Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  My theory is that Perot never really wanted to win, he just wanted to make a statement. And when he saw the momentum building for him that summer, he got scared that he might actually pull it off. Only Perot could really answer whether he secretly preferred working in his empire, but that’s what I suspect. Still, I did see this glimmer of hope for a legitimate third party—and then I watched it start to flicker out as fast as it had risen.

  When different affiliates from third parties all around the country came together in 1996, three-time Colorado Governor Dick Lamm had joined the movement. He is a brilliant man, a savvy politician, a speaker of truth in many ways. Some of us had groomed Dick to get the Reform Party nomination in 1996. Perot would always hold the status of being its creator, but we felt this would show the party growing beyond him. But at the eleventh hour, the Perot forces undercut Lamm and put Perot up again as the candidate.

  Right then and there, our group from Minnesota and a lot of other supporters started to question what was really going on. All of a sudden, our new national party was being labeled vindictive because we brought forth another possibility. Isn’t that what politics is supposed to be? Not a dictatorship. But apparently, Perot and his Texas group didn’t truly want to create a legitimate third-party movement. It was really about Ross Perot’s ego.

  He won 8 percent of the popular vote in ’96, less than half of what he’d done in ’92, but still respectable for a third party. Let me tell you what happened when I needed his help during my run for governor two years later. It was the time when I was trying to secure a bank loan for the $325,000-plus in campaign financing that was due me, but getting stymied by the powers-that-be. Remember I mentioned that a half dozen banks had turned me down, until the little Franklin Avenue Bank came through?

  Before that happened, I flew to Atlanta with some of my key people to meet with Perot. The law doesn’t say that the loaning bank can’t be from out of state. We figured Perot must know a bank in Texas; he probably even owned a few! We sat down for a meeting, told him what was going on—that we thought we could win this election but that the money was critical—and could he help us in some way?

  Perot never said no directly, but he couldn’t seem to look any of us in the eye. When we left the room, I immediately turned to Dean Barkley and Doug Friedline and said, “He’s not going to help us one bit.” I could read it in his body language, and the tone of his voice. At that point, I knew that this Reform Party was bogus. It’s all about Ross Perot, and anything that threatens him is going to get squashed. He never did endorse me for governor that year. And I never saw him again.

  I couldn’t make it to the third annual convention of the Reform Party in the summer of ’99, because my plane got delayed due to bad weather. My back was killing me anyway, from an injury I’d suffered playing golf a few days earlier. I did address the delegates by phone hookup from my ranch, and told them that we owed Perot a great debt as the party’s founder. When Perot gave his speech, he didn’t even mention my name. But our candidate, Jack Gargan, got elected to party chair over the Perot wing. And the Reform Party became eligible for almost $13 million in federal funding for the 2000 presidential election.

  I’d already made it clear that I would not go for the presidency that year. As the millennium dawned, I’d only been governor for one year. I’d made a four-year promise to fulfill my obligation to the state of Minnesota. I didn’t believe that, all of a sudden and for your own personal political gain, you start campaigning for another job.

  There was only one person, I decided, that I would break my promise for. At the time, it was John McCain.

  When Senator McCain came to see me in Minnesota early in 2000, he had just begun taking on George W. Bush. He was going hot and heavy, with the very distinct possibility he would get the Republican nomination. I was supporting him, because I believed then that a veteran, like him, and a moderate—which he no longer is today—was what the country needed.

  We were sitting in my office when I looked McCain in the eye and broached a possibility. “Senator,” I said, “if you will quit the Republican Party, I will break my promise to Minnesota and I will run with you. You for president, me for vice president. And we will win the 2000 election.”

  He smiled and said, “Well, I’d love to have you on board, but I can’t quit the Republican Party.”

  I said, “Well, if you can’t do that, then I can’t join you. Because I will not join either of these parties.”

  He repeated, “Well, I won’t quit the Republicans.”

  I said, “Okay, so be it.”

  That’s where it ended. We went out and met the press and smiled for the cameras. I respected McCain; he didn’t have to give me a reason why. I would have loved to have seen him break free then, because the possibility was there. If he and I had run together, I think there’s a strong chance we could have won as independents. I’ll always remember flying into New York City that same winter. I was in a limousine heading into Manhattan in the middle of the night, with the window down, when we passed by a construction site. One of the workers recognized me, pointed, and said, “Hey—the wrong governor is runnin’ for President!”

  So I believe it was wide open in 2000. Neither candidate, Bush or Al Gore, really inspired anyone. But, of course, McCain knows Karl Rove and the Republicans better than I do. They sabotaged his candidacy a couple of months later, spreading false rumors that cost him the South Carolina primary.

  Now that Bush’s term is almost up, the right-wing Republicans have resurrected McCain. I wouldn’t make my offer again today, I’ll tell you that. Not to an arch conservative who still supports the Iraq War.

  Not too long after my meeting with McCain, I called a press conference.

  Headline: VENTURA QUITS REFORM PARTY, CITING LEADERS

  Gov. Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, the Reform Party’s highestranking elected official, said yesterday that he was resigning from the party over his growing dissatisfaction with its fractured leadership.

  Speaking outside the governor’s residence in St. Paul, Mr. Ventura described Party leaders as ‘hopelessly dysfunctional’ and said he could not support a political organization that might have Patrick J. Buchanan, a former conservative commentator, as its presidential candidate and David Duke, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as a party member.

  —The New York Times, February 12, 2000

  I encouraged the state party to follow suit and, about a week later, they withdrew also, and we went back to being the Independence Party of Minnesota again. I couldn’t be with any party that would consider having Pat Buchanan as its presidential nominee; not a man who’d been involved with “dirty tricks” in the Nixon administration, and who wanted to expel the United Nations from New York.

  All of a sudden, Donald Trump came forward as a possible alternative. He thinks a lot like me, and we had several meetings together. I’ve known Trump since the early WrestleManias he staged in Atlantic City, which were the fastest sell-outs he ever had. At least you could look at Trump and say, “This guy knows how to do business.” So I came out in favor of his receiving the Reform Party’s nomination. And Donald has said publicly that, if I ever run for president, he will fully support me, financially and any way that he can.

  But in 2000, I saw the handwriting on the wall. There was a loophole that allowed Buchanan to come in and claim the Reform Party nomination. You see, the party wasn’t put together in an ironclad way. You could walk into the convention and become a delegate that same day, just by signing up. That’s what Buchanan did. He had the power in all the states to bring in more delegates than the other candidate, an Iowa physicist named John Hagelin. This divided the Reform Party into warring camps. It got so bad that dual conventions ended up being held at the same time in separate areas of the Long Beach Convention Center. Ultimately, the Federal Elections Commission ruled that Buchanan would receive ballot status—as well as that nearly $13 million in federal campaign funds.

  Basically, Pat Buchan
an hijacked the Reform Party. Nobody had ever thought ahead as to whether someone with the steamroller he had could do this. I’m sure he had plenty of help from Republican operatives. In fact, when Buchanan called the Republicans a “beltway party” and announced he was leaving in October 1999 to seek the Reform Party nomination, my belief is that it was a set-up all along by the Republicans. A way to destroy the momentum for a third party.

  Buchanan had huge debts from his previous campaign when he was seeking the Republican nomination in ’96. He saw an opening to be almost like a corporate raider—take that federal funding and retire his campaign debts with it. After he raided our treasury, he didn’t even put on a campaign. It was reported that he was sick. Even though he was on the ballot in forty-nine states, he finished fourth in the general election with 0.4 percent of the popular vote.

  Well, they wanted a third party gone and, in my opinion, Buchanan was the black knight sent to do it. Throw the last bit of dirt on the casket, at least temporarily. The Reform Party destructed, and it’s a shame. In hindsight, had Perot graciously stepped aside and allowed for natural evolution, and for Dick Lamm to be the candidate in ’96, there’s quite the possibility that today you would have a legitimate three-party system in this country. But it came down to the fact that Perot and his cronies didn’t want to relinquish the power for the common good.

  Movements of third parties rise and fall, much like the tide. Right now, we’re at a very low ebb. But it’ll come back. The corruption of the Democrats and Republicans ensures that it will. I call them the Demo-crips and the Re-blood-licans. No different really than the Crips and the Bloods street gangs—except that these guys wear Brooks Brothers suits.

  Eventually people will start seeing the light again, and some leader will step forward and raise the third-party banner.

  CHAPTER 5

  Crossing Borders: A Curious Sense of Security

  “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.”

  —former President Harry Truman, December 1963

  The longer we drive through Texas, the more I realize the monotony of American culture today. Whether you’re in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, or El Paso, it’s the same stores, the same everything, and it’s continuous. It’s not just McDonald’s—every sit-down place is now part of a chain. The only way to get away from it is to pull off onto a side road and go into some Podunk town. One time Terry and I finally find a little rib joint—we and two others are the only white people in there, and what a moment of fresh air!

  What are we doing to our country? I wonder. Lord, I think, give me one of the so-called underdeveloped nations, where I can walk into a local man’s shop with its own unique character, not a conglomerate like Wal-Mart that offers everything under the sun.

  Coming in east of El Paso, right in the residential section—which I’m sure wasn’t residential when it was built—is a huge oil refinery. Now the city has expanded out to contain it. All the wealthy citizens live across on the New Mexico side. El Paso itself is down in a valley and, as we cross it east to west, the smog lingering beneath the mountains looks almost worse than L.A. I realize, here’s another place with environmental destruction I wouldn’t want to live in.

  For a whole day, we are literally going down the highway with all the NASCAR people. They had a big race in Dallas and now they’re going to Phoenix. One thing about NASCAR—they’ve got some money! You ought to see these rigs! The best looking semis I’ve ever seen in my life, all polished and chromed, freshly painted. State of the art.

  An excerpt from Terry’s journal: We were going through Flagstaff, a really big down grade to Phoenix. Husband was in a really good mood. On a sixty-degree grade, he took his foot off the gas and was going fifty-five miles an hour without any help from the engine. I was looking over the side of a gorge about fifty feet below us and said, “Hey, could you slow down a bit?” And husband said, “I’m not losin’ face by slowin’ down, I’m goin’ out NASCAR, baby!”

  We stay a couple of days with old friends in Phoenix. They haven’t seen us since my governor days, and we have a lot to catch up on. They’ve gotten into studying Eastern religions, and I notice a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead on a coffee table. Which, of course, inspires me to tell the story of my meeting with the Dalai Lama.

  We have a Tibetan population in Minnesota. I don’t think they’re a huge population anywhere, but we seem to have a fairly substantial number. So, when the Dalai Lama was traveling the country in the spring of 2001, he came and spoke to a joint session of our legislature. I was scheduled to visit with him privately for twenty to thirty minutes in my office.

  As the meeting date approached, I thought, what am I going to ask this guy? “Mr. Dalai Lama, please tell me the meaning of life?” I mean, how many times has he heard that from people? What could I ask that I’ll bet no one in the world ever has?

  Then it came to me. I’m a big fan of the movie Caddyshack, as any golfer is. Remember the great scene with Bill Murray, where his character—Carl the Groundskeeper—is telling the kid how he used to be a caddy? And who did he get but the Dalai Lama himself? Big hitter, even wearing all his robes. At the end of the round, he figures, “The Lama’s gonna stiff me.” So he says, “Hey, Lama, how about a little something for the effort here?” That’s when the Dalai Lama tells him, “Gunga gunga la gunga.” Which means, “When you die, you’ll have total consciousness.” And Bill Murray says, “So I’ve got that going for me!”

  I was really curious whether the Dalai Lama had ever seen Caddyshack. But I wouldn’t just out-and-out ask him, I wanted to get a feel for him first. He sat down across from me and my family in his flowing robe. Apparently he had done his homework on me, because he wanted to know what diving under the water was like. I told him, “You need to do it. It’s very hard to describe, but it’s a whole other world that you can explore very easily. A world where you go right down into the food chain. That’s what makes it exciting, because you’re very helpless in many ways. Everything down there is a whole lot more mobile.”

  So after we’d talked for a while, and I realized that the Dalai Lama is a remarkable person—very honest and with a tremendous sense of humor—I thought: why not? I had warned my son and my wife that I was going to do this. As I was leading up to it, they caught on. Tyrel, already flushed with embarrassment, excused himself. My wife was left there to face the consequences, I guess.

  TERRY: I knew right when he was going to do it. He knew all the important stuff was over. I watched his body language. I saw that leg start to bounce up and down. That’s when Ty jumped out of his chair: “I have to use the restroom.” I was experiencing what can only be described as total mortification. And I figured by the time Jesse was done, all chances of my having a life-changing event were also going to be over.

  I looked at the Dalai Lama and I said, “Your holiness, can I ask you a personal question?” He said, sure.

  I said, “Do you watch movies?”

  He said, “Not very often.”

  I said, “So—you’ve never seen the movie Caddyshack?”

  He said, “No.”

  I said, “Well, you should, because you’re in it.”

  He gave me this kind of puzzled look. Like, gee, I don’t remember being on the set. When did I do that? And where are my royalties?

  I said, “Well, you’re in it, though not actually in it—but there’s a whole scene about you.”

  The Dalai Lama started to laugh. He gets asked all these mystical questions, to which he can always give you an answer. But someone had finally asked him a real question, which he didn’t know how to answer. I suspect he found this a relief.

  I was also hoping that, wherever he stayed that night, his people would run out and get the movie and he’d sit down and watch it.

  We snuck the Dalai Lama out of the Capitol Building. It has secret underground
passageways where you can get people out if you need to. Then I went out to meet the press, a big mass of the Minnesota reporters. By this point in my career as governor, they weren’t exactly at the top of my list. I was staring quietly at them with a straight face. Of course, the first question was, “Well, what did the Dalai Lama say to you?”

  What a lead-in! How could the press spoon-feed me any better? I stayed stone-faced and I said, “Well, the Dalai Lama said to me, ‘Gunga gunga la gunga.’ Which means that when I die, I’ll have total consciousness. So I’ve got that going for me!”

  Only one of the media picked up on the humor. That was the fellow from Public Radio, Erik Eskola. He burst out laughing. I turned around and walked back to my office. No more questions. That’s the only quote I gave ’em.

  The Dalai Lama did bless me and give me a silk prayer scarf that I have today in my home office, hanging right over the back of my name-chair.

  “Hey, honey, we’re almost at the border.” Terry has dozed off. From Phoenix we’ve driven south and then west again, through Yuma, and now to a crossing point into Mexico just over the Arizona-California line, at Calexico. On the other side is the border town of Mexicali. I think of the old Gene Autry song, “Mexicali Rose”: “I’ll come back to you some sunny day . . .” I want to get here in time to cross at dawn, anticipating we can make it to Guerrero Negro by the next night. That’s the separation point between Baja Norte and Baja Sur, 450 miles from the U.S.