Where the Buck Stops
Page 50
23In 1961, the Twenty-third Amendment finally gave residents of the District of Columbia the right to vote in presidential elections. The amendment also gave the District of Columbia three electors. MT
24This has happened a couple of times since. In Richard M. Nixon’s first contest he received 43.4 percent of the vote, with the other candidates receiving the other 56.6 percent of the voles. Hubert Humphrey received 42.7 percent and George C. Wallace received 13.5 percent, but Nixon got 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191 and Wallace’s 46. For his second term, however, against Senator George McGovern, Nixon got 61 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes to McGovern’s 17. Jimmy Carter had what might be called a draw; he received 50 percent of the votes with 40,825,839, and Gerald Ford received 48 percent with 39,147,770 votes, the remaining 2 percent going to other candidates. But Carter received 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. These figures total 537, but there were actually 538 votes cast. The missing vote was east by an elector from Washington State, who voted for Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan wasn’t a presidential candidate at that time. Reagan beat Carter easily in the next election, getting 43,899,248 votes, 51 percent, to Carter’s 35,481,435 votes, 41 percent, with 5,719,437 votes, 7 percent, going to John B. Anderson, a former Republican who ran on the Independent ticket, and Reagan absolutely overwhelmed Carter in the electoral voting, 489 votes to Carter’s 49. Anderson received no electoral votes at all. Reagan did even better in his second run for the presidency, receiving 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale’s 13. Mondale’s votes came only from his home state. Minnesota, and from the District of Columbia. MT
25I think my father would have liked glasnost, the new Russian policy of relative openness and relative freedom for the Russian people, though he would have wanted to see a lot more of it happening there before he’d be convinced that it was totally genuine. I hope it’s still in existence and expanding by the time this book appears. MT
26The British, of course, have now adopted the decimal system, though it took them nearly a couple of centuries to get around to it. And we’re still trying to popularize the metric system in this country. It’s now the official system, but it continues to baffle and confuse the general public. MT
27My father’s attitude toward dress was slightly different: the moment he could afford it, he switched from ready-made suits to clothes made up for him by the best tailors, and when he was a senator, he was on the list of the ten best-dressed men in the Senate. But he shared Jefferson’s insistence on comfort at all times. He wanted to look good, but was much more concerned with feeling relaxed and comfortable. MT
28For people who don’t recognize this name, though I imagine everybody will, it should be explained that Harry Byrd was a prominent and powerful Virginian who was first elected to the Senate in 1933 and who died in 1966. His son, Harry Byrd, Jr., was a senator from 1965 to 1983. It should further be explained that there always seem to have been Byrds of the nonfeathered variety in Virginia. One of the first such Byrds was William Byrd II, who lived from 1674 to 1744 and was one of the first royal governors of Virginia, and who became so rich and powerful that he ended up owning 179,000 acres of even richer Virginia soil., One of his estates was so large that it included the entire area of what is now the city of Richmond. I’m not sure that Harry senior was part of that same family, since he was actually born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, back in 1887. But he certainly became a powerful Virginian and a powerful southern politician, and when Eisenhower and Stevenson were opposing each other, some electors in Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia even gave Byrd a total of fifteen electoral votes. His brother, incidentally, was Richard E. Byrd, the explorer. MT
29There have been two additional amendments signed into law since my father wrote those lines. The Twenty-fifth Amendment, adopted in 1967, was the result of President Kennedy’s assassination and allows presidents to fill the office of vice president instead of leaving it vacant. And the Twenty-sixth Amendment, adopted in 1971, changed the minimum voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. MT
30My father was not here in 1973 when Spiro T. Agnew became the second. Aside from their resignations as vice presidents, of course, there’s no comparison between the two men. Calhoun had plenty of faults, but after resigning as vice president, he went on to serve as a senator again and as secretary of state under President John Tyler in 1844 and 1845. Agnew left office one step ahead of the sheriff, accused of accepting bribes as vice president and of income tax evasion, and was fined $10,000 and placed on three years’ probation. He was also ordered to pay $268,000 to the state of Maryland for various deeds committed while he was governor there, before becoming our vice president. He then went on to write a best-selling spy novel, which my agent, Scott Meredith, who also handled the rights to the Agnew novel, says wasn’t too bad, and after that showed up doing mysterious jobs for various Arabs. Later on, he announced that he was bankrupt. MT
31Ronald Reagan eventually beat that record. He was born on February 6, 1911, and was two weeks short of his seventieth birthday when he delivered his inaugural speech on January 20, 1981. I can’t remember whether or not he wore an overcoat. MT
32My father originally used a shorter word here, but then decided to change it. MT
33The unofficial ban ended on November 2, 1976, with the election. of Jimmy Carter. Carter is, of course, from Georgia. MT
34“The sad truth is that my father is probably mistaken here. In 1978, Dr. Harold Schwartz, a noted physician associated with the USC School of Medicine, studied twenty years of medical evidence and research on Lincoln’s physical condition and determined that Lincoln was suffering from a disease calltted Marfian’s syndrome, a hereditary ailment that affects the heart and alters bone growth. Dr. Schwartz pointed out in a medical journal article that Lincoln’s unusually long arms, fingers, and legs, and his visibly sunken chest, were typical of people afflicted with Marfan’s syndrome, and so was a symptom that Lincoln himself described, an occasional involuntary twitching of his left foot, which is also typical of the disease. Dr. Schwartz’s conclusion was that Lincoln was near death at the time of his assassination. MT
35My father was embarrassed about giving details of the typographical error, but as a longtime writer of mystery novels. I believe that you’ve got to be fair to the reader and be sure to name the killer once you’ve described a murder. I’ve also got to confess that I think the typo was pretty hilarious. The line was supposed to read, “The President spent much of the evening entertaining Mrs. Galt.” The way it came out was. “The President spent much of the evening entering Mrs. Galt.” MT
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