One-Night Stands with American History

by Richard Shenkman

  SOURCE: Paul Morgan and Sue Scott, The D.C. Dialect (Washington: Washington News Books, 1975), p. v.

  ROCKY WEARS BLACK

  When Chiang Kai-shek died in April 1975, President Ford sent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to Taiwan to attend the funeral. Shortly afterwards a reporter asked “Rocky,” who had become vice president only a few months before, how Ford was going to use him. “It depends,” replied Rockefeller, “on who dies.”

  SOURCE: John Lindsay, newspaper reporter, Washington, D.C., in a personal interview with Richard Shenkman at the Capitol, January 1979.

  A MOMENT IN THE LIFE OF GERALD FORD’S PRESS SECRETARY

  Following is a remarkable exchange that occurred on Friday, September 3, 1976, between Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, and White House reporters on the subject of the President’s campaign strategy:

  Q: Ron, is the President going to make one speech every two weeks?

  A: Probably a little more frequently than that. I think as Jim [Baker, campaign director] said he outlined the strategy pretty thoroughly at that time.

  Q: Is that right, one a week?

  A: Probably a little closer to two a week, yeah.

  Q: Two a week.

  A: No, I say one a week would be closer to the fact than one every two weeks.

  Q: Ron, you said that this was a strategy reached after careful thought.

  A: Um-hum.

  Q: Could you share with us at this point what the thought was? What’s he trying to accomplish by this strategy?

  A: I think what I tried to say before, that the strategy is designed to elect the President. After all, the issue of this election is—You have a President who’s been here for two years, who has a record, who has run up accomplishments, who has proposals for additional accomplishments. Do you want to keep him? Or, you have another candidate, with proposals and promises and positions on issues? Do you want to replace the President you have with the other fellow? Now that’s the issue of the campaign.

  Q: [Laughter]

  A: You asked me a question. I’m answering it with our answer. If you want to hear it, okay, if you want to laugh it off I’ll stop and go on to the next question. Okay, you asked me a question. I’m trying to answer it. This is the central issue of this campaign. Our strategy is designed to make the point that you should keep the President you have. There’s a lot of people that have worked a lot of hours, including the President—and, as I say, you’ve all heard about it or seen the strategy book and so forth, and we are following our agreed-upon strategy.

  Q: Is that the theme? Keep the only President you have?

  A: It’s one of the themes.

  Q: That was one he used in Texas, where it didn’t work too well. Is there any reconsideration—

  A: Well, you know, I, okay.

  Since Watergate

  “I’m just confused. I don’t know what I ought to do anymore. I don’t know what works or what doesn’t work. I don’t know why this is happening. I’m just so confused.”

  ’HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

  SCRAPBOOK OF THE TIMES

  • When Jimmy Carter was asked in the 1960s to join the racist White Citizens Council, he said, “I’ve got $5 but I’d flush it down the toilet before I’d give it to you.”

  • Billy Carter was allergic to peanuts.

  • When Jimmy Carter was president, he kissed the queen mother on the lips. She was appalled, as obituary writers noted upon her death.

  • On the morning of the Wisconsin primary in 1980, Jimmy Carter held a press conference to announce that there had been substantial progress in talks to free the American hostages in Iran. Nothing came of this supposed breakthrough.

  • In the 1990s, the Reagan Alumni Association, which is composed of 5,000 members of past Reagan campaigns, proposed replacing Alexander Hamilton’s picture on the $10 bill with Reagan’s.

  • In the first Bush administration, when Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney complained one day that not one of his assistants supported Colin Powell’s plan to deactivate thousands of small nuclear weapons in place in Europe, Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded, “That’s because they’re all right-wing nuts like you.”

  • Ronald Reagan was considered by teachers to be a bright child. He could read by the age of five.

  • When Ronald Reagan’s father was told by a hotel clerk that the hotel did not allow Jewish guests, he stomped out and slept the night in his car.

  • Jimmy Carter won over many Americans as an ex-president, but he infuriated two successors. On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, Carter recommended in a letter to the members of the United Nations Security Council that they should oppose American policy. The Bush administration considered accusing him of treason. In 1994, during a crisis with North Korea over nuclear weapons research, Carter, in violation of instructions from the State Department, told North Korea the United States would agree to lift economic sanctions. A Clinton cabinet secretary exploded in rage that Carter was a “treasonous prick.”

  • Bill Clinton, as quoted by Newsweek: “I was a man of forty when I was sixteen and at forty a boy of sixteen.”

  • According to speechwriter Michael Waldman, Bill Clinton in 1993 reviewed every line of the federal budget—a first for any president.

  • Bill Clinton loved to talk. His State of the Union address in 1995 was the longest any president ever delivered. He spoke for one hour and twenty minutes.

  • The first time women were mentioned as a group in a presidential inaugural address was in 1997.

  • On his last day in office, Bill Clinton granted a presidential pardon to Marc Rich, who was number six on the Department of Justice’s list of “Most Wanted” international fugitives. Rich’s ex-wife Denise had donated approximately $1.5 million to Clinton-related causes near the end of his term. Justice Department officials afterward noted that the pardon for Marc Rich was not processed through regular channels.

  • Carlos Anibal Vignali, a drug dealer, and Almon Glenn Braswell, a convicted swindler, also were granted pardons in Clinton’s final week in office. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother, Hugh Rodham, lobbied to obtain the pardons and was paid $400,000 compensation. He later returned the money when ethical questions were raised about his fees.

  • George W. Bush is related to two former presidents. His father, George H. W. Bush, was president. And W.’s fourth cousin, five times removed, was Franklin Pierce of Vermont, U.S. president from 1853 to 1857. Barbara Bush, whose maiden name is Pierce, is the only woman in U.S. history to be the wife of one president, mother to another, and the fourth cousin of another.

  • An exact tally of the people killed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City is elusive. The New York Police Department lists 2,823, while the medical examiner’s office lists 2,819. Other lists vary from 2,786 to 2,814. The death toll from the other attacks is undisputed: 224, not counting the hijackers; 184 at the Pentagon, plus 40 in Pennsylvania.

  • On the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack, the numbers that popped up for the New York Lottery were 9-1-1. “The numbers were picked in the standard random fashion,” stated a lottery official. “It’s just the way the numbers came up.”

  VIETNAM AFTER THE WAR

  The war in Vietnam was one of the most divisive and unpopular wars in American history. The American military withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, and on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon. The American ambassador and other officials escaped in a helicopter evacuation from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy. The American part of the war was over. What happened next in these countries continues to be of interest in America because of its past involvement and because of the large number of refugees who are now American citizens.

  Following the communist takeover, from 500,000 to 1 million people were placed in reeducation camps. The total population of South Vietnam was about 20 million. The victims included not only former South Vietnam
ese soldiers but students, intellectuals, monks (both Buddhist and Catholic), and many political militants who had been in sympathy with the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the communists) but quickly found themselves on the outs from their northern comrades.

  Conditions in the reeducation camps varied considerably. While some camps were near towns and did not even have fences, other camps were in isolated jungle areas where seventy to eighty prisoners were placed in cells built for twenty. Hunger, disease, torture, and death were common. The typical “reeducation” stay in the camps lasted three to eight years. The last survivors of the reeducation programs did not return home until 1986. Of course, hundreds of thousands of others became “boat people,” fleeing the country in anything that might float. Many of these refugees drowned or were killed by pirates. Today Vietnam remains one of the most oppressive nations on earth.

  SOURCE: Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 565–635.

  RONALD REAGAN: TAX CUTTER?

  In his first year in office, Ronald Reagan famously succeeded in winning congressional approval for the single largest tax cut in American history: a 25 percent cut in taxes across the board. That fixed in stone his reputation as a tax cutter.

  But Reagan also increased taxes, though his doing so received far less attention. Over the course of his administration, Reagan raised taxes seven times. To disguise what he was doing, his handlers referred to most of these increases as “revenue enhancers.”

  One of the biggest budget challenges he faced was saving Social Security. To assure the program’s continued solvency, Reagan approved what was, at the time, the largest tax increase in American history. This tax passed Congress less than two years after Reagan had signed the largest tax cut in American history. The tax hike brought in so much revenue that the surplus was used to help the government pay for other social programs for the next generation.

  Taken together, Reagan’s tax cuts were larger than his tax increases. But by the end of his term he had barely reduced the tax burden on Americans. According to Michael Kinsley, “Federal tax collections rose about a fifth in real terms under Reagan. As a share of [the gross domestic product], they declined from 19. 6 percent to 18.3 percent.” Most Americans at the end of his term paid higher taxes than they did at the start.

  WAS REAGAN SENILE AS PRESIDENT?

  “In her book Reporting Live, former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl wrote that she and other reporters suspected that Reagan was ‘sinking into senility’ years before he left office. She wrote that White House aides ‘covered up his condition’—and journalists chose not to pursue it. Stahl described a particularly unsettling encounter with Reagan in the summer of 1986: her ‘final meeting’ with the president, typically a chance to ask a few parting questions for a ‘going-away story.’ But White House press secretary Larry Speakes made her promise not to ask anything. Although she’d covered Reagan for years, the glazed-eyed and fogged-up president ‘didn’t seem to know who I was,’ wrote Stahl. For several moments as she talked to him in the Oval Office, a vacant Reagan barely seemed to realize anyone else was in the room. Meanwhile, Speakes was literally shouting instructions to the president, reminding him to give Stahl White House souvenirs. Panicking at the thought of having to report on that night’s news that ‘the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet,’ Stahl was relieved that Reagan soon reemerged into alertness, recognized her, and chatted coherently with her husband, a screenwriter. ‘I had come that close to reporting that Reagan was senile.’”

  SOURCE: Jeff Cohen, “The Press Slept While Reagan Rambled” (www.TomPaine.com).

  RONALD REAGAN ON MOUNT RUSHMORE

  In 1997, disturbed by public indifference to Ronald Reagan, a group of supporters began a public campaign to raise his profile and improve his image. They called their campaign the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project. It was wildly successful. In 1998 they succeeded in getting Congress to change the name of Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Soon after that they succeeded in getting a turnpike in Florida named after him, then a nuclear aircraft carrier. The group’s goal? “We want to create a tangible legacy so that thirty or forty years from now, someone who may never have heard of Reagan will be forced to ask himself, ‘Who was this man to have so many things named after him?’” explained Michael Kamburowski, the Reagan Legacy Project’s executive director. William Buckley lobbied to get Reagan placed on Mount Rushmore.

  ANATOMY OF A POLITICAL HIT

  Politicians never know for sure which story or event will take hold in the public mind. What words or actions will be a defining moment? Will the event even be true?

  On February 5, 1992, George H. W. Bush was running for reelection. On that day of campaigning, Bush stopped by the National Grocers Association convention in Orlando, Florida. One of the exhibits Bush visited displayed a new type of supermarket scanner that could not only price groceries, but could weigh them and read mangled or torn bar codes. Gregg McDonald of the Houston Chronicle was the only newspaper reporter who accompanied Bush, and he later filed a two-paragraph story for the press pool that stated Bush had a “look of wonder” on his face when shown the latest in grocery store technology. McDonald’s full story for the Chronicle that day did not mention Bush had viewed any grocery store scanner equipment.

  The next day, the New York Times ran a front-page story by Andrew Rosenthal that claimed Bush had “emerged from 11 years in Washington’s choicest executive mansions to confront the modern supermarket.” The President, according to Rosenthal, “grabbed a quart of milk, a light bulb, and a bag of candy and ran them over an electronic scanner. The look of wonder flickered across his face. . . . ‘Is this for checking out?’” The story then continues with Bush saying, “I just took a tour through the exhibits here. Amazed by the technology.” The front-page story continued by reminding readers that supermarket scanners had been developed in 1976 and had been in general use for over a decade. The impression that Bush was out of touch with ordinary people was unmistakable. Of course, the Rosenthal piece failed to mention that Rosenthal himself was not there when all of this “occurred,” and that the entire basis for his article was fabricated from McDonald’s mention in the pool report of a “look of wonder.”

  Newspapers and especially editorial writers around the country quickly picked up and repeated the Times story. Here, in one concise anecdote, was a larger truth about cloistered career politicians. The next day the Boston Globe ran a story called “President Bush Gets in Line.” The Washington Post followed with “Grocery Shopping Needn’t Concern President.” Anthony Lewis of the New York Times editorial page piled on further with “The Two Nations.”

  Within a week, however, other reporters realized the Rosenthal piece was being taken seriously and that, at best, it was a very questionable interpretation of what actually had happened. Stories began to appear in other newspapers criticizing the Times’s methodology. USA Today ran a story on page two called “Bush: Scanner Story Was Short-Change Job.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution followed with, “How President Bush Got Dunked by the Pool.” The Washington Post ran, “The Story That Just Won’t Check Out.”

  Now with egg on its face, the New York Times found a videotape of the event and ran a story proclaiming that Bush had reviewed both ordinary and newfangled scanners, and was unfamiliar with and impressed by both. But no one else who viewed the video saw it that way. Newsweek reported that Bush was “curious and polite, but hardly amazed.” Time stated that the exchange was “completely insignificant as a news event. . . . If anything, he was bored.” And Bob Graham, the salesman who had demonstrated the scanner technology for Bush, stated, “It’s foolish to think the president doesn’t know anything about grocery stores. He knew exactly what I was talking about.”

  The story faded quickly; the New York Times had its opinion of events, and everyone else who
checked into it had another. But the perception lingered. Public attention had shifted away from the Gulf War and was beginning to focus on the not-so-great economy. President Bush had first said a recession would not happen; then when it did, he promised the recession would end soon. He seemed older and out of touch, someone who would no more know how to handle the troubled economy than he would know the price of a quart of milk. His lead in the polls began to slip away. And, after all, didn’t we hear somewhere that the president doesn’t even know that grocery stores have electronic scanners?

  SOURCE: Barbara and David Mikkelson, Maybe I’m Amazed: Urban Legends Reference Pages (www.Snopes.com, 2001).

  CLINTON-ERA QUOTES

  • Bill Clinton’s advice to Gennifer Flowers, which she taped, on what to say if she was ever asked about a possible affair with Clinton: “Deny that we ever had an affair.”

  • Bill Clinton, on 60 Minutes, after denying having an affair with Gennifer Flowers: “I have absolutely leveled with the American people.” (Same interview: “I have acknowledged that my marriage is not perfect.”)

  • Bill Clinton, referring to Monica Lewinsky: “Listen to me. I never had sexual relations with that woman.”

  • Bill Clinton, testifying in the lawsuit filed by Paula Jones: “That depends on what the meaning of the word is is.”

  • Bill Clinton, in the brief speech to the country acknowledging he had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky: “I misled even my family.”

  • Bob Kerrey, Democratic senator from Nebraska: “Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?”

  • Johnny Chung, the former Democratic Party fund-raiser who told federal investigators that China’s chief of military intelligence funneled $300,000 through him to the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times (July 1997): “I see the White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open the gates.”