By the time he left Mobile, at seventeen, he had developed a deep hatred for blacks, especially those who were dating whites. He got married twice. Both marriages lasted a year. Both wives said he’d beaten them.
On September 21, 1976, he turned up in a Washington suburb. He saw a black man and a white woman walking down the street and sprayed them with chemical Mace. He jumped bail and never stood trial.
Early in 1977, he set a bomb that destroyed the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was also connected a month later to the bombing of a Washington home belonging to an Israeli lobbyist.
He started robbing banks like the outlaws in his Westerns to support himself. Before he was caught, he’d robbed sixteen of them.
Later in 1977, he was driving his 1972 Capri through Madison, Wisconsin. He was stuck in traffic. The car ahead of him was driven by a black man. A white woman was sitting next to the man. They got through the traffic, but the same car was still ahead of him, driving slowly. He kept honking at them to speed up. The man pulled over to the side and came to Joseph Paul Franklin’s car. Franklin had just robbed a bank. He had a stolen gun with him. “That was done on the spot of the moment. I hadn’t planned it. I just whipped the pistol out and shot him right there.” He shot the woman, too, and drove off. “It just happened to be two people I totally hated. Once whites begin having sex with blacks, they aren’t even human.”
Still in 1977, he shot and killed a Jewish man outside a synagogue in Missouri.
In February 1978, he shot and killed an interracial couple strolling through an Atlanta neighborhood.
In July 1978, he shot a black man in Chattanooga as the man was speaking to his white girlfriend outside a pizza parlor.
“It was my mission. I just felt like I was engaged in war with the world. My mission was to get rid of as many evildoers as I could. If I did not, then I would be punished. I felt that God instructed me to kill people.”
In 1979, he shot a black cabdriver who was speaking to a white woman in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park.
On May 29, 1980, hearing that Vernon Jordan was in Fort Wayne, he parked his car on the side of Interstate 69, raised the hood as though he was having car trouble, and walked up the hill to the grassy knoll facing the Marriott Inn.
In June 1980, he shot two black teenagers in Cincinnati, Ohio. In July 1980, he killed two black hitchhikers in West Virginia. In August 1980, he killed two black men and two white women jogging together in Salt Lake City, Utah.
On October 28, 1980, he was finally caught in Lakeland, Florida, after he’d sold his plasma to a blood bank for five dollars. His wanted poster had been sent to all blood centers. President Carter, whom he’d threatened earlier by mail, was due in Lakeland on a campaign stop hours after his arrest. Police officers said they “could not rule out the possibility” that Franklin’s presence in Lakeland at the same time was “more than coincidence.”
All told, he would be charged with twenty murders.
In 1997, he was on death row in Missouri, still awaiting execution. Law-enforcement officials from across the country were coming to interview him, trying to tie him in to other killings. He seemed to enjoy the attention. “Blacks still aren’t my favorite people,” he said. Prosecutors called him an “animal,” but he smiled and said, “I’m Jesse James or Billy the Kid. I look at myself as an outlaw of the Wild West. They didn’t go around killing innocent women. I would never do that, either.”
Sometimes Joseph Paul Franklin seemed to be holding court. He told Atlanta detectives who wanted to visit him that he’d only talk to them if they brought a “pretty woman” for him to gaze at during the interview. They brought a female deputy and Franklin stared at her breasts and leered and licked his lips for two hours.
When Kenneth W. Starr’s Mad Hatter folly finally came to fruition . . . when the preacher’s son got the Ace of Spades up in front of his Republican congressional snipers, what happened was that Vernon Jordan did to them what sniper Joseph Paul Franklin had tried to do to him: He blew them away. He blew them to smithereens. He did not miss the spinal cord.
Q: Was your assistance to Ms. Lewinsky, which you have described, in any way dependent upon her doing anything whatsoever in the Paula Jones case?
A: No.
Q: And that is exactly the point, that you looked at getting Ms. Lewinsky a job as an assignment rather than just something that you were going to be a reference for.
A: I don’t know whether I looked upon it as an assignment. Getting jobs for people is not unusual for me, so I don’t view it as an assignment. I just view it as something that is part of what I do.
Q: During the course of the meeting with Ms. Lewinsky, what did you learn about her?
A: Enthusiastic, quite taken with herself and her experience. Bubbly, effervescent, bouncy, confident. Actually, I sort of had the same impression that you House managers had of her when you met with her. You came out and said she was impressive, and so we came out about the same place.
Q: And did she relate to you the fact that she liked being an intern because it put her close to the president?
A: I have never seen a White House intern who did not like being a White House intern, and so her enthusiasm for being a White House intern was about like the enthusiasm of White House interns—they liked it.
Q: Did she make reference to someone in the White House being uncomfortable when she was an intern, and she thought that people did not want her there?
A: She felt unwanted—there is no question about that. As to who did not want her there and why they did not want her there, that was not my business.
. . .
Q: And sometime after your meeting on December 11 with Ms. Lewinsky, did you have another conversation with the president?
A: You do understand that a conversation between me and the president was not an unusual circumstance.
Q: I understand that.
A: All right.
Q: Let me be more specific. Did he [Clinton] indicate that he knew about the fact that she had lost her job at the White House, and she wanted to get a job in New York?
A: He was obviously aware that she had lost her job in the White House, because she was working at the Pentagon. He was also aware that she wanted to work in New York, in the private sector, and understood that that is why she was having conversations with me. There is no doubt about that.
Q: And he thanked you for helping her.
A: There is no question about that, either.
Q: And on either of these conversations that I’ve referenced . . . did the president tell you that Ms. Monica Lewinsky was on the witness list in the Jones case?
A: He did not.
Q: And did you consider this information to be important in your efforts to be helpful to Ms. Lewinsky?
A: I never thought about it.
Bang! A single bullet fired from a grassy knoll! Vernon Jordan had won a Purple Heart in what he considered his war for social progress. He had been decorated with the medal of honor by black people, many white people, by presidents, by corporations. And Kenneth W. Starr and his white-bread congressmen thought they were going to beat up on him?
In October 1998, Joseph Paul Franklin told an Ohio judge, “You are just a representative of the satanic system and you’ll be judged by Jesus Christ.”
“I won’t have twenty notches on my gun when I am,” the judge responded.
Joseph Paul Franklin had by then admitted one more shooting: the March 1978 wounding of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt in Lawrenceville, Georgia. He had seen a pornographic interracial photo spread in Hustler, Franklin said, and he “just happened to be” in Lawrenceville when Flynt’s trial began. In the right place at the right time . . . It wasn’t the porn that had bothered him; it was the interracial couple.
Within the context of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, it was a heart-stopping coincidence. Bill Clinton was saved from removal from office to a great extent through the efforts of two men—the Ace of Spades, who s
tuck by him, and the pornographer, who scared the bejesus out of all of Washington. And the same man had shot both of them! What if he had been a better shot? What would have happened to Bill Clinton then? What if Jesse Jackson had been in Chicago when Franklin went looking for him? What if Franklin hadn’t been busted by the time President Carter got to Lakeland?
Joseph Paul Franklin represented everything my generation loathed and had tried to change in American society: racism, anti-Semitism, the cowboy myth, the love of guns, the sexism, the wife battering. He was a twisted, demonic foot soldier who didn’t like blacks and interracial couples any more than did the Night Creature, the Ratwoman, the Bag Lady of Sleaze, or Führer Man.
Hillary spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and many of us were sure she had used the phrase opportunistically, pragmatically, mendaciously to save her husband and their presidency. But were we really supposed to believe that the man who named himself for Goebbels “just happened to be” in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Lawrenceville, Georgia, when Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt were there? This wasn’t some factoid Oliver Stone had conjured to con us into buying a ticket. Or a piece of gonzo Hunter Thompson had emitted from his fevered brain. This was real.
And if it was all part of a great, unseen, and continuing shadow war for the heart and soul of America, what commentators euphemistically referred to as “the culture war,” then where would it end? JFK went down and so did Bobby and so did Martin and so did Medgar and so did Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt. And Bill Clinton almost went down just as surely, but in a different way, saved by men who had already taken bullets. From one grassy knoll to another . . . where would the next grassy knoll be?
[6]
Al Gorf Loves Tipper Galore
The day the Starr Report was released was one of the saddest and happiest days of my life.
I knew that the president I’d served and admired would be left with a legacy most accurately characterized by the kind of rock and roll lyrics that had so outraged Tipper. And I knew that, finally and forever, I could rid myself of the awful paranoia that in 1993 Bill had victimized Tipper in ways analogous to the manner in which he had abused Monica Lewinsky.
I knew that if anything had happened between them, Ken Starr and his zealous army of investigators would have discovered it. He could have destroyed both Bill and me with one report about a vice president cuckolded by his commander in chief. He would have destroyed a love story even greater than the one Erich Segal wrote about us.
The Rock of Gibraltar of my life has been my love for my wife of nearly thirty-three years, the mother of my four children, the woman I first called Tipper Galore after we saw a James Bond movie together when we were in college.
My mother didn’t like her at first. “She has no credentials,” Mother said, wanting me to date “sophisticated” women from around Boston. But then she didn’t like Bill, either. “Bill Clinton is not a nice person; don’t associate too closely with him,” she said. “He grew up in a very provincial atmosphere.”
I love my dear old mother, but she’s a professional snob and she’s often—well, I’ll put this in the kind of alpha male terms my new media adviser, Naomi Wolf, wants me to use.
Mother is often full of shit.
. . .
Mother was “Mrs. Senator Ma’am” and my dad was “Mr. Senator Sir” to the help as I was growing up on the eighth floor of the Fairfax Hotel in Washington, D.C. My father was Albert Gore, the distinguished liberal populist senator from Tennessee, and my mother, Pauline, was his smartest campaign adviser.
Dad, who’d once played the fiddle with the Carter Family on the radio, now decked himself out in English tweeds and divinity school blue suits. Mother, who’d been a waitress when they met, was now the president of the Congressional Wives Forum and the president of the Women’s Speakers Bureau of the Democratic National Committee.
They were gone much of the time and I was mostly alone in the apartment with my black nanny, Ocie Bell, who’d put the food out on the table and make it look “pretty” for me. When they were in town, we went for sunset strolls, parading up and down in front of the embassies on Embassy Row, or I was up on the Roof Garden of the Fairfax with them, drinking milk while they had their highballs.
My dad called me “honey” and took me with him to committee meetings at the Senate. He let me float my toy submarine in the Senate pool. He introduced me to Vice President Nixon and the vice president rocked me on his knee. He took me to Saturday-afternoon dance lessons and showed me how to do the waltz. He accompanied me to violin lessons, too, but Mother made him stop. “Future world leaders do not play the violin,” Mother said.
Sometimes, when I was bored and they were out of town, I sneaked up to the Roof Garden and dropped water-balloon bombs on the limousines waiting at the curb. I met President Kennedy—first at a party at our apartment and then on the phone. My dad let me listen in as the president called some people “sons of bitches.” My dad even sneaked me into President Kennedy’s private office when he was out of town. I sat in his rocking chair.
My parents enrolled me when I was in the fourth grade at St. Albans, a private school near our apartment, where a great many Kennedys and Roosevelts had gone. St. Albans, to use a Naomi Wolf word, sucked. The other kids called me “Al Gorf.”
I was a good kid, though, just like I’d been a good little boy. I had a teacher who said to me many years later, “You were so mature and advanced, I had almost to look at you to see if you were a child or a man.” I was a bored child.
The only good news was that the Jockey Club, the city’s fanciest restaurant, had opened on the first floor of the Fairfax Hotel and I could sashay into the kitchen any time and eat whatever I wanted. Dad started sending me in the summers to the small town in Tennessee named Carthage, where he was from and where we had a farm. I had to do farm work every day with some of Dad’s acquaintances. Clean the hog parlors for a summer, then back to the Jockey Club and St. Albans.
It was that same routine for a lot of years—St. Albans, my parents gone, and the farm in the summer, my parents rarely there. I didn’t have any close friends.
I played football and basketball and I listened to the radio all the time: Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry. A black doorman at the hotel liked me and sometimes he took me into the alley behind the Jockey Club and we tossed a football back and forth.
In school, Al Gorf learned how to balance a broomstick on his nose for a half hour. And in Carthage, Al Gorf saw a girl sitting in a car listening to Ray Charles and went up to her.
I was thirteen and she was sixteen—Donna Armistead—the Ritchie Valens song was out about then and I was in love with it—and I asked Donna to go out with me. We went to a drive-in with some of her friends, and the next day I asked her to go steady. She agreed.
And they called it puppy love, but I had a girlfriend now when I went back to St. Albans. I wrote her twice a day and I called her every Saturday night at 7:30. In my junior year at St. Albans, Mother and Dad were gone so much that I moved into the dorm. I slept as long as I could each morning before chapel, using a clip-on tie and cutting the back out of my shirts so I could just put them over me like a T-shirt under my jacket. Or I’d wake up at three in the morning sometimes and get dressed for the next day and go back to bed.
In Carthage, Donna and I would kiss a lot and make out and pet, but we’d never go all the way. We were the Ken and Barbie of the Tennessee hills. Once, when Donna and I were in the basement of my parents’ house in Carthage, Mother was in town and she came running downstairs. We were on the couch, rubbing hard against each other, and Mother broke us up and told me to take a cold shower. I did. Another time, Donna and I were parked in a lover’s lane and headlights were suddenly behind us. I jumped out of the car so fast, I was wearing her shoes. My dad was standing there. He said, “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you think it’s time we were getting on home?” We got on home.
In my senior year at St. Albans, I was o
n the varsity football and basketball teams. We sucked. We won one and lost seven at football; we won two and lost fourteen at basketball. When the school yearbook came out, it said, under my picture, “People who have no weaknesses are terrible.”
I went to a couple of the school debutante dances, moving Al Gorf around to Johnny Mathis, but I still wrote Donna twice a day. I went down to see the Beatles at Washington Stadium with three classmates. They all loved John; Paul was my favorite. I celebrated graduation by driving around town in my father’s Chrysler Imperial, alone, and tossing cherry bombs out the window. One of them bounced back into my lap and almost ended Al Gorf’s sex life, which had hardly begun.
I was probably closer to Powell, the doorman at the hotel, than to any of my classmates. Powell and I had Jackie Wilson in common and I knew so much about music that we never ran out of something to talk about. I knew that Lefty Frizzell was in jail in Roswell, New Mexico, the night the flying saucers landed . . . that Jerry Lee Lewis almost killed Paul Anka on an Australian tour . . . that Ray Charles was a bigger stud than Elvis . . . that Brenda Lee was a thirteen-year-old midget.
I asked Powell if he’d take me down to the Howard Theater, a fabled R&B house, to see James Brown, and he did. James Brown knocked me out and I swear I almost had an orgasm watching that business he did with his cape at the end of the show.
I met her at my graduation dance. She was with somebody else. I saw her across the room; a vision of wispy blondness, long hair, angelic face, mirror-bright blue eyes. Marianne Faithfull with a dazzling cinematic smile. Oh, pretty woman!
We talked a little bit. Her name was Tipper Aitcheson. Her mother had nicknamed her after a thirties big-band hit called “Tipi Tipi Tin.” I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. A case, Tipper said later, of pure animal magnetism.
I called her the next day and asked her to another graduation dance that same night. We danced and danced. Everything and everyone else melted away. It was the first time Johnny Mathis ever sounded really good to me.
American Rhapsody Page 41