Anyway, with only a month to go before the election, my campaign’s loan applications had been turned down by a half dozen banks. The head of the Republican Party at that time happened to be Bill Cooper, the head of the Minnesota Banking Association. Coincidence? You tell me. The law said you could not put up your own collateral. I was in a real bind.
Then Steve Minn, a member of our Reform Party who’d been elected to the Minneapolis City Council, happened to talk to his neighbor one day over the backyard fence. The neighbor was vice president of the Franklin Avenue Bank, in what was basically the Minneapolis ghetto. Giving high-risk loans was their specialty. “Send Jesse down to us, we’ll do it,” he said.
It’s safe to say I would not have become governor had it not been for the Franklin Avenue Bank. Within twenty-four hours, they wrote up our loan. That $325,000 then went to Bill Hillsman, with the Northwoods Advertising Agency. His TV ads were ready, and all he was waiting for was the check. One of Bill’s ideas was a Jesse Ventura Action Figure, being used by these two kids to do battle with an Evil Special Interest Man doll. Another ad had me sitting there, posed like Rodin’s famous sculpture of “The Thinker,” not quite naked but almost. (Truth be told, a body double did the filming, not me). The idea was, “The Body” had morphed into “The Mind.”
TERRY: This was where I had to eat crow. When they came to me with that last commercial, I said to Jesse, “You can’t run this, everybody’s going to hate it! They’re even going to question whether you’re wearing any clothes! I don’t see how this makes you a serious candidate!” I thought the “little-guy ads” were frivolous. I remember arguing with Bill Hillsman in our living room. Bill kept saying, “Trust me, trust me.” Well, these turned out to be killer ads that people just loved! I went to Bill later and said, “Man, it’s a good thing there was somebody smarter than me running that campaign!”
Bill has a sixth sense about how to communicate to the people. He’d put Paul Wellstone over the top with his ads in 1990. By the time of the last debate, which was televised statewide, I’d shot up to 23 percent in the polls. Once again, Humphrey and Coleman were jabbing at each other, this time about how they would reduce health-care costs for low-income senior citizens. Norm accused Skip of making the same promises ten years ago. I chimed in, “Ten years ago, Norm was a Democrat.” Which was true—he’d switched parties. “And working in my office!” Skip cried, taking my bait. When I challenged their budget and tax-cut notions, they got so hot against each other that the moderator tried to cut them off. I stood up and pretended to hold them apart, in this political boxing-ring.
That last weekend of our 72-Hour Drive to Victory tour, a new TV ad appeared that featured my animated action figure driving a huge RV down the highway to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” A voice-over talked about another six-foot-four-inch wrestler from a third party—Honest Abe—who the people voted in because they believed in what he stood for.
Farm country ends after you cross the border into northern Oklahoma, and you soon enter a lush area filled with trees and beautiful rolling hills. Our dog, Dexter, a Belgian Malinois—they’re the original shepherds—sits quietly in the seat behind us, looking out the truck-camper window. Terry and I are talking about stopping before long, when we come to a good truck stop.
“Hey, honey,” I say, “remember when we all met in our kitchen at the ranch, the day after the election?”
“I thought it was pretty impressive,” Terry says, “that there were my girlfriends and my mom, kinda running the show with all your big political people.”
“But do you remember the first thing we said?”
“Never forget it. Everybody was sitting there looking around at each other, and it was: ‘What in the hell do we do now?’”
CHAPTER 3
Down That Texas Trail
“The Christian church in all its freakish ramifications and efflorescence’s is as dead as a doornail; it will pass away utterly when the political and social systems in which it is now embedded collapse. The new religion will be based on deeds, not beliefs.”
—Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945
We always spend the night in truck stops. These are real Americana, a truly unique part of blue-collar America. We pull into the back and expand the camper out, among all the 18-wheelers. The drivers tend to leave their trucks on a low idle, a kind of soothing hum that lulls you to sleep. I never have any trouble sleeping in the truck stops. Usually we get there before a lot of the truckers arrive and, by morning when we wake up, the lot will be jammed.
You can stay there for free, and you get a feeling of security parking among them. I’m not ever recognized. I’ve grown my hair out and cut off my beard, and I haven’t been clean-shaven probably since the military. Maybe a couple of times in wrestling, but I had the bleached-blond hair back then.
The friendliness we generally encounter on the road is wonderful. Except on one particular night in Denny’s. They have a big-screen TV in the corner, and everybody is glued to it. All watching Fox News. It doesn’t take me long to get sick of it, and I ask if they can change the channel. But they won’t. It’s stuck on Fox News!
TERRY: Most of the truck drivers are these huge, burly guys. And there’s Jesse, sitting there complaining about Fox News and talking loudly about Bush. I mean, he’s big too, but it scared the heck out of me!
Why do I react like this? The media today are controlled by the big corporations. It’s all about ratings and money. Believe it or not, I think the downfall of our press today was the show 60 Minutes. Up until it came along, news during the Walter Cronkite era was expected to lose money. The networks wrote it off, in order to bring the people fair reporting and the truth. But when 60 Minutes became the top-rated program on television, the light went on. The corporate honchos said, “Wait a minute, you mean if we entertain with the news, we can make money?” It was the realization that, just like any sitcom or drama series, if packaged the correct way, the news could make you big bucks. No longer was it a matter of scooping somebody else on a story, but whether 20/20’s ratings this week were better than Dateline’s. I’m not knocking 60 Minutes. It was tremendously well done and hugely successful, but in the long run it could end up being a detriment to society.
My major criticism of today’s media is, they’re no longer reporting the news, they’re creating it. When that happens, you’re in deep trouble. Here’s an example from the sports world: Not long ago, after the Vikings lost a football game, the press went to a Minneapolis bar wanting people to trash the team. I heard this from somebody who was there that night. Instead of arbitrarily seeing what a certain table’s opinion was of the game, they kept going around the room until they found the right person to say what they were looking for. That’s who got on TV. To me, that’s dishonest reporting. Creating the news.
I went through something similar after I appeared on David Letterman’s show. I guess Letterman wanted to get a little spark going, so he said: “Now you’re governor of Minnesota, home of the Twin Cities. If you had to pick one, which city do you like better?” Well, back home, that was a death sentence waiting to happen. So I figured, rather than avoid the question, I’d be honest. “Well, David,” I said, “I was born in Minneapolis. So naturally, if push comes to shove, I’m gonna choose my hometown. I went to Minneapolis Roosevelt, not St. Paul Central.”
Then I thought I’d have some fun. I made a mistake, though. In my position, I wasn’t allowed to make jokes, even on Letterman or Leno. (Even though, last time I checked, mostly what they do on those shows is entertain people and say funny things.) Anyway, I said, “My biggest criticism of St. Paul is their streets. In Minneapolis, all the streets are either numerical or alphabetical, so you’ve got a good idea where you are. In St. Paul, there’s no rhyme or reason to them.”
I added this: “Dave, you know that St. Paul’s got a huge Irish population. And when they were naming them streets, well, you know them Irishmen.” I made the motion of drinking a
beer. Now correct me if I’m wrong but, on St. Patty’s Day, what do they do? They drink—not water, right? When I go to see the Timberwolves play, right across the street is so-and-so’s Irish Pub. So I kind of viewed the two as synonymous with each other.
Here’s what the Minnesota media did with that: They went out until they found an Irishman who was angered and offended. I heard they went through about ten people first, who all laughed and said, “Of course, who cares, that’s what the Irish are known for.” That last angry Irishman was the one who got on TV.
I was greeted home by hordes of reporters at the airport, demanding an apology to the Irish community. At that point I realized that, from now on, I could only tell Slovak jokes. See, if you tell them you’re that nationality, then you’re off the hook because you’re talking about yourself.
I came back to Letterman’s show a year or two later. The first line out of David’s mouth was, “Well, what have you been up to, and what have you learned in the last year, being governor?” I looked over at him and said, “Well, David, I’ve learned that I can get in trouble without you!” Because I’d been in hot water for a half dozen other things I said or did by then. Letterman roared.
I had some fun with Tim Russert, too, on Meet the Press. Our first exchange, soon after I became governor, went like this:
Tim: “If I call you Jesse ‘The Mind’ Ventura, will you call me Tim ‘The Body’ Russert?”
Me: “Take off your shirt right now, Tim. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Shows like Russert’s would often display a picture of me wearing my pink feathered boa from my wrestling days and say, “Look, there’s the governor of Minnesota!” Well, one day an old college classmate of Tim’s sent us a picture of him from those years, wearing a beard and shoulder-length hair and looking a lot like Meathead from All in the Family. So when I went on Meet the Press the next time and he started remarking about old photos of me, I said, “Speaking of photos, Tim”—and I whipped this one out and asked the cameraman to zoom in—“I want people to see the real Tim Russert!” He looked kind of embarrassed, but he was a good sport about it.
I got a fair shake from Chris Matthews on Hardball, even from Geraldo Rivera. They didn’t take cheap shots and they asked good questions. The thing about most of the media is that they want to reduce everybody to the lowest common denominator. They don’t want people to have any heroes. I’ve got nothing against criticism of political figures, but that’s different from a personal attack. It’s easier to do sensationalism and character assassination than focus on the real issues. And they’re obsessed, it seems, with portraying the ugliest side of humanity—the dishonesty, hypocrisy, ego battles, and fights.
How dare Fox, CNN, and MSNBC call themselves news stations? They’re entertainment stations. Think about Anna Nicole Smith. A live feed to the hotel where she died? Why would she deserve this type of coverage? She’s nothing but a silicone-breasted gold digger who married an old guy to get his money. I wouldn’t even list her as the poorest poor man’s Marilyn Monroe. Yet the woman warrants weeks of our attention? At the very same moment, a group of scientists came out and said unequivocally that global warming is being caused by human beings. Did you hear that mentioned on the “news”? No, that day Britney Spears shaved her head. People would rather hear about this than what’s happening in Iraq? Or are we simply being dumbed-down to that point? The people of the United States should demand more than this!
Which is why I go ballistic in a truck stop that can’t manage to switch away from Fox News.
The famous Route 66 out of Oklahoma City doesn’t get traveled much anymore. There’s even grass growing over parts of it. John Steinbeck, when he described the westward migration of the Dust Bowl farmers to California in The Grapes of Wrath, called Route 66 the “Mother Road,” a nickname it still retains. As a kid, I remember Nat King Cole, and later Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, singing about how you could “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” Then there was the TV show Route 66, featuring these two young guys in a Corvette looking for adventure on the highways of America.
So the road became part of our auto culture mythology. The first drive-through restaurant sprang up along Route 66—Red’s Giant Hamburgs in Springfield, Missouri. And yes, the first McDonald’s, out in San Bernardino, California, also appeared in the mid-1950s on 66. Later, you found restaurants like the Big Texan, which advertised a seventy-two-ounce steak dinner that was free of charge to anybody who could down the whole thing in an hour!
Given all this history, Terry and I had to check it out for a while. She’s a real sucker for roadside attractions, and Route 66 had always boasted plenty of these—from Dairy Queens to reptile farms. (Our standard operating procedure was to start the day with a hefty breakfast, grab an afternoon ice cream, and then stop for dinner.) When we came to our first “Authentic Indian Trading Post,” Terry got all excited. But when we pulled into the village, we got out and saw that all the “authentic” teepees were painted on plywood boards. There were “authentic moccasins,” but they were made by the Minnetonkan Moccasin Company back up in Minnesota! I didn’t figure our Indians had gotten as far south as Oklahoma.
A day later, after we’d driven by a dozen more of these “authentic trading posts,” I realized these were the McDonald’s of Native Americans. I understand commercialism, but it’s disheartening to realize that even American history has suffered a corporate takeover. It was actually kind of heartbreaking for Terry, because she thought we’d stumbled onto something unique. And it isn’t at all.
Road signs noted in Terry’s journal:
Native American Cherokee Trading Post—24-Hour Restaurant and a Subway.
Rattlesnakes Exit Now.
Pumpkin Maize and Pizza Farm.
Dinosaur Park and Petrified Forest—free polished petrified wood, meteorites fifty percent off!
Navajo Feed and Pawn.
Approaching on the border between Oklahoma and Texas, we saw signs for the Gene Autry Museum. You had to pull off the main highway and drive about twelve miles to get there and, unfortunately, when we arrived, it had closed a half-hour before. Terry had seen something very disturbing on the way in, and alerted me to look for it on our way back. I won’t soon forget it. It was what we presumed was a scarecrow. But it had a black bowling ball for a head, the holes being the eyes and nose. And it had a noose around its neck.
I looked at Terry and said, “Wow, are we really in the twenty-first century?”
Dallas isn’t that far, once you cross the border into Texas. We were going to pay a visit to an old Navy buddy of mine, a physician who lived in the suburb of Arlington. I’d been to Dallas twice in recent years. The first time, as governor, I wanted to see Dealey Plaza. After leaving office, I came back in 2003 to participate in commemorating the fortieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
I’d been a young teenager when Kennedy was killed. I remember the country being sad but, at the time, numb and surreal. Then, when I was at junior college in the 1970s, Mark Lane came to speak about the questions he had concerning the Warren Commission. I started to wonder. When I went into my wrestling career, on airplanes I started reading all the books I could about the assassination.
It caused quite a stir when I told an interviewer from Playboy that I did not believe the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. That was my first year as governor and, as far as I’m aware, I was the highest ranking official who’d ever made that statement. My most basic reasoning is this: If Oswald was really who we were led to believe—a disgruntled little Marine private who got angry with capitalism and became a communist, tried to defect to Russia, came back and thought he’d make a name for himself in history by shooting the president—then why would any of the evidence need to be withheld and locked away in the National Archives for seventy-five years because of “national security”? As a Navy SEAL, I had top-secret clearance. That was higher than Oswald’s, and I know a few secrets, but not en
ough to jeopardize national security.
When I was traveling around the country to promote my first book, the publisher said I could go to either Houston or Dallas. I said, “Give me Dallas.” First I went to where Jack Ruby shot Oswald, inside police headquarters. A cop gave me the tour. The eerie part was that there was the elevator we all saw on TV—and down on the floor, almost on the exact spot where Oswald lay dying, the tile had oil on it that still looks like blood.
From there, I went to Dealey Plaza. I walked the picket fence where a second gunman most likely was firing from. I took my time. I walked out on the street, looked at the decline of the road. Then I went into the Texas School Book Depository, where Gary Mack—curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at the time—met my party. The actual supposed sniper’s nest on the sixth floor is sealed off. But you can go to the next window, which would seem to be an easier shot, because you’re eight feet closer to where the motorcade passed and at basically the same angle. When you look out, you see a massive Texas oak tree. I turned to Mack and said, “Clearly, forty years ago, this tree was much smaller.” He said, “No, this is maintained by the federal government as a National Monument, so it’s trimmed to be kept as close to authentic as can reasonably be done.” Even if the tree had been several feet smaller in 1963, I didn’t see how three shots could have cleared its branches and still lined up right on the presidential motorcade. Besides, Oswald had seven seconds to get three rounds off. He was using a bolt action weapon—with which he’s going to miss the first shot and somehow hit with the next two?
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 6