Here Comes Trouble (31 page)

“What are you doing up watching TV?” my mother asked.

“Bobby is dead!”

“No!” my mother said, clutching her chest and sitting down. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

“Just hang it right there on your door,” Salt said, instructing me where to place the “Nixon’s the One” poster. “There. Perfect.”

Thomas Salt was a high school senior and in charge of the Students for Nixon club, and although I was just a freshman, I had already moved up as his number two in charge of everything he didn’t want to do. We were students at St. Paul’s Seminary in Saginaw, Michigan, and we were certainly in the minority when it came to supporting the scoundrel Richard Milhous Nixon. We lived in a haven of Democrats (obviously, they were all Catholics, and Nixon was the evil one who’d been defeated by our only Catholic president). The entire seminary was blindly supporting Humphrey—but not Salt and not me, and not a few brave others. We weren’t supporting warmongers, period, regardless of what their party affiliation was.

Well, I’m not so sure about the
we
of that statement, as the four others were the sons of well-to-do Republicans whose fathers were either corporate attorneys or executives at Dow Chemical or one of the car companies. They probably liked Nixon because that was how they were wired. Me, I had joined in with them because I refused to support Humphrey on purely moral grounds—and while it may seem strange to use the word
moral
while backing Richard Nixon, the way I saw it, I just didn’t have a choice.

Oh, sorry—there
was
a choice. There was George Wallace running as an independent Klandidate for president (he would go on to win five Southern states). My congressman from Flint, Don Riegle, said that Nixon told him he had a “secret plan to end the war.” He promised that Vietnam would be over within six months of his election. (And it was. Six months after his
second
election, in 1972.)

But for now, Nixon was the “peace candidate,” and that was all I needed to hear. He was also in favor of lowering the voting age to eighteen years old. He said he would create an environmental protection agency (the EPA). He said he would make it illegal to treat girls in schools any different than boys (Title IX). He was also a shady, shifty character, and your gut knew he couldn’t be trusted any further than you could throw his dog, Checkers. But he said he would end the war.

In addition to our campaigning on the high school campus, we spent Saturday afternoons knocking on doors in Saginaw, a blue-collar town that didn’t have much use for Republicans. We soldiered on nonetheless, and we did our best for the man everyone called Tricky Dick.

I was a freshman, so I needed to get special permission to campaign off campus for Nixon. This was granted, so long as I agreed to do some extra chores at the home of the diocese’s auxiliary bishop (and the seminary’s former rector), James Hickey.

It was early October 1968, and my job was to help drain and clean the bishop’s outdoor pool. Bishop Hickey remained close to the goings-on at the seminary he helped to found a decade ago, and in turn that meant he had heard about our efforts for Richard Nixon.

“I hear you’re interested in politics,” he said to me, as I mopped up the pool’s interior.

“Yes, Bishop. My family has always paid attention to government and stuff.”

“I see. But why Nixon?”

I was nervous enough because I hadn’t the slightest idea how to clean a pool. I was afraid I might give the wrong answer—and it would be “good-bye priesthood.”

“The war is wrong. Killing people is wrong. He will end the war.”

“Will he, now?” the Bishop said, looking at me squarely over the top of his wire-rim spectacles.

“Uh, that’s what he says. Six months and no war.”

“You know this man has a—how shall we say it?—a history of not telling the truth.”

I was now in huge trouble. The next thing I expected to hear was that I was committing a mortal sin by helping Richard Nixon.

“I remember when he first ran for the Senate in California,” the Bishop continued. “Made up a bunch of things about his lady opponent that weren’t true. Awful things. People didn’t find out until later. But it was too late. He was already a senator then.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The October temperature was dropping, and the water from the hose that would splash on me was cold and unpleasant. I did not want to listen to this sermon. Besides—what’s a bishop doing with his own swimming pool?

“I didn’t know that,” I said respectfully. “I wasn’t for him in 1960,” I added, hoping that would give me some dispensation.

“How old were you in 1960?”

“First grade. I even memorized President Kennedy’s inaugural address.”

“Can you still recite it?

Of course I could. I’d been giving the speech to the nuns for years for extra credit.

“Well, let me hear a little of it.”

And so there I stood, mop and squeegee in hand, and gave him my favorite part:

“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”

He enjoyed that. So I thought I’d continue with another one, this time with the Kennedy accent:

“To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

“Very impressive!” he offered, an approving smile on his face. “These are important words. Never forget them.”

He paused.

“And, of course, I’m not telling you how to vote, but if you would, please do me a favor and reflect on those words you just recited to me.”

The war, of course, didn’t end six months after Nixon took office. It got bigger. We invaded another country (Cambodia), antiwar groups and journalists were spied on, and to celebrate Christmas of 1972 we dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than we dropped during any campaign of the war. In all, we would end up killing over three million southeast Asians, and over fifty-eight thousand of our troops would never come back alive. The bishop knew this, and I later would realize he had me over not to clean a pool but to clean my head. The following spring Bishop Hickey was sent to Rome and then later became the bishop of Cleveland, and finally, the cardinal of the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Two women missionaries he dispatched to El Salvador were brutally murdered along with two other religious women by the American-backed government there. He became outspoken while in D.C., opposing the U.S. wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

A year later, after leaving the seminary, I made a pact with myself never to reveal to anyone that I had campaigned for Richard Milhous Nixon.

ACT II: Horses on the Ellipse

“You’re not taking your sister to Washington,” my father said, sitting at the dinner table. “No, you are not,” my mother chimed in.

I was eighteen and an adult and could do what I wanted, but my sister Anne was seventeen and still in high school. I had announced that I was going with friends on a trip to Washington, D.C, to participate in a massive antiwar demonstration on the day Nixon was to be inaugurated for his second term. The car was to contain myself; our church’s youth leaders, Gary Wood and Phyllis Valdez, and their friend Peter Case; my buddy Jeff Gibbs; and my sister Anne.

The fight at the dinner table for Anne to go became more intense. All subjects were now open to debate: the war, the long hair, the guitar Mass, John Sinclair (who grew up down the street), the Weathermen gathering in Flint, the peace signs we painted on the walls in the basement, the effect all this was having on our younger sister, Veronica, etc., etc.

In the end, Anne said she was going and there would be no further discussion. Silence. End of dinner.

We got to my cousin Pat’s house outside D.C. before midnight. We crashed there, and when we awoke, we made our plans for the day. There was a teach-in, and Leonard Bernstein was going to conduct a “Concert as a Plea for Peace” at the National Cathedral, with Senators Edward Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy speaking.

When we got to the cathedral the following evening, we were shocked at the size of the crowd trying to get in. The line stretched for what seemed like a mile. There was no way we were going to get inside—until Peter said he had an idea.

“Just keep your eye on me,” he said, “and one by one come up and join me.”

Peter broke out a bag of peanuts and went up toward the front of the line, found someone who looked like he had a friendly face, and offered him some of his nuts. A jovial conversation ensued, making it seem like Peter knew the guy who was “obviously” holding a place for him. Now five more of us had to make this look casual enough to walk up and appear as if we belonged there. And one by one we did. This apparently was too much for one guy in line who was watching the whole ruse unfold. He left his place in the line and walked up to us.

“I’m wondering how your conscience is handling this right now,” he said in a voice that sounded remarkably similar to my conscience. “Do you think it’s right to make cuts like this and deny people who’ve been here before you a chance to go inside?”

None of us said anything. No one made eye contact with him. It’s as if he wasn’t there. But we were.

“Amazing,” he remarked, shaking his head. “Nothing to say for yourselves? And at a church, no less.”

None of us felt very good about ourselves. What we had done was wrong. We’d also driven six hundred miles and didn’t really give a shit. Or at least tried to pretend we didn’t. Everyone around us heard the scolding and all eyes were on us. We couldn’t wait to get inside the church and be taken off the cross.

The concert was unlike anything I had ever attended. Bernstein conducted members of the National Symphony and other orchestras in Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War.” It was a haunting, beautiful work of classical music, and I noticed the sadness on the faces of many around me. There were readings and poems, and it deeply moved the twenty-five hundred who were present (another twenty-five thousand listened on loudspeakers outside on the lawn of the cathedral).

On Inauguration Day we got there early so we could try to get a glimpse of Nixon’s limo before he went to Capitol Hill. Security was very tight, but we got close enough to see the armored car and jeer at it and hold our signs so he could see them. As he passed, he waved, and we waved back, though not with the entire hand. I was a long way from the seminary.

The rally on the Ellipse by the Washington Monument was not as large as previous antiwar rallies, but it was still populated by upwards of seventy-five thousand people. It was the largest crowd I had ever been in, and it was intense and angry. People were fed up with Nixon and his murderous ways. We stood on top of the hill at the base of the Washington Monument, looking out across the demonstration and to the White House, hoping Nixon was back and looking out the window.

After about two hours, some of the demonstrators decided it was time for more aggressive action. The Washington Monument is encircled by fifty United States flags. A group of students thought the flags might look better if they were flown upside down. And that’s what they did. The National Parks police were outnumbered and called for reinforcements. Within minutes, in rode the cavalry. Dozens of cops on horseback ascended the hill to the monument. As we were not participating in this sidebar demo, we weren’t worried about anything happening to us. Wrong assumption. The horsemen started attacking anyone in sight with their clubs. We took off, like most of the crowd, running down the hill. The police decided to pursue us. I did not know it was humanly possible to outrun a horse, but somehow we shot down that hill like bullets. I could hear one horse right behind me, and at that moment I figured I could do something instantly that the horse couldn’t do.

Stop.

As I stopped dead in my tracks, the horse just kept going. There were plenty of other protesters to chase. I yelled at the others in our group to follow me, and we moved out to the right side of the crowd where there were no police. Out of breath, we all agreed that was too close a call and decided that we had done enough to make our voices heard. We flipped off the White House one last time (“Did you see him in the window?” “Yes, I think I saw him!”), and headed back to Michigan.

ACT III: Bad Axe

I had worked for him, I had protested him. And now I wanted closure. I wanted to say good-bye.

It was clear that Nixon wasn’t long for the White House. By the late spring of 1974, after the break-in of the Watergate offices of the Democratic Party, after the Senate Watergate hearings and John Dean’s revelations, after Alexander Butterfield admitted Nixon taped every conversation in the Oval Office, after the White House authorized the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, after Nixon lost at the Supreme Court and the Pentagon Papers were published, and after he tried to cover it all up, President Richard Milhous Nixon was hanging on by a thread when he decided to pay a visit to three small towns northeast of Flint, Michigan.

He had been hiding in the White House, drinking, talking to old paintings on the wall, afraid to go out and be with the public, the majority of whom now wanted him to either leave the presidency of his own volition or be the first president to be tossed out. He wanted neither. He was a fighter. He never gave up, even when all his chips were down, many times before. He was Dick Nixon of Yorba Linda, California, and he wasn’t going anywhere but where destiny intended him to be.