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Thursday, February 20, 2014
Snippets of abhorrent conversations between President Richard Nixon and his advisors
By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Ed.
[From various sources, including The White House tape transcripts, oral histories, and previously unreleased Oval Office tape recordings]On homosexuality and society (Oval Office with John Erlichman)
Nixon: "I do not mind the homosexuality. I understand it. (14-second beep to hide personal information) But nevertheless, the point that I make is that goddamit, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality… even more than you glorify whores. Now we all know that people go to whores…we all have weaknesses. But, goddammit, what do you think that does to kids? What do you think that does to 11 and 12 year old boys when they see that? You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates."
Ehrlichman: "But he never had the influence that television had."
******
Nixon: "You don't want to know."
******
Nixon: "I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people?"
Kissinger: "About two hundred thousand people."
Nixon: "No, no, no, I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?"
Kissinger: "That, I think, would just be too much."
Nixon: "The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?…I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes."
******
On Jews and marijuana - May 26, 1971
"You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose because most of them are psychiatrists."
On African-Americans and Espionage - July 5, 1971
"So few of those who engage in espionage are Negroes. …As a matter of fact, very few of them become Communists. If they do, they either, like, they get into Angela Davis — they’re more of an activist type. And they throw bombs and this and that. But the Negroes, have you ever noticed? There are damned few Negro spies."
"You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose because most of them are psychiatrists."
******
"So few of those who engage in espionage are Negroes. …As a matter of fact, very few of them become Communists. If they do, they either, like, they get into Angela Davis — they’re more of an activist type. And they throw bombs and this and that. But the Negroes, have you ever noticed? There are damned few Negro spies."
******
On abortion - January 23, 1973
"There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape."
"There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape."
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014
72 years ago today, FDR authorized internment camps for American citizens: the internment of Japanese-Americans from Kent, Washington
It was 72 years ago today that FDR signed Executive Order 9066. Which paved the way for the American internment/concentration camps. I wrote about this a few years ago, especially as it affected the little farm town (no longer) in which I grew up. From All This Is That, 2012. /jack
by Jack Brummet, Green River Valley Editor
Dust storm at an internment camp a/k/a relocation center
The Japanese-Americans were sent to hastily, and flimsily, constructed camps called "War Relocation Centers" (which we now generally call internment camps) in remote parts of the nation's interior. . .far away from where they might have, say, used a flashlight to guide a fleet of Japanese bombers toward the Boeing warplane plant.
I focus here on Kent, Washington (now a suburb of Seattle), because that's where I grew up, and know first hand about some of the aftermath of the camps. The first wave of immigrants to Kent, Washington happened shortly before 1900. The immigrants were mostly European. There were, even as I was growing up, several Italian families still farming the valley. The 1900 census count shows just 13 Japanese-named families in and around Kent.
The number of Japanese immigrants rose steeply over the next few years until 1907, when the US Government put the brakes on the number allowed to immigrate. Eventually, in the 1920's, Japanese immigration was banned altogether. The Anti-Alien Land Law in 1923 barred these immigrants from owning land, or even becoming citizens. Those with a child born in America could put land in the child's name. Some of the Japanese worked for established farmers and some cleared land and began their own farms in Kent, Auburn, and the tiny nearby villages O'Brien, Orillia, and Thomas.
Many Japanese farmers owned dairy farms until the price of milk plummeted after the World War I. Those farmers jumped into vegetable and berry farming, and their truck farms were profitable. They sold produce in Seattle, at the public market and farm stands, and shipped lettuce and cabbage to the east coast.
By 1930 there were around 200 Japanese families farming the White/Green River valley. In 1942, months after Pearl Harbor, all people of Japanese descent in the White/Green River Valley were evacuated and detained at an internment camp at Tule Lake, California. They lost their businesses, farms and personal belongings. They lost everything in the war hysteria.
My mother, Betty Brummet, remembers Japanese American kids being marched from Ballard High School one day. Some of the students lined up and booed.
The phrase "shikata ga nai" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") summarized the interned families' resignation to their helplessness. This was even noticed by the children, as mentioned in Farewell to Manzanar. They tended not to make waves, and complied with the government to prove themselves loyal citizens.
Dust storm at an internment camp
Photo of a shop owner in my hometown of Kent, Washington, in 1942
Through the 1950's the Green River continued to flood the valley floor in late spring. This is what made the valley floor some of the richest soil in the world. . .but, alas, flooding prevented big business from locating there. In 1963 the Army Corps of Engineers built the Howard Hansen Dam (an earthen dam, still protecting the valley from floods) to regulate the river waters. The danger of uncontrolled flooding ended. The flat, treeless land on the valley floor now was an attractive area for business. And build they did.
Boeing built an aerospace lab, and the floodgates were opened. Farming was over, and dwindled rapidly, although there are a few pockets left. One of my old high school mates, Danny Carpinito has in fact become a wealthy vegetable farmer. Of the Japanese kids I knew in school, virtually none remained in Kent after high school. Of course, neither did I nor most of my friends, although some of our families still live there.
Sources:
The Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
The History of Kent, Washington: http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/curriculum/vtours/kent/
Japanese Relocation Centers: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/internment1.html
The Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American
Previous articles, and photos on the Green River Valley and Japanese-Americans from All This Is That (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/)
Previous articles, and photos on the Green River Valley and Japanese-Americans from All This Is That (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/)
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ATIT Reheated: Dick Tuck, American prankster hero
By Jack Brummet, Presidents Editor
Dick Tuck is a legendary political strategist and hoaxer who made a life-long career out of making life miserable for Richard Nixon. He's been a hero of mine ever since Hunter S. Thompson (a friend of his) wrote about him during the 1972 Presidential campaign.
Tuck writes on dicktuck.com: "Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal. In the Chinatown Caper, a sign saying "Welcome Nixon" also asked – in Chinese – "What about the Hughes Loan?" [Ed's note: Howard Hughes had made a large, no-interest, loan, or possibly a large cash gift, to Nixon's brother Donald. This naturally erupted into a scandal...albeit, a containable one]. Once the phrase was translated for Nixon, he rushed over to the crowd, seized the sign and tore it up in front of the TV cameras. The message was simple: do you want a guy like this running your state or nation? "
"This kind of behavior, these ethical standards had been Nixon's since law school, when he broke into the Dean's office with some friends to see if his grades were good enough to keep his scholarship. It continued in his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Pat Brown, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.
"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer."
As Adlai Stevenson said during the 1956 Presidential campaign, “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”
My favorite quote by Dick Tuck is from his concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election, in which he received about 10% of the vote:
This poster is from Tuck's 1966 Congressional campaign. He claimed his opponents added the Dick to form the F word, Tuck said he thought voters would think his opponent had done this and he'd "get the sympathy vote" with this tactic.
In 1950, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon. He watched first hand as Dick Nixon smeared her as "The Pink Lady." After that, he made it his mission to mess with Richard Nixon every chance he got.
One of Tuck's best pranks was "the Chinatown Caper." During his campaign for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon visited Chinatown in Los Angeles where children held "welcome" signs in English and Chinese. As Nixon spoke, an elder from the community whispered to him that one of the signs in Chinese said, "What about the Hughes loan?, " a reference to an unsecured/illegal $205,000 loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother, Donald. Nixon grabbed the sign on camera and ripped it up.
After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who gave Nixon a hug and said in front of TV cameras, "Don't worry, son! He beat you last night, but you'll get him next time."
Tuck and many other people say that he was never malicious in his political pranks. Richard Nixon, however, became obsessed about Tuck, and even railed about him in some of the Watergate Tapes. But Nixon also admired Tuck, and often compared the dirty tricks committed by staffer Donald Segretti unfavorably to the elegance and humor of Tuck's political shenanigans. After the Watergate blew up in the newspapers, Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, saw Tuck in the Capitol. Haldeman reportedly turned to Tuck and said, "You started all of this." Tuck replied, "Yeah, Bob but you guys ran it into the ground."
In a 1973 Time magazine article, Tuck told a reporter, "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest. He asked me to advance a Nixon visit." He organized a rally at UC Santa Barbara, and booked the largest auditorium they had. He booked it on a day when no students would be able to attend, and didn't do any publicity for the rally. Forty students showed up in the 4,000 seat auditorium. Tuck got up to introduce Nixon with a long, rambling monologue with many references to Nixon's cut-throat, red-bashing campaign tactics against Jerry Voorhis. He then announced that Nixon would now speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon, of course, had not planned to speak about the IMF. Therefore, when he got up to the podium he was momentarily speechless. When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."
In 1956, Nixon was running for reelection as Eisenhower's Vice President. The Republican Convention was held in San Francisco that summer, and Tuck learned that the route taken by garbage trucks going to the dump led past the convention center. Tuck paid to have all the garbage trucks bear signs that read "Dump Nixon".
Tuck also performed other pranks to undermine Nixon's campaign effort like posing as a fire marshall to provide low estimates of the turnout at Nixon's rallies, or telling bandleaders at rallies that Nixon's favorite song was "Mack the Knife."
In one incident Tuck dressed up as a train conductor and signalled a train to leave the station while Nixon was delivering a speech from its rear platform. Reportedly, the train pulled out of the station with Nixon still speaking. [ed's note: There is some debate about whether this incident actually occurred].
By 1968, when Nixon ran for President, Tuck spooked Nixon's campaign managers so badly that they started imagining phantom pranks. A shipment of buttons printed in Greek, Chinese, and Italian arrived at Nixon's campaign headquarters for use at ethnic rallies in NYC. Nixon's campaign manager ordered that all the buttons be destroyed, just in case Tuck had tampered with them (he hadn't).
During the '68 Presidential campaign, Tuck often hired pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs with his campaign slogan, "Nixon's the One."
By 1972 Nixon decided he needed his own Dick Tuck. Naturally, Nixon's efforts to mimic Tuck's pranks had a vicious bent and went badly awry. Donald Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers alleging sexual misconduct on Hubert Humphrey's part and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included racist language.
Tuck was a key adviser in Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. After Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, he rode in Kennedy's ambulance as the mortally-wounded candidate was rushed to the hospital.
Sources: Dicktuck.com; Wikipedia.com/dick_tuck; jackbrummet.blogspot.com; Stephen J. Whitfield. "Nixon as a Comic Figure," American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring 1985, 114-132; Ron Kurtus, "Did Dick Tuck Cause Watergate?" revised August 28, 2000.
 | "The real Nixon was always there, all I did was keep the spotlight on it." |
Tuck writes on dicktuck.com: "Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal. In the Chinatown Caper, a sign saying "Welcome Nixon" also asked – in Chinese – "What about the Hughes Loan?" [Ed's note: Howard Hughes had made a large, no-interest, loan, or possibly a large cash gift, to Nixon's brother Donald. This naturally erupted into a scandal...albeit, a containable one]. Once the phrase was translated for Nixon, he rushed over to the crowd, seized the sign and tore it up in front of the TV cameras. The message was simple: do you want a guy like this running your state or nation? "
"This kind of behavior, these ethical standards had been Nixon's since law school, when he broke into the Dean's office with some friends to see if his grades were good enough to keep his scholarship. It continued in his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Pat Brown, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.
"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer."
As Adlai Stevenson said during the 1956 Presidential campaign, “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”
My favorite quote by Dick Tuck is from his concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election, in which he received about 10% of the vote:
"The people have spoken, the bastards."
In 1950, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon. He watched first hand as Dick Nixon smeared her as "The Pink Lady." After that, he made it his mission to mess with Richard Nixon every chance he got.
One of Tuck's best pranks was "the Chinatown Caper." During his campaign for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon visited Chinatown in Los Angeles where children held "welcome" signs in English and Chinese. As Nixon spoke, an elder from the community whispered to him that one of the signs in Chinese said, "What about the Hughes loan?, " a reference to an unsecured/illegal $205,000 loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother, Donald. Nixon grabbed the sign on camera and ripped it up.
After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who gave Nixon a hug and said in front of TV cameras, "Don't worry, son! He beat you last night, but you'll get him next time."
Tuck and many other people say that he was never malicious in his political pranks. Richard Nixon, however, became obsessed about Tuck, and even railed about him in some of the Watergate Tapes. But Nixon also admired Tuck, and often compared the dirty tricks committed by staffer Donald Segretti unfavorably to the elegance and humor of Tuck's political shenanigans. After the Watergate blew up in the newspapers, Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, saw Tuck in the Capitol. Haldeman reportedly turned to Tuck and said, "You started all of this." Tuck replied, "Yeah, Bob but you guys ran it into the ground."
In a 1973 Time magazine article, Tuck told a reporter, "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest. He asked me to advance a Nixon visit." He organized a rally at UC Santa Barbara, and booked the largest auditorium they had. He booked it on a day when no students would be able to attend, and didn't do any publicity for the rally. Forty students showed up in the 4,000 seat auditorium. Tuck got up to introduce Nixon with a long, rambling monologue with many references to Nixon's cut-throat, red-bashing campaign tactics against Jerry Voorhis. He then announced that Nixon would now speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon, of course, had not planned to speak about the IMF. Therefore, when he got up to the podium he was momentarily speechless. When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."
In 1956, Nixon was running for reelection as Eisenhower's Vice President. The Republican Convention was held in San Francisco that summer, and Tuck learned that the route taken by garbage trucks going to the dump led past the convention center. Tuck paid to have all the garbage trucks bear signs that read "Dump Nixon".
Tuck also performed other pranks to undermine Nixon's campaign effort like posing as a fire marshall to provide low estimates of the turnout at Nixon's rallies, or telling bandleaders at rallies that Nixon's favorite song was "Mack the Knife."
In one incident Tuck dressed up as a train conductor and signalled a train to leave the station while Nixon was delivering a speech from its rear platform. Reportedly, the train pulled out of the station with Nixon still speaking. [ed's note: There is some debate about whether this incident actually occurred].
By 1968, when Nixon ran for President, Tuck spooked Nixon's campaign managers so badly that they started imagining phantom pranks. A shipment of buttons printed in Greek, Chinese, and Italian arrived at Nixon's campaign headquarters for use at ethnic rallies in NYC. Nixon's campaign manager ordered that all the buttons be destroyed, just in case Tuck had tampered with them (he hadn't).
During the '68 Presidential campaign, Tuck often hired pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs with his campaign slogan, "Nixon's the One."
By 1972 Nixon decided he needed his own Dick Tuck. Naturally, Nixon's efforts to mimic Tuck's pranks had a vicious bent and went badly awry. Donald Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers alleging sexual misconduct on Hubert Humphrey's part and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included racist language.
Tuck was a key adviser in Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. After Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, he rode in Kennedy's ambulance as the mortally-wounded candidate was rushed to the hospital.
Sources: Dicktuck.com; Wikipedia.com/dick_tuck; jackbrummet.blogspot.com; Stephen J. Whitfield. "Nixon as a Comic Figure," American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring 1985, 114-132; Ron Kurtus, "Did Dick Tuck Cause Watergate?" revised August 28, 2000.
---o0o---
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Nothing Can Hurt Me Now—The Big Star Documentary
By Jack Brummet, American Music Ed.
I watched "Nothing Can Hurt Me Now" last night. It was moving, informative, and wonderful. Since I discovered them in the early 90's, they have been in my top ten bands of all time. If you love rock and roll, you should watch this documentary--buy it, stream it, do whatever it takes. I feel lucky to have seen them four times when they reformed with Ken Stringfellow AndJonathan Paul Auer a/k/a The Posies. Thank you Jody, Alex, Chris, Andy, and Jon and Ken for the great music that has fueled the soundtrack of my life for the last 20+ years.
If you haven't heard Big Star, it's time. Probably the most moving part of this film is the number of people—across the music industry—that revered them and were inspired by them. And it wasn't about the money for once; they didn't make any, no one one made any. It was a losing proposition all around except for the magnificent music that influenced so many great singers, bands, and songwriters. Big Star reverberates all around us now in a crazy lineage, filtered through succeeding rock generations down to current indie bands through bands like REM, Cheap Trick, Teenage Fanclub, The Replacements, The Posies, and all the rest.
And a video from The Tonight Show, not after Big Star reformed during the 1990's:
I watched "Nothing Can Hurt Me Now" last night. It was moving, informative, and wonderful. Since I discovered them in the early 90's, they have been in my top ten bands of all time. If you love rock and roll, you should watch this documentary--buy it, stream it, do whatever it takes. I feel lucky to have seen them four times when they reformed with Ken Stringfellow AndJonathan Paul Auer a/k/a The Posies. Thank you Jody, Alex, Chris, Andy, and Jon and Ken for the great music that has fueled the soundtrack of my life for the last 20+ years.
If you haven't heard Big Star, it's time. Probably the most moving part of this film is the number of people—across the music industry—that revered them and were inspired by them. And it wasn't about the money for once; they didn't make any, no one one made any. It was a losing proposition all around except for the magnificent music that influenced so many great singers, bands, and songwriters. Big Star reverberates all around us now in a crazy lineage, filtered through succeeding rock generations down to current indie bands through bands like REM, Cheap Trick, Teenage Fanclub, The Replacements, The Posies, and all the rest.
And a video from The Tonight Show, not after Big Star reformed during the 1990's:
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Monday, February 17, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Drawings: Faces #616-#624: Confessions, part 2
By Jack Brummet
[pen, pencil, and pink highlighter on surplus 24"x24" surplus muslin sterilization wrapper]
.jpg)
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Saturday, February 15, 2014
Drawings: Faces #608-#615 - Confessions (Part 1)
By Jack Brummet
[pencil and Sharpie on a surplus hospital muslin instrument wrapper]
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