by Dave Barry
Extra Credit
Try to think up a campaign slogan even more inane than “I like Ike.” (Hint: This is not possible.)
Bonus Question
What does one do with extra credit, anyway?
Chapter Nineteen. The Sixties: A Nation Gets High And Has Amazing Insights, Many Of Which Later On Turn Out To Seem Kind Of Stupid
The sixties was a unique era in American history. Mention the sixties to any middle-aged urban professional, and he’ll transform himself into something worse than one of those Depressionites, droning away about his memories until you think up an excuse to leave. Such is the impact that this exciting era still has on the American consciousness. Because it was a time of truth, but also of lies; of love, but also of hate; of peace, but also of war; of Otis Redding, but also of Sonny Bono. There was a “new feeling” in the land, especially among the young people, who joined the “hippie movement” to express their need to be free, to challenge the traditional values of American culture, to order some pizza right now. Yes! the “times they were a changin’” and nobody expressed the spirit of the sixties better than the brilliant young poet-songwriter-irritatingly-nasal-whiner Bob Dylan, when, with his usual insightfulness, he sang:
How many times can a man be a man Before a man is a man?
Moved by the power of this message, tens of thousands of young people rejected the trappings of a grasping greedy society to live simple, uncluttered lives dedicated to meditation and spirituality and listening to sitar music and ingesting random substances and becoming intensely interested in the ceiling and driving home at one mile per hour. As a result of these experiences, the “Flower Children” of the sixties developed a unique set of values, a strong sense of idealism and social awareness that still exerts a powerful influence over their decisions in such philosophical areas as what radio stations to listen to when driving their Jaguars to their brokerage firms.
The 1960 Presidential Election
In 1960 the Democratic candidate was the rich, witty, graceful, charming, and of course, boyishly handsome Massachusetts senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who gained voter recognition by having his face on millions of souvenir plates and being married to the lovely and internationally admired Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Kennedy’s major political drawback was that the nation had never elected a Roman Catholic; on the other hand, the nation had never elected a total dweeb, either, and the Republicans had for some reason nominated “Dick” Nixon. So it was a very close race.
The turning point was a series of nationally televised debates, in which Kennedy, who looked tanned and relaxed, seemed to have an advantage over Nixon, who looked as though he had been coached by ferrets. Kennedy held a slight lead going into the bonus round, where he chose Category Three (Graceful Handsome Boyish Wittiness) and won the Matching luggage plus Texas plus Illinois, thus guaranteeing his victory in the November election. This was widely believed to be the end of Nixon’s career.
The Kennedy Administration
Kennedy had pledged, during the 1960 election campaign, to “get the country moving again”—to get it out of the Eisenhower doldrums, to bring back
its vigor, to reinstill its pride, to reassert its leadership around the world, maybe even to get it into a dumbfounding, unwinnable war. And under the gracefully boyishly handsomely witty charmingness of his leadership, America began to do just that. Kennedy immediately set the tone in his inaugural address, in which he promised that the country would land a Peace Corps volunteer on the Moon, and ended with the stirring words of the famous challenge “Ask not what your country cannot do that you cannot do, nor what cannot be done by neither you nor your country, whichever greater.” The Kennedys also captivated the nation With their unique style, which soon earned the young administration the nickname “Camelot” (from the popular Broadway musical Guys and Dolls). The Kennedy style was an eclectic blend of amusing and graceful activeties that ranged from taking fifty-mile hikes to inviting cellist Pablo Casals to perform at the White House to playing touch football on the lawn. As the Kennedy mystique grew, the first family’s activities were widely imitated: Before long, millions of Americans were taking Pablo Casals on fifty-mile hikes. When he begged for a chance to rest, they laughed and threw footballs at him. Such was the vigor of the times.
So everything would probably have been ideal if the Red Communists had not decided to be their usual party-pooper selves by causing new international tension in the form of ...
The Bay Of Pigs
In 1960 there was considerable concern about the fact that Fidel Castro, a known beard-wearing Communist, had taken over Cuba, which is a mere ninety miles from Key West, Florida, site of America’s largest strategic stockpile of tasteless T-shirts. This alarmed the U.S. intelligence Community, whose crack team of analysts developed a Shrewd plan under which the U.S. would secretly train an army to invade Cuba; which then according to the plan, would cause the population to rise up in revolt and throw Castro out of power. This plan worked smoothly, with everything going exactly as planned, except the part about the population rising up in revolt, and so forth. It turned out that large segments of the population had already risen up in revolt just a short time earlier to put Castro into power, but unfortunately our intelligence community had misplaced the file folder containing this tidbit of information. So the invasion failed and the U.S. got some international egg on its face. But Kennedy took it with his usual boyishly witty graceful handsome charminghood, and the intelligence community, showing admirable spunk, quickly discovered an exciting new place to think up Shrewd plans about: Southeast Asia.
Once more everything seemed to be going pretty well, until, wouldn’t you know it, along came ...
The Berlin Crisis
This was caused when the Russians noticed that every morning approximately 173,000 East Berlin residents commuted to work in West Berlin, and every evening approximately 8 Of them commuted back. The Russians, showing the kind of subtle public-relations skills that have made them so popular everywhere they tromp, responded by building the Berlin Wall, which created a crisis that was not resolved until President Kennedy went over there in person and made the famous inspirational proclamation “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I wish to see a menu”). This calmed international tensions, but only briefly, for in October 1962 a major event was to occur, an event that would become the focus of the world’s attention for several tense days. We refer, of course, to the World Series, in which the Yankees beat the Giants four games to three. Also, there was a Cuban missile crisis, which the United States won in the final minutes by going into a “prevent” defense.
Another shocking development that occurred at this time was that “Dick” Nixon reached such a low level of credibility with the voters that even California refused to elect him as governor. In his concession speech, Nixon told the press: “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore,” prompting the reporters, in a fit of nostalgia, to batter him unconscious with their wingtips. This was widely believed to be the end of his career.
So by 1963, all things considered, the sixties seemed to be going pretty well. Which just goes to show that you can never tell, because except for the discovery of Aretha Franklin, the rest of the decade turned out to be ...
A Long String Of Bummers
First of all, Kennedy was assassinated, which was traumatic enough in itself but was made even worse by the fact that we never did find out for sure what happened, which means that for the rest of our lives we’re going to be opening People magazine and reading articles about Yet another conspiracy buff claiming to have conclusive proof that Lee Harvey Oswald was actually working for Roy Orbison or the Nabisco Corporation or whatever.
THEN we got President Lyndon Johnson, who tried his darnedest, by means of looking somber to the point of intestinal discomfort, to convey integrity, but who nevertheless made you think immediately of the large comically dishonest Warner Brothers cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. Plus his wife—this is still difficult to
believe even years later—was named “Lady Bird.” Johnson was nevertheless elected overwhelmingly in 1964, easily defeating Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, who turned out to be an OK guy but who at the time appeared to be perfectly likely to launch a nuclear first strike against, say, New York.
THEN we got into the Vietnam War, which is still causing arguments involving: the people who supported it but didn’t fight in it, versus the people who didn’t support it but did fight in it, versus the people who didn’t support it and didn’t fight in it, versus the people who supported it and might have had to fight in it if ever the Indiana National Guard had been called up, which was of course a distinct possibility, and so on.
THEN more people got assassinated and everybody started hating everybody and there were riots in the streets. THEN Gilligan’s Island was canceled.
So by 1968 things were really bad. They were so bad that it seemed impossible for them to get any worse, unless something truly horrible happened, something so twisted and sinister and evil that the human mind could barely comprehend it.
The Nixon Comeback
Yes. One day we turned on our televisions, and there he was, “Dick” Nixon, looking stronger than ever despite the holes in his suit where various stakes had been driven into his heart. He was advertised as a “new” Nixon with all kinds of amazing features, including an illuminated glove compartment and a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, but of course he couldn’t tell the voters what it was, because then it wouldn’t have been a secret plan.
Nixon’s running mate was an individual named Spiro Agnew, whose principal qualification was that when You rearranged the letters of his name, You got “grow a penis” (Dick Cavett discovered this. Really.). Their campaign theme—we are not making this up—was “Law and Order.”
The Democrats, meanwhile, were in trouble. The war had become extremely unpopular, so President Johnson had decided not to seek reelection, which was an act of great statesmanship in the sense that nobody except maybe Lady Bird would have voted for him anyway. The process by which the Democrats decided who their new nominee would be was about as organized as a tub of live bait, culminating in the 1968 Chicago convention which consisted of spokespersons for about 253 major ideological factions giving each other the finger through clouds of tear gas. Out of this process emerged Hubert Humphrey, a nice man with a lot of solid experience and an unfortunate tendency to sound like Porky Pig, only not as dignified. On top of this, the Democrats had to contend with the candidacy of Alabama governor George Wallace, who appealed to what the political experts called “disaffected Democrats” defined as “Democrats missing teeth.”
And thus it was that on election day, October 8, 1968, the voters went to the polls and elected, as leader of the greatest nation that the world has ever seen, President Richard Milhous N ... President Richard M ... President R ... Please don’t make us do this.
The Nixon Presidency
Nixon’s first official act as president was to sneak out behind the White House and bury his secret peace plan to ensure that nobody would find out what it was, which would have been a breach of national security. With that
important task accomplished, he swung into action, working feverishly to accomplish his most important objective, to realize the cherished dream that had driven him through all these years of disappointment, to reach the long-sought goal that, thanks to his election was finally within his grasp, namely: getting reelected.
Discussion Questions
1. Didn’t you always, even when you were sitting around with your friends pretending to be really enthralled, secretly hate sitar music? Admit it.
Chapter Twenty. The Seventies: A Relieved Nation Learns That It Does Not Actually Need A President
The seventies dawned with “Dick” Nixon riding high. The nation had surged ahead in the space race through a series of courageous accomplishments by astronauts such as Donald “Deke” Slayton, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Scott “Scotty” Carpenter, and Nicholas “Nicky the Squid” Calamari, climaxing with the historic moment on October 8 when Neil “Satchmo” Armstrong became the first human, with the possible exception of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, to set foot on the Moon, where he expressed the emotions of an anxiously watching world with the unforgettable statement “Hi Mom!”
On the foreign-policy front, Nixon continued to protect the national security by not telling anybody, not even his secret wife, Pat, what his secret plan to end the Vietnam War was. At the same time, he undertook a major clandestine foreign-policy initiative by sending chocolates and long-stemmed roses to legendary Communist Chinese revolutionary leader Mao (“Mo the Dong”) Zedong. Helping him with this initiative was the brilliant, avocado-shaped genius Henry Kissinger, who became the nation’s top foreign-policy strategist despite being born with the handicaps of a laughable accent and no morals or neck.
The daring initiative came to fruition in 1972 when Nixon became the first American president to visit China, where Mao , an avid prankster, presented him with two giant pandas, named Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing. This was actually a hilarious Communist joke, because “Ling-Ling” and “Hsing-Hsing” are the words that Chinese children use to describe bodily outputs, as in “Mommy, I have to make ling-ling.” The Chinese officials just about died laughing when Nixon was making his thank-you speech and Ling-Ling went Hsing-Hsing on his shoe. (The pandas now reside in the National Zoo, where, over the past eighteen years, nearly a third of the federal budget has been spent on various elaborate schemes to get them to reproduce, which is also pretty funny inasmuch as they are both males.)
The China initiative was a notable coup, and even though the darned pesky Vietnam War was still going on, everybody knew that “Dick” had his secret plan, which he could dig up and put into effect at any time. So things looked very good indeed for him going into the 1972 election. He got a lot of help from the Democrats, who, continuing the tradition they established in 1968 of appearing to be incapable of operating an electric blanket, let alone the country, nominated George McGovern, who had exhibited a wide-ranging appeal to a broad cross section of nearly fourteen voters. The result was that in the 1972 election Nixon carried all the states and every major planet except
Massachusetts.
So by 1973 “Dick” Nixon was at the pinnacle of power and appeared poised to become, against all odds, one of the most successful and respected presidents in the nation’s history. This was the signal for God to come into the game and create ...
The Watergate Scandal
The Watergate Scandal, which gets its name from the fact that it was a scandal, began with a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by a group of burglars so ludicrously incompetent that they obviously had to have some connection with the federal government. Sure enough, when two plucky and persistent Washington Post reporters, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, began poking around, a confidential source named “Deep Throat”—whose identity remains a closely guarded secret to this very day because it was Pat Nixon in drag—revealed to them a fascinating tidbit of information: Some species of mollusk can actually change their gender.
This was the “missing puzzle piece” that the two brash young journalists needed to “break the story.” Within days the scandal was such hot news that it was turned into a highly popular television series called The Senate Watergate Committee’s Parade of Scuzzballs, starring genial host “Senator Sam” Ervin (Okeefenokee), who had the entire nation listening with rapt attention in an effort to figure out what the hell he was saying. Senator Sam spoke in Deep Southern, which is similar to English, only unintelligible, so everything he said came out sounding like “We go’ heppin’ wif de bane pone.” But everybody was on his side anyway, because the committee witnesses—a group of high-level Nixon administration aides, all of them named Klaus—projected all the warmth and personal integrity of eels. (We are pleased to report, however, that while in federal prison they all found the Lord, who was serving a six-year sentence for faili
ng to file tax returns.)
So things looked very bad for the Nixon administration, and they got even worse with the revelation that Nixon had secretly taped all the Oval Office conversations that had taken place between him and the various Klauses. The tapes contained many shocking and highly revealing exchanges, such as this one, from October 8:
NIXON: Because you have, you have problems with the, with the [expletive deleted], with the ...
KLAUS: Yeah [garbled], with the, uh, with the ...
NIXON: ... with, uh, with the [expletive deleted].
KLAUS: ... with the ...
NIXON: [Expletive deleted].
KLAUS: ... with the Smoot-Hawley.
NIXON: Shit.
As damaging as these revelations were, matters got even worse for Nixon when one of the tapes was found to contain, at a crucial juncture, an eighteen-minute gap where nothing could be heard except a hum. This was the last straw: The American public, simply would not tolerate a president who would fritter away eighteen minutes humming during a crucial juncture. The next day, October 8, the Senate Watergate Committee voted 17-9 in favor of a resolution proposed by Senator Ervin calling on the president to “Rang onsum latmun sookles.” Clearly the dice had been cast down onto the gauntlet. Nixon appeared to have only two options left: