THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (29 page)

After the death of Bobby, Ted was the
heir
apparent
to the Kennedy political dynasty. He had been
approached about running for President in 1968, but a November
election was just too soon after RFK’s June killing. It was all
systems go, however, for 1972. Nixon seemed vulnerable with
Vietnam. After Chappaquiddick, he was done for 1972 and even 1976.
He tried in 1980 but failed miserably.

The “what if?” game revolving around JFK and Nixon,
both World War II veterans, freshman Congressmen in 1946, so close
they were like “brothers,” with “old man Joe” helping to finance
Nixon’s Congressional and Senate campaigns; the possibilities and
scenarios are utterly mind-blowing.

JFK’s stealing the 1960 election. The Bay of Pigs,
the Vienna summit with Kruschev, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the
coup d’etat
of Ngo Dinh Diem, the death of Marilyn Monroe,
even the Vietnam War, may have gone very differently had Nixon been
in the White House.

Events revolving around Bobby Kennedy are equally
ironic. Wiretapping King, his fallout with Johnson, the escalation
in Vietnam, Johnson’s election and subsequent decision not to run
again, RFK’s murder, and Nixon’s election; all create a tangled web
of possibilities with various starting and end points.

Then came Teddy’s disaster at Chappaquiddick with
more convoluted results. It prevented him from running in 1972 (in
truth nobody was going to beat Nixon that year based on any
foreseeable circumstances, tenuous when these people are being
discussed). However, the greatest motivation for bugging Democrat
National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in 1972 was Nixon’s
obsession with Ted Kennedy
; a desire to play the same
“hardball” the Kennedy’s played against him in 1960; to beat that
family at all costs; and therefore to get “dirt” on Teddy
Kennedy.

It was the resulting Watergate scandal that gave
Kennedy the political upper hand. He and his party were determined
to destroy Nixon and wipe out his Vietnam tri-angulation legacy,
forged in the Paris peace talks. Kennedy succeeded. Millions died
in Southeast Asia. It would be moral relativism to blame Kennedy.
The blame is directed at Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and Communism,
but this disaster was not beyond the ability of a smart man like
Ted Kennedy to foresee. He did what he did anyway, in order to
disgrace Nixon and gain naked political power.

So, it would appear that the “great game” was over.
The Kennedy’s (as usual) had won. Not so fast. Kennedy lost the
1980 Democrat nomination and never dared to run again. In 1991 his
nephew was arrested for rape. In the investigation, it was
discovered that instead of coming to the girl’s rescue, he appeared
pantless in a nightshirt, hopin’ for “sloppy seconds.” Kennedy’s
name and visage, at least in conservative circles, has been
synonymous with drunkenness, sexual lasciviousness and cowardice.
Like his father, he has had to helplessly watch the “Kennedy curse”
affect others in the family, such as nephew John Kennedy Jr., who
perished in a 1999 plane crash. Perhaps most galling of all, he has
been a spectator at the “coronation” of the Bush family, replacing
his own as the true “royal family” of American politics. Despite
having far less appeal and elitist charisma, their success and
influence has outweighed the Kennedy’s impact, despite every
desperate effort to prevent it by Teddy!

****

In the years after the Dodgers and Giants left New
York, the city found itself in a political and social upheaval.

“The country had been so dominant after World War
II, but then in the ‘60s we slipped into a slew of problems
starting with Vietnam,” recalled former New York Governor Mario
Cuomo. “It was a very unsettling time with social and cultural
changes. Under our feet the ground was giving way.”

“I think New York City always felt things more
quickly,” recalled David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
chronicler of Vietnam, as well as a book on the 1950s and others
about sports. “There was a feeling by the administration in
Washington that whatever happened in New York wasn’t happening in
the rest of the country. But, in New York City in 1968 . . . there
was an acute sense of anti-war and a country in conflict with
itself.”

New York’s racial animus, always boiling right below
the surface, began to come to a head. The dominant civil rights
ethos
of the late 1960s was not Dr. King’s Christian
non-violence, especially after his assassination, but the “hate
whitey” rhetoric of Sonny Caron, H. Rap Brown, Stokeley Carmichael
and the Black Panthers. Malcolm X had been assassinated in New York
in 1965. In the aftermath of this tragedy, the Black Muslims
radicalized. Malcolm X himself had softened right before his death.
Having journeyed to Mecca, he experienced a religious epiphany,
returning with the resolve to work with King and view all men of
any color as his brothers.

After three terms, Mayor Wagner was gone. The
influence of kingpins such as Carmine De Sapio and Robert Moses was
waning. John Lindsay, an upper class liberal-to-moderate
rank-in-file member of the “Rockefeller wing” of the Republican
Party was elected in 1965 over Conservative Party candidate William
Buckley and Democrat Abe Beame. Lindsay oversaw a city in
manufacturing decline, with Wall Street down in a struggling
economy. Union militancy and strikes beset him. On his first day in
office the Transportation Workers Union shut down subway and bus
service. It was something like that seemingly every week. The
citizens of the greatest city in the world were held virtually
hostage to strikes by bus drivers, garbage workers, sanitation
workers, and the like. The place literally stank.

In the wake of the Great Society, welfare costs were
out of control. Ironically, Nixon, who mistakenly thought if he
embraced some liberal ideas they would hate him less, enacted many
of the Great Society’s proposals under LBJ.

“Things were difficult in the city for a long time
during this period,” said David Garth, a political advisor to
Lindsay. By 1969, much of the Berkeley-San Francisco
counter-culture found its way to Greenwich Village. Lindsay put two
of the most radical 1960s hippies, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin,
on the city payroll
, hoping to mollify their criticism, with
predictably bad results. Crime soared out of control. The Mob
controlled more of the city than Lindsay or the Governor.

“You were really talking about two New Yorks,” said
Garth. “To some, crime didn’t exist in our section (of town). But
the black and Spanish communities were having real trouble. The
confrontation between whites and blacks and Spanish grew
tremendously in that period and that’s when you had riots.”

Hoffman stabbed Lindsay in the back by organizing
one at Grand Central Terminal, with 3,000 protestors creating
havoc. The police reacted predictably with dozens ending up in
hospitals.

On the day of King’s assassination, Lindsay
courageously went to Harlem and spoke with people, as Bobby Kennedy
did that day in Indiana. The riots in Harlem and the Bronx were not
as bad as in other places. Baltimore, in particular, was seemingly
on fire. In an era of great suspicion between blacks and whites,
Lindsay was viewed as one of the few white politicians who could
effectively communicate with black audiences.

Columbia University was the scene of anti-war riots
as bad as any at Cal-Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, or
other hot sports. The Students for a Democratic Society, organized
by Left-wing radical Tom Hayden (one of the “Chicago seven,” so
named when they stood trial for the riots at the Democrat National
Convention in Chicago), organized sit-ins and occupation of
Columbia. At one point Columbia was shut down for a week, ending
only when the cops stormed the buildings. At one point, 200,000
people marched in New York City to protest Vietnam. The hippies
morphed into something called the “yippies,” which may or may not
have become the “YUPPIES” of the 1980s. They stormed the stock
exchange where, ironically, many of them became millionaire
“capitalist pigs” 17 years later.

The teachers went on strike, with predictable
results: juvenile delinquency and crime. Many have said this event
started the bad relations between blacks and Jews (traditional
social allies) that came to a head during the Al Sharpton/Tawana
Brawley incident of 1987. Blacks seemed to prolong the school
closings. Jews, chomping at the bit to get back in, blamed the
blacks for the strike.

“It was a time of tremendous social unrest and
poverty in the city,” said Mario Cuomo. “We were in a corroding
period, and the city bore the brunt of all the problems and the
real use of major drugs started around this time.”

“I was definitely aware of things,” recalled black
filmmaker Spike Lee, one of the great chroniclers of New York
society over the years. “My parents made sure we all knew what was
happening. The civil rights movement, the assassinations,
everything. The whole country was in turmoil.”

“The country was not feeling very good about itself
and the city was not feeling very good about itself,” said Rudolph
Giuliani, later a prosecutor credited with “sending the Mob
upriver” in the 1980s; cleaning up New York in that role and later
as Mayor in the 1990s; leading them through 9/11; and embarking on
a quest for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008. “They
both needed some things to feel good about.”

In 1969, novelist Norman Mailer made a quixotic run
for Lindsay’s office. His original supporters and advisors included
writer George Plimpton, gadfly Norman Podhoretz,
New York
magazine editor Clay Felker, and feminist Gloria Steinem. He hoped
to gain traction from the Upper East Side crowd. He joined forces
with the Irish columnist Jimmy Breslin. As a political combination
others have been better, but as literary talents this was
heavyweight material. Most of the campaign consisted of sitting
around Mailer’s Columbia Heights abode drinking heavily. The idea
was to split the vote and pick up the Democrat Party, in shambles
at the time.

“New York City is today a legislative pail of
dismembered organs strewn from Washington to Albany,” Mailer wrote
in the
New York Times Magazine
. “We are without a
comprehensive function or skin. It is simple: our city must become
a state.” The city-state idea may have been a “modern Athens” in
Mailer’s view perhaps, but to most it was a “crackpot idea.” Mailer
also came up with the plan of banning automobiles in Manhattan, an
elitist concept of imposing one’s will on others, since the man
“slummed” in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights when not in Provincetown, a
Martha’s Vineyard village that later became known for its gay
community. This was an ironic twist since Mailer, married six
times, fancied himself a man of Hemingwayesque
machismo
, an
amateur boxer (and chronicler of the “sweet science”) whose
greatest “fight” was the stabbing of his second wife during a
passionate argument.

Breslin wanted to legalize gambling, which he was
lucky did not result in his being offed by the Mafia. Mailer called
himself a “left conservative,” a moniker he was still holding onto
as late as the Iraq War debates, with little explanation as to what
it meant other than he fathered a lot kids!

Mailer lost in the Primary. Lindsay had looked to be
all but dead, but revived his candidacy when he switched to the
Liberal Party. His association with the New York Jets, rabid
cheerleading, appearances at Shea Stadium, and locker room
celebrations with the Mets gave him face time, a veneer of
popularity allowing him to squeak by in the fall elections.

“If I’m right about this city being on the edge of
doom, then Heaven help this city, because there’s not much to look
forward to with the men they elected today,” Mailer said after
losing. His candidacy was blamed by some with splitting the vote
not in his favor as planned, but for Lindsay and the Liberal Party
ticket, which despite the name was more moderate than some of the
other parties and candidates running. Mailer always maintained a
strong identification with New York in succeeding years.

High hopes

“I have a dream.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“High hopes” was Frank Sinatra’s campaign song for
John F. Kennedy in 1960. Indeed, JFK’s high hopes came true, but so
much had occurred in the star-crossed decade that followed; no
pundit, no prophet or political scientist could possibly have
painted a picture describing the changed, topsy-turvy, tragically
beautiful world that followed. The cataclysmic differences between
1960 and 1969 mark the great social upheaval in American, and
possibly world history. Perhaps only wars have brought about such
change, but even that is arguable.

1969 dawned, and with it high hopes that change was
in the air. So much had gone wrong that it seemed there was no
place to go but up. Richard Nixon was sworn in on January 20. He
was a Californian but like so many of New York’s greatest sports
stars over the years, was also a
bona fide
New Yorker. He
had taken a job with a “silk stocking” Wall Street law firm in 1963
and lived in a fancy East Side building that also housed Nelson
Rockefeller. His New York connections paid off when the Empire
State gave him the electoral votes he needed to win the
Presidency.

Now, America looked to him to extricate the country
from Vietnam. The Right wanted him to turn up the heat militarily,
forcing the Communists to capitulate. The Left knew that Nixon had
established diplomatic ties with Soviet leaders like Nikita
Kruschev. They hoped he could arrange a deal with the Russians that
would benefit everybody, the result being American withdrawal with
honor.

New York had particularly high sports hopes for
1969. Something was in the air. Aside from having a quasi-New
Yorker in the White House, the city was enthralled with the Jets.
On January 12 “Broadway Joe” Namath engineered the seminal event in
NFL history, a 16-7 upset of Baltimore. Mayor Lindsay attached
himself to the team, leading the over-the-top celebration when they
returned from Miami. It had been such an upset, such a miracle, and
was so full of magical serendipity, that all things seemed
possible. Namath and the Jets embodied the very essence of change,
in sports and in society. So influential were the key players in
the Jets’ saga that there was a sense, unrealistic as it may have
been, that they could do anything. In this regard, it went beyond
the playing field. They could effect society. They could help
end the war
.