The Book of Bastards

by Brian Thornton

  By the 1950s the Iranian economy was so bad that President Mohammed Mossadeq considered nationalizing Iran's oil industry. Though the change would save Iran, it would also effectively cut the British off from their sweet profits and force them to pay fair market prices for their oil and gas. The British sought and got the help of the CIA. Mossadeq was denounced by a ruthless and well-funded propaganda organization as a despot who had misled the electoral process. Just like that, he was ousted, and the son of a British-deposed shah took over Iran.

  In Guatemala's case the bone of contention was land. An American corporation called the United Fruit Company owned most of the land in the country in the early 1950s, as it had for decades. United Fruit had a long history of interfering in the internal affairs of Central American countries, and the corporation frequently requested and received assistance from the U.S. government. United States troops intervened in the interest of keeping United Fruit's operating costs as low as possible. These low costs included the bribes that greased corrupt Guatemalan government officials into agreeing that United Fruit should only have to pay about $3 per acre in taxes on “unimproved” tracts of land. Of course, the land was actually worth many times more than that.

  So when Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was elected president of Guatemala in 1951, he decided to nationalize the company's holdings in his country. He seized the land and goods, and redistributed them to the peasants so that they could feed themselves. To add insult to injury, Guzmán even offered to reimburse United Fruit, but only at the rate at which they had valued their lands for the purpose of taxation assessment: $3 per acre!

  That was the beginning of the end of Guzmán. Both Dulles and his brother secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were major stockholders in the United Fruit Company; when corporation officials went to them in a panic, Dulles acted with alacrity. Within months the CIA had been called in and backed yet another coup of an elected leader. By 1954 their efforts had (pardon the pun) borne fruit. This time the deposed president fled into exile in Mexico and was replaced by a military junta willing to continue to “tax” United Fruit at the agreed-upon $3 per acre.

  Bastards.

  “Perhaps we have already intervened too much in the affairs of other peoples.”

  — Allen Dulles

  59

  RICHARD J. DALEY

  The “Last Boss” (1902–1976)

  “I'm not the last of the old bosses. I'm the first of the new leaders.”

  — Richard J. Daley

  The “last boss” was the guy who delivered the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy; he was the man who ordered out riot police and asked for help from the Illinois National Guard to suppress protestors picketing the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The “Last Boss” Richard J. Daley once said that there was no partisan way to ensure that the garbage got picked up on time. He would have known. No one — not even gangsters like Al Capone — so completely controlled the levers of power in the Windy City before or since Daley took office in 1955.

  Daley was one of the last of the machine politicians that defined big city politics in America throughout much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Born in the shadow of the stockyards on Chicago's infamous South Side, Daley went to law school at night while working as a clerk. Although he briefly hung out his shingle in 1933, Daley's career was in politics.

  Daley worked his way up through the city's ward system. When he first ran for office in 1936, he won a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives as (of all things) a Republican. A lifelong Democrat, Daley switched parties only so he could get elected, and quickly switched parties again in 1938 when he was elected to the Illinois State Senate.

  For the next seventeen years Daley held a succession of posts. He learned the ropes and forged alliances that helped him build a power base within the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. In 1953 he was elected its chairman. Two years later he became Chicago's mayor, a post he would hold for the rest of his life.

  During his formative years as an Irish-American politician, Daley made friend-ships and political alliances with like-minded Irish-Americans across the country. The most prominent of these was Joseph Kennedy of Massachusetts.

  When Kennedy's senator son John ran for president in 1960, Old Joe Kennedy depended on Daley to help bring Chicago, and by association the rest of Illinois, to his son's electoral tally. Daley did deliver, to the everlasting outrage of the Republicans, by stuffing the voting roll sheets with thousands of names taken from the city's cemeteries. All of the forged ballots safely “voted” for Kennedy and the rest of the Democratic Party ticket. Kennedy won Illinois by eight thousand votes.

  When Chicago was tapped to host the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention, Daley intended to use the national stage to showcase how well his machine ran the city. He forgot to consider the “Yippies” and their allies in the Antiwar Movement. Their protests began spinning out of control on August 23, 1968.

  Fearing that anarchy would result from this raft of demonstrations, Daley okayed the use of force in shutting down the dissenters, including orders to shoot to kill anyone caught with a gun. Things got heated and eventually the governor called out the Illinois State National Guard to help restore order.

  Daley didn't lose his office, but he did pay a price politically. As his power base eroded, Daley's health also began to decline. In 1976 he died suddenly as a result of his second heart attack in as many years at seventy-four. According to many historians, Daley's time in office wasn't without benefit for his constituents. He worked to renew Chicago's downtown and made its walking suburbs livable and attractive to the city's middle classes; Daley's work kept them (and their tax dollars) from fleeing the city limits for the suburbs as they had in nearly every other large American city over the past two decades.

  “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home.”

  — Richard J. Daley to Connecticut Senator Abe Ribicoff after Ribicoff questioned Daley's using riot police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention

  60

  JOE MCCARTHY

  America's Witch-Hunter-in-Chief (1908–1957)

  “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

  — Joe Nye Welch

  No book on the subject of “bastards” (political or otherwise) would be complete without the inclusion of that opportunistic train wreck “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy, Republican senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957. A falsehood-spewing, grandstanding gasbag of the first order, McCarthy's meteoric rise to public celebrity was equaled only by his precipitous fall from grace.

  Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1908, McCarthy dropped out of school while very young to help work the family farm. At age twenty he completed the entire local high school curriculum over the course of a single year, then went to college and settled on the law as a vocation. By 1938 he had passed the bar and gotten himself elected to a nonpartisan judgeship.

  McCarthy joined the Marine Corps at the outset of World War II, and was immediately commissioned as an officer because of his status as a judge. He served in a noncombat role with a Marine aviation unit as their intelligence officer. By the end of the war he had earned the rank of captain.

  After the war McCarthy prepared to run for the U.S. Senate and lied his ass off about his war record in furtherance of his political aspirations. He succeeded in getting elected as a senator from Wisconsin in the 1946 elections and maintained a low profile for his first three years in the Senate.

  All that changed in a February, 1950, speech given at Wheeling, West Virginia: McCarthy claimed that the State Department was riddled with Communists, many of them spies. Over the next four years McCarthy set out on a witch hunt, seeking to rid first the federal government and then the entertainment industry of people who might be either spying for or sympathetic to the Soviet Union. With the Cold War just starting, people were frightened. The time was ripe for the
rise of a demagogue willing to play on that fear to his advantage.

  BASTARD B.S.

  Among the many lies McCarthy told were that he had enlisted at the beginning of the war and that he had flown thirty-two combat missions, thereby earning consideration for the Distinguished Flying Cross. He later received the honor based upon more falsifications in his paperwork; he claimed he had broken a bone in his foot as a result of being shot down, but it actually happened during a hazing ceremony on a troop ship headed to the South Pacific.

  In speech after speech, McCarthy went after “secret Communists” and “Soviet agents” that always seemed to be just around the corner. And although his allegations were invariably filled with bombast, they were equally light on proof.

  McCarthy's fall was just as spectacular as his rise. In 1953 he began investigating rumors of a spy ring that reportedly infiltrated the U.S. Army. In these “Army– McCarthy Hearings,” McCarthy met his match in Army lead counsel Joe Nye Welch. He also made a fatal mistake: he allowed the proceedings to be recorded for a documentary film. He came across as a bully. It all came to a head when the soft-spoken, unassuming Welch (who seemed downright fatherly on TV) called America's Witch-Hunter-in-Chief out:

  Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us … I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

  And that was that.

  His power broken, McCarthy continued to serve in the Senate, but his political career was over. The bully had been faced down. Within three years he was dead of hepatitis at the age of forty-eight.

  Bastard.

  “Senator McCarthy's zeal to uncover subversion and espionage led to disturbing excesses. His browbeating tactics destroyed careers of people who were not involved in the infiltration of our government.”

  — Senators Carl Levin (D–Michigan) and Susan Collins (R–Maine)

  61

  JFK

  “Fiddle and Faddle” (1917–1963)

  “It was the best thirty seconds of my life.”

  — Actress Angie Dickinson joking about her tryst with President Kennedy

  He was the movie-star handsome, Harvard-educated, wealthy son of a powerful Massachusetts family. Winner of both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. President. Hero. Martyr. Icon.

  Womanizer. Plagiarist.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  As it turns out Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize — winning book Profiles in Courage was largely ghostwritten; most scholars think it was the work of future White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. But it made JFK look intellectually deep, and his father Joe worked hard to get one of his boys elected president and made sure the book got a mountain of publicity.

  The fact that Jack Kennedy liked women is well established, and women returned the favor. It's also well-known that his wife was aware of his serial adultery. Once, Jackie even showed him a piece of lingerie left behind by one of his dalliances and asked him to return the item to the lady in question, as it wasn't Jackie's. Kennedy had quite a taste for Hollywood actresses, and had reportedly slept with a number of them including Angie Dickinson, Gene Tierney, and of course, Marilyn Monroe.

  Kennedy and Monroe met for the first time when they attended a February 1962 party held in the president's honor at the home of his brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford. The sparks flew and they quickly began an affair.

  She went on solo vacations with Kennedy, and stayed over at the White House while the First Lady was away. And then there was the whole singing “Happy Birthday” thing. Monroe fell in love with Kennedy; he viewed sex as something more along the lines of a tag-team sport. The affair couldn't last, and it didn't.

  According to Kennedy confidant Florida Senator George Smathers, Kennedy ended things with Monroe in a particularly callous manner. After a day spent sailing on the Potomac, he told her he wasn't interested in getting a divorce. “You're not exactly First Lady material, Marilyn,” he said by way of letting her down.

  And that was that.

  Monroe's life had already been spiraling out of control for over a decade as a result of the long struggle with her manifold personal demons. Within months of the breakup, she was dead of a drug overdose. What Kennedy felt about her passing is not recorded.

  FIDDLE AND FADDLE

  It is a well-documented fact that Kennedy was a lifelong and inveterate womanizer. What is not nearly so well-known is the part played in JFK's sex life by a couple of women given the codenames “Fiddle” and “Faddle” by the Secret Service. Both women were attractive and married. Both were on the White House payroll and listed their occupations as “secretary” (although neither of them could type). Apparently both women were highly adept at “helping the president relax.” Their special assignment was to join JFK for frequent lunchtime nude swims and accompany him on trips where the First Lady was not in attendance. None of this was reported by a “respectful” White House Press Corps, nearly all of whom were men.

  Perhaps the most telling insight into Kennedy's attitudes regarding love, intimacy, and sex has been offered by Frank Sinatra's valet, George Jacobs. He knew Kennedy from the times the president was a guest at the singer's Beverly Hills home. In an interview given long after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Jacobs said “His need was like that of Alexander the Great: to conquer the world. To him, Marilyn was one more conquest, a trophy — maybe the Great White Shark of Hollywood, but still a record, not a romance.”

  “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

  — John Fitzgerald Kennedy

  62

  LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

  Bathroom Power Politics (1908–1973)

  “There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.”

  — Lyndon Baines Johnson

  Texas-born and hardened in the crucible of the Great Depression, Lyndon Baines Johnson grew up to be both an effective and a quotable bastard. He is known today largely for his role as John F. Kennedy's successor as president of the United States after Kennedy's assassination and for getting the nation embroiled in the unpopular Vietnam War. But Johnson was also likely the most successful majority leader in the history of the U.S. Senate.

  Johnson began his political career as an aide in Texas state government, and proved himself capable of rousing people and getting things done. He was elected to the House in 1937 and held office there for twelve years. Johnson spent part of this time in the Naval Reserve during World War II, operating as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's eyes and ears in the Pacific Theatre. He even earned a dubious Silver Star award for observing fifteen minutes of combat time on a B-26 bomber run. In 1949 Johnson moved to the U.S. Senate. During his twelve years there, Johnson rose within the Democratic leadership, taking over as Senate majority leader in 1954 when the Democrats reclaimed the majority.

  Johnson was, without doubt, the most effective Senate majority leader ever. He studied the senators working within his caucus and applied the “Johnson Treatment” to the ones from whom he wanted votes. Journalists Roland Evans and Robert Novak described the strategy as a combination of intimidation and cajolery; “an almost hypnotic experience” that “rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

  He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, but lost. Johnson surprised many by accepting the offer to be Kennedy's running mate. Kennedy's staff knew he needed a Southerner on the ticket to land the South's electoral votes that year. Johnson met that goal, and he also (allegedly) assisted in the voter fraud that delivered Texas to Kennedy.

  BASTARD IN THE BATHROOM

  Power is a funny thing. Like confidence, the appearance of power is often
more important than the actuality of it. This is particularly true when trying to get employees to do your bidding without having to constantly threaten or discipline them. Johnson, a student of human nature, chose to remind members of Congress and of his cabinet that he was running the show by sending them to the bathroom. He had a habit of calling government officials who weren't getting their jobs done to see him in the White House. When notified that the subordinate in question was awaiting entry into the Oval Office, Johnson would go into his small private bathroom, drop trow, and make the person sent for discuss the issue while Johnson sat on the toilet. No one ever openly questioned who was in charge during Johnson's administration.

  Vice President Johnson was publicly loyal to the president, but behind closed doors, he chafed at the public's love affair with the handsome young Kennedy. “Jack was out kissing babies,” Johnson once remarked, “while I was out passing bills.”

  But when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Johnson hit the ground running. He passed more sweeping social reform legislation than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Johnson was responsible for so many things we take for granted today including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. These accomplishments, though, did little to save his career.

  Johnson also escalated the war in Vietnam, and that cost him the White House in the long run. He retired from politics in 1969 and died in 1973.