THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (28 page)

In March, Johnson announced that “if nominated I
will not run, if elected I will not serve” as President after the
November elections. Senator Robert Kennedy immediately entered the
Democrat Primaries, establishing himself as the favorite in the
general election. Nixon, in the process of winning the Republican
nomination, was apoplectic over the prospect of losing a bitter
campaign to
another
Kennedy. He vowed to play “hardball”
this time; to fight the Kennedy’s with everything he had no matter
how bare knuckles it got.

In April, just as Major League teams were playing
their openers, a white man in Memphis, Tennessee assassinated Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. Race riots had gripped a number of American
cities in 1967. After Dr. King’s murder, it escalated to virtually
every metropolitan urban center in the nation. However, Senator
Kennedy spoke soothingly to a black audience in Indianapolis. After
informing the unsuspecting crowd, who reacted in horror, he gave a
graceful speech, invoking the memory of his brother “who was also
killed by a white man.” Kennedy quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus,
and almost by miracle Indianapolis remained one of the few major
cities that did not burn.

In the spring of 1968, RFK shot to the stratosphere
of political popularity like few before or since. He organized a
coalition of blacks (despite having wiretapped King), Mexican farm
workers (despite coming from unimaginable wealth and privilege),
and all-out opponents of the Vietnam War (despite literally being
one of the architects of the war). Kennedy was able to walk all
these tightropes, harnessing the full force of anti-war
sentiment.

In June, Kennedy won the California Primary,
establishing himself as the
de facto
nominee and favorite
against Nixon. That day he and his family relaxed in the sun and
surf at the Malibu home of John Frankenheimer, a friend and
supporter. He was the same man who directed
The Manchurian
Candidate
, the 1962 political thriller about the assassination
of a Presidential candidate which had been shelved for a while
after JFK’s actual killing the next year. RFK had no intention of
attending a rally at the Ambassador Hotel near downtown L.A.
Sometime around nine at night he received a call from aides who
said the ballroom was abuzz with excitement over his victory, and
that his appearance would be a tremendous help to the campaign.
Kennedy made the 45-minute drive along the twisting, turning
Pacific Coast Highway, then on up to the mid-Wilshire District
where the Ambassador is. After telling the exuberant audience “it’s
on to Chicago and
let’s win there,” he brushed his moppish hair, smiled, waved and
left. He would have exited through the front entrance but it was a
madhouse of supporters so at the last second, so his handlers
(including former football star Rosey Grier) took him through the
kitchen. There he was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian
Arab-Palestinian apparently motivated by RFK’s support of Israel.
It may have been the first shot in the War on Terror.

The murder of Robert F. Kennedy opened the door for
Richard M. Nixon’s election to the Presidency that fall. Historians
can argue that RFK’s victory over Nixon was not in the bag. Indeed,
anything could have happened and it was not a
fait accompli
,
but even the most ardent Nixon fans, if honest, must admit it would
have been an uphill struggle.

Nixon found his voice and his constituency, who he
brilliantly identified as the Silent Majority: Christians,
patriots, honest citizens, taxpayers, families, supporters of the
military who believed winning in Vietnam, defeating Communism, and
achieving American interests was necessary. The unsaid flip side of
the Silent Majority was that Democrats, liberals and anti-war
protestors were not what the Silent Majority was; Christians,
honest citizens, taxpayers, and the like. This divisive argument
lasts to this day, and of course no conservative can successfully
blanket the Left with accusations of treason, dishonesty, atheism,
and the like. That said, Nixon identified
his
constituency,
and they voted for him. In 1972 they returned him to office with
the highest vote count in the history of America.

The “Kennedy would have won” crowd also fails to
account for the effects of the 1968 Democrat National Convention in
Chicago. Even Bobby Kennedy would have been hard pressed to salvage
a successful convention out of the warring parties. The Left took
the Democrats to task for not taking a hard-line stance on the
Vietnam War (not unlike the Iraq scenario). There were still many
hawks in the Democrat Party. The South was still Democrat.

Protestors threw bags of feces at the Chicago cops.
Mayor Daley, ironically the man who may have been most responsible
for giving his party the Presidency in 1960, may have been most
responsible for denying it to them in 1968. His orders to the
Chicago police were to treat the rioters like enemy combatants in a
war, and that was what happened. The convention was a disaster for
the party, giving an ugly face to the Left. The Silent Majority saw
those mean faces, all captured in techni-color on every television
set in every living room. They rejected it wholesale. The election
went to Nixon by a thin margin over Vice-President Hubert Humphrey,
who had broken from LBJ on the war.

Nixon also utilized what has come to be known as the
“Southern strategy.” He siphoned off just enough of George
Wallace’s supporters to cut into Dixie. It was still the Jim Crow
South, with the Ku Klux Klan a major influence. These leftovers
from the Confederacy were 100 percent Democrat. Over time, the
South found Nixon and later Reagan to be palatable. Jim Crow and
the KKK faded away. The Republican Party filled the vacuum,
husbanding the South back into the mainstream of America, to the
great benefit of its citizenry, especially its black citizenry.
Some have tried to accuse the GOP of using “racist tactics” to
divide the South after the “Southern strategy.” If indeed
Republican motivations were to hurt black folks, the wholesale,
indeed miraculous improvement in their lives in the following years
indicate the Republicans were abysmal failures if this was their
intent.

It was not.

As 1968 turned to 1969, the United States was at its
most divided point since the Civil War. Nixon promised to “bring us
together,” but at that time and place he was not likely the one to
accomplish this. His role in bringing down Alger Hiss in the early
1950s still stuck in the craw of Democrats. They despised him. As a
strident anti-Communist, literally a “Red baiter,” a term of the
1950s, Nixon was committed to his Right-wing constituency and to
orchestrate what he called a “secret plan” to end the war. Most on
the Right were hoping to bomb Hanoi back to the Stone Age, force
Communism to its knees, and declare American hegemony in the manner
of MacArthur accepting Japanese acquiescence on the deck of the
U.S.S. Missouri in 1945. All of this, they believed, was the will
of the true God, the Lord Jesus Christ. It was in many quarters a
“go it alone” strategy in which the Republicans simply wrote the
Democrats off as somewhere between cowards and traitors. The dirty
work needed to be done by them and them alone. In the end, the
liberals could thanklessly complain about the conservatives who
saved them. The conservatives would just shrug it off, like a
reluctant movie hero; Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, John Wayne.

This attitude played out again during the Iraq War.
Neither Vietnam nor Iraq (at least so far) has had the results
conservatives said it would. The lessons of both these wars are not
yet determined and may not be for a long time. The Right holds
dearly to the “no appeasement” strategy of Winston Churchill during
World War II. This might be simplistic, since World War II was
relatively “black and white,” dividing simple lines of demarcation
between good (America, England) and evil (Nazi Germany, Japan). Our
“allies,” the Soviets and China (at least part of China was our
ally), almost immediately became evil while West Germany and Japan
became post-war partners. Out of this confusion Korea and Vietnam
emerged.

Wars in the Middle East are even more complicated.
They involved “friends” like Saudi Arabia, who rooted for Hitler
until they saw which way the wind was blowing and threw in with
Roosevelt. Iran was a friend, now a foe. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was
a “friend” when he opposed the Iranians who kidnapped U.S.
diplomats. We supported Afghanistan’s Islamic militants when they
beat the Soviets before they turned on us.

From a strictly political point of view, which in
Washington and many circles is the only one that counts, “blame” is
assigned to the Democrats in Vietnam and is being conveniently
lined up the same way in Iraq. The Republicans successfully painted
Ted Kennedy and the Democrats as “selling out” the South Vietnamese
after Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger orchestrated a
brilliant tri-angulated peace plan favoring U.S. interests over
those of both the competing Soviets and Chinese in 1972-73. After
Watergate, Kennedy’s Democrats refused to uphold the accords in
order to get back at Nixon. Millions died in Southeast Asia over
the next years. Ronald Reagan blamed the Left, America agreed, and
the GOP went on a winning streak beginning in 1980 that, depending
on one’s standards or point of view, they still ride today.

These kinds of long-term global strategies were the
specialty of both Nixon and Kissinger, both Machiavellians who saw
everything as an endgame. Like a good baseball manager who sees the
eighth inning in the second inning, in 1969 they were making
decisions that they knew would affect events in the 1970s and
beyond. Many of these resulted in short term criticism, long term
success. In Latin America, they supported Right-wingers in a series
of “dirty wars,” but our CIA killed Che Guevara and Communism never
did take.

In Vietnam, they inherited a war that could no
longer be won the way Nixon might have won it in 1962-64. Nixon has
critics who say he should have understood the futility of fighting
on when public support was gone, which it was by 1969. In looking
at the big picture, however, the price Nixon made the Communists
pay in Southeast Asia eventually played a role – maybe even a
decisive one - in Reagan forcing the Communists to their knees two
decades later, when Cold War victory was finally achieved. It could
be further theorized that Vietnam today is peaceful and
semi-capitalist; more or less the very result we were looking for
between 1964 and 1973. The Left argues that they arrived at this
state of affairs
despite
American involvement in the region.
It is not an easy question to resolve. However, considering the
ferociousness of the Communists - their torture chambers where our
prisoners were held, the 100 million who died under this ideology -
the concept that this peaceful condition was to be arrived at
strictly by agrarian Communist means is nebulous at best,
impossible to conceive when logic is applied.

This “war of attrition” theory, a large part of
Kissinger’s stock in trade, very well may apply to the War on
Terror, although those of us reading this now may be long in the
tooth when this endgame plays itself out. The
Pyrrhic
victory
of
King Pyrrhus
of Epirus may be used as an effective
analogy for the
Vietnam-Al Qaeda scenarios. MacArthur certainly understood this
concept, declaring at one point during World War II that, “Disease
is my strategy. Starvation is my friend. Attrition is my ally.”

But in 1969, the street protestors and students
demonstrating on American campuses did not see that far ahead. They
did not know, understand or chose not to believe the facts about
the Communist Holocaust, which made the Nazi version pale in
comparison, albeit over a longer term and in less spectacularly
heinous manner (although a life is still a life). Nixon had no
“honeymoon period.” “LBJ’s war” immediately was “Nixon’s war” in
the minds of the Left. He vowed an “honorable end,” although his
promise of a “secret plan,” scoffed at by the Left in the
beginning, turned out to be less than what many believed it should
have been (all-out bombing in some quarters; Kremlin intervention
from others).

In the summer of 1969, three events occurred that
diverted attention from the Vietnam War. In July, the U.S.
successfully landed a man on the Moon. Whether this is the greatest
accomplishment in the history of Mankind is hard to say. However,
when one adds up a list of contenders, say 50 of the all-time
greatest achievements – the Pyramids, roads, wheels, the printing
press, the Trans-continental railroad, electricity, flight, the
Hoover Dam, the World Wide Web – it becomes clear that at least
half, and probably more like 80 percent of these things, occurred
on American soil by Americans. There is a pervasive anti-American
bias that will make note of this and still fail to recognize
American Exceptionalism, regardless of the self-evident truths
placed before thine eyes.

In August of 1969, the Manson family went on two
brutal murder rampages in the Hollywood Hills. They appeared to be
hippies gone bad. This event and the Altamonte fiasco a year later
helped to officially close the chapter on the “Summer of Love.”

The third event was part of that cosmic Greek
tragedy known simply as “Kennedy vs. Nixon.” Ted Kennedy picked up
on a campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne. Driving drunk on
Martha’s Vineyard, he veered the car into the waters under the
Chappaquiddick Bridge. Kennedy escaped and chose not to make a
rescue attempt of the girl. He waited nine hours until his
intoxication could not be detected before contacting authorities.
The girl died. Whether she could have been saved either by Kennedy
or a quick call to the police is not known; most probably not.
Nevertheless, Kennedy’s actions devastated his political career. It
was all watched in mute silence by “old man Joe,” felled by a
stroke years earlier. He was forced, as if by wrathful judgment, to
watch all he had schemed for fall apart by the most unpredictable
means.