by a landowning class determined to keep the Indian majority from power. I also had come to know the executive director of Americans for Democratic Action, James Loeb, who had been named JFK’s ambassador to Peru.
I was told I could be the country director for Peru, provided Sarge Shriver, who was then overseas, approved, because he had to sign off on everyone at that level with a personal interview. So I flew back home, thoroughly committed to the Peace Corps, to await Shriver’s return. He called me within a week, and the sound of his voice and the eagerness of his greeting only confirmed my decision. But we had trouble connecting. His first call was on a Thursday, wondering if I could come to Washington for the weekend (“Eunice says we have plenty of room—bring your tennis racket”), but I had a trial scheduled and had to decline. One of his later invitations was to come to Hyannis Port for the weekend, hard to turn down but an important distribution agreement had to be drafted by Monday. Finally, he noted he would be in Texas the following week, training the first group of volunteers to go to Tanganyika, and could I join him there? I could, indeed, and so it was I met Shriver, on what was to be the day my life changed, in a small cottage in a run-of-the-mill motel in El Paso.
Sarge was surrounded by staff, all involved in the training operation, yet he seemed to be concerned only with me. He wanted to know about law school and my practice and seemed to have memorized every movie my father (or uncle) had written. He was amazed I spoke Spanish and wanted a detailed description of the army program where I had learned the language, as well as to trade combat experiences with me (he had served on a submarine in the Pacific). I had never, I thought, had such rapport with someone new, particularly a potential boss. He invited me to join him in Lima on a forthcoming trip to South America, and finally, after one last Burt Lancaster story from me, he reluctantly rose to go back to address the volunteers and told me the Peru job was mine. I thanked him, he turned me over to some staff person for details (when and where to report), and then, as he went out the door of the motel room, he asked me, “Don’t you want to know your salary?” I said I assumed it would be adequate to live in Lima with my family but asked, “What is the salary?” “I haven’t the foggiest idea,” he answered, and left the motel.
I saw him next at the airport in Lima. I had not yet been sworn in but was on board as a temporary consultant. Sarge was accompanied by his Latin America regional director, Jack Vaughn (whom I would later succeed), an interesting fellow in his own right. Jack had knocked around Latin America for some years in various government capacities, most recently in economic development as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program, spoke fluent Spanish, and had a splendid sense of humor, a gift for mimicry—in English or Spanish—and a prominent past as a Golden Gloves boxing champion. Sarge and Jack and I then set out on a weeklong jaunt through Peru, through the Andes cities of Cuzco and Puno and the coastal cities (and slums) along the way. Also along the way, we learned the system of landownership. Vast tracts, hundreds of thousands of acres, were owned by members of the ruling class and farmed by sharecroppers, who were sold along with the land.
A rapidly growing section of Peru, one the establishment—U.S. and Peruvian—preferred to ignore, was the
barriadas,
sprawling, seemingly disorganized slums surrounding the major cities, mainly Lima. These were in fact highly organized “shanty” villages, formed on public lands by collections of squatters who would descend on a tract of unoccupied land, armed with thatched or tin roofing and canvas walls, usually by night, and by morning would have created several blocks of flimsy but established neighborhoods, often adjacent to other
barriadas
. By the early 1960s, these organized villages, totaling, in the case of Lima, more than a million squatters, had been set up in neighborhoods with rough governing structures, divisions of labor, and commerce. No government had ever seriously attempted—or dared—to eliminate these structures or reduce their size.
I resolved to devote a substantial number of Peace Corps volunteers to the
barriadas;
it would be, I thought, a good complement to those in the smaller villages in the Andes seeking to stimulate some effort to end feudalism (there was no better word to describe a system in which people who worked the land could be virtually bought and sold along with the land). Sarge was thinking the same thing because he said to me, “Good targets for community development. Saul Alinsky would surely disapprove of the way things are done here.”
Saul Alinsky was then, and via his writings probably still is, the foremost advocate, if not the instigator, and perhaps the inventor, of the community organizing belief that economically poor people can and, more important, should work together and exercise power on their own behalf.
For Sarge and me, it was all new and fascinating, particularly as the stark social contrasts and the color and class systems made themselves apparent. Jack explained why most of the Creole (white and Spanish) and mestizo (Spanish and Indian) men had mustaches—to show they were not Indian—and how the only people left for the remaining heirs of original Incas to look down on were the Negroes, a small group found only in the cities, as doormen, taxi drivers, or athletes (rather as in the United States, I thought).
We had our moments to remember; as we went through some wild country where the coastal desert gave way to the Andes and then a jungle-like interior, we were to cross a river canyon on a bridge made of what seemed to be ropes and mats made of dried grasses. “Does this bridge have a special name or description?” Sarge asked—slightly apprehensively—of Jack Vaughn, who seemed to be an expert on all the local color. Vaughn, terse and seemingly disinterested, answered, “It’s called the Bridge of San Luis Rey, a reference to the famous novel in which a Peruvian bridge collapses, killing everyone on it.” Later, on a four-passenger rail cart on a narrow-gauge track, between Cuzco and Machu Picchu, the car stalled and stopped, and the operator fiddled with the operating parts with what seemed some urgency. In the gathering darkness, Sarge asked Jack if any other trains were coming through on this single track. Pulling on his pipe, Jack replied, “Only the express.”