JAMES ROGAN

(Story of my 2014 visit with Carter is adapted from my 2024 book, "Look, Mom—I'm a Congressman!")

Jimmy Carter, America's 39th president (1977-1981), turns 100 years old today. He is the only president in American history to have reached this centennial milestone.

I met Carter a number of times over the last fifty years, beginning with his first White House bid and into his post-presidential years. To be candid, I wasn't very fond of him on a personal level. I found him prickly, somewhat moody, and, on occasion, borderline rude. In my 2014 book, And Then I Met, I reported some of these earlier encounters with him (including two visits to his hometown of Plains, Georgia in 1988 and 1990). These recollections were not particularly warm toward the man. I did soften toward him temporarily when he wrote me a brief note complimenting the job that I did during President Clinton's impeachment trial, but even that cordiality failed to offset my overall coolness toward him.

In 2014, Bobby Linzey, a former Georgia Democratic Party official and longtime pal of both Carter's and mine, called me not long after I had sent him a copy of my book that included those Carter stories. After sharing his divergent opinion of the former chief executive, he delivered an unexpected invitation: "Jimmy's ninetieth birthday is in October, which coincides with the Plains [Georgia] Peanut Festival. We're planning a birthday dinner for him. We want you to come to Plains and be the guest speaker."

I thought Bobby was joking. "You did read the chapters I wrote on him?"

"Yes, I read them. But that's okay. We view some things differently about him, but I know you'll be sensitive and will do a good job."

"Have you run this by Jimmy? I don't want to show up and have my presence ruin his birthday."

"He's fine with it, and he'd like to welcome you back to Plains."

"I sure hope you know what you're doing. In fact, I hope we both know what we're doing." When I hung up, I booked a flight to Georgia for late September.

• • •

As mentioned earlier, I first visited Plains in 1988, which was seven years after the Carters left Washington. When I returned twenty-four years later for Carter's ninety birthday party, little about the town had changed. With a population of about seven hundred living within less than a square mile, things like movie theaters, fast-food establishments, and department stores didn't exist there. The nearest ones were ten miles away in Americus. Main Street still had eight contiguous brick-and-wood buildings dating from the early twentieth century, each of which bore historical significance in Carter's early life. These structures once housed the Carter family's peanut office, farm business, and Jimmy's early legislative and campaign offices. In 1988, most of these buildings stood vacant, with only Hugh Carter's worm farm and his antique store (where Hugh personally hawked mementos of his famous first cousin to visiting tourists) in operation. With business in decline, Hugh closed his two shops in the mid-1990s. By 2014, souvenir merchants had taken over the buildings.

After checking into the Americus Quality Inn (also the location for the birthday banquet), I drove to Plains for the start of the Peanut Festival. During Carter's administration, up to ten thousand people visited Plains each day. In his post-presidential years, the town remained a tourist destination, but the once mighty flood of visitors trekking there in the old days had receded substantially. For this year's fiesta weekend, several hundred came to enjoy the carnival-like celebration. Fast food vendors (including some selling Gator-on-a-Stick—unimaginable snack fare to a native Californian), a jump house, pony rides, lemonade stands, a live band, and craft vendors lined the flag-bedecked streets.

I wandered over to the train depot and joined the small crowd watching as former President Carter passed out dozens of small trophies to the winners in each category of that morning's one mile and 5K foot races. Ignoring the slight drizzle, he smiled and posed for photos with every recipient; their ages ranged from grade school to elderly. Other than a slight stoop in his posture, and his hair and eyebrows now snow-white, he hadn't changed much since the 1980s. He dressed casually in black sneakers, blue jeans, dress shirt with sleeves rolled up, and a tooled leather belt with a large brass horseshoe buckle emblazoned with "JC". A handful of Secret Service agents, also dressed casually but wearing dark glasses and earpieces, kept their distance while studying the onlookers.

When the awards ceremony ended, Carter and his security detail departed in a van, but twenty minutes later he reappeared on Main Street with Mrs. Carter for the start of the parade. Appearing on the balcony of the Plains Inn and Antique Mall Store (formerly Hugh Carter's antique shop), the Carters acknowledged the applause and shouts of birthday wishes from the assembled crowd. Speaking into a microphone, he kicked off what he called "the biggest small-town parade in America" by sharing his secret for a long life: "Eat lots of peanuts!" Mrs. Carter, wearing a sweatshirt promoting her grandson's gubernatorial candidacy, also welcomed everyone to Plains, and then she signaled for the parade's start. A Planter's "Mr. Peanut" drum major waving a baton and leading a high school marching band led the procession, followed by a tractor carrying the town's Shriners, a motorized peanut bus, beauty pageant winners, and various local elected officials and political candidates.

When the parade ended, I skipped the remaining festivities and returned to my motel room to draft my banquet speech for that evening. Approaching this task left me nervous. I faced the challenge of preparing a favorable talk about a man whom I had just spanked in my newly published book. Also, since the organizers billed my presentation as a "roast," this included the added stress of making my speech entertaining. Finally, and not the least of my concerns, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and former First Lady would judge it while sitting a few feet away from me.

No pressure here.

When I sat down at the small desk in my motel room with pen in hand, I decided that success depended on making Jimmy Carter look good and making myself the butt of any jokes. Through this prism I began constructing my presentation.

• • •

The intervening hours flew. That evening I went to the banquet room fifteen minutes before the designated 6:00 p.m. start time. Some of the attendees already there asked me to autograph their dinner programs or copies of my books. I was still signing when Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter arrived. The crowd cheered as the couple waved and then took their seats at the head table, where I joined them. After we exchanged brief greetings, the emcee asked the three of us to lead the procession to the dinner service. Rather than tuxedoed waiters bringing us the food, and in keeping with Carter's preference, this banquet proved both humble and democratic in nature. All guest—including the former presidential couple—walked to the motel's coffee shop where we collected dishes, served ourselves from buffet-style carts, and then we carried our filled plates back to the banquet room.

Settling back with him at the head table, Carter and I talked at length during supper. In an unexpected surprise given my prior experience with him, I found myself warming up to the nonagenarian. He asked about my experience during President Bill Clinton's impeachment and trial. I told him that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde divided the main case between Arkansas Congressman Asa Hutchinson and me. I handled Clinton's perjury and Hutchinson covered the obstruction of justice charge. I mentioned that when I left Congress, my onetime impeachment nemesis who later became my friend, Clinton's White House Counsel Lanny Davis, had tried to recruit me to his law firm. Back then Lanny told me that he had attended a farewell party at the mansion during Clinton's last few nights in the White House. When they were alone, Lanny broke the news to his former boss of his recruitment effort. Instead of recoiling at the idea, Lanny said that Clinton grew wistful as he recalled that their team had defeated me for reelection in a very bloody House race. Despite this two-year onslaught against me, Clinton said that every time he encountered me during it, he found me very respectful and polite. Clinton told Lanny that he had concluded that I voted as I did because, as a former prosecutor and trial court judge, I felt that the evidence compelled me to do so. He said that there was no political advantage for me in impeaching him. Just the opposite—it had cost me my political career. After sharing this insight with Carter, I leaned in closer to him and lowered my voice so that Mrs. Carter wouldn't overhear the coda to the story: "Lanny also told me that Clinton said, 'Yeah, Rogan did what he did because he thought it was the right thing to do—not like those other two fuckers from Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson and Jay Dickey! Fuck those guys!'"[1] His born-again Christianity notwithstanding, Carter (an old Navy man) erupted in laughter upon hearing Clinton's salty expression of dismay toward two Arkansans whom he felt had betrayed their hometown boy.

Carter pointed to the vintage 1976 campaign button pinned to my lapel. "What's that badge you're wearing?" he asked.

"I wore this in honor of your birthday," I told him. The badge depicted Mrs. Carter and bore the legend, "Rosalynn for First Lady." I handed it to him, and he passed it to his wife.

"Oh, my!" she exclaimed. "I've seen Jimmy on many campaign buttons before, but I've never seen my face on one!"

"Mrs. Carter," I replied, "they made these buttons because the campaign knew it would help win votes for your husband." She handed it back, but I asked her to keep it. I had brought it to give to her. Thanking me, she told me that her son Chip was the collector in the family. "I can't wait to show it to him," she added.

I introduced Carter to my friend David Azbell, who once had served as press spokesman for former Alabama Governor George Wallace. Running four times for the presidency (1964 as a Democrat, 1968 as a third-party candidate, and 1972 and 1976 as a Democrat), Wallace had challenged Carter for their party's nomination in that final race. David's father, Joe Azbell, had managed Wallace's last two presidential campaigns. Carter told us that Wallace had called him after Carter beat him in the 1976 North Carolina primary: "Wallace told me that he was dropping out to endorse me. He pledged his delegates to me because he said he wanted to live to see a Southerner elected president."

I told Carter that I had always felt that Wallace's candidacy that year had given Carter's chances significant help: "Because nobody took your candidacy seriously in the beginning, and because Wallace's earlier populist appeal terrified the Democrat establishment, in many early primaries the anti-Wallace voters threw in with you as a way to 'stop Wallace' in the South and split his base. Of course, by the time you stopped Wallace, nobody could catch up to stop you." I told Carter that another of his rivals for the 1976 nomination, former Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN), had been my law partner before I returned to the bench, and that I had once chided Birch about his Meet the Press appearance on the eve of the critical 1976 Florida Democratic primary. During this interview, Birch (who was not on that state's ballot) asked all of his Florida supporters to vote for Jimmy Carter in their primary to help stop Wallace. Carter guffawed when I shared with him Birch's reply after I reminded him of his failed campaign strategy: "That was the absolute dumbest thing I ever said in my entire political life!"

Over dessert, Carter reminisced about the national campaign that preceded his first presidential run, which was the battle for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination won by Senator George McGovern (D-SD). He shared this recollection of McGovern's doomed race that year: "Most of us Democratic governors that year didn't support McGovern for president in the primaries, but we all wanted to be his vice-presidential running mate at the convention. I was hoping he'd pick me, even though I supported Scoop Jackson[2] over him, and I had placed Scoop's name in nomination. Given how McGovern's campaign ended up in a landslide defeat, it was probably a good thing he didn't choose me!"

I replied that if McGovern had selected him as his running mate, it wouldn't have hurt Carter's later prospects: "McGovern's disastrous convention was run so poorly that the presidential and vice-presidential nominees didn't deliver their acceptance speeches until around three in the morning. Had he picked you, it wouldn't have hurt you in the long run, because nobody would have been awake to know that you were on the ticket with him!"

I told him about the day I had spent campaigning with his former rival for the White House, Gerald Ford (see the previous chapter, "Cold Shoulder"), and how, when I asked him whether press reports of a close bond between him and Carter were exaggerated, Ford quickly disabused me of that suggestion. "As he talked about you," I told Carter, "he spoke with a personal affection in a very heartfelt and moving way. I came away from our discussion believing he viewed you not only as a friend but as a brother."

Carter nodded. "That feeling is reciprocated," he replied. "We did have a pretty bitter race in 1976. After I won, and during the transition, Jerry was very helpful to me, and he did all he could to make it as smooth as possible. I think the ice really began to thaw when I opened my inaugural address [in 1977] by paying tribute to him. That started it."

"Later that year," Carter continued, "President Reagan asked Richard Nixon, Jerry, and me to represent the United States at Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's funeral.[3] On our way to Egypt aboard Air Force One, the three of us got a chance to talk. When Nixon retired to his cabin, Jerry and I sat up all night talking. That started our friendship. Over the years since, whenever we asked Jerry to do a program at the Carter Center, he always came to help. We became very close personal friends, and we were like brothers. In fact, Rosalynn and Betty [Mrs. Gerald Ford] became very close friends, too. So yes, we're very close to the Fords."

When Carter finished his tribute to Ford, he flashed a broad smile and added. "I'll tell you another story from that race against Ford that I'll bet you've never heard. After I won, and during the transition, a member of Ford's team came to Plains and pleaded with me to allow him to remain in his position as head of the CIA during my upcoming term. I met with him and listened to his plea, but then I turned him down and replaced him. His name was—" Here Carter paused and stretched out the punchline to heighten the impact of the answer:

"—George Bush!"

After we shared a laugh over that irony, I replied, "That's strange. I don't remember hearing Bush brag about that in 1980 when he ran against Reagan in the Republican primaries!"

Still laughing, Carter replied, "No, I don't think he did!"

Carter asked if I had a favorite for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. I didn't. As a sitting judge, the canons of ethics precluded me from engaging in partisan activities. He speculated that defeated 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney would run again, and then he told me that he credited his own grandson, James Earl Carter IV, for derailing Romney's previous White House bid. "James wanted to help President Obama's reelection campaign," he explained, "and so he started scouring the Internet for Romney quotes and speeches. He uncovered the video with Romney's '47 percent' quote. That's what killed Romney." The video that Carter IV unearthed came from a Romney campaign reception where the presidential candidate told a group of his major donors assembled at a Florida mansion, "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for [Obama] no matter what… who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims…. These are people who pay no income tax…. And so, my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents." Carter's grandson turned over the video to a magazine, and the ensuing press coverage brutalized Romney as someone indifferent to the needs of 47 percent of Americans. Romney spent the rest of his losing campaign trying to assure voters that he really did care about all Americans, but that self-inflicted wound never healed.

"I think Obama owes his reelection to my grandson James," Carter told me. "The video proved to be pivotal in the campaign. That '47 percent' quote stuck to Romney for the rest of the race, and he couldn't shake it off no matter how much he tried to explain it away or apologize for it. It was a turning point."

• • •

The emcee interrupted our conversation when he started the program. After welcoming remarks and head table introductions, I stepped to the lectern to begin my speech. Feeling more relaxed and less nervous after the very pleasant time I had just spent with Carter before and during dinner, I took a chance and opened with a story about Ronald Reagan, the man who defeated Carter's reelection bid in 1980. When it drew a big laugh, even from Carter, by telling a story centered on the man who defeated him for reelection, I knew I was almost home free.   

All of my pre-speech nerves proved unwarranted. Throughout my talk, the banquet's guests of honor, along with the audience, laughed and applauded. When I returned to my seat, Jimmy was still laughing as he patted me on my back and thanked me.

After the dinner wrapped up, and as I said goodnight to the Carters, he gripped my hand. "You'll be at church tomorrow morning for my Sunday school class, right?"

"I'll be there—but only if you don't call on me."

"Well," he grinned, "if I do call on you, I'll be kind—just as kind to you as you were to me tonight!"

"Mr. President, now I'm scared."

• • •

If, in 2014, Plains had remained essentially unchanged in the twenty-six years since I had visited, one significant difference became apparent. Carter's Sunday school classes that I had attended back then were informal to the point of mild chaos. From the moment Jimmy arrived until he concluded his class, flashbulbs fired, people in pews stood up and moved around while taking pictures, others changed seats constantly to get a different view, and the rude or ignorant chatted among themselves while disregarding his efforts to present the Gospel. After the service, when the Carters stood outside posing for photos with visitors, people jostled their way into the line. Once reaching the former first couple, they pawed at them for autographs (after he had made clear his "no autographs at church" policy). They shoved at him news articles or manifestos that they felt he needed to read. They held up the line by monopolizing their moment with babbled commentaries, or they did all of the above.

When I settled into my pew this Sunday morning for the return engagement, I learned that a new sheriff had arrived to bring order to the Wild West.

Her name was Jan Williams.

I first took notice of her as we waited outside the church for the Secret Service metal detector inspection. She stood next to an agent and joined him in studying the faces of the visitors in line. Someone behind me asked her if she was a Secret Service agent. "No," she replied. "They won't let me carry a gun. I'm far too dangerous."

"Then who are you?"

"I'm the person in charge."

Indeed, she was.

Before Carter's class began, "Miss Jan" (as everyone called her) stepped to the front of the sanctuary, smiled, and welcomed everyone to Plains. "Uh oh," I overheard one Carter class repeater whisper to another. "Here it comes."

Her companion replied, "Yeah. Miss Jan. She frightens me."

For the next twenty minutes, Miss Jan offered a charming mix of Southern hospitality, patient and loving teacher, and no-nonsense drill instructor outlining a strict list of dos and don'ts. As long as everyone followed her rules, she promised a cherished memory from attending President Carter's class. I also absorbed the impression that, if required, she would steeplechase the pews and eject rulebreakers by the seat of their britches.

Among Miss Jan's firm rules: 

--No applause when President Carter arrives and leaves. "He doesn't like that. He wants your focus to be on the Lord and the message."

--Photographs are allowed while President Carter greets the congregation and asks from where everyone hails. "But once he starts the class with a prayer, every camera is to be down and in your lap. Do not raise it to take pictures during his lesson. If you do, I'll have the Secret Service confiscate it."

--No talking during class.
--No unnecessary moving around the sanctuary.
--No autograph requests at any time while at church.
--At the end of services, President and Mrs. Carter will pose for pictures with visitors. The line will form outside and in an orderly fashion. When you meet President Carter, do no try to shake his hand or touch him in any way. "He's turning ninety in two days," she warned. "We don't want President Carter to get sick from your germs. Hand-to-hand contact is how germs get passed along. We'll use your camera to take a picture of you with the Carters. Then you will collect your camera and move out of line. Do not delay the line with chatter or try to hand anything to the Carters."
--If the line is long, stay in line if you want a picture. If you leave the line prematurely, you'll not be permitted to rejoin it.

By the time Miss Jan ended her presentation, she had frightened me, too.

Wearing a business suit, an open-neck shirt, and a bolo tie with a turquoise clasp, Carter entered the sanctuary as Miss Jan finished leading us in prayer. I noticed a few people raised their hands to clap instinctively, but Miss Jan's stony gaze suppressed that impulse. Carter greeted everyone, asked the tourists to tell from where they came, and he invited a visiting pastor to lead the class in prayer.

Then came an unexpected development.

"Is Jim Rogan here this morning?" he asked. Caught by surprise, I looked up from my church bulletin as several people pointed to where I sat. I tossed him a salute and nodded. Carter smiled at me, and then he continued with this introduction:

"Well, Jim Rogan is a very distinguished person. He's a former congressman from California. He's a judge now, but when he was in Congress he was involved in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and he wrote a book about it. He told us last night at our dinner that he attended my Sunday school class here twenty-six years ago, and that I had asked him a question during class that he couldn't answer." The audience laughed while watching my fidgety reaction. I wasn't sure where this was going, but I suspected that Jimmy was about to even the score for my roasting him last night. My instincts proved correct:

"Because Jim couldn't answer my question back then," he continued, "he's spent the last twenty-six years studying the Bible, and he became a very distinguished Bible scholar—he says!" Once again, the sanctuary filled with laughter. He waited for it to subside before he pulled the snapper. Saying that he had planned to teach this morning about Hezekiah, he added, "Since Jim's learned so much about the Bible, I want to ask him this morning to come up here and give us the historical context in which Hezekiah lived, and then we'll have him teach us all about Hezekiah's life."

For a moment, fellow guests in the sanctuary thought this a serious invitation. They smiled and nodded approvingly at me—until I pulled out my white handkerchief, raised it over my head, and waved it to indicate my surrender. With the audience now in on his joke, and suppressing his own laugh, Jimmy continued, "Well, as you can see, Jim's a very modest person. He doesn't want to show off his expert knowledge. So, I'll take over that job, Jim, with your permission. But you be sure and correct me if I'm wrong in my presentation."

Jimmy Carter had fun turning the tables on his roaster. I assure the reader that nobody appreciated it more, nor felt more honored by the joke, than its victim.

• • •

For the next fifty minutes, Carter taught from the book of Hezekiah. Amazingly, and with only hours separating him from his ninetieth birthday, he did so without notes. His message was profound and his delivery flawless. He amazed everyone with both biblical knowledge, depth, and ability.

"The lesson that I'd like us to take away," he said in conclusion, "is to live our lives in a way that's more pleasing to God. This reassures us that when difficulties come, we can face them with courage and equanimity. We have a partner available to us who knows everything. We can form an alliance with God to have a full-time partnership."

When the class concluded, and after a brief break, Jimmy joined Rosalynn in her pew for the regular church service. When it finished, the Carters left the sanctuary and positioned themselves outside on the lawn for the photo line while Miss Jan stood guard nearby. Under her supervision, nobody dared violate any rules, especially the no-handshake directive.

When my turn came, Jimmy beamed. "Okay, Mr. President," I said as I approached. "You got me!" He stuck out his hand to me. I started reaching reflexively, and then I pulled back sharply. "Are you kidding?" I said to him. "Do you want Miss Jan to slap me?"

"This is our one exception," Miss Jan called from the sideline.

As Jimmy and I shook hands, I told him how much I enjoyed his class and my return visit to Plains. "But I have a question for you," I added:

"Are we even now?"

Beaming that infectious and famous smile, the former president replied, "Well, just about!"

• • •

Two days later, on Jimmy's official ninetieth birthday, I wrote and told him how much I enjoyed having the honor of sharing with him and Rosalynn his celebration weekend in Plains. Per his request during our dinner, I sent him copies of my three books that had been published at the time: Rough Edges, Catching Our Flag, and And Then I Met.

A week later, he replied in his trademark fashion: a brief handwritten note in the upper margin of my letter to him. That was how he had replied to my very first letter to him over forty years earlier when he was Georgia's former governor, and I was a high school student. On my latest letter he wrote, "Jim, Thanks for your memorable visit and for the books. Come back and see us soon. Jimmy Carter."

Despite this invitation to return, Jimmy Carter's ninetieth birthday party celebration in 2014 marked my last visit to Plains. It was just as well. I never could have improved upon the very fond memories of America's thirty-ninth president that I brought home from that trip.

And so, a decade after our last visit in Plains, I join all of President Carter's friends and admirers in wishing our 39th president a very happy 100th birthday, and may God continue to bless him and his family.

[1] President Clinton, a former Arkansas governor, expressed his simmering ire over two homegrown representatives, Arkansas Republican Congressmen Asa Hutchinson and Jay Dickey, each of whom voted for impeachment. As governor, Clinton had once appointed Dickey as a special justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Hutchinson, himself a future Arkansas governor, also served with me as one of the lead prosecutors in Clinton's Senate trial.

[2] U.S. Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson of Washington (1912–1983) ran unsuccessfully for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. Four years later, he ran again and lost the nomination race to Carter.

[3] Anwar el-Sadat (1918–1981) served as Egypt's third president. In 1978, Carter hosted Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at a Camp David meeting that resulted in a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and for which Sadat and Begin later shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1981, Islamic fundamentalists assassinated Sadat for making peace with the Jewish state.

• • •

Willie Mays died on June 18th at age 93. With his passing, a part of my childhood died with him.

I only wish my memories of meeting him were more pleasant. 

• • •

Like most young boys during my childhood, I loved baseball. Growing up in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s, my sports hero was Willie Mays, the star hitter and outfielder for the San Francisco Giants.  My grandfather first brought me to Candlestick Park in 1962 to see the Giants play their rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I ate hot dogs and candy, drank barrels of Coca-Cola, and marveled at the enthusiasm from the tens of thousands of fans whenever The Say Hey Kid came to bat.

Willie Mays. You had to be there to appreciate the phenomenon. He played in the major leagues for twenty-three years, and all but his last two seasons were with the Giants. Twice the National League's most valuable player, and twenty times named to baseball's All-Star team, he retired in 1973 behind only Babe Ruth in career home runs (660 to 714). Whether socking a home run or striking out swinging, I never knew so much excitement existed on earth until I saw him at the plate.  He was, in the eyes of a five-year-old sitting on his grandfather's lap, beyond mortal. After my first trip to the ballpark, Willie Mays replaced cowboy star Roy Rogers at the top of my boyhood pantheon. I wore a Willie Mays Fan Club badge on my shirt, and I coaxed Grandpa to mount Willie's bobble head on our station wagon dashboard. When local TV stations aired a public service announcement of Willie warning kids not to play with blasting caps found on the street, I walked around my neighborhood looking for them. I didn't know what they were, but I wanted to find one—so as not to play with it, all because Willie said so.

The luster diminished somewhat when, as a kid, I attended a game in which Willie played. Attendance grew sparse near its end because the Giants trailed badly, so at the bottom of the ninth I snuck into an empty seat directly behind the home team's dugout.  Willie came to bat with two outs, the crowd roared for him, but he hit an infield fly and made the final out. The Giants lost, but who cared? We all saw Willie play.

He left the batter's box and walked directly toward me. I reached across the top of the dugout. "Willie!" I called to him, "I'm a big fan! Can I shake your hand?"  He scowled, grumbled something, and passed by me. My older cousin who brought me to the game saw my disappointment.

"Don't be sad," she consoled me. "Willie's just had a bad day. Everyone has bad days." 

• • •

My chance to meet him came a few years later when he scheduled an early-morning live interview at a local TV station in a run-down section of San Francisco. The studio shared the block with an alley, a soup kitchen, and a flophouse for transients. The low-rent setting didn't deter me, especially if I could see him without thousands of other fans around.

Two hours before sunrise, my younger brother Pat and I took the bus downtown, and then we fended off drunks and perverts on our walk to the studio. After waiting there an hour, a pink Avanti sports car pulled up to the curb. The personalized license plate "BUCK 24" gave away the identity of the driver before we saw his face. Willie's team nickname was "Buck," and his Giants jersey bore number 24. He parked in front of the studio and exited his car.

There he was, only a few feet away from Pat and me on an otherwise empty street. What a thrill for two young fans! For a moment, we remained speechless, and then I blurted out, "Willie, you're our hero! We come to your games!  Will you sign our baseballs?"  I extended my ball and pen. 

He stopped, glowered at me, and said nothing for what seemed forever. The silence broke only when he summoned a guttural sound from the depth of his esophagus. After bringing forth a mouthful of phlegm, he spewed it onto the sidewalk an inch or so from my foot. My eyes widened as I absorbed the scene and tried unlocking its meaning.

"Maybe this is some sort of baseball ritual," I thought. "Maybe the players greet each other this way."  When I looked up, Willie still stared at me.

My mind kept racing: "Am I supposed to greet him the same way?" I wondered. "I guess he's waiting for me to do it back to him. Well, okay, here goes."

Just as I was about to launch a return salute, Willie snatched the ball from my hand, scrawled his signature across it, and then smeared the writing with the side of his hand as he tossed it in the air. The ball hit the street and rolled down Golden Gate Avenue.

As I chased after my smudged trophy, Pat asked if he'd sign his ball, too. Willie spun around and jabbed his index finger toward Pat.

"No!" he barked. "You kids got enough." With that, he turned and approached the studio entrance.

By now I had retrieved my ball and was approaching the scene when Pat called out, "Hey, Willie." He looked back to hear Pat finish his thought:

"Screw you!"

Pat turned and ran down Golden Gate Avenue toward Hyde Street and the bus station. His older brother, clutching a smeared baseball, was right behind.

• • •

Many years later, when I was just out of law school, I attended a sports collectable show in Los Angeles. The schedule featured Willie Mays signing autographs for what was then a top-dollar fee at such gatherings: $6 each. Since he was so unpleasant when Pat and I asked him for a free autograph long ago, maybe, I thought, he might be more chipper if people paid him for it. I decided to test my theory. Besides, six bucks was a small price to pay to replace the smeared and scuffed baseball in my collection.

Dealers and cases of baseball memorabilia for sale crowded the hotel ballroom. Willie, now retired from the game for over a decade, signed at a corner table. The people in his long line carried baseballs, bats, cards, photographs, jerseys, gloves, and so forth. After fans paid their money and handed him their item, he signed without looking up or acknowledging any expressions of admiration or gratitude. Once the money hit the cash box, he wrote his name, handed back the autograph, and then he called out, "Next."

A dad approached him with his young kid in tow. "Hey, Willie, will you make out the ball for my son Johnny?"

"No inscriptions. Next."

From another fan: "I've followed you since you played for New York. It's such an honor to meet you."

"Next."

This went on for the hour that I waited. The script never changed: "Hey, Willie, you're my hero…."

"Next."

When my turn came, I paid my fee, handed over my ball, he signed it, I said thanks, and then I stepped away without waiting for him to tell me to keep moving. 

• • •

Thirty years after Pat and I encountered Willie Mays on Golden Gate Avenue, my brother worked as the operations manager at PacBell Park (now Oracle Park, which is the home stadium for the San Francisco Giants). When I visited him one afternoon in his ground-floor office, I was surprised to see Willie Mays signed memorabilia decorating his walls. Pat told me that Willie, now old, stooped, and moving slowly, still attended most home games. He'd often stop by Pat's office to shoot the breeze and have a beer with my brother before the opening pitch. They became friends.

"In fact," Pat added, "he was here yesterday. I told him that my brother was coming to town for a visit, so he signed this for you." Pat handed over a baseball, un-smudged and un-scuffed, inscribed to me.

"Do I leave the six bucks with you?" I asked.

"No charge. He did it as a favor. Besides, he raids my refrigerator before the games, so we're even."

"Did you ever mention how rude he was when we met him as kids, or that he once spewed his phlegm at my shoe?"

Pat shrugged. "No, I never bothered telling him—

"—Why tell him what he already knows?"

• • •

What to make of my encounter with baseball great Willie Mays? I suspect that decades-long worldwide fame takes its toll, especially when an unending parade of well-meaning fans fill those years with nonstop impositions. At some point even the most fan-friendly celebrities must come to begrudge these intrusions. Although my experiences with him were less than ideal, I'd bet that countless other fans could testify to his acts of kindness, generosity, and patience when they met him. I choose to believe that I experienced the exceptions instead of the rule. As my cousin told me at Candlestick Park on that long-ago afternoon, everyone is entitled to a bad day.

Rest in peace, Willie. 

Some years ago I owned this privately printed slipcase-edition of quotations from New York Governor Alfred E. Smith (1873-1944), who was the 1928 Democratic nominee for president. The book is entitled, "Let's Look at the Record." There was no copyright date or publication information in it. At some point, I included it in a large donation to a library sale.

Last week I found another copy of it at a used bookstore for $2. Enclosed with it was the original letter of transmittal from the man who published it. I bought the book as a curiosity, and researched "Bill," the man who printed and distributed these to his friends.

As it turns out, "Bill" was William J. McCormack, who was a friend and supporter of Smith's. He was also a bit more than that. According to his Wikipedia biography, McCormack began his business career as a grocer's wagon-boy running errands along New York's West Side docks. He went on to establish one of the most powerful stevedoring companies in the United States. By the mid-1930s, he held a virtual monopoly on stevedoring along the New York docks. He became known as the mysterious "Mr. Big" of the New York waterfront.

In the early 1950s, details of McCormack's relationships with International Longshoreman's Association President Joseph P. Ryan and various organized crime figures were revealed in a series of New York Sun articles by Malcolm Johnson entitled "Crime on the Waterfront." These articles, and the 1953 Waterfront Crime Commission hearings that followed, provided Elia Kazan with the factual background for his classic 1954 film "On the Waterfront." In the film, Kazan based the character "Mr. Upstairs," whose face is never shown (only the plush estate where he lives), on William J. "Bill" McCormack.

Kazan's film received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director for Kazan. In 1997, it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the eighth-greatest American movie of all time. Kazan's original director's script is now housed at Wesleyan Cinema Archives. In the section depicting a key scene with "Mr. Upstairs," Kazan kept a magazine picture of William McCormack.

The Lesson: always flip through the pages of old books in used bookstores. One never knows what interesting tidbits one might find.

I mourn the passing of Willie Mays, who died today at age 93. With his passing, a part of my childhood died with him.

I only wish my memories of meeting him a couple of times would expire. 

Like most young boys during my childhood, I loved baseball. Growing up in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s, my sports hero was Willie Mays, the star hitter and outfielder for the San Francisco Giants.  My grandfather first brought me to Candlestick Park in 1962 to see the Giants play their rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I ate hot dogs and candy, drank barrels of Coca-Cola, and marveled at the enthusiasm from the tens of thousands of fans whenever The Say Hey Kid came to bat.

Willie Mays. You had to be there to appreciate the phenomenon. He played in the major leagues for twenty-three years, and all but his last two seasons were with the Giants. Twice the National League's most valuable player, and twenty times named to baseball's All-Star team, he retired in 1973 behind only Babe Ruth in career home runs (660 to 714). Whether socking a home run or striking out swinging, I never knew so much excitement existed on earth until I saw him at the plate.  He was, in the eyes of a five-year-old sitting on his grandfather's lap, beyond mortal. After my first trip to the ballpark, Willie Mays replaced cowboy star Roy Rogers at the top of my boyhood pantheon. I wore a Willie Mays Fan Club badge on my shirt, and I coaxed Grandpa to mount Willie's bobble head on our station wagon dashboard. When local TV stations aired a public service announcement of Willie warning kids not to play with blasting caps found on the street, I walked around my neighborhood looking for them. I didn't know what they were, but I wanted to find one—so as not to play with it, all because Willie said so.

The luster diminished somewhat when, as a kid, I attended a game in which Willie played. Attendance grew sparse near its end because the Giants trailed badly, so at the bottom of the ninth I snuck into an empty seat directly behind the home team's dugout.  Willie came to bat with two outs, the crowd roared for him, but he hit an infield fly and made the final out. The Giants lost, but who cared? We all saw Willie play.

He left the batter's box and walked directly toward me. I reached across the top of the dugout. "Willie!" I called to him, "I'm a big fan! Can I shake your hand?"  He scowled, grumbled something, and passed by me. My older cousin who brought me to the game saw my disappointment.

"Don't be sad," she consoled me. "Willie's just had a bad day. Everyone has bad days." 

• • •

My chance to meet him came a few years later when he scheduled an early-morning live interview at a local TV station in a run-down section of San Francisco. The studio shared the block with an alley, a soup kitchen, and a flophouse for transients. The low-rent setting didn't deter me, especially if I could see him without thousands of other fans around.

Two hours before sunrise, my younger brother Pat and I took the bus downtown, and then we fended off drunks and perverts on our walk to the studio. After waiting there an hour, a pink Avanti sports car pulled up to the curb. The personalized license plate "BUCK 24" gave away the identity of the driver before we saw his face. Willie's team nickname was "Buck," and his Giants jersey bore number 24. He parked in front of the studio and exited his car.

There he was, only a few feet away from Pat and me on an otherwise empty street. What a thrill for two young fans! For a moment, we remained speechless, and then I blurted out, "Willie, you're our hero! We come to your games!  Will you sign our baseballs?"  I extended my ball and pen. 

He stopped, glowered at me, and said nothing for what seemed forever. The silence broke only when he summoned a guttural sound from the depth of his esophagus. After bringing forth a mouthful of phlegm, he spewed it onto the sidewalk an inch or so from my foot. My eyes widened as I absorbed the scene and tried unlocking its meaning.

"Maybe this is some sort of baseball ritual," I thought. "Maybe the players greet each other this way."  When I looked up, Willie still stared at me.

My mind kept racing: "Am I supposed to greet him the same way?" I wondered. "I guess he's waiting for me to do it back to him. Well, okay, here goes."

Just as I was about to launch a return salute, Willie snatched the ball from my hand, scrawled his signature across it, and then smeared the writing with the side of his hand as he tossed it in the air. The ball hit the street and rolled down Golden Gate Avenue.

As I chased after my smudged trophy, Pat asked if he'd sign his ball, too. Willie spun around and jabbed his index finger toward Pat.

"No!" he barked. "You kids got enough." With that, he turned and approached the studio entrance.

By now I had retrieved my ball and was approaching the scene when Pat called out, "Hey, Willie." He looked back to hear Pat finish his thought:

"Screw you!"

Pat turned and ran down Golden Gate Avenue toward Hyde Street and the bus station. His older brother, clutching a smeared baseball, was right behind.

• • •

Many years later, when I was just out of law school, I attended a sports collectable show in Los Angeles. The schedule featured Willie Mays signing autographs for what was then a top-dollar fee at such gatherings: $6 each. Since he was so unpleasant when Pat and I asked him for a free autograph long ago, maybe, I thought, he might be more chipper if people paid him for it. I decided to test my theory. Besides, six bucks was a small price to pay to replace the smeared and scuffed baseball in my collection.

Dealers and cases of baseball memorabilia for sale crowded the hotel ballroom. Willie, now retired from the game for over a decade, signed at a corner table. The people in his long line carried baseballs, bats, cards, photographs, jerseys, gloves, and so forth. After fans paid their money and handed him their item, he signed without looking up or acknowledging any expressions of admiration or gratitude. Once the money hit the cash box, he wrote his name, handed back the autograph, and then he called out, "Next."

A dad approached him with his young kid in tow. "Hey, Willie, will you make out the ball for my son Johnny?"

"No inscriptions. Next."

From another fan: "I've followed you since you played for New York. It's such an honor to meet you."

"Next."

This went on for the hour that I waited. The script never changed: "Hey, Willie, you're my hero…."

"Next."

When my turn came, I paid my fee, handed over my ball, he signed it, I said thanks, and then I stepped away without waiting for him to tell me to keep moving. 

• • •

Thirty years after Pat and I encountered Willie Mays on Golden Gate Avenue, my brother worked as the operations manager at PacBell Park (now Oracle Park, which is the home stadium for the San Francisco Giants). When I visited him one afternoon in his ground-floor office, I was surprised to see Willie Mays signed memorabilia decorating his walls. Pat told me that Willie, now old, stooped, and moving slowly, still attended most home games. He'd often stop by Pat's office to shoot the breeze and have a beer with my brother before the opening pitch. They became friends.

"In fact," Pat added, "he was here yesterday. I told him that my brother was coming to town for a visit, so he signed this for you." Pat handed over a baseball, un-smudged and un-scuffed, inscribed to me.

"Do I leave the six bucks with you?" I asked.

"No charge. He did it as a favor. Besides, he raids my refrigerator before the games, so we're even."

"Did you ever mention how rude he was when we met him as kids, or that he once spewed his phlegm at my shoe?"

Pat shrugged. "No, I never bothered telling him—

"—Why tell him what he already knows?"

• • •

What to make of my encounter with baseball great Willie Mays? I suspect that decades-long worldwide fame takes its toll, especially when an unending parade of well-meaning fans fill those years with nonstop impositions. At some point even the most fan-friendly celebrities must come to begrudge these intrusions. Although my experiences with him were less than ideal, I'd bet that countless other fans could testify to his acts of kindness, generosity, and patience when they met him. I choose to believe that I experienced the exceptions instead of the rule. As my cousin told me at Candlestick Park on that long-ago afternoon, everyone is entitled to a bad day.

Rest in peace, Willie. 

My old friend and colleague, former Congressman Chris Cannon, died this week at age 73.

Chris and I first met when we were elected to Congress in November 1996. He sat next to me during our freshman orientation, and we struck up a friendship immediately. That friendship grew over the next couple of years, and it deepened when, as freshmen members of the House Judiciary Committee, we found ourselves enmeshed in what became the first presidential impeachment and trial in 130 years.

The House selected thirteen "managers" to lead the prosecution of President Bill Clinton in the U.S. Senate. Both Chris and I found ourselves on that roster. I could spend hours talking about the intensity and the stress we faced. Suffice to say that I saw many of our colleagues go wobbly as the Senate let us know, before we ever called our first witness, that the fix was in and that they would acquit Clinton—no matter what the evidence showed. One who never flinched, and who insisted on the right of the House to present its case in full, was Chris. For a freshman congressman to throw down the gauntlet in the face of our own leadership looking for ways to cut and run took tremendous courage, and it endeared him to me.

The day of opening statements was filled with stress and angst. At the end of that very long day, I went home exhausted. My wife told me that my mother had called from California and wanted me to return her call before I went to bed. I did so. When I got Mom on the phone, I asked if she had watched her son's opening statement in the impeachment trial of the president of the United States.

"Yeah, I saw it," she said with an air of indifference.

Surprised at the blasé tone in her voice, I asked her how she thought I did.

"Oh, you did OK," she replied, "but I didn't like your necktie. Where did you get it?"

"I don't know where I got it," I told her, my annoyance now growing. "What difference does it make? You watch me give an opening statement in the trial of the century, and all you noticed was my necktie?"

"I didn't like your necktie," she insisted. "Now that Congressman Chris Cannon—he had a lovely necktie! Where does Chris Cannon get his neckties?"

"How the hell do I know where he gets his neckties! I don't care where he gets them!"

"You need to ask him where he gets his neckties."

"Mom, is that all you have to say about my presentation?"

"No. I also didn't like your haircut. Who cut it?"

"Liria cuts my hair. She used to be the Senate barber, and now she has her own business. What do you mean you didn't like my haircut?"

"I just didn't like it. Now Chris Cannon—he has a wonderful haircut. Very nice. You need to ask him to take you to his barber."

The next morning, the House Managers were assembling in our conference room for a meeting before resuming the Senate trial. I couldn't wait to tell Chris about my experience the night before, but I never got the chance. Chris walked into the room, saw me, and approached with a beaming smile.

"Hey, Rogan," he told me, "you'll never guess who called me last night!"

Oh, God, please—no.

"This woman called the office and insisted that she speak to me. I came on the line. She said she's your mother! She wants me to take you tie shopping and for a haircut! She sounded very sincere and insistent. Was that really your mother?"

I looked Chris square in the eye. "No," I told him. "It wasn't my Mom. It was probably some crackpot calling your office."

He laughed. "She told me that you'd probably say that," he replied. "Anyway, I'm going this weekend for a haircut. Want to come along? No offense, but I think your Mom is right—you need some help. And when we're done, maybe we can go pick up a few ties."

We never went tie shopping or haircutting together, but some months later, when my mother made her only visit to Washington, I took her to lunch in the House Members' Dining Room—and of course, her sartorial hero Chris Cannon joined us.

Rest in peace, old friend. 

In today's Los Angeles Times, criminal justice reporter and columnist Anita Chabria reported that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's California convictions for sex crimes will likely stand-- unlike his similar convictions in New York, which were reversed recently by that state's appellate court. The reason: under California law, prior sexual offenses are admissible against a defendant in a sex crimes prosecution. In New York, that is apparently not the case, and because prosecutors there admitted such evidence, the convictions were reversed.

I note this differing standard between New York and California with great personal interest, because the California law that allows for admitting this evidence was written by me 30 years ago when I was a young state legislator.

After a 40-year career in public life, it is gratifying to look back and know that my former colleagues and I occasionally left behind something lasting to help protect our most vulnerable victims. https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2024-04-30/chabria-column-jim-rogan-harvey-weinstein-politics

[The following story is adapted from my book, Shaking Hands with History, 2021]

Sixty years ago today, SS-100-X became the most famous car in automotive history. You have seen it many times, you would recognize its photograph instantly, and yet its name conjures in you no recognition. Unlike Ford's Mustang or Chevrolet's Corvette, when this car rolled off the assembly line it was assigned no catchy name: just a number. It set no speed records. At over twenty feet long and almost four tons, it moved with the nimbleness of a World War I tank. In fact, it took its place in history while traveling at only 11.2 miles an hour. It isn't its speed or design drawing almost two million people annually to view it on display in a museum.

SS-100-X began as a 1961 Ford Lincoln Continental four-door convertible. After major modifications, it joined the White House fleet of automobiles. On this date six decades ago, November 22, 1963, it transported President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor and Mrs. John Connally along a seven-mile procession through Dallas, Texas. At 12:30 p.m. that afternoon, it became a macabre relic of American history.

SS-100-X: it was the car in The Motorcade.

Many years later, I came to know several people who rode in that fateful procession.[1]  The recollections they shared with me about their experiences that day follow.

David F. Powers

Born in 1912 in Boston to Irish immigrants, Powers worked in the publishing business and served in the Army during World War II before meeting fellow veteran John F. Kennedy in 1946. When the future president returned home from the war and ran for Congress that year, Powers joined the campaign and remained with Kennedy all the way to the White House. His formal administration title was Special Assistant to the President, but their relationship ran much deeper. He was a member of the "Irish Mafia," a tight circle of longtime Kennedy confidants. The year after the assassination, Powers became the first curator and director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. 

Powers and I had connected through a mutual friend. In 1993, when he learned of my forthcoming Boston visit, he invited me to the library to join him for coffee.

Within minutes of arriving at his office, we were fellow Irishmen sharing jokes and stories of family connections to the old country. He told me he knew some Rogans from Ireland. Their name originally was Regan, but an immigration official at Ellis Island transposed the "e" to an "o" when their ancestors arrived here. He asked if they were any relation. "Only if they're rich Irish," I replied.

He laughed. "I know what you mean. I was a poor working-class shanty Irishman who just happened to know the president of the United States."

Dave Powers and I hit it off at once.

Our connection cemented when I showed him my copy of his 1972 book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye that he had signed for me when I was a teenager. "And you've kept it all these years!" he exclaimed with appreciation.

"Since I hear that you're a political memorabilia collector," he said, "I put together a few things for you." He handed me a large envelope of various JFK photographs from the library, along with a vintage Life magazine from December 1963, which was the JFK memorial edition. "I had a few of these left over, and I thought you'd like to have it." We stood over his desk as he flipped through the magazine and commented wistfully over many of the highlights of Kennedy's life depicted in the photos.

He turned yet another page, and then his expression changed. Gone was the smile, and a pained look overcame him. I looked down at the page that altered his demeanor. It was a photo spread from the 8mm Zapruder film, which was the only motion picture footage taken of the assassination. He closed the magazine.  "I wish that wasn't in there," he said in a whisper.

"Dave, you were there that day. Are you ever able to shake the memory of it?"

"Never. Here at the library reminders surround me every day of what might have been. It's unavoidable."

We sat on the couch and he told me about that trip to Dallas. Because Texas was a key state for JFK's anticipated 1964 reelection campaign, Kennedy chose to make a two-day trip there to shore up his support. He described their hectic schedule after leaving Washington on November 21 for San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth (where the official party spent the night).

"The next day, after a speech to the chamber of commerce, we flew from Fort Worth to Dallas and landed at Love Field. The crowds were huge and friendly, and the president and Jackie beamed when they came off the plane. After shaking hands with people along the fence, they climbed into the limousine with Governor and Mrs. Connally. I was in the Secret Service car right behind them as we started the procession through downtown Dallas to the Trade Mart, where the president had a speech scheduled for 12:30.

"Along the way I took home movies of the crowds and the motorcade, but I ran out of film as we got closer to downtown. There the crowds grew larger and larger, and they were more and more enthusiastic. The president and Jackie rode in the back seat of their car. He waved to the people on the right, and she waved to the crowd on the left. We planned it that way so that nobody on the sidewalks would feel ignored.

"We turned off Main Street. We made a couple of sharp turns and proceeded onto Elm Street, which put us almost at the end of the route. We were going slowly on the turns. I checked my watch and saw it was 12:30, which was the time we were due at the Trade Mart a few miles away. That was good, I thought. We weren't too late. We'd be there in a few minutes.

"Then I heard what I thought was a firecracker. I looked up and saw the president's body start moving slowly to the left. Another shot rang out, and Governor Connally disappeared from view. I saw a nearby overpass in front of us and I thought that maybe someone was shooting at us in an ambush. Then I heard a third shot and saw it blow off the back of the president's head. The impact of the bullet sounded like a melon thrown against a cement wall.

"The cars all accelerated quickly. Jackie climbed onto the back of the limousine, but a Secret Service agent jumped on the rear of the car and shoved her back inside. It probably saved her life.

"When we arrived at the hospital a few minutes later, I ran over to the president's car. Several of us picked him up and put him on a stretcher. I knew he was gone when I saw him."

Powers pushed aside the magazine. "Come on," he said, "let me show you some happier memories." He gave me a tour of the photographs from the Kennedy years adorning his walls, which included signed pictures and mementos from John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy. One photo depicted JFK and Powers in a motorcade through Ireland a few months before the assassination, inscribed, "Dave Powers goes home. Best wishes from his travelling companion, John Kennedy."  Nearby was a framed document bearing a seal and ribbon. During the Kennedy years, JFK promoted fifty-mile hikes for physical fitness. After Kennedy pressured Powers into making one of those lengthy treks, the president presented him with this unique certificate congratulating him for hiking fifty miles—to and from Kennedy's refrigerator to steal the president's Heinekens.

"Here's something that you'll really appreciate," he said, and then he led me around his desk to a rocking chair. "This was the president's actual rocker that he used in the Oval Office. When we closed down the library exhibits for refurbishing some months ago, I told the archivist to store this here." During JFK's presidency, he used it to ease his chronic back pain, and he loved it so much that his staff brought it on Air Force One whenever he traveled. I had seen countless photographs of him relaxing in this very chair. I mentioned that I recalled watching the TV news the day after the assassination and saw a mover wheeling this rocker on a dolly out of the Oval Office. When that image came across the screen, my tough-as-nails longshoreman grandfather wept.

Dave nodded. "Give it a try," he told me as he motioned with his head toward the chair. 

"Are you sure?"

"Go ahead. The president wouldn't mind if an Irish kid from San Francisco sat in it."

"What if he knew the Irish kid was a Republican?"

He laughed. "Well, that might be a problem, but we won't tell him. Go on, try it out." Dave picked up my camera and snapped a photograph of me sitting in JFK's chair.

"That's a very historic chair," he said with a grin, "and you're adding to its history. You just became the first Republican ever to sit in it—

"—And, trust me, you'll be the last!"

Evelyn Lincoln

John F. Kennedy hired Evelyn Lincoln as his personal secretary during his final months as a member of the House of Representatives. She remained in that sensitive post when Kennedy moved on to both the U.S. Senate and the White House. Like Dave Powers, she flew to Texas with the president and rode in the motorcade.

I struck up an acquaintance with Mrs. Lincoln (as the president always called her) through the mail when I was a teenager and after she had retired. In later years, we became friends and spoke over the telephone often. She was quite pleased that the young boy who used to write to her about his interest in history and politics later served in public office.

Although we had maintained a friendship for many years, we met only once. Over dinner with my wife and me in 1991, she shared many behind the scenes stories of the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and other leaders of that era. Ironically, our evening together coincided with the twenty-eighth anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. As the wine poured, she offered increasingly unvarnished recollections—until it came to Dallas. When I tried drawing out those memories, she couldn't go beyond generalities. The grief proved too much. It wasn't until a couple of years later during a phone conversation that she offered these limited comments about that day.

"We left the White House by helicopter for Andrews Air Force Base on Thursday morning, the day before he died, and we flew aboard Air Force One to Texas. During the flight, the president sat in his private office talking to a number of Texas congressmen joining him for the trip. Later that night, he spoke at a testimonial dinner in Houston, and then we spent the night in Fort Worth.

"On Friday morning, before he left the hotel, I had the chance to introduce him to a few of my relatives who lived in the area. They were thrilled to shake his hand and meet him. He looked so handsome in his blue suit, and he charmed them.

"The president made a breakfast speech to the chamber of commerce, and then we headed to the airport. The flight to Dallas was short—only fifteen minutes. I remember taking some memos into his private cabin for him to sign. He looked distracted as he chatted with the congressmen seated with him. While he listened, he signed the memos and handed them back to me. They were the last things he ever signed.

"Air Force One landed at Love Field. It had been raining when we left Fort Worth, but now there was sunshine. I knew Kennedy would be pleased, because without the rain he could ride in the limo without the bubbletop on it. He always preferred to ride in an open car with no covering so that the crowds could get a better look at him. Afterward, the press reported that the bubbletop would have saved him from gunfire, but that's not true. The bubbletop wasn't bulletproof. Its only purpose was to protect him from the elements.

"By the time I got off the plane, I saw that he and Jackie were shaking hands with people along the fence. She wore a pink suit and matching pillbox hat, and she held a bouquet of red roses in her arm.

"I was already in my assigned car when the president and Jackie climbed to their limousine. Governor and Mrs. Connally were with them. The motorcade left for the Trade Mart, where the president had a 12:30 speech.

"As we drove through Dallas, I was amazed at the crowd size and the wonderful response we received. We had worried about hostile protests, but I saw none. Everybody was cheering, smiling, and waving. My last memory of Kennedy alive was seeing him in the back of the limousine with a beaming smile as he waved.

"I remember him waving."

That was it. She went no further. During our earlier dinner, she hit the same termination point in her recollection: "As his car pulled out of Love Field for the ride through downtown Dallas, I saw him sitting in the back seat. He was waving his hand." Then she stopped. "After all these years," she told me during dinner, "it's still too painful to discuss."

With that, and just as she had during our later telephone conversation about Dallas, Mrs. Lincoln changed the subject.

Jack Valenti

Jack Valenti met John Kennedy only once. It occurred on the last night of the president's life.

Born in 1921, Valenti flew over fifty combat missions during World War II. After obtaining a Harvard MBA degree, he returned home to Houston and began a career as an advertising executive and political consultant. His friendship with Lyndon Johnson dated back to the future president's congressional years. In late 1963, when Kennedy decided to make a political trip to Texas, Johnson recruited Valenti to organize the multi-city tour. Valenti rode in the Dallas motorcade. Immediately following the assassination, he joined the new administration as Johnson's presidential assistant. He remained at the White House until 1966, when he left government to become the president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Holding that position for the next thirty-eight years, he was the public face of, and chief advocate for, the Hollywood movie studios.

I knew Jack from my time in Washington. With much of the entertainment industry sited in my Los Angeles district, I allied frequently with the studios in the battle to protect American intellectual property (IP) from piracy. My membership on the House Judiciary Committee's IP subcommittee gave me a position of legislative leadership on this issue. Later, in my capacity as U.S. under secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, I became the Bush Administration's de facto IP czar. Because of these positions, I worked closely with Jack for years, and we developed a close friendship.

Our relationship transcended partisan politics. During my 2000 reelection campaign, President Clinton targeted me for defeat as payback for his impeachment. Thanks to Clinton's help, my Democrat opponent, Adam Schiff, had campaign contribution reports that looked like a Who's Who of Hollywood. After Jack's death, one of his MPAA lieutenants told me that she attended a meeting with Jack and the studio heads during that campaign. The leaders told Jack that Clinton was lobbying them hard to support Schiff financially, as were all of their A-list stars. Jack (a lifelong liberal Democrat and a close friend of Clinton) listened politely for a few minutes, and then he ended the discussion. "Gentlemen," he said, "Jim Rogan has been the best friend Hollywood has had in Washington when it comes to protecting our interests. As long as I am head of this association, we will support him, and I don't give a damn what Bill Clinton thinks about it." That was that. Although Schiff collected checks from people like Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg, my campaign deposited checks from Disney, Fox, Warner, Universal, and Paramount.

One day, while joining him for lunch at his Washington office, I brought along a copy of the famous photograph of Lyndon Johnson, flanked by his wife and a dazed Jacqueline Kennedy, taking the presidential oath aboard Air Force One shortly after the assassination. I asked Jack (who was depicted in the photo standing a few feet from Johnson) to autograph it for me. After he obliged the request, he told me about his experience that nightmarish day.

"About a month earlier, Vice President Johnson called me at my ad agency office in Houston and told me that President Kennedy had decided to make a multi-stop visit to Texas that November. Lyndon wanted me to organize it. He wasn't happy about the trip. He thought it was a bad time for Kennedy to come. Governor John Connally and Senator Ralph Yarborough, both Democrats, were having a terrible feud, and their bitterness was causing intraparty divisions. However, the president needed Texas to win the 1964 election, so he decided to visit.

"I put my business on hold and spent the next month working out the details of each stop. I coordinated everything with senior White House staff, the Secret Service, the Democratic National Committee, the state Party offices, and so forth. It was a monumental task, and I knew Lyndon would expect perfection when he brought the president to his home state. This had to be a success.

"On Thursday, November 21, the official party landed in Houston. JFK and Jackie came off the plane, and the crowds went wild. I focused on getting everyone into the motorcade and then to the hotel without any problems, so I didn't meet him when he arrived. A big problem developed before the motorcade departed. At the last second Yarborough refused to ride in the same car with Lyndon. I couldn't believe that asshole! I shoved him into a car with some Texas congressmen, and then I jumped into a White House staff car and we all took off for the hotel.

"The reception at the Rice Hotel went off perfectly. Lyndon told me that the president was pleased with it. So was Johnson, so much so that he told my wife, Mary Margaret, to go home and pack a bag for me. Johnson wanted me to travel with the official party to Dallas and Austin the next day.

"That same night, we all attended a testimonial dinner for Congressman Albert Thomas. While everyone was backstage, Johnson brought me over and introduced me to the president. We had never met. He thanked me for my work in organizing the trip, and he said that I did such a good job that he might steal me away so that I could organize his other trips. Then he introduced me to Jackie, who was dazzling. Like every other man in America, she enchanted me. The president thanked me again, and I went back to overseeing the program. How ironic it is that the only time I ever met John Kennedy was on the last night of his life.

"The next morning, we were in Fort Worth for a breakfast. When that finished, Kennedy, Johnson, Connally, and the other politicians went outside in the drizzle and spoke from a makeshift wooden platform to the few thousand people who had congregated outside. Then we drove to the airport for the flight to Dallas.

"At Love Field, another great crowd awaited. I did a final motorcade check, and then I jumped into a car with Kennedy's personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. We were about six cars behind the presidential limousine when we departed.[2]

"Along the way the crowds were boisterous and cheering. Everyone was smiling. I knew Lyndon would be very pleased with the turnout.

"Near the end of the route, we made a couple of quick turns into Dealey Plaza. Suddenly, the car in front of me accelerated quickly. Police started waving at the cars behind, people started running in the street, and I wondered what the hell was going on. My first reaction was that the cars in front took off speeding to the Trade Mart because we were running late for Kennedy's speech.

"At that time, I didn't know anything bad had happened. Our driver took us to the Trade Mart. When we arrived and the president's limo wasn't there, I thought they must be running late, or maybe they stopped for some reason. Then I heard a guard say the president and Governor Connally had been shot. I couldn't believe it. I grabbed a deputy sheriff and told him I had the president's personal secretary with me and that we needed to get to the hospital right away. He put us in his squad car, and we rushed off to Parkland Hospital.

"It was bedlam at the hospital. Cars parked all over, Secret Service and police swarming about, people rushing in and out. I dropped off Mrs. Lincoln with some Kennedy people. One of Johnson's aides came over and whispered to me that Kennedy was dead. He said the vice president wanted to see me right now.

"I was fighting back tears when I found Johnson in a small room in the hospital basement. People entered and started speaking to him. A Secret Service agent pulled me aside and said that Johnson wanted me to get out to Air Force One immediately. I didn't know why. I just did what he told me.

"An agent drove me back to Love Field and I boarded the jet. Everyone on board looked shell-shocked. They spoke to each other in whispers. Soon after, Johnson boarded the plane. He grabbed my arm and said, 'Jack, I need you on my staff. You need to come to Washington with me right now. Tell Mary Margaret to send your clothes. You can live with me until you and your family find a place back there.' That was that. My life and career as a Houston ad exec were over forever, although I didn't realize it at the time.

"Once on the plane, Johnson took charge immediately. He started making phone calls and meeting with people in the office. I couldn't believe how calm he looked after what had just happened.

"The White House and Secret Service pushed Johnson to leave Dallas for Washington immediately. He refused, and he ordered that the plane not depart without Kennedy's body and Jackie aboard.

"While we waited for Jackie and the late president, another debate erupted as to whether Johnson should take the oath now or back in Washington. He decided to do it before we left. He wanted the oath ceremony photographed, and he wanted that photo given to the press outlets immediately so that the world, and especially our enemies, would know that there was a continuity of leadership.

"A hearse pulled up on the tarmac with a coffin. They carried it up the stairs, loaded it in the back of the plane, and covered it with an American flag. Jackie remained in the back with the casket. Johnson sent someone to ask if she felt up to coming forward and joining him as he took the oath. When she appeared, she looked like she was in a trance. Judge Sarah Hughes from Texas had joined us, and I had obtained the oath over the phone from the Department of Justice. With everyone now assembled, Judge Hughes asked Johnson to raise his hand. Just before she administered the oath, Congressman Thomas pulled me next to him to get a better view of history being made."

"And," he added ruefully, "because of Albert Thomas's thoughtfulness, I ended up in one of the most famous photographs ever taken."

Former House Speaker Jim Wright

To say that Jim Wright's Republican colleagues disliked him when he was the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives understates the point. The third-ranking House Republican at the time, Congressman (later Vice President) Dick Cheney, said of him, "He's a heavy-handed son-of-a-bitch, he doesn't know any other way of operating, and he will do anything he can to win at any price, including ignoring the rules, bending the rules, writing rules, denying the House the opportunity to work its will. It brings disrespect to the House itself. There's no sense of comity left." Congressman (later Speaker) Newt Gingrich called Wright the most corrupt speaker of the twentieth century, and he recruited seventy-seven other GOP colleagues to file formal ethics charges against him.

Despite this onslaught, there was a lone Republican congressman who liked Jim Wright, albeit one who never had to endure service under his ham-handed leadership.

I liked him.

Born in 1922 in Texas, he flew as a bombardier during World War II. After the war, he returned home and held several local political offices until 1954, when he won the first of seventeen terms in Congress. Elected speaker in 1987, his ruthless approach in ramming through his legislative agenda angered Republicans (and many Democrats). After ethics charged piled up against him, which ranged from improperly profiting from book sale royalties to unlawful foreign policy interference, he resigned from Congress while maintaining his innocence. Upon leaving Washington, he returned home and taught college.

My youthful appreciation for coaxing historical recollections from noted leaders didn't end when I arrived in Congress. If anything, it metastasized because senior colleagues who had witnessed history from front row seats abounded. During legislative downtime, I looked for opportunities to ask them about their experiences. Occasionally, I wrote to retired members whom I wanted to meet and invited them to lunch when they came to town. Soon after I wrote to Jim Wright back in Texas, he called me and said that he planned to be in D.C. for the annual Former Members of Congress Association gathering. Each year, the Association holds a two-day reunion for former House and Senate members. The agenda always includes a morning business meeting held in the House chamber before the legislative session.  We set that date on the calendar to meet.

Incumbent congressmen never attended these Association get-togethers in the chamber. With busy schedules, and with no political benefit derived from schmoozing has-beens, they had better things to do. Unlike my colleagues, I'd come, stand along the back rail of the chamber, and point out for our teenage House pages all the notables from the past whom I recognized: "See that man over there in the tan coat? He ran for president in 1972. I got his autograph when I was a kid. See that tall guy in the aisle of the second row? He was secretary of the Treasury. See the lady in the red dress?  She was the Democrat vice presidential nominee in 1984—the first woman nominated by a major party." Later, I watched with satisfaction as the pages brought autograph books over to the people I had identified for them. These once prominent and now largely forgotten old-timers smiled as they signed for the pages, many of whom were born long after their public careers had ended.

At the Association's 1998 meeting in the House chamber, I pointed out an elderly man. "Do you see that fellow over there in the light blue sports coat? That's Jim Wright. He was Speaker of the House ten years ago."

Later, when I walked over and introduced myself, he greeted me warmly, and then he fished around in his wallet for a piece of paper bearing my name and telephone number written on it. "See? I was going to call you today," he said with a slight speech impediment, which he explained came from his recent cancer surgery on his tongue and jaw.

I invited him to lunch. "Absolutely!" he responded. "Why don't I come to your office and pick you up, or else I can come to your committee room and wait for you?"

"Sorry, sir, but it's not appropriate having a former Speaker of the House wandering the Capitol halls looking for a freshman, especially when the freshman is the beneficiary of the meeting. I'll come to you."

"All right let's meet for lunch in the private Speaker's Dining Room across from the Members' Dining Room. The nice thing about being a former speaker is that I am allowed to reserve it."

At noon, we had the dining room to ourselves. As a favor for one of the House archivists, I asked him to sign for her a photograph of his formal portrait hanging in the Capitol. He inscribed it, "To Barbara, who takes care of the old things in the Capitol—like me!"

Throughout lunch, he shared stories about his career in Congress and some of the historical figures with whom he worked. The most memorable part of our discussion came when he told me about November 22, 1963.

"I represented Fort Worth in Congress for thirty-four years, which was the city where President Kennedy started his last day. It was such a big deal to have the president of the United States in my district. He gave a speech there that morning and paid tribute to me. Then we drove over to the airport and boarded Air Force One for the flight to Dallas.

"Governor Connally and other Texas congressmen were on the plane with us. We sat talking with the president during the flight, and he was very interested in discussing the different political dynamics of Fort Worth and Dallas. We were still discussing it when the plane landed at Love Field. As we prepared to leave, he turned to me and said, 'Jim, we'll finish this discussion later this afternoon when we get back to the plane.'"

At this point in his story, Wright wiped away a tear. When he continued, he said softly, "We never finished that discussion."

I asked about the motorcade. He recalled, "It was a beautiful day. The crowds all along the way were very enthusiastic. I was in a car behind the president, maybe five cars back.[3]

"Near the end of the motorcade, as we got closer to the Trade Mart, I heard a loud pop. At first, I thought it was a firecracker. Then I heard a second pop, and I assumed it was a twenty-one-gun salute. 'This is a strange place to do that,' I thought. Then I heard a third pop, and that was odd because, if this were a twenty-one-gun salute, the shots were out of cadence. My heart sank when I looked out the window and saw horror on the faces of the people standing along the grassy knoll. I didn't know it at the time, but they had just seen the president's head explode.

"I turned to see the president's car. It looked as if it had stopped in the middle of the street, and then it sped off as a Secret Service agent climbed onto the back of it. I saw another Secret Service agent violently push Lyndon down in his car.

"When we arrived at Parkland Hospital it was pandemonium. I saw the president carried out of his car." Wright paused briefly and gazed toward the carpeting on the floor. Composing himself, he continued: "I looked inside of his limousine. Blood, brain tissue, and chunks of his head covered the back seat. I knew he was dead.

"A few minutes later, I saw Lyndon at Parkland. He was stunned by what had happened, but he recovered quickly. He handled himself well that day under terrible circumstances.

"After the doctors pronounced the president dead, Lyndon wanted to get back to the plane immediately. He didn't know if there was a conspiracy to kill the whole government or not. We called Judge Sarah Hughes, who came to the plane to swear him in. I was in the plane with him when he took the oath of office."

I asked Wright how that day impacted him as he reflected on it thirty-five years later. He shook his head. "It was the saddest day of my entire career. It had started on such a high note. I was hosting the president of the United States in my hometown. My adrenaline was flowing, and I was on cloud nine. Then it all was destroyed. I've relived the day in my mind many, many times over the last thirty-five years.

"And, sadly, I will again, many, many more times."

Dan Rather

I wanted to hear about history even when I was in the middle of making it.

In January 1999, a few hours after I delivered my opening statement in the Clinton impeachment trial before the United States Senate, I appeared on Larry King Live, a television interview show broadcast live to an international audience on the CNN network. When I arrived at their Washington studio, I learned that King had invited two additional interrogators for our interview: Dan Rather, then the longtime anchorman of the CBS Evening News, and fellow CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, the host of the long-running news show, Face the Nation.

A producer introduced me to both Schieffer and Rather in the greenroom before airtime. I told Rather I looked forward to his questions because I was a longtime fan. He thanked me, but his eyes showed scorn for what he undoubtedly thought was a cheap effort to ingratiate myself. Conservative Republicans had for years bashed Rather and other media liberals, so the last person from whom he expected a sincere compliment was a conservative congressman. Still, he looked surprised and mildly impressed when I told him, "When you were a young reporter, you were in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. That must have been an incredible experience."

His countenance changed from disdain to quizzical. "How did you know that?" he asked.

"I heard your reporting from that day. Like I said, I've followed your career for decades." Since we had time before going on air, I asked him to tell me about Dallas.

"Kennedy was scheduled to make a five-city Texas trip," he told me. "CBS assigned me to head up their coverage of the visit. At the Dallas portion, I positioned myself at the very end of the motorcade. I stood just beyond the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza on the opposite side of an underpass. The motorcade would come down Elm Street, drive under the pass, and then head out to the Trade Mart for his speech.

"At 12:30, the motorcade turned onto Elm and started its approach to where I waited. It only had about forty yards to go until its end. Because of my location, I never heard any shots. The first sign I had that something was wrong was when Kennedy's limousine sped past me without any other cars behind it. It raced by so quickly that I wasn't even sure it was his car.

"Suddenly, there was confusion all around. I knew something bad had happened, but I didn't know what. I rushed back to the local CBS affiliate. When I got there, reports had come over the wire services of shots fired at the motorcade. We still had no information about whether anyone was hit.

"I knew Dallas, and I assumed that if any trouble had developed, they would take anyone injured to Parkland Hospital. I called Parkland on a hunch, and I got in my call before everyone else jammed up the switchboard. My source there told me that Kennedy died. I called the New York television studio with the news, but they refused to announce it on the air until the White House confirmed it.  CBS Radio didn't wait for confirmation. They went live with me saying that the president died. The official White House announcement didn't come until later.

"I went back to the scene and learned that a guy at a local clothing store might have taken a movie of the shooting. I tracked down the photographer, Abraham Zapruder. Once he developed the film, he let me watch it just one time. The graphic nature stunned me. It showed the president's head explode upon impact from the final shot. Later, I gave an on-air verbal account of what I saw on the film during a live CBS broadcast. I contacted Zapruder again and tried to buy the film for CBS, but Life magazine had beaten us to it."

With that, Larry King's producer interrupted the discussion and escorted us into the studio.

A few days later, I sent a note to Rather and thanked him for sharing his memories of Dallas. I also wrote that I suspected my comment about being an old fan was cause for understandable cynicism, so I hoped to restore my credibility with an attachment: I enclosed a copy of the letter he wrote to me in August 1974 (when I was a teen) in which he thanked me for writing and expressing appreciation for his work at CBS.

A couple of weeks later, a large box arrived. Inside were autographed copies of every book Rather had authored, with each bearing a gracious inscription. He enclosed a letter thanking me for sending that old letter, along with a suggestion that we get together for coffee.

Once again, my boyhood hobby of collecting political memorabilia paid off a dividend in later life.

Texas Governor John B. Connally

Of all the people in the Dallas motorcade, I once met the man with whom I wanted to talk the most about that day. Unfortunately, our encounter was not under circumstances that allowed me to ask former Texas Governor John Connally about his recollections of riding with Kennedy in SS-100-X.

Born in Texas in 1917, Connally served in the Navy during World War II. Later, he obtained a law degree and became an aide to his longtime friend, Lyndon Johnson, during LBJ's congressional years. At Johnson's urging, Kennedy named Connally as secretary of the Navy in 1961, a position he held until he resigned the following year to run for Texas governor. He went on to win three consecutive terms in the statehouse, and in this capacity, he welcomed the Kennedys to his home state in November 1963.

When the presidential motorcade departed Love Field for downtown Dallas, Connally sat in the jump seat of SS-100-X directly in front of Kennedy. According to the official Warren Commission report, the assassin's second shot passed through Kennedy's neck and throat, and then it struck Connally's back, exited his chest, blew through his wrist, and then lodged in his thigh. Although seriously wounded in the shooting, Connally survived.

President Nixon named Connally (still a Democrat at that time) as his secretary of the Treasury in 1971. Sixteen months later, he resigned to head "Democrats for Nixon" for the Republican president's 1972 reelection campaign.

Three weeks before Election Day 1972, Connally came to San Francisco as a Nixon campaign surrogate. Along with two school friends, I waited outside KGO at dawn for him to arrive. The sun was just rising when a black stretch limousine pulled to the curb. We were his only welcoming committee when he exited the car.

Connally had a commanding, dignified presence. He was tall, with wavy white hair and a deep baritone voice. That he survived one of the most infamous crimes in American history added to his mystique. While shaking hands with the same man I had seen depicted in countless photographs seated with Kennedy in that blue Lincoln, I felt both awed and awkward. I wanted to ask about his experience on that fateful day, but when my opportunity arose, I fumbled about for a way to approach the sensitive subject. If I ask him about Dallas, will it upset him? Will it cause some traumatic reaction? I lost my nerve.

Connally stood on the sidewalk and signed autographs for us, which created for me an unexpected distraction. As his hand moved across our souvenirs, I stared at his wrist looking for the scars from the bullet's entrance and exit wounds. I couldn't see them, so subconsciously I started leaning closer and closer. While I fixated on his wrist trying to spot his gunshot scars, I noticed that his hand had stopped moving suddenly. A deep voice asked, "Is something wrong, son?"

I snapped back to consciousness with a start. Without realizing it, I had positioned my face about three inches from his hand! Now embarrassed, I glanced upward and saw Connally looking at me quizzically.

"Son? Are you okay?"

"Oh, I'm sorry governor, I was—I was—I was admiring your cufflinks! And I'm farsighted. I just wanted to get a good look at them. Boy, they sure are beauties."

"My wife gave them to me. I'll tell her you like them." He posed for a group picture, and then he disappeared inside the studio.

Damn! John Connally stood with me on a deserted street, but I was a kid and I lost my nerve. I never asked my questions. That was too bad because the opportunity never returned.

Although John Connally and I never met again, I still got to see in person the man in the jump seat, along with a very, very good look at a nice pair of cufflinks. 

One Last Recollection

A final memory comes from the man whose photograph taken that day made headlines around the world. Although his image is seared into every memory of November 22, 1963, you won't recognize his name, but you know Clint Hill. At the first sound of gunfire, he was the Secret Service agent who jumped onto the rear of SS-100-X, pushed Mrs. Kennedy back into the car, and threw himself over the First Couple as the limousine sped to the hospital.

Born in 1932, the college athlete became a Secret Service agent in 1957 after a stint in Army intelligence. He served on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's protective detail and then, after Kennedy's election, the Service assigned him to guard First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. On November 22, 1963, as the motorcade neared the sniper's perch, he stood on the left running board of the Secret Service car trailing behind SS-100-X, which put him in direct line with Mrs. Kennedy's position in her car.

At the sound of the first shot, Hill jumped from the running board and sprinted to the presidential limousine. He put his foot on the rear bumper and grabbed the handrail to pull himself onto the car, but the limo driver accelerated rapidly. Hill almost fell off, but he managed to pull himself onto it in time to save Mrs. Kennedy, who had climbed onto the rear trunk to retrieve a section of her husband's skull. Hill shoved her back inside, and then he protected the Kennedys with his own body until they arrived at Parkland Hospital.

I never had the privilege of meeting Agent Hill, but we did correspond some years ago. After the fiftieth anniversary of Dallas, I wrote and asked him about that day. He responded with an amazing handwritten letter that described November 22, 1963 as a routine day for presidential travel. The crowds they encountered in Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas remained large and enthusiastic.

As the motorcade turned into Dealey Plaza, he heard a gunshot and saw Kennedy react to it by grabbing his throat. Hill rushed toward the presidential limousine to protect the First Couple from additional fire. He added a final, brief sentence to this most painful recollection:

"I was too late."

• • •

After thirty years at the helm of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Dave Powers retired in 1994. He died at age 85 of a heart attack on March 28, 1998.

Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy's personal secretary, died at age 85 of cancer on May 11, 1995.

Jack Valenti ran the MPAA for thirty-eight years until his retirement in 2004. He died at age 85 on April 26, 2007 of complications after suffering a stroke.

Richard Nixon hoped to make John Connally his new vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, but the Democrat-controlled Congress signaled it would not confirm the man who abandoned their Party to align himself with Nixon. In 1980, Connally ran for president as a Republican, but he garnered only one delegate to the national nominating convention. He died at age 76 on June 15, 1993 of pulmonary fibrosis.

Following Dallas, Clint Hill continued in the presidential protective detail. He went on to guard Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. The Secret Service promoted him to the position of assistant director before he retired in 1975.

After Kennedy's assassination, the FBI moved SS-100-X to the White House garage, where agents photographed the interior and searched it for evidence. It was cleaned, painted, and overhauled, and then it returned to presidential service. During the next fifteen years, it transported Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter before the government retired it from the fleet in 1977. The next year, it went on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where it remains to this day as one of the venue's most popular attractions.

[1] Two journalists that I had met in previous years, Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News and David Broder of the Washington Post, both had traveled in the Dallas motorcade press bus. I was unaware of this at the time that I met them, so I missed the opportunity of asking them about it.

[2] According to a schematic chart of the motorcade, both Jack Valenti and Evelyn Lincoln rode in the White House Official Party bus, which was twenty cars behind SS-100-X during the procession through downtown Dallas. See Todd Wayne Vaughan, Presidential Motorcade Schematic Listing, November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas, vers. 9.00 (1993), www.jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/.../Item%2015.pdf, 34 (accessed July 15, 2019).

[3] The car in which Jim Wright rode in the Dallas motorcade was twelve cars behind SS-100-X. See Vaughan, Presidential Schematic, 21.

* * *

Yesterday America lost former First lady Rosalynn Carter, who died at her home in Plains, Georgia at age 96.

During her Washington years, Mrs. Carter brought a gentle dignity and charm to the White House. A devoted wife and mother, her post-White House accomplishments are often overlooked by those of her husband. Every time Jimmy Carter swung a hammer to build a Habitat for Humanity home in some desolate area of the globe, his wife of 77 years was almost always nearby wearing her own tool belt and assisting in the effort.

On a personal level, Mrs. Carter was lovely, unassuming, and gracious. All of us who had the pleasure of meeting her will remember her elegance and true Southern charm.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Carter.

I am saddened to learn of the passing of my former colleague, Congressman Tom Bliley (R-VA), who died yesterday at age 91.

A mortician by profession (don't bother with the jokes—he had heard them all), Bliley served as Richmond's mayor before winning election to the House in 1980. When I was elected in 1996, he was chairman of the committee to which I had hoped to gain appointment: the House Commerce Committee, which was Congress' oldest (and arguably most powerful) committee.

As chairman, he ran a tight ship, and he showed little interest in the uninformed contributions of his junior members. During committee hearings, after the chairman and a few senior members made their introductory remarks, Bliley made it known he preferred that his junior members (e.g., me) submit their comments in writing.

He also didn't value independent spirits from his GOP ranks when it came to Virginia's parochial interests. Before he signed off on my joining the Commerce Committee, he called me on his cell phone during Freshman Orientation Week while having his car serviced at his neighborhood "Jiffy Lube."

"Newt [Speaker Newt Gingrich] wants my blessing on you joining my committee," he said in his southern drawl. However, before he consented, the chairman demanded my assurance on a vital question: "If I let you on Commerce, are you gonna give me any trouble over 'The Golden Weed'?

The Golden Weed?

"Well, Mr. Chairman," I began, "as a former prosecutor and a former state court judge, I'm afraid I have a problem with legalizing marijuana. It leads to—"

"I'm not talkin' about marijuana!" he snorted. "I want to make sure you won't give me any troubles with tobacco! I don't need another pain in the ass Californian on my committee like Henry Waxman [a liberal Democrat from Los Angeles]." As the chairman railed about Waxman's ongoing anti-tobacco crusade, I surmised that he assumed everyone west of Atlanta wanted to treat tobacco as if it were crack cocaine.

 I assured him that I had libertarian values on The Golden Weed, and the deal was done.

After I left Congress, the chairman took me to lunch. While we dined, a bevy of lobbyists made a pilgrimage to our table to pay homage to the senior lawmaker, with each one topping the last in pouring out effusive praise for Bliley's brilliance and eminence. When the last of them left, I asked Chairman Tom if he ever grew tired of all of this brown-nosing.

He smiled. "Rogan," he told me, "I always try and remember that whenever all of these people line up to kiss my ass, it ain't my ass that they're really kissin'. It's the chair that my ass sits in that they're really kissin'!

Very sound advice for anyone holding a position of power or responsibility.

Rest in peace, Mr. Chairman. It was a pleasure serving with you.

Is today's mainstream media fair and balanced, or do its practitioners put their fat thumbs on the liberal side of the political scale—and then fight to keep it there?

Turner Catledge (1901-1983) joined the New York Times in 1929 as a beat reporter; he retired 40 years later after serving as the paper's managing editor, executive editor, and the company's vice president. For many years he was, as the subtitle of his 1971 autobiography revealed, "the man who ran the world's most powerful newspaper."

A lifelong Democrat who believed in keeping his political leanings out of hard news stories, Catledge made no bones about his personal ideological bent: "I am a Democrat, both by tradition and conviction," he wrote in his memoir. "I am a Democrat for the same reason the Pope is a Catholic—I was born one and subsequent developments persuaded me to remain one. I've scratched the Democratic ticket only once and felt terribly unclean when I did." Turner Catledge, My Life and The Times: By the Man Who Ran the World's Most Powerful Newspaper (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 66.

In reading his memoir this week, I was taken aback by an observation that he made over a half century ago: he wrote that during his final years as editor in the late 1960s, the Times "began to have a new sort of problem in our political coverage. The war in Vietnam, growing racial tensions, and other factors had radicalized many talented young journalists. Some didn't want to work for the Times, with its demands of objective reporting, and some who did come to work for us often chafed at our requirements [of objectivity in reporting]. They wanted a journalism of commitment, and resented those of us who seemed to hold them back. They were a new generation, and we editors could no longer take it for granted that they were devoted to the ideal of objectivity and impartiality." Catledge, 213.

Instead of correcting this defect, journalism schools and the media hierarchy over the last half century have encouraged it. What is the result? A recent Gallup poll (February 2023) showed that respect for the press has cratered to such a degree that a solid majority of Americans now believe that news organizations exist not just to skew the news ideologically—they exist to deliberately mislead the public.

America's journalism schools and the mainstream press should heed Turner Catledge's warning from long ago.

In mid-2001, President George W. Bush nominated me for U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce. The subsequent 9-11 terrorist attacks held up my U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing because the Senate turned its attention to establishing the Department of Homeland Security, confirming a new FBI director, and other pressing issues. It was not until late 2001 that the White House notified me that the Judiciary Committee had calendared my hearing.

"But I have some bad news for you," the presidential liaison officer added. "A committee staffer called and told us that Senator Dianne Feinstein is going to chair your hearing. The staffer snickered when she told us. It sounds like the committee Democrats want to get even for you almost running against Feinstein last year."

It was true. Since I faced a near-impossible 2000 congressional reelection campaign following my role in impeaching President Clinton (who held a 75% approval rating in my Los-Angeles and Hollywood studios-based district), I gave serious consideration to a go-for-broke statewide U.S. Senate race against Dianne. The national Democrats had made my House seat their Number One target, and my constituents remained furious at me for helping to impeach Clinton. Since I had more donors and had raised more money than any other member of Congress—Senate or House—I had nothing to lose in making the longshot race against Dianne. In the end, GOP House leaders talked me into taking a pass on the Senate run. I went home to defend my House seat against Democrat State Senator Adam Schiff, who clobbered me in November 2000. No matter: given the utterly disastrous GOP showing statewide in California that year, Dianne wouldn't have clobbered me.

She would have annihilated me.

Back to my story: The Democrat committee staffer who thought she was sharing nail-biting news about Dianne chairing my hearing didn't know that I had a good relationship with my state's senior senator. We had worked together on several California projects, and I helped her when I could on nonpartisan issues. Beyond that, city blood was thicker than water: Dianne and I were both San Francisco natives, and she knew that when I was a young kid (and back then an ardent Democrat), I had passed out her literature in her S.F. Board of Supervisors and mayoral campaigns. Once, during the Clinton impeachment trial, Dianne approached me on the Senate floor during a recess. "Hey, Jim," she asked, "remind me. What part of San Francisco are you from?"

"I'm from the Mission District, Dianne. Fourth generation."

She shook her head. "No wonder you're so damned tough," she said.

We got along.

When my White House hand-holder finished kvetching about Dianne chairing my hearing, I told him not to worry. I called Dianne directly and I asked her to be my sponsoring senator introducing me to the committee.

She agreed.

On the morning of my confirmation hearing, Dianne presented me to her colleagues with such compliments that when my turn came to address the committee, I chided her gently: "Madam Chairwoman, of all the kind things you just said about my background, you left out the one that's most important for today's hearing."

Dianne looked puzzled as my mild push-back, and then she invited me to share the missing ingredient. I smiled: "Last year, I had the infinite good sense not to run against you for reelection."

A couple of years later, Dianne gave me private OK when President Bush nominated me to the federal bench. That was not enough to get me through, because the Democrat-controlled Senate blocked most of Bush's judicial nominees near the close of his second and final term.

In more recent years, and toward the end of President Trump's term, I was a finalist for consideration by the White House for nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Near the end of the lengthy back-and-forth between the Trump White House and California's two Democrat senators (Dianne and Kamala Harris), Dianne opened private negotiations with President Trump's people—a negotiation that, with her blessing, would have included my nomination as part of a package deal. Unfortunately, this was only a few days after Republicans had become infuriated with Dianne for sliding in a surprise witness at the high profile confirmation hearing for Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. The witness sandbagged Kavanaugh with decades-old allegations of sexual improprieties. When word leaked out that Trump's people were now negotiating with Feinstein over federal judges after her Kavanaugh assault, conservative columnists and talk radio hosts lit up in condemnation for Trump in negotiating anything with the woman responsible for the Kavanaugh slander. Overnight my name dropped from the list, and the White House nominated a non-Feinstein vetted person as a sop to outraged conservative thought leaders.

Most conservatives who pay attention to politics disliked Dianne Feinstein.  I was not one of them. Although our politics rarely meshed, she was a serious legislator, and she was old school. Although she remained in the game long past her expiration date, I liked Dianne Feinstein, and I mourn her passing this week at age 90.

Starting in the 1940s, the US Supreme Court began turning America into a secular nation under their "separation of church and state" doctrine - - an out-of-context phrase that was derived from a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson. 

Apparently, neither Jefferson nor George Washington got the Court's memo. Here is a small sampling I ran across this weekend while reading a compilation of some of their famous orations in Alexander K. McClure's "Famous American Statesmen and Orators" (1902):

"And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.

"It would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty being, who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States[.]" George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789.

"We ought to be persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and what which Heaven itself has ordained." George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789.

"Before taking my leave on this occasion, [I appeal] once more to the benign Parent of the human race, in humble supplication, that, since He has been pleased to favor the American people with opportunities for deliberating in perfect tranquility, and dispositions for deciding with unparalleled unanimity on a form of government for the security of their union and the advancement of their happiness, so His divine blessing may be equally conspicuous in the enlarged views, the temperate consultations, and the wise measures on which the success of this government must depend." George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789.

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.… Let is simply be asked: where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligations deserved the oath which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle…. It is substantially true that virtue and morality are a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?" George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796.

I could go on, but you get the point. 

"A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude. One of the first signs of the breaking down of free government is a disregard by the taxing power of the right of the people to their own property. It makes little difference whether such a condition is brought about through the will of a dictator, through the power of a military force, or through the pressure of an organized minority. The result is the same. Unless the people can enjoy that reasonable security in the possession of their property, which is guaranteed by the Constitution, against unreasonable taxation, freedom is at an end." Calvin Coolidge, June 30, 1924.

Fifty years ago today—June 13, 1973—California Governor Ronald Reagan gave to me the most meaningful item of political memorabilia in my collection. It not only traveled far and then returned, but it changed my life—and maybe a bit of history, as you will see.

On that long-ago afternoon, Governor Reagan headlined a luncheon in the Plaza Ballroom of the Boundary Oak clubhouse in Walnut Creek, California. Hosted by the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association, the invitation promised that Reagan would "present his bold initiative proposal entitled 'A Reasonable Program for Revenue Control and Tax Reduction' [which calls for] an effective lid on state government spending."

Unbelievable by today's standards, attending this private reception with Ronald Reagan, enjoying a country club sit-down lunch with him, and hearing him unveil a major administration initiative cost "$6 per lunch including tax and tip" (per the invitation). Back then, six bucks was a lot of money to a young teenager, and I didn't have it, but the deficiency didn't discourage me. By the way, to the hostess who left the Boundary Oak's entrance door unattended momentarily that day, I send my deepest thanks across the years.

Reagan arrived at noon and admirers besieged him. While others ate, he enjoyed little of the lunch served him. Instead, he spent most of his time shaking hands, posing for photographs, and signing autographs for admirers.

Shortly before the program began, Reagan sat at the head table reviewing his stack of four-by-six cards bearing his handwritten speech notes. I decided to wait around after the luncheon and ask him if I could have them for my political collection.

After Reagan finished his speech, his security detail whisked him to the nearby La Velada room for a radio broadcast, and then for a hastily arranged meeting with Republican state legislators bussed down from Sacramento so that Reagan could brief them on his new initiative. Scores of luncheon guests lingered outside the room waiting for him to exit, but as the hours passed only three people remained: a ten year-old boy holding a vintage Brownie camera, his mother, and me.

Three hours later, a Reagan aide told us that the governor was about to leave, but not from the entrance where we waited. His security detail had brought his car around to the rear. The aide suggested that we wait by his car if we wanted to see him when he departed. The boy and his mother were in front of me as we made for the exit, but they moved too slowly. As we stepped through the door, Reagan had just settled into the rear of his limousine. His motorcade started pulling away.

For some reason, Reagan glanced back over his shoulder. He saw the boy holding the old camera dropping his head in disappointment. Reagan leaned forward and said something to his driver. The limousine stopped, and then it backed up to where we stood. Rolling down his window, Reagan called to the boy, "Hi, son! Were you waiting to take a picture of me?" The speechless boy nodded his head. With no reporters (or anyone else) around to witness his kindness, Reagan climbed out of the car, greeted the boy and his mother, and posed for a picture with them. He then turned to me and smiled.

Here was my chance. I praised his luncheon speech and then I said to him, "Governor, while you were reviewing your notes, I saw that they were all handwritten. Did you write them out yourself?"

"Why, yes, I did," he replied. When I asked if I could see them, he pulled them from his coat pocket and handed them to me. As I leafed through the cards, he told me he had written them the night before in his hotel room. He explained that with this speech he had formally kicked off his statewide ballot initiative campaign to reduce state taxes and curb spending. Calling this the "signature initiative of my administration," he told me he had spent three hours last night working on it because of its significance.

It was now or never: "Governor, may I have them for my political memorabilia collection?"

He grimaced. "Uh, well," he said, "you see, I'll need to give this speech more than once and I don't have another copy of it. My staff will kill me if I don't come back with it."

Sensing my opportunity slipping away, and remembering how the sad-faced boy with the Brownie camera had touched Reagan's sympathy nerve, I tried the same ploy. I dropped my chin to my chest and wiped away a nonexistent tear. "I understand, governor. It took you three hours to write it. Three hours—that's how long I've been waiting for you."

He sighed. "Okay, you win. You may not be able to make heads or tails out of my writing, but you can have them."

Brazenly, I handed back the last note card to him: "They're no good if you don't autograph them," I said. Smiling and shaking his head, he penned his name on the last card and returned it to me. Reagan then took back the cards to show me that on each one his handwritten notes were on one side for today's speech, and on the other side were speech notes typed in large black font. He explained that the typed side was his reading copy of a speech he had delivered earlier to a California Highway Patrol audience. Not one to waste paper, he said he used the back of the CHP speech to handwrite his speech notes for today's event. "So you see," he said, "you're really getting two speeches for the price of one."

• • •

The rest of the story:

Eight years later, when voters installed Ronald Reagan in the White House, I was a student at UCLA Law School. A financial crisis hit, and I needed $1,500 to pay for my tuition or else the school would drop me. Knowing of my dire straits, a collector offered me the needed money for Reagan's speech notes. I refused. The new president gave them to me, and I could never part with them.

As time ran out and faced with the choice of being kicked out of school or selling the notes, I had no choice but to let them go. I kept page one of Reagan's notes in my collection, and I sold pages two through eight. The money paid my tuition. I finished law school, passed the bar exam, and my career took its course.

After I served as a House Manager in the U.S. Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton, I had lunch with Clinton's White House counsel, my friend Lanny Davis. He told me that during the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings, Clinton and the White House senior staff called me, "The Domino." I asked why. He explained that they had identified several GOP Judiciary Committee members wanting to vote against impeachment, but they needed cover. These congressmen said that if I voted against it, then they could use the excuse that an ex-prosecutor and an ex-judge looked at the evidence and found it lacking. "We knew if we could flip you our way, these others would follow," Lanny told me. "We could have killed impeachment in the committee." I suspected that his assessment overestimated my influence, but he insisted that they had the votes to defeat impeachment if their linchpin (me) voted no.

Not long after this lunch, I spent a rare afternoon relaxing at home and sifting through my memorabilia collection. When I came upon page one of Reagan's old speech notes, I looked at it for a long time while thinking about what Lanny had told me. If Ronald Reagan hadn't given me those notes almost 30 years earlier, I wouldn't have finished law school, which meant that I never would have become a prosecutor, a judge, a state legislator, a congressman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, or a House Manager in the Clinton impeachment trial. Would that changed circumstance have mattered to the ultimate vote? Who knows?

As I reflected on Lanny's chain reaction theory, it caused renewed pining over the forced sale of pages two through eight, I hoped that Ronald Reagan might forgive me if he knew that I had sold them to finish my education and embark on a life of public service. Somehow, I felt he would.

A few weeks later, I was flipping through an auction catalog of political memorabilia for sale. I gasped when I saw Auction Lot #73: it was pages two through eight of my old Reagan speech note cards. The original purchaser had died, and his heirs were selling his collection. I bid on the notes and then monitored the competition by telephone on the night of the auction. When the sun rose the next morning, Ronald Reagan's 1973 Boundary Oak speech notes returned home.

Some years later, I showed the notes to Martin Anderson, a former Reagan senior adviser who wrote two Reagan books sourced from the president's holographic archives. He told me that his comprehensive research throughout Reagan's body of work showed that my Boundary Oak note cards are the only known complete set of Reagan's famous four-by-six-inch handwritten speech notes outside the possession of the Reagan Library. More importantly, they are the only autographed complete set known to exist anywhere. Apparently, nobody ever thought to ask Reagan to sign his speech cards before I came along, and nobody bothered to ask after.

Because Ronald Reagan wouldn't turn down a glib fan in a parking lot half a century ago, a unique historic treasure now rests in the archives of Michigan's Hillsdale College (where I donated them in 2018). Lining the pathway to Hillsdale's repository of my donation are life-sized bronze statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.

• • •

My visit to the Boundary Oak clubhouse in 1973 wasn't the last time that I waited three hours for Ronald Reagan. I did it once again 30 years later on a hot, muggy afternoon in downtown Washington, D.C. At the first sight of the American and presidential flags leading the procession, I couldn't help but smile in recalling Ronald Reagan's grimace, followed by the twinkle in his eye, when he handed over that stack of note cards 31 years earlier. On that day in 2004, as I watched the riderless horse following his flag draped casket pass by, I remembered what Ronald Reagan did for America and for the cause of freedom.

But mostly, I remembered what Ronald Reagan, so long ago, did for me.

* * * * *

Richard Riordan, a wealthy businessman who won election as the 39th Mayor of Los Angeles (1993 to 2001), was the last Republican to hold that position. When I served as a Republican representative in both the California legislature and in Congress, I represented Los Angeles County, and so I worked closely with Dick on many issues and we became quite friendly.

At his request I gave him my endorsement when he ran for reelection in 1997; when I ran for reelection a couple of years later, I asked him to reciprocate. "Well, Jim," he told me apologetically, "I think you're the greatest, we're friends, and you know I'm all for you. But, well, I have to work with the Democrats in L.A., you have a big target on your back, and it might hurt me if I endorse you. I hope you understand." I told him I did—completely. No hard feelings.

A couple of days later he called me. "You know," he told me, "I've been thinking about it. You're really a great congressman and you deserve reelection, so I'm endorsing you."

Any gratitude I felt was tamped down a bit when, a few hours later, I learned that he had timed his call to me to coincide with Mrs. Dick Riordan issuing a press release announcing that she was hosting a major Los Angeles fundraiser--for my opponent!

Dick Riordan died today at age 92. As I told him 25 years ago, still no hard feelings. Rest in peace. 

One of the most liberal members of the House of Representatives during the years spanning the presidencies of Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) was the first female member of Congress to win election from Colorado. During her quarter century in Washington, she was an aggressive advocate for many left-wing causes (few or none of which I would have agreed with had I been her colleague back then).

I arrived in Washington just as she left Congress, but I came to know her when she became president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers. Because my portfolio covered intellectual property, she became a frequent visitor to my office. She was the one who introduced me over lunch in the Capitol restaurant to her close friend and former House colleague, Geraldine Ferraro (D-NY), the 1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee.

In late 1987, Pat was an undeclared (and virtually unknown) candidate for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. Along with six other candidates with little or no national standing, the press dubbed the group of aspirants, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." On the eve of what observers thought would be her presidential campaign kickoff, she announced that she would not seek the White House.

During one of our visit many years later, I asked Pat why she had opted out of the presidential race. With her large smile, she threw back her head and laughed. "Well," she told me, "it dawned on me that if I ran and won, I'd be like the dog who chases cars. I'd have asked myself, 'Now that I've caught it, what do I do with it?!"

A tough fighter in the trenches, but a charming lady behind the scenes, she died today at age 82. Rest in peace.

I met Raquel Welch at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco almost 50 years ago when the American Cancer Society presented her with an award. Before she entered the ballroom, so many fans crowded around her in the foyer that they mobbed her. Incredibly, this world-renown star had no entourage or security. She showed up unescorted to the event. Seeing her predicament, I took her arm, told her to follow me, and I led her into the safety of the then-empty ballroom where she was to be honored at a tribute banquet. Later that evening, when she saw me, she rewarded my gallantry with this signed photo, possession of which made me the envy of every other guy I knew in 1975--and probably now.

On that night many decades ago, I had expected to encounter an Amazon. I was surprised to find her both petite and shy; I was not surprised to find her a woman of almost indescribable beauty. Moreover, she was very gracious. This delightful woman charmed a smitten teenage photographer long ago, and that charm remains as he remembers her upon her passing today at age 82. Rest in peace.

Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the founding legends of rock and roll, died this week at age 87.

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s I paid my way through law school bartending at the world-famous Palomino Club in North Hollywood, where I saw Jerry Lee perform often.

A Jerry Lee performance had nothing predictable about it except that it guaranteed a sellout crowd. Not long after I started there, Jerry Lee took the stage in a packed house for his first show. He banged out a few notes and then shoved the piano off the stage. The huge instrument smashed onto the floor below. As the astonished crowd watched, Jerry Lee yelled at a stunned Tommy Thomas, the owner of the club, "The next time I play your fuckin' club, Tommy, have a piano that's in tune." The audience cheered as Jerry Lee stalked off to his dressing room.

Tommy somehow managed to find another tuned piano in time for the second show. After that, every time Jerry Lee played, a piano tuner sat underneath the stage for every show and retuned the instrument before and after each performance.

Crowds who came to see Jerry Lee Lewis proved as rowdy as their idol. When he played one night on my night off, I came in to see his opening show of a three-night run. Tommy filled the old barn with customers well above legal capacity. By the time Jerry Lee went on, the whooping cowboys in the audience had been drinking for hours. Country star Tanya Tucker, seated in the front row, mounted Jerry Lee's piano and sang a couple of songs as the fiery pianist pounded on the keys. One excited cowboy climbed atop a table for a better view. An arm reached up from the crowd and jerked him backward. Soon tables overturned, fists and bottles flew, and a melee erupted. When one drunk tried to climb on the stage, Jerry Lee kicked him and sent him flying backward into the audience without missing a note on the piano. A hysterical waitress working her first night ran up to me in a panic.

"Do something!" she screamed.

"I am," I replied. "I'm watching Jerry Lee's show."

Rest in peace, Killer.

* * * * *

[Adapted from my book Shaking Hands with History]

Over the years, I came to meet or know about ten people who rode in President John F. Kennedy's fateful motorcade through Dallas on November 22, 1963. Of all of them, I once met the man with whom I wanted to talk the most about that day. Unfortunately, our encounter was not under circumstances that allowed me to ask former Texas Governor John Connally about his recollections of riding with Kennedy in the presidential limousine (the vehicle identified by the Secret Service as SS-100-X).

Born in Texas in 1917, Connally served in the Navy during World War II. Later, he obtained a law degree and became an aide to his longtime friend, Lyndon Johnson, during LBJ's congressional years. At Johnson's urging, Kennedy named Connally as secretary of the Navy in 1961, a position he held until he resigned the following year to run for Texas governor. He went on to win three consecutive terms in the statehouse, and in this capacity, he welcomed the Kennedys to his home state in November 1963.

When the presidential motorcade departed Love Field for downtown Dallas, Connally sat in the jump seat of SS-100-X directly in front of Kennedy. According to the official Warren Commission report, the assassin's second shot passed through Kennedy's neck and throat, and then it struck Connally's back, exited his chest, blew through his wrist, and then lodged in his thigh. Although seriously wounded in the shooting, Connally survived.

President Nixon named Connally (still a Democrat at that time) as his secretary of the Treasury in 1971. Sixteen months later, he resigned to head "Democrats for Nixon" for the Republican president's 1972 reelection campaign.

Three weeks before Election Day 1972, Connally came to San Francisco as a Nixon campaign surrogate to campaign against the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator George McGovern. Along with two school friends (Dan Swanson and Alex Pava), I waited outside KGO at dawn for him to arrive. The sun was just rising when a black stretch limousine pulled to the curb. We were his only welcoming committee when he exited the car.

Connally had a commanding, dignified presence. He was tall, with wavy white hair and a deep baritone voice. That he survived one of the most infamous crimes in American history added to his mystique. While shaking hands with the same man I had seen depicted in countless photographs seated with Kennedy in that blue Lincoln, I felt both awed and awkward. I wanted to ask about his experience on that fateful day, but when my opportunity arose, I fumbled about for a way to approach the sensitive subject. If I ask him about Dallas, will it upset him? Will it cause some traumatic reaction? I lost my nerve.

Connally stood on the sidewalk and signed autographs for us, which created for me an unexpected distraction. As his hand moved across our souvenirs, I stared at his wrist looking for the scars from the bullet's entrance and exit wounds. I couldn't see them, so subconsciously I started leaning closer and closer. While I fixated on his wrist trying to spot his gunshot scars, I noticed that his hand had stopped moving suddenly. A deep voice asked, "Is something wrong, son?"

I snapped back to consciousness with a start. Without realizing it, I had positioned my face about three inches from his hand! Now embarrassed, I glanced upward and saw Connally looking at me quizzically.

"Son? Are you okay?"

"Oh, I'm sorry governor, I was—I was—I was admiring your cufflinks! And I'm farsighted. I just wanted to get a good look at them. Boy, they sure are beauties."

"My wife gave them to me. I'll tell her you like them." He posed for a group picture, and then he disappeared inside the studio.

Damn! John Connally stood with me on a deserted street, but I was a kid and I lost my nerve. I never asked my questions. That was too bad because the opportunity never returned.

Although John Connally and I never met again, I still got to see in person the man in the jump seat, along with a very, very good look at a nice pair of cufflinks. 

• • •

President Nixon had hoped to make John Connally his new vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, but the Democrat-controlled Congress signaled it would not confirm the man who had abandoned their Party to align himself with Nixon. In 1980, Connally ran for president as a Republican, but he garnered only one delegate to the national nominating convention. He died at age 76 on June 15, 1993 of pulmonary fibrosis.

* * * * *

By October 1972, polls showed that Democrat presidential nominee George McGovern's campaign appeared headed for an overwhelming defeat at the hands of President Nixon in the general election four weeks away. Anticipating the White House loss, Democrat Party leaders turned their attention to protecting their congressional majorities. Their national campaign committee scheduled all-star fundraising dinners around the country, and the San Francisco installment (at $500 per couple) came to the Fairmont Hotel on October 5.

My 12 year-old brother Pat and I slipped into the Grand Ballroom when a security guard left the entrance unattended temporarily. After entering, we had lengthy and uninterrupted time to visit with both former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (defeated recently by McGovern for the 1972 presidential nomination) and Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, McGovern's original vice presidential running mate dropped from the ticket in late July (I'll have more to say about Senator Eagleton in the next chapter). Only a few months earlier, while active candidates, both had traveled the country with an army of Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers, and cheering fans greeting them at every stop. At this event, the donor-guests paid scant notice to either of them, preferring instead to cultivate and flatter the other political leaders in attendance not branded recently by defeat. It taught me at an early age that political adulation for winners is fleeting; for losers, it's nonexistent.

I had hoped to meet one of those leaders attracting great attention that night: House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-LA). First elected to Congress in 1941, he had served on the Warren Commission that investigated and reported the government's official version of President Kennedy's assassination. With House Speaker Carl Albert's pending retirement, Boggs was the heavy favorite to succeed him as the next speaker of the House. Who better than to ask questions about my future congressional aspirations? Throughout the evening, each time I tried to approach him, the crowd surrounding Mr. Leader appeared impenetrable.

At the end of the formal program that evening, and as the room emptied, I saw Boggs talking privately in a corner of the room with local Congressman Phillip Burton (D-CA) and his brother, California State Assemblyman John Burton.[1] Pat and I hung back and waited for their animated conversation to end so that I could meet and talk to the future speaker.

While we lingered, a diminutive woman tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was waiting to meet Boggs. I told her yes, but I didn't want to interrupt his discussion with the Burtons. Insisting the majority leader wouldn't mind, she took my arm and pulled me toward the object of my interest. I balked and said that I didn't want to intrude—I was content to wait.

"Oh, he won't mind at all," she said with a smile as she continued tugging. "I'm Lindy Boggs—Hale's wife."

Mrs. Boggs (with Pat and me in tow) broke into the political powwow with the Burtons and introduced us to everyone. Then she took my camera and directed our group to pose together for a photograph. Boggs signed an autograph for me after his wife snapped the picture. When she told him of my interest in politics and government, he urged me to stick with it. "Maybe I'll see you back in Washington someday," he said.

• • •

Eleven days later, Majority Leader Boggs went to Alaska to campaign for Congressman Nick Begich's reelection. In Anchorage, they took off in a small twin-engine Cessna bound for Juneau. The plane disappeared somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the lengthiest search in U.S. history, authorities to this day never have located the plane or the victims' bodies.

On January 3, 1973, the House passed a resolution declaring Boggs's seat vacant due to his death. His widow Lindy ran successfully in the special election to fill her late husband's seat. After she took office, I sent her a copy of the photograph she had taken that night at the Fairmont (which turned out to be one of the last pictures taken of her husband). In her gracious reply letter, she recalled our conversation regarding my goal of one day serving in Congress. She noted that in ten years I would be 25, which is the constitutional age for congressional eligibility.

"I'll wait for you," she wrote.

 A quarter century later, after I won a seat in Congress, I tracked down former Congresswoman Boggs' address (she had retired after serving almost 20 years in the  House) and  sent her a copy of the photo she had taken and the letter she had written me long ago. On my new congressional letterhead, I penned this message: "I am so disappointed—you didn't wait for me!" Soon thereafter, she visited me in Washington for a lovely reunion lunch. After she became U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See during the Clinton Administration, we had dinner together at the American embassy during my trip to Rome.

• • •

A couple of years later, while in the middle of President Clinton's impeachment drama, I appeared on the ABC News Sunday show This Week. I broadcast my segment from the Los Angeles affiliate station via satellite. Before airtime, I heard through my earpiece ABC News analyst and program host Cokie Roberts (in the Washington studio) thanking me for coming on her program.

While we waited to go live, I mentioned my story about her parents, Hale and Lindy Boggs. Suddenly my earpiece went dead. A few minutes later, we went on the air and she interviewed me without missing a beat.

A few weeks later, Cokie and I had lunch. I mentioned to her the curious "dead earpiece" incident from our interview. She said that my audio feed went silent because she had become emotional when I mentioned meeting her father in San Francisco, and she needed to compose herself before airtime. That event where I met her parents was the last time that she ever saw him. She added that she already knew the story of my meeting her parents because her mother had shared it with her previously, but until I had raised it, she hadn't made the connection that I was the congressman of whom her mother spoke.

Here is yet another example that this is, indeed, a small world. Maybe there's something to that "Six Degrees of Separation" theory after all.

• • •

Former Congresswoman Lindy Boggs died at age 97 of natural causes on July 27, 2013.

Reporter Cokie Roberts died at age 75 of cancer on September 17, 2019.

* * * * *

When I think of my beloved friend Ken Starr, who died yesterday at age 76, I remember one of the kindest men—and one of the most brilliant lawyers—I have ever known. He and his wife Alice were dear friends of Christine's and mine for almost a quarter of a century, and we mourn his loss as we would that of a family member.

I have many memories of Ken over the years, and I shared some of them in my Clinton impeachment memoir "Catching Our Flag." But the one that came to mind when I heard the news yesterday goes back about 23 years ago when both of us were still quite recognizable because of constant media exposure over the preceding years.

Shortly after the impeachment trial, we went to lunch at one of our favorite hangouts, the Silver Diner café in Arlington, Virginia. The Silver Diner is a 1950s-style hamburger joint complete with vinyl booth seating and little tabletop juke boxes.

While we ate, I noticed an ample woman seated at the counter staring at us. I smiled and nodded. After she paid her check, she walked over.

"I know you two guys," she exclaimed. "You're those two impeachment guys. I recognize you from TV."

Ken, the former special counsel whose investigative report to the House Judiciary Committee led to Clinton's impeachment,  smiled and started to extend his hand to introduce himself. I brushed his arm aside and took it from there:

"Lady," I told her, "you've just made our day. Actually, we're not those guys. We're celebrity impersonators. The reason we're in suits and ties is because we're doing a gig this afternoon in front of the Northern Virginia Title Insurance Agents convention over in Tysons Corner."

"Oh!" she replied. "That's amazing. You really look like them. So what do you guys do?"

"Well, we tell some Clinton and impeachment jokes, we do a soft shoe dance, and then we sing a little song. No big deal."

"What do you sing?"

I turned to Ken, whose face looked blank.  The only song that came to mind at the moment was an old Irish ballad:

"We sing 'Danny Boy.'"

"I love that song! Sing it for me?"

And with that, Judge Ken Starr and I sang "Danny Boy" during the lunchtime rush at the Silver Diner. We must have been okay, because a short order cook behind the counter joined us.

A smattering of nearby patrons applauded our completion. The woman thanked us, and then she gave Ken a quizzical look.

"What's wrong?" Ken asked.

"Well," she said, "now that I get a better look at you two guys, I think he [pointing to me] really looks like the guy on TV." Then she turned back to Ken and shook her head dismissively. "You," she told him, "well, work on it. You don't quite have it down yet." With that, she turned and exited.

When she was beyond earshot, we all laughed—and nobody laughed harder than Judge Kenneth W. Starr.

Rest in our Lord and Savior's arms, Brother Ken. We'll meet again.

* * * * *

[This story is adapted from my 2013 book, And Then I Met….]

For five generations, audiences have laughed at the antics of those irrepressible kids from producer Hal Roach's Our Gang comedy films made in the 1920s–1940s (later dubbed The Little Rascals for television syndication). Of the many child actors who came and went during the life of the classic series, perhaps the best known and most beloved was George "Spanky" McFarland, the chubby leader of the gang. Along with pals Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Darla, Butch, and others, the Gang stumbled from one hilarious childhood circumstance to another. After a decade of starring in these comedy short subjects, Spanky became a Hollywood has-been at age 14 in 1942. He and his family moved back to Texas, and for the next 50 years he worked in various sales jobs while making occasional guest appearances on television and at Hollywood memorabilia shows.

When executing his 1930s movie contracts with the Hal Roach Studios, Spanky's parents signed away the rights to his name and image forever. Decades later, Spanky filed strings of lawsuits against people and companies using his childhood image. It galled him that these legal efforts hit repeated brick walls. That was how we first met: I did some legal work for him as a young lawyer in the early 1980s, and we kept in touch afterward.

• • •

Movie producer Hal E. Roach created the Our Gang–Little Rascals film treasury. Nicknamed "The Boss" by the actors and crew who worked on Roach's "Lot of Fun," he began his film career in 1912 when he did extra work in silent films. Within a couple of years he started his own production company that became the premiere comedy factory in Hollywood. Harold Lloyd, Will Rogers, Jean Harlow, and Charley Chase were some of the actors in his stable. Aside from discovering them and creating the Our Gang comedies, he also paired as a team two of his minor contract players. This union gave the world perhaps the best-loved comedy duo in film history: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Hal Roach remained the last living witness to Hollywood's transition from fruit orchards to entertainment Mecca. In 1990 I traveled to Catalina Island for a celebration of Stan Laurel's centenary. While attending a special showing of Stan and Ollie movies at the Avalon Theatre, an elderly man seated in front of me laughed heartily at the comedy antics on-screen. At the end of the showing, the house lights came up and the emcee announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, all these films will live forever because of the vision and foresight of the movie pioneering genius who created and produced these classic treasures, Hal Roach. Mr. Roach will celebrate his 100th birthday next year and we are honored to have him with us tonight. Please welcome Mr. Hal Roach." The audience rose in an ovation, and the old man seated in front of me who had laughed throughout the films stood and waved.

Later that evening, Roach attended Laurel's celebratory birthday banquet in the Carno Ballroom. He invited me to join him at his table for coffee and cigars. He introduced me to Eddie Quillan, a character actor from the 1930s and 1940s most noted for his role in the classic film The Grapes of Wrath. During our visit Quillen appeared drawn and fatigued; two weeks later he suffered a fatal heart attack.

The party remained in full swing long past dinner. When I bid Roach goodnight around midnight, he was still holding court at his table, smoking thin cigars, signing autographs for fans, and greeting well-wishers. I later learned that The Boss stayed until the celebration ended after 2:00 a.m.

• • •

In the fall of 1992, Spanky called and said he planned to visit Los Angeles to meet with his onetime boss Hal Roach (now almost 101). "I've only seen the old man once in 50 years," he told me, "and that was when I presented him his honorary Academy Award in 1984. I've never had the chance to sit and talk to him one-on-one as an adult, so this could be an interesting meeting. I want you to come with me."

As it turned out, the desired reunion with his former employer had a motivation beyond nostalgia. He wanted Roach to sign an affidavit regarding the interpretation of a 1936 contract between Roach Studios and Spanky's parents. Spanky felt the document would help in his pending lawsuit against yet another business using his name. "Some bastards in New Jersey have opened a bar called 'Spanky McFarland's,'" he griped. "They're using my name and likeness, and a statement from Roach might help me in the lawsuit." Although I doubted a contemporaneous affidavit regarding a half-century-old contract would have much legal heft, especially since Roach had disposed of his rights to the Our Gang films decades earlier, any excuse to visit Roach was good enough for me.

On the appointed day, I picked up Spanky and his wife Doris at the Beverly Hilton Hotel where they were staying for the weekend. As we exited, we encountered about a hundred movie fans awaiting the celebrity arrivals for the American Cinema Awards being held at the hotel that evening. Someone behind the rope line outside the entrance recognized Spanky and asked him to come over and sign autographs. He waved them off and grumbled to me that these "autograph hounds" would pester him throughout his stay.

We drove through the winding roads leading to Roach's Beverly Hills home and parked in front of the single-story ranch-style house overlooking a hilltop at 1183 Stradella Lane. Roach's nurse, Don Aho, greeted us at the front door and led us into the living room, which was decorated unpretentiously with worn furniture. Stacks of magazines and inexpensive photo albums lay in piles on tabletops. In the midst of this clutter stood Roach's special Oscar, bookended by photographs of Roach with President Reagan.

Aho escorted Roach into the living room. Leaning on his metal cane and moving slowly, Roach wore hearing aids in each ear. When he saw Spanky, his face brightened and he shuffled quickly toward his portly discovery. Embracing him warmly, he patted Spanky's girth and chuckled, "You haven't slimmed down since you were five years old!"

"The Boss" settled into his chair and told Aho to serve us drinks. A few minutes later, Aho returned with a tray of Diet Cokes. "Spike mine with some vodka," Roach instructed his nurse. Then he turned and said to me with a grin, "I'm almost 101 years old. At this age, I'll have some vodka when I want it!" Spanky asked for his the same way.

Roach said he wanted some photographs taken with his guests and produced two cameras, but one was broken and the other had no film. Fortunately, I had brought mine to record the reunion. Roach liked my suggestion that he and Spanky pose with Roach's Academy Award; I handed the heavy Oscar to Spanky and he held it aloft as my shutter clicked.

Roach pointed to actor Roddy McDowall's oversized book on the coffee table that compiled celebrity photographs coupled with tributes from other stars who knew them. Printed next to the photograph McDowall took of Roach was Spanky's testimonial. Roach handed the book to Spanky and asked him to read it aloud. As Spanky recited his homage to "the man who gave me my first job when I was five years old," his voice broke and both men wept.

Once Aho served the drinks, Roach lit a cigar and spoke generally about the old days of filmmaking. He said people had often tried to buy or borrow his film rights. He joked about taking a trip years earlier to Germany where a film producer had given him an envelope stuffed with cash while requesting the rights to exhibit his films. Roach turned to Spanky and said, "Never sign away your likeness or film rights. They are worth a fortune now." This comment served as an introduction to the business purpose of the meeting.

Spanky told Roach about his pending New Jersey lawsuit, and then he handed Roach the affidavit that he wanted signed. As Roach took the document, he smiled and said, "I'll sign it without even reading it!" Despite this comment, he reviewed the document carefully before scratching his signature on it. "I hope this will help you," he said as he handed it back.

Spanky produced several photographs of the Boss and asked Roach to sign them for family members. Roach obliged and penned his name slowly on the pictures. While he signed, he invited me to tour his trophy room and den. There I saw memorabilia and dozens of inscribed photographs framed on the wall: Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Walt Disney, and Lucille Ball were there alongside pictures of Roach dining with Laurel and Hardy and playing polo with Will Rogers. A presidential commission signed by Harry Truman was displayed amid countless plaques and awards. In the midst of all was a framed poster depicting the Our Gang children.

Over in a corner, Aho showed me boxes on the floor filled with stacks of photographs of Roach. He invited me to select a couple to have The Boss sign for me. When I asked where all the pictures came from, he pointed to a separate four-foot-high stack of envelopes: "This is fan mail that's come in," he said. "The old man signs maybe two or three things a day. The rest go in this pile and are never returned. He just can't do much of this anymore."

Using his cane, Roach joined me in the den and gave me a guided tour of his mementos. I pointed to an oversized photograph of a scowling, bald man in a tuxedo and with his arms folded across his chest. The photo bore a lengthy but undecipherable inscription in white ink. "Mr. Roach," I said as I pointed to the picture, "I recognize this man, but I can't place him. Is this [pioneer film director and actor] Erich von Stroheim?"

Roach bent over and studied the photograph closely. Suddenly, his eyes welled with tears. He looked at me and said, "That was my dear friend—Mussolini! He was a very great man and a dear friend." The Italian Fascist dictator America had battled in World War II was Roach's dear friend? He caught me off guard with his warm feelings for a man whose countrymen so despised him that they hung him from his ankles in the middle of the town square and desecrated his corpse after they had killed him. "Mr. Roach," I said with a grin, "you are probably the only man alive today who not only can say you knew Mussolini as a friend, but who would admit to it!"

Roach shrugged off my comment and shared some insights into his relationship with Il Duce:

"During my visit to Italy in the 1930s, I was summoned to meet Mussolini. I had only seen him in the newsreels, which depicted him as a ranting tyrant who would puff himself up like a big blowfish during his speeches. When I walked into his office, I entered a long room with only a desk and chair at the far end. He sat scowling at me as I approached. But he was full of crap and I knew it! He was acting for me, and I can always spot an actor. As I drew closer, my smile grew larger as his scowl grew deeper. Finally we were face-to-face. I had such a huge broad smile, and he had such a mean scowl! I knew he was a faker, and he knew I knew it. So he finally smiled and shook my hand, and from then on we were friends.

"One night at dinner I sat next to Mussolini's wife. Mussolini sat across from me and next to his mistress. He kept fondling and groping his mistress during dinner. Mrs. Mussolini seemed oblivious to all this and showed no concern for her husband's behavior. Finally, I leaned over and said to Mrs. Mussolini, "Look, I don't mean to pry, but doesn't it bother you that your husband is so intimate with this woman?"

"Mrs. Mussolini appeared confused that I would even ask such a question and replied in great seriousness, 'I am but a mere woman; he is Mussolini! How can one woman ever hope to please the great Mussolini? It is an honor just to be married to him.'"

When I told Roach that Mussolini obviously had his wife trained better than I could ever train mine, he laughed at my joke and slapped his knee. (Later that night I recounted this story to my wife Christine. Without missing a beat, she looked me up and down, and then she replied dryly, "You're no Mussolini.")

Roach invited me to sit with him in the den. We settled into cozy armchairs as he reminisced about my favorite comedians, Laurel and Hardy. I asked him when he stopped making their films. He replied blandly, "When it wasn't worth it anymore."

Trying to interpret his comment and draw him out further, I suggested, "Oh, you mean their style of comedy had become passé after a while and was no longer marketable at the box office?" He leaned toward me, puffed his slender cigar, and then he corrected my misinterpretation:

"No, that's not what I mean at all. I mean that when those two dumb bastards decided they knew more about making comedies than I did, that's when it wasn't worth it anymore, and that's when I stopped making their pictures! Neither one of them was any great brain. All Hardy liked to do was golf, and all Laurel liked to do was fish."

Spanky joined us and asked him why the Laurel and Hardy films have endured. "That one's easy," Roach chuckled:

"Most producers who put together a comedy team had one funny guy and one straight man. With Laurel and Hardy, we had two comedians and no straight man. When Stan did something funny, we got a laugh. Then I had the camera cut to Babe [Hardy's nickname], and we got a laugh from his reaction. Then we cut back to Stan and got another laugh from his reaction to Babe. So you got three laughs for the price of one."

Roach told a story of taking a Catalina fishing trip with Stan on Laurel's yacht during their heyday: "This one's a little dirty. We were on the ship and Stan introduced me to a beautiful young woman. He said, 'She's the nicest woman I ever met. I met her at 6 p.m. and we were in bed having sex by 7 p.m.' Stan later married her. He married many times. Women were crazy about him for some reason. I never understood it. On screen he was such a little crybaby. Yet when Laurel and Hardy went on tour, the women went mad over him."

Switching subjects, Roach nodded toward Spanky and told me how he came up with the idea of making the Our Gang films:

"One day I was listening to this awful audition of a little girl. She was heavily made up, and I only tolerated her because she was the daughter of a friend. When the audition was done, I told her the usual answer we gave people back then: "Don't call us; we'll call you." After she left my office, I wandered over to the window and looked out at the lumberyard across the street where a bunch of kids played. Two of them were having a life-and-death argument over a scrap of wood.

"Later, I looked down at my watch and realized that I had been watching them for 20 minutes! I couldn't understand why I would be so interested in just watching a bunch of kids do what kids do. Then I started to think that maybe a film audience would like to watch kids just be kids. I told my employees to round up a bunch of kids and test them. We made the first film, Our Gang, and it was a huge success. The rest is history.

"I did the same thing with Laurel and Hardy. People liked the Our Gang films because they got to watch kids being kids. They liked Laurel and Hardy because they got to watch adults be kids. It was the same formula."

"The funny thing about my career," he added, "is that everyone remembers me for the comedy shorts. Nobody remembers that I did some serious and great feature films too, like Of Mice and Men, Topper, Captain Fury, and One Million Years BC."

While we visited, the teenage son of Roach's cook played with a basketball in the rear yard. Roach urged me to go out and shoot baskets with the boy. He positioned his chair so he could watch our brief pickup game from the window. After ten minutes he called me back inside. "I'm tired today," he said, and then he pointed to his swimming pool. "I usually swim twice a day in the pool for exercise, but not today. I'm too damned tired."

Roach's nurse whispered to me, "The old man had been in pretty good shape until recently. He really did swim twice a day for exercise, but no more."

Our visit with Roach lasted over two hours. The conversation was fascinating, but I saw his energy fading. We returned with him to the living room when the time came to leave. Spanky kissed the old man on the forehead and said goodbye. They held hands and lingered for a couple of minutes and became teary-eyed at what both knew was a last farewell.

"Take care of my boy here, Judge!" Roach instructed me. He took my hand in his and patted it with the other. "It means a lot that you both came to see me."

• • •

Before we left, Roach asked me to send him a set of the pictures we had taken that day with my camera. A few weeks later, after I had the film processed and the prints made, I sent them to Don Aho. I asked him to give one set of pictures to Roach, and to ask The Boss to autograph two extras for me.

Aho returned my signed photographs bearing Roach's shaky autograph on them. His signature had deteriorated substantially since he had signed a picture for me during our visit. In his letter, Aho apologized for the poor quality of the autograph, explaining that the old man's health had declined significantly since Spanky's and my visit.

Hal Roach died two weeks later, on November 2, 1992, just short of his 101st birthday. While battling pneumonia, he suffered a fatal heart attack at his Stradella Lane home.

• • •

When I heard the news, I called Spanky to offer condolences. Sounding very down, he said he had been giving interviews to reporters all day, and that he was flying to California the next day for the funeral. He asked me to join him there.

We met for the service on November 4 at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood. While waiting in the parking lot for Spanky, I ran into Don Aho. He told me that the old man had started slipping the very day we came over. Despite his increasing frailties, Roach had told him that morning, "Clean me up and make me look alive for Spanky's visit." Aho said that we were Roach's final visitors. "More important than that," he said, "those photographs you took of Roach during your visit were the last ones ever taken of the old man. He never posed for another picture. Also, the ones he signed for you a couple weeks ago were the last autographs he ever signed. I brought them to him on his sickbed, and he insisted on signing them himself even though he could barely write any longer. He said he had to do it personally—he said that he didn't want the judge to hold him in contempt of court!"

Aho went inside the church with Roach's family. A few minutes later, I connected with Spanky in the crowded parking lot. One of the priests from the church asked me to take his picture with the former child star.

Spanky and I sat together during the service. He reminisced frequently about our meeting with Roach, and his eyes kept filling with tears as he talked about the man who gave him his start in movies. He also pointed out the other mourners with whom he had worked in the Our Gang movies: former child stars Dorothy "Echo" DeBorba, Tommy "Butch" Bond, Eugene "Pineapple" Jackson, and Mary Ann Jackson. One of early television's comedy pioneers, Sid Caesar, sat alongside longtime television talk show host Mike Douglas in the pew in front of us. "I was on Mike Douglas' show 20 years ago with Darla Hood [another Our Gang alumnus]," Spanky noted. "It was the last show she did before she died of a heart attack."

After the service, Spanky gave interviews and signed autographs on the front steps of the church. A slender, bald, elderly man approached us. "Spanky!" he said, "Don't you remember me?"

Spanky registered no recognition. "Uh, no, sorry."

The man smiled broadly: "It's me! Darwood Kaye—I played 'Waldo' in the Gang films with you!"

Spanky gasped. "Waldo! I haven't seen you in 50 years!" They hugged, laughed, and cried together. Waldo told us that he had spent his post-Hollywood decades in ministry as a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor. Their animated conversation grew somber when they noted how few of their costars still lived.

After the service, Spanky and I drove into downtown Westwood for dinner at Hamburger Hamlet. Since he never had the chance to have Roach sign the pictures we took during our meeting, I surprised him with one that I had Roach sign. He wept so much over the gift that I took it out of his hands.

"Geez, Spanky," I chided him, "get a grip on yourself—you're going to smear the autograph."

• • •

The following spring, Spanky came to Los Angeles to film an episode of the long-running television comedy sitcom, Cheers. After the shooting, he drove to my home in Glendale and spent the entire afternoon and evening with us. He said he enjoyed filming his cameo appearance. "They treated me well at the studio," he said. "I've enjoyed being back before the cameras so much that I would like to pick up more studio work." He hoped that word of mouth around Hollywood might let people know he was available, but he rejected my suggestion that he get an agent. "They're all crooks," he snorted.

Christine and I sent him home to Texas with a suitcase filled with fresh avocados from our backyard tree. He said he planned another Southern California visit in the fall, and we put the date on the calendar for his return visit.

It wasn't to be. Three months after our last visit, Spanky suffered a massive heart attack at home and died at age 64 on June 30, 1993. He had survived The Boss by only seven months.

Ironically, a year after Our Gang child star Darwood "Waldo" Smith and I met at Hal Roach's funeral, he served as a juror on one of my criminal trials in Division 3 of the Glendale, California courthouse. He died at age 72 on May 15, 2002 after a hit-and-run driver struck him. The crime remains unsolved. 

* * * * *

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union who presided over its dissolution and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending the Cold War,  died today at 91.

After he had left office, I met Gorbachev twice, and I even dealt with him in an official capacity on a patent dispute during my tenure as Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

During our first meeting 30 years ago, I found him to be both a charming and witty conversationalist, but far more importantly, I found impressive his expressions of support for market-based economic reforms in the old Soviet republics.

Below are my recollections of that first meeting with him long ago, which is excerpted from my 2013 book, "And Then I Met....":

• • •

In the spring of 1992, I received an invitation from Lodwrick Cook, chairman of ARCO, to a luncheon at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library honoring former President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the now-defunct Soviet Union—for a $5,000 contribution. The invitation to dine with Reagan and Gorbachev was enticing but prohibitive. I wrote Cook and thanked him for thinking of me but declined respectfully: Raising a family on a government salary as a state court judge with a car payment and a mortgage, I told him, meant that if I spent $5,000 to dine with anyone, I would need to move to the Reagan Library permanently because I'd no longer be welcome in my current home.

A few days later, Cook's secretary surprised me with a phone call: "The Reagan event is sold out anyway," she said, "but Chairman Cook wants to invite you to a private lunch for Gorbachev at ARCO Towers in Los Angeles. He is having the lunch and reception so some of our executives and local government officials can meet Gorbachev during his visit to California." She advised me to get there an hour early because the Secret Service planned to secure the building.

I arrived for the event and found the surrounding streets swarming with activity. Police closed the traffic lanes closest to the building and security agents hovered everywhere. Hundreds of ARCO employees stood behind an outdoor barricade to get a glimpse of Gorbachev when his motorcade arrived.

A Secret Service agent escorted me to a private elevator to the 37th floor; another agent brought me into a large reception room where Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and other local officials awaited Gorbachev's arrival.

At 12:15 p.m., spontaneous applause spread through the room. Gorbachev, accompanied by his wife Raisa and their daughter Irina, had arrived. Smiling broadly, he mingled freely during the reception and chatted with guests through a simultaneous translator.

When Cook introduced me to his honored guests, Mrs. Gorbachev extended her hand and greeted me in her best English:  E-e-e-t   e-e-z   n-i-z-e  to meet you!" Former President Gorbachev gripped my hand and pumped it vigorously.

As Gorbachev and I talked, I had the impression he was in no hurry to move on because (unlike everyone else) I didn't speak "at him" through the interpreter, meaning I didn't look at the interpreter and say things such as, "Please tell Mr. Gorbachev that I want him to know that I...." When communicating with him, I spoke to him directly and he did the same with me. He told me later that I was the only person he met during his California trip who knew how to speak through a simultaneous translation interpreter. I replied that I had an unfair advantage over others: As a trial court judge in Los Angeles County, I dealt each day with criminal defendants through simultaneous translators, so the skill came naturally to me.

 "I hope that is the end of the comparison!" he said as he laughed.

Ushers steered the guests into the main dining room. I found myself seated at the table right next to the honorees, with Raisa Gorbachev sitting behind me. During the luncheon, county and local government officials took turns presenting the Gorbachevs with gifts, certificates, and plaques. He acknowledged each memento with a smile and a bow before turning over the booty to an aide.

Between presentations, he continued to greet guests and sign autographs. Even my seatmate Tom Plate, editorial page editor for the Los Angeles Times, wasn't immune to the temptation. "It's not very chic for reporters to ask for autographs," Plate told me. I suggested this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to obtain a great memento for his grandchildren. He swallowed hard and approached the former Soviet leader with a pen and menu in hand. Gorbachev inscribed it in Russian, "To a great news editor."

In starting the program, Cook mentioned that Mrs. Gorbachev had a distinguished background as an educator, and that Gorbachev loves the ballet and opera. "And," he noted, "he can recite the works of [Russian author Alexander] Pushkin!" Gorbachev chuckled when he heard the translated claim and then called out a response from his seat: "I can't do too much of that anymore!" Cook presented the Gorbachevs with a handmade quilt from an Amish village in Pennsylvania. While Gorbachev admired the quilt, Mrs. Gorbachev climbed on top of her chair, pointed to the quilt, and said (in Russian), "That quilt is meant for me and not for my husband!"

Gorbachev received a standing ovation when introduced. He embraced his American host and then waved the room to silence. Speaking without notes (and with his interpreter at his side), he promised a brief impromptu speech. Noting that Los Angeles had been rocked by riots the previous week, he praised local officials for their handling of the violence. He said there had been speculation as to whether the unrest might force him to cancel his Los Angeles visit: "I had no intention of canceling," he said, which brought a rousing cheer.

His speech focused on expanding markets in the former Soviet Union. He encouraged the gathering of business leaders to expand commerce to Russia. "Your investments will help to make a free-market economy work there," the former head of the Communist Party implored the gathering of capitalists. It was ironic to hear the man given unprecedented power to hold together that dying communist regime now preaching the gospel of free markets. Yet Gorbachev showed no hint of discomfort at this new role. He expressed his hope repeatedly that Russia and the United States would work together to help modernize his nation through pro-growth policies and economic development.

• • •

Thirty years have passed since I sat in ARCO Towers and listened to the former president of the Soviet Union preach to an American audience the failures of socialism and the benefits of capitalism over a command economy. When reading the economic nostrums of some of our state and national leaders these days, I'm thinking we should have invited Gorbachev back for more speeches.

* * * * *

When President Jimmy Carter, whom I have met many times dating back to 1976, autographed a photograph taken of us having dinner together, he wrote on it, "Best wishes to Jim Rogan, Jimmy Carter."

I confess: I felt a little disappointed. I thought that after my decades of public service--and my knowing him at least a little bit--I might get a tad more of a personal inscription beyond "Best wishes." After all, "Best wishes" is what politicians write on photos for total strangers.

Recently I stumbled across a copy of this autographed photo that President Carter presented to someone else.

Let the record reflect that my previously bruised ego is now completely salved!

* * * * *

As a follow-up to my earlier post re my attending the 1972 Republican National Convention, and with this week being the 50th anniversary of that gathering, I'm adding a few more photographs and stories that fellow history buffs might find interesting.

When we returned from Miami in August 1972, I wrote to the White House and asked if they had any photos of the convention for my collection. They sent me a large official White House print of this photo (posted above) of Nixon and Agnew standing before the convention receiving the cheers of the delegates on the last night of the '72 convention. The curious thing about the photo is this: if you look at the bottom right corner, you will see standing together and talking the permanent chairman and vice chairman of the convention: Congressman Gerald Ford and Senator Bob Dole.

I came to know both of them in later years, and at different times I showed each of them this photograph. I asked if they had ever dreamed on that night in 1972 that, at the next convention four years later, it would be Ford and Dole standing before the convention as the GOP presidential and vice presidential nominees. Of course, the answer was positively no--and both were struck by the irony of the photo. (Jerry Ford told me his dream was to become Speaker of the House, and then retire to Michigan; Bob Dole told me he certainly had dreamed that he'd be the presidential nominee at a future convention, but never that he and Ford would be the 1976 nominees.)

The other thing I love about the photo is that you can see depicted on the floor, next to the lectern, a piece of Samsonite hard plastic luggage that is stuffed with gavels. Those gavels were made in the House of Representatives wood shop. You cannot buy one of those House gavels. The only way to get one is for the Speaker to give it to you—and they typically go to a Member of Congress, and usually only after the member presides over debate as Speaker Pro Tem. Apparently, House Minority Leader Ford had made friends with the guy in the House wood shop, because he brought to Miami a suitcase filled with them. Ford had brass plaques placed on each gavel, and then he presented one of them to each of the convention speakers.

I have in my collection one of the gavels that came from that suitcase. I told Ford that I swiped it from the suitcase as workers started to disassemble the hall on the last night of the convention. I also said that I confessed the theft to him freely because

a) the statute of limitations had long passed, and

b) I told him that we were basically co-conspirators in crime, since I knew that he clearly had swiped government property and converted it to partisan campaign use! Our secret was safe because we had the goods on each other. Later, Ford gave me a similar gavel that he had used as chairman of the 1968 GOP National Convention, so today I have both of them on display in my office.

Fifty years ago today, on August 18, 1972, as a 14 year-old boy and with no adult supervision for the next week, I boarded a plane in Oakland, changed planes in Los Angeles, and then caught a red-eye plane to Miami to attend the 1972 Republican National Convention, where President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won renomination for a second term as president.

The story of my 1972 Miami adventure, adapted from my 2013 book "And Then I Met..." is below. Looking back on the experience, I'm so glad that Alameda County, California apparently didn't have social workers tracking down mothers (like mine) who let their unaccompanied minors travel 3,000 miles to cavort for a week at a national political convention.

Thanks Mom!

• • •

National nominating conventions are to political junkies and campaign memorabilia collectors what Valhalla is to a dead Viking, so my boyhood dream was to attend one. In 1972 my chance came when I received a letter from Tom Bell, chairman of the Young Voters for the President (YVP) delegation to the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. Bell wanted to organize thousands of young volunteers to help staff the convention. For only $280, the YVPs offered round-trip airfare from California to Florida, hotel rooms and meals for a week, and admission to the convention to see the renominations of President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew. However, there was a hitch: the YVPs limited eligibility to registered Republican voters ages 18 to 30. I was a 14 year-old boy who thought of himself as a Democrat back then, but so what? The Democrats didn't invite me to their convention—the Republicans did.

There was a second hitch: I needed to convince my mother to let me fly cross-country alone and spend a week 3,000 miles away with no adult supervision. Knowing the likely response if I asked permission, I bypassed the consent route and went for the fait accompli. I filled out the YVP application (Jim Rogan, Registered Republican, Age 26) and mailed it back to Mr. Bell with a $280 money order that I purchased with savings from my part-time job at an Oakland toy store.

"Oh, Mom, I almost forgot to tell you," I mentioned casually after dinner that night, "this August I'll be flying to Miami for the Republican National Convention. I'll only be gone about a week. I'll call you while I'm there."

She laughed. "Are you kidding? You're 14 years old. You can't just fly across the country and be gone for a week by yourself. That's ridiculous."

"Mom, I'll be with 20,000 Republicans—how much trouble can I get in? Besides, I already paid for it—$280. It's nonrefundable."

She scowled at me before extinguishing her cigarette in the ashtray. "In that case," she told me, "have a good time. And stay out of trouble." My single mother's permissive standards sometimes came in very handy.

A week later I received from the YVPs my notice of acceptance, along with a confirmed reservation aboard the Miami Special flight departing Los Angeles International Airport at midnight on August 18, 1972.

• • •

I was unprepared for the anarchy aboard our charter flight to Florida. From the moment our plane went "wheels up," the college-aged passengers leapt from their seats and the in-flight party began. Someone pried open the liquor galley and passed out now-complimentary bottles to all takers. Rock music blasted through the cabin and people danced in the aisles or on the seats. Recognizing the futility of trying to preserve order, our stewardess crew kicked off their shoes, tossed aside their pillbox hats, and joined in the revelry.

Growing up in liberal San Francisco, I had always heard that you could tell a Republican by his or her hair color: gray for men and blue for women. My traveling companions smashed that stuffy stereotype. They were young, hip, fun, loud, and (for many soon after takeoff) inebriated. As I surveyed this wild scene, I remembered what I had said to convince my mother to let me go on this unsupervised weeklong escapade. Now I asked myself the same question I had put to her, but the emphasis changed: How much trouble could I get into with these Republicans?!

My late-twenties seatmate (I'll call her Bambi—not her real name) offered a potential answer to that question. At first, she presented a severe contrast to the other partying passengers. Her old-fashioned blouse buttoned all the way up her neck-high collar. She wore glasses, a long skirt, clunky shoes, and her hair piled high in a bun. We struck up a friendly but reserved conversation.

As the plane reached its cruising altitude, she drank a glass of wine—and another, and then another. In time, the upper buttons on her librarian blouse loosened up as much as her previously reserved persona. The bobby pins came out of her bun and piles of chestnut locks dropped past her shoulders. She kicked off her klogs and stretched her legs under the seat in front of her.

Somewhere over Kansas, a deeply relaxed Bambi turned toward the window and caught me looking at her. Embarrassed, I apologized. She reached over, took my hand, and studied me over the top of her glass frames with sleepy, half-closed green eyes. Her slow transformation from frumpy seatmate into an attractive—even sexy—woman mesmerized me.

"You know," she said in a low voice, "you really seem like a nice guy. You're easy to talk to. May I tell you something?"

"Sure," I said innocently.

"I have a bit of a problem. It's a secret." After assuring her that she could trust me with her confidence, she let it fly: "I'm a nymphomaniac."

Even at 14, I knew what that meant.

Bambi leaned in closer. "Say," she asked through those sleepy eye slits, "how old did you say you are?"

We looked at each other in silence for a few beats before I answered: "I'll tell you the truth. I lied on my application. I wrote back to the national committee and said that I was 26 because I really wanted to come to the convention. But it's not true. My real age would have disqualified me."

"So how old are you?"

I cleared my throat: "Bambi—I'm 32."

As a young boy growing up in a pro-union and Democrat San Francisco household, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to be a Republican. Now, as our airborne jubilee continued winging throughout the night, I recognized for the first time that America did indeed have a vigorous two-party system, and that perhaps I shouldn't be so hasty in deciding which one suited me better.

• • •

Our charter plane arrived in Miami the next morning. Once we landed, organizers packed our time with campaign and convention-related events. Since President Nixon faced no serious opposition, the thousands of enthusiastic Republicans descending on Florida gathered for a coronation, not combat.

That afternoon I attended a poolside reception for Vice President Agnew at the Americana Hotel. At the conclusion of the event, and always looking for a chance to add to my collection, I shimmied up a pole mounted near the platform and yanked the convention seal off a speaker's lectern. If I met any dignitaries, I thought this might be a unique item on which to collect autographs. As it turned out, I was not disappointed.

• • •

Nautilus Middle School in Miami has a significant bit of unknown historical trivia that might surprise their current faculty and students: Over one 24-hour period in 1972, three future presidents of the United States visited their small campus. I know because I was there.

August 21 was the first full day of the convention. I boarded an early morning shuttle to Nautilus (vacant for the summer recess), which became our YVP holding area during our week in Miami. There we encamped under a large outdoor tent on the athletic field. During convention down times, we assembled under the tent painting rally signs, making new friends from 50 states, drinking complimentary Pepsi Cola from a nearby concession stand, eating boxed lunches catered by the Marriott hotels, and meeting a parade of Party dignitaries dropping by to thank us for our help.

At noon, a station wagon pulled onto the field. Out stepped a middle-aged man with thinning brown hair and wearing gray slacks and a yellow open-neck shirt—Congressman Gerald R. Ford (R-MI), the minority leader of the House of Representatives. Recovering from recent knee surgery to correct an old football injury, he hobbled on a cane over to our tent. An organizer summoned the volunteers together and introduced him to us.

Many of the YVPs were indifferent to hearing or meeting the rather obscure congressman. While Ford spoke, most volunteers remained in the back of the tent painting signs, blowing up balloons, or napping on the grass. For those of us listening, he kept his remarks brief. He welcomed the YVPs to Miami and thanked everyone for their efforts on behalf of the Nixon–Agnew ticket. He then urged us to return home at the end of the convention and work very hard to deliver a Republican congressional majority in November. This, he added, would bring him his greatest personal ambition—becoming speaker of the House.

Ford mingled with the YVPs, signed a few autographs, and answered questions, but his prolonged standing appeared to aggravate his knee pain. When he signaled to his driver his readiness to go, the aide had to assist him back to the car. Ford slid his cane underneath the seat and waved goodbye as the station wagon pulled away.

• • •

The next day, Miami's brutally hot and muggy weather (combined with no air-conditioning under our tent) left the cluster of YVPs increasingly lethargic. Even the free cups of Pepsi failed to bring relief. The ice melted immediately in the oppressive heat.

This sluggish spirit evaporated when a sedan pulled up to the tent and someone shouted excitedly, "It's Governor Reagan!" Unlike the reception accorded Congressman Ford, volunteers ran from all corners of the school and crammed underneath the tent to cheer Reagan as he stepped from his automobile. Where other guest speakers generated only mild interest, his surprise appearance merited a rock star-worthy reception.

During convention week, the other guest speakers visiting us wilted quickly in the heat. Neckties came off, shirt collar buttons loosened unceremoniously, and dress shirts drenched in perspiration. Reagan proved the exception. He looked crisp and fresh throughout his time with us as he discussed the Nixon campaign, the important convention efforts of the YVPs, and his own vision for an America free of bureaucratic intrusion into people's lives.

When his impromptu remarks concluded, an aide told him it was time to go. Reagan brushed him off and told the crowd of young activists there was no place he would rather be right now than with them, and he took questions for another 15 minutes. 

When a youth asked if he would run for president in 1976, the prolonged ovation almost drowned out his answer. Cocking his head and smiling, he demurred. "Well," he replied coyly, "1976 is a long way off."

The crowd mobbed Reagan when he finished. He signed autographs and shook hands as he made his way back to the car. Once inside, he rolled down his window and shook more hands until his driver pulled away.

• • •

A few hours later, another car arrived with an unrecognized dignitary: the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, former Texas Congressman George Bush (who had lost a U.S. Senate race two years earlier). Wearing slacks, an open-neck shirt, and a security pass hanging from a chain around his neck that resembled the ones that we wore, he walked around the field introducing himself and thanking the volunteers. Bush gave a brief pep talk to the troops that drew the same lukewarm interest shown in Gerald Ford's visit. It was less a reflection of their flat oratorical skills as it was the afternoon's draining heat and humidity. Besides, let's face it, Ronald Reagan was a tough act for anyone to follow. 

• • •

I turned 15 on the opening day of the 1972 Republican National Convention, but the birthday blessing proved mixed. Getting inside the hall to witness history was more difficult than expected. Thousands of protesters descended on Miami to disrupt the proceedings. For our protection, the National Guard provided a fleet of buses with steel-barred and mesh windows to transport us through the downtown area. As our caravan barreled down Collins Avenue, I watched as troopers lining the route fought against demonstrators trying to break through the lines. Rocks and bottles crashed against our bus along the route.

At one checkpoint, a trooper in full riot gear and carrying an automatic rifle boarded our bus and gave us these ominous instructions: "There's a lot of tension out there on the streets and some of these people are very violent. If your bus is attacked, do not try to leave the bus. Stay on board. Your life may depend on it. If any of them break through and attack your bus, everybody needs to lean toward the rioters so they will have a harder time turning the bus over and killing you."

Lean toward the rioters if they try turning over the bus? The trooper offered no Plan B.

The scene outside the Miami Beach Convention Center looked just as grim. Police clashed with a huge mob of screaming rioters. Only a chain-link security fence separated us from the anarchy. The view unnerved me, but I hadn't come all this way to be deterred. I planned to get inside that hall no matter what.

Gratefully, our bus made it by the melee and dropped us safely at the entrance. Because security inside the arena was very tight, the line to enter the hall moved agonizingly slow. The Secret Service required each person to pass through two metal detectors and then have all personal items hand-searched. After half an hour, the line had barely moved. As the time approached for the opening gavel, I felt sure that I would miss it.

An impatient reporter at the rear of the crowd held aloft his press credentials and pushed his way through to the front of the line calling out, "CBS News—let me pass, please. CBS News...." The mass of people moved aside for him without ever looking over their shoulders. If it worked once, it might work again: I held my YVP credentials over my head. "Excuse me," I shouted. "NBC News—let me pass, please. Excuse me, please, NBC News...." Once more, the Red Sea parted and I walked directly to the security screening table inside the arena.

Any lingering bus ride anxiety dissolved when I entered the hall. The sight thrilled me. Neat rows of tri-folded red, white, and silver state delegation banners perched atop poles rested amid the thousands of seats. At the front of the arena stood a two-story eggshell-colored podium bearing the seals of all 50 states. Huge American flags and Nixon banners hung from the rafters. In the skyboxes, network news anchormen Walter Cronkite of CBS, John Chancellor and David Brinkley of NBC, and Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith of ABC all looked down from their glass-encased perches. Behind the podium, two large Jumbotron screens flashed a repeated admonition: "Delegates and Alternates: Please be seated."

From my seat in the gallery, I watched as U.S. Senator Bob Dole banged the ceremonial gavel and called the 1972 Republican National Convention to order. Little did I dream that a quarter-century later, Dole—the 1996 GOP presidential nominee—would campaign for me in my three congressional races.

One of the first convention speeches that night was the briefest. Former Kansas Governor Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican nominee against Franklin D. Roosevelt, stood before the microphones and received a standing ovation. The 84-year old wore a huge sunflower (his 1936 campaign symbol) on his coat lapel. Landon accepted a commemorative plaque, and then he delivered a two-sentence speech: "We meet tonight in this convention in unity and enthusiasm for the winner of the next election, a great president, a great world leader, Richard Nixon. One good term deserves another."

Seeing Landon in person delighted me. A few years earlier as a young boy I had wanted him to send me an autographed picture. When I read somewhere that the Topeka telephone directory listed his home number, I decided to call him and ask for the picture personally. I waited for my mother to leave and run errands, and then I dialed Prescott 2–2460. Sure enough, the former governor answered the telephone himself, but the results proved frustrating. No matter how loudly I spoke,  Landon kept saying we had a bad connection, he couldn't hear me clearly, and he told me to hang up and try again. I did—14 times. The next month, when my mother received the whopping $50 long-distance bill (the equivalent of $400 in 2020) for 14 peak-time calls to Topeka, I got a slap to go with the signed picture that Landon sent me. When Landon died 20 years later, I wrote a condolence letter to his daughter, U.S. Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, and I shared that story. She wrote back: "I appreciate your story about Dad. It always amazes me to hear how many people have talked with him and remember him fondly. He of course loved the attention, and I am sure he enjoyed your calls as much as you did—and he didn't get spanked for it!"

Landon wasn't the only nostalgic speaker that night. Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, compared Democrat presidential nominee George McGovern to the coyotes roaming around his native Arizona: "My coyotes just bay and moan and cry over everything that exists, but they never suggest anything new, anything better, or anything constructive to replace them." He hit McGovern as an appeaser to the communist government in North Vietnam, saying, "For the first time, a candidate of one of our major parties has already surrendered to the enemy before the election has been held…. I say to the communist bosses in Hanoi that the McGoverns do not speak for America, nor will they ever get the chance."

Governor Ronald Reagan, the temporary convention chairman, used McGovern and the Democrats as fodder for his comedic talents, with each joke about them provoking uproarious laughter throughout the hall. Turning serious, he accused McGovern of pursuing utopian and extravagant policies amounting to a deliberate deception on the voters. "If we confiscated all the earnings of all the corporations in America at 100 per cent, we would have less than a third of the price of [McGovern's] promises."

The evening also proved memorable for an unexpected reason. During a filmed tribute to Mrs. Nixon (who made a brief appearance on stage following its conclusion), I stepped out of the hall for some fresh air. When I tried returning through the same gate, a guard said my pass didn't authorize readmission there and he didn't know where to direct me. I walked the outer perimeter of the auditorium trying other gate entrances, but security rebuffed me at each one.

Meanwhile, another violent confrontation erupted between police and rioters on the other side of the nearby chain-link fence. Teargas burned my eyes and throat as it wafted my way, while members of the mob directed profane jeers and gestures at the only visible conventioneer—me. Someone threw a rock that missed my head. Trapped outside the hall between a convention fortress on one side of me and a riot on the other, I didn't know what to do. Fortunately, a Secret Service agent saw my plight. He ran over, checked my credential quickly, and then he escorted me back inside the hall just as more rocks crashed where I had stood moments earlier.

Later that night, on the armored bus ride back to our hotel, I looked out my barred coach windows. Shrieking rioters again tried to break through the police lines to attack us. For the $280 I paid to be in Miami, I was getting far more of a convention experience than I ever anticipated. Still, it was an unforgettable way to spend my 15th birthday.

• • •

The next morning, the YVPs boarded buses for President Nixon's arrival ceremony. Thousands of supporters waving flags and campaign signs packed the temporary bleachers on the tarmac at Miami International Airport's Eastern Airlines hangar on 36th Street. The lineup of celebrity speakers warming up the crowd for Nixon included singer Ethel Merman and movie stars James Stewart, Mickey Rooney, and John Wayne.

Cheers arose when the gleaming Air Force One came into view on final approach. Chants of "Four More Years! Four More Years!" rang out as the plane landed and taxied to a stop. The clamor grew earsplitting when the cabin door swung open and a solitary man in a blue suit stepped onto the mobile stairs and waved.

President Richard Nixon deplaned and walked to the bank of microphones on the tarmac. Joined by First Lady Pat Nixon and their family, he thanked the YVPs for their welcome and promised to reward our efforts with a November victory. "I have not yet attended the convention," he told us. "The custom is that candidates who have not been nominated do not attend. I should not be here now, but I think I'm going to be nominated tonight, and so is Vice President Agnew!" With the 1972 election the first where 18 year-olds could vote for president, he added, "Based on what I've seen here today, those predictions that the other side is going to win young voters are wrong. We are going to win them."

When he finished speaking, he and Mrs. Nixon walked along the fence shaking hands. As he passed in front of me, I reached for his hand across the people in front of me, but he moved too quickly. I missed my chance.

The Nixon family boarded Marine One, the presidential helicopter. It circled the crowd twice before disappearing.

I didn't meet the president of the United States, but I saw him arrive on Air Force One and give a speech, and he came within a few feet of me. Not a bad way for a young political history buff to spend a morning.

• • •

Inside the convention hall that night, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller placed Nixon's name in nomination. During the roll call of the states, organizers corralled our YVP groups into an auditorium and handed out noisemakers, flags, and floppy Nixon hats. As the balloting neared its conclusion, they escorted us to the delegate entrances on the convention floor.

Over the loudspeaker came the voice of the chairman of the Missouri delegation casting all of its 30 votes for Nixon, which gave him the needed majority. From my spot, I saw Congressman Gerald Ford, the chairman of the convention, pound the gavel and declare Nixon the 1972 Republican presidential nominee. The band struck up patriotic music, ushers threw open the gates, and the YVPs waving flags and tooting noisemakers swarmed onto the convention floor as a quarter million balloons dropped from ceiling nets.

I wandered the arena taking pictures and gathering campaign buttons worn by generous delegates. Standing near the podium, I looked up and saw convention chairman Gerald Ford off to the side of the stage speaking privately with vice chairman Bob Dole. The irony of that image returned to me four years later. Through the twists of history, these two obscure 1972 convention officials stood before the next national convention as the 1976 Republican nominees for president and vice president.

• • •

On the final night of the convention, I sat in the gallery for the acceptance speeches. In his address, Vice President Agnew pledged, "I shall do everything in my power to help reelect this great president and, after his reelection, to assist him in every way 1 can in the difficult task that lies ahead. That task is to make this nation the best possible home for all Americans…. Do we turn our country over to the piecemeal, inconsistent and illusory policies of George McGovern? Or do we entrust the future of this nation to the sound, tested leadership of Richard Nixon? There can be only one answer to that question. And in November it will be answered resoundingly with the reelection of the president."

Agnew concluded his remarks by introducing Nixon, who emerged from behind the stage to the strains of Hail to the Chief and a wall-shaking ovation. State banners and Nixon signs bounced up and down as the chant again rolled through the arena: "Four More Years! Four More Years!"

Once the applause died down, Nixon claimed his prize: "Four years ago, standing in this very place, I proudly accepted your nomination for president of the United States. With your help, and with the votes of millions of Americans, we won a great victory in 1968. Tonight, I again proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States, and let us pledge ourselves to win an even greater victory this November in 1972."

• • •

When the acceptance speeches ended, Nixon and Agnew wrapped their arms around each other and waved to the delegates as balloons dropped, the music blared, and conventioneers cheered themselves hoarse. Before adjourning the proceedings sine die, Gerald Ford announced that the Nixons and Agnews wanted to meet as many people as possible before leaving.

I rushed through the delegate floor entrance, which was next to the vice presidential receiving line. While waiting my turn to meet the Agnews, legendary singer Frank Sinatra and Governor Nelson Rockefeller strolled by me as they left the nearby VIP box. As a longtime Sinatra fan, I would like to have met him, but I didn't want to lose my place in line.

Agnew gave each of us moving through his line a ball point pen bearing his facsimile signature and the vice presidential seal. I thanked him and his wife, and then I hurried over to the Nixon line. While waiting, I added more autographs to my convention seal, including Governor Rockefeller, Bob Dole, future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and many other notables.

The Nixons greeted people in their receiving line for over an hour. As my turn neared, a security guard shut down the line. For the second time this week, I has missed my chance to meet President Nixon. (As it turned out, 20 more years would pass before we met.)

Nixon picked up a microphone and announced it was time to go: "I was just reminded that we have a rather light day tomorrow," he explained. "Let me give you an idea of what a 'light day' is for a president: I fly to Chicago and speak at the American Legion Convention. Then I fly to Detroit to dedicate the Eisenhower High School. Then I fly to San Diego and speak at a rally, and then we fly by helicopter to San Clemente and speak there."

• • •

After the Nixons left, the convention hall emptied quickly. Workers swarmed onto the floor and began disassembling the arena in preparation for an upcoming sports event. Souvenir hunters grabbed state banners off the poles, tore them into thirds, and divided the pieces. Before Miami, I had always envied the political convention cleanup crews because I assumed that they would find treasure troves of discarded campaign memorabilia when it ended. Now I combed the empty aisles looking for abandoned mementos. I found the only thing a cleaning crew inherited at the end of a national convention was a messy hall.

• • •

After joining fellow YVPs for a postconvention party at the Americana Hotel (complete with a fully hosted bar and buffet), I dragged myself back to my hotel room around 4:00 a.m. Shortly after dozing off, shouts in the hallway awakened me. I dressed quickly and opened my door. A man down the hall yelled, "Get that woman out of my room!" As a small crowd gathered around him, he explained that he had come back from the Americana party, took a shower, and then he discovered a nude woman in his bed demanding sex. I thought he might be drunk until I heard a female inside his room shouting slurred obscenities and pleading for him to return and, well, take care of business.

I peeked through his open door. A naked and crying woman stood against the far wall using the window drapes as partial covering.

Bambi! It was my seatmate from our charter flight to Miami a week earlier.

As hotel security led her from his room, I patted on the shoulder the guy she had surprised and told him, "She's a nice girl once you get to know her."

• • •

I carried home to California a suitcase filled with political memorabilia, as well as countless memories of that historic trip. Those three future presidents I had met at Nautilus Middle School had each signed the convention seal I swiped from the podium my first night in Miami. Later I added President Nixon's and Vice President Agnew's signatures to it. Today it hangs framed in my office.

Back then I never imagined that in later decades I would come to know many of the people whose autographs I collected at the convention, including those three future presidents. The Reagan family invited me to his private graveside interment ceremony when he died in 2004. Former Presidents Ford and Bush became friends; both campaigned for me and held fundraisers for my congressional races. Those experiences remained many years in the future, and they were unimaginable to a starry-eyed 14 year-old boy who stepped off a plane in Miami on a humid August morning in 1972.

By the way, that purloined convention seal returns "home" occasionally: I have loaned it to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library to display whenever the archivists request it. I do so without any concerns over legal repercussions—

—The statute of limitations on my podium seal heist expired long ago.

[The above story is adapted from my 2013 book, "And Then I Met… Stories of Growing Up, Meeting Famous People, and Annoying the Hell Out of Them"]

* * * * *

David McCullough, perhaps the most preeminent American historian of my generation, died yesterday at age 89. The author of ten books and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, his books covered the broad swath of the fabric of our country—and he wrote every one of them not on a word processor or computer, but on a 1946 Royal KMM manual typewriter. When asked why he worked on so antiquated a machine, he conceded that using a computer would allow him to write faster, but he  said that in writing slower he had more time to think about what he wanted to compose.

Almost 25 years ago I attended a congressional bipartisan retreat (these days, the concept of a congressional "bipartisan" anything sounds anachronistic). The guest speaker was McCullough, who at the time had received recently the Pulitzer Prize for his biography on President Harry S Truman. When I asked McCullough to autograph my copy of his book, I mentioned with a grin that I was pleased to meet "a fellow Truman scholar." Turning serious, he asked if I had written a Truman book, too. I laughed and told him no, and then I explained that I had written an article in the early 1990s for American Heritage magazine (later republished in Reader's Digest in 1994 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Truman's accession to the presidency) . My article told the story of how old Harry had helped me with my seventh grade homework project, and in so doing he settled forever (in a letter that he had written to me) the historical dispute as to whether his middle initial "S" did or did not get a period.

McCullough's eyes brightened. "The 'homework' story in American Heritage!" he said with a touch of excitement. "Truman wrote to you and explained about the S in his middle name! I not only read your article, but it helped me win a bet on that issue!" 

It seems that when Harry Truman took the time to help a young admirer with his  junior high homework assignment long ago, both David McCullough and I came out as winners.

I reconnected with McCullough a few years ago, and he surprised me with a box filled with inscribed copies of some of his most famed works. Those volumes rest tonight in an honored place in the library of a grateful fan who has spent countless hours enjoying his enduring books.

* * * * *

Oliver Hardy, half of Hollywood's iconic comedy team Laurel and Hardy, died 65 years ago today at the age of 65 from complications following a stroke.

Although "Babe" Hardy died two weeks before I was born, I have been a fan of Stan's and Ollie's since my early boyhood. Ollie's partner, Stan Laurel, who survived him by seven years, answered every fan letter personally and kept his name and telephone number listed in the Santa Monica phone directory so that fans could call or write to him. In 1964 he answered a fan letter from a little boy by sending him this signed photo of Laurel and Hardy.

Below are a few brief reflections on Laurel and Hardy taken from my 2013 book, "And Then I Met." Next month, on the 30th anniversary of the day I spent with movie producer Hal Roach (then almost 101 years old), I'll post more memories from the studio chief who first joined together two of his contract comedians, and then introduced the world to Laurel and Hardy.

• • •

While a prosecutor and judge in Los Angeles during the 1980s-1990s, I befriended a local Glendale businessman. For almost 30 years, Rand Brooks owned and ran Professional Ambulance Service. For several years, I never knew that Rand's ambulance company was a later-in-life career. Only over lunch some years into our friendship did he mention casually that in the 1930s, he worked as a trick-riding cowboy in a Wild West show. Later he tried his hand at acting in movies and early television. But he had one role that guaranteed his place in motion picture history:  he played Charles Hamilton, Scarlett O'Hara's first husband in the 1939 film classic, "Gone with the Wind."

That discovery paled next to another that he shared with me: he had been married for many years to Stan Laurel's daughter. I delighted in listening to him reminisce about my favorite comedy duo:

"Babe [Oliver Hardy's nickname] gave Stan all the credit for their success. Babe always said, "Stan was a genius, and all I did was do what he told me to do.

"Although Stan could be funny in private, he was basically a very serious man. He was sweet but serious. We had a wonderful relationship.

"Stan was married many times. One of his wives, Lois, was a bitch. She was cheap as well as mean. I was married to their daughter Lois for 28 years. The first 20 years were good ones. My ex-wife, Lois, was a good lady, but her mother did everything possible to destroy our marriage.

"The guy that owns the merchandising rights to Laurel and Hardy, Larry Harmon, is a crook. He stole the rights from Stan. I was going to handle all that for Stan and Stan would have made money. Instead, Harmon did it and cheated him. Stan's attorney, Ben Shipman, was also a crook. He kept Stan broke while he lived high off the hog from Stan's money. Stan kept Shipman around because Shipman was always able to get Stan out of trouble."

Rand offered a brief insight into another Hollywood legend, his onetime costar, Marilyn Monroe: "I got a call from a guy in New York recently who wanted me to talk about Marilyn for a scandal magazine. I told him to go to hell. I made a low-budget movie with Marilyn many years ago [Ladies of the Chorus, 1948] when she was first getting started. There was no scandal there. Our relationship was friendly and pleasant. There was nothing sensational. Marilyn was just a sweet, naïve, and insecure girl."

I'm sorry that Rand never wrote his book. He had more than enough wonderful stories of the Golden Age of Hollywood to fill a volume. He was a great guy and a great friend.

• • •

Rand Brooks sold his ambulance company and retired to his ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley to breed horses. He died of cancer at age 84 on September 1, 2003.

* * * * *

Senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was born 100 years ago today. Although we ended up on different sides of the political equation, it was my great honor and privilege to know this distinguished public servant and consummate gentleman. 

Below are some reflections on Senator McGovern taken from my 2013 book, "And Then I Met." I hope that you enjoy them. 

* * *

On January 18, 1971, Senator George McGovern (D-SD) announced his candidacy for the 1972 Democrat presidential nomination. These days, White House contenders start running many years before the contest, but back then a candidate announcing almost two years before Election Day was unprecedented. The unknown McGovern needed the time. With heavyweight opponents lining up to run, the press mocked his quixotic effort. At the starting gate he registered only 2 percent in the Gallup poll, earning him the nickname, "George Who?"

Born in 1922, McGovern flew 35 combat missions as a bomber pilot during World War II. Returning home, he earned a Ph.D. and taught history and political science. Elected in 1956 to the U.S. House of Representatives from South Dakota, he gave up his seat to run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1960. He served for two years as director of Food for Peace, and then he won a close Senate race in 1962. In 1972, he captured the Democrat presidential nomination, only to go on and lose the White House to Richard Nixon in one of America's most lopsided landslides.

McGovern brought his fledgling campaign to San Francisco in August 1971 for a $3 per person fundraising reception at the Rodeway Inn. His presidential viability appeared so remote that none of my political collector buddies wanted to attend it with me, so I conscripted my little brother Pat to come along. Even at that absurdly low price we couldn't afford tickets, so we snuck into the event.

We stood outside the hotel's front door hoping to see McGovern when he arrived. While waiting we met his lone aide staffing the event, who spoke freely about the problems of running a campaign that most considered a joke and with no money in the bank. He said McGovern usually stayed in private homes during these trips because his campaign couldn't afford hotel rooms.

As we spoke, a banged-up 1960s station wagon pulled forward at the entrance. The aide whispered to us, "If I tell you something, can you keep a secret? There he is now."

McGovern climbed out of the car, combed his thinning hair, put on his suit jacket, and then he greeted Pat and me. There was no danger of breaching the aide's secret because as McGovern walked through the lobby nodding and smiling at people, nobody recognized him. It fell upon Pat to hold the elevator for the understaffed candidate, who rode it upstairs to freshen up in a room that a sympathetic supporter rented for him.

The aide we befriended kept riding up and down the elevator to check on the reception turnout and then reporting upstairs to McGovern. On one of these revolving trips he offered to get an autograph for me. He returned a few minutes later with a signed card. I asked what McGovern was doing when he signed it. "Truthfully," he replied with a smile, "he was standing naked in the bathroom shaving."

About 50 people attended McGovern's reception in the La Paz Room. When he arrived, the woman at the door collecting the entrance fee grew distracted, which enabled Pat and me to slip inside.

McGovern gave an impromptu talk that focused on his commitment to ending the Vietnam War, which was the cause motivating his entry into the race. His style was low key and casual, and he took questions from the audience for half an hour.

The affair ended with him leaving as he had arrived—walking through the lobby in anonymity to his waiting station wagon. But when he returned to campaign in San Francisco eight months later, the dynamic had changed dramatically.

• • •

Question:        When is the winner the loser and the loser the winner?

Answer:           When the winners and losers are presidential candidates.

The above riddle is a phenomenon of politics, where expectations often count more than votes. The 1972 Democrat presidential primaries are an example of this conundrum. As the gun sounded for the nomination race, Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME) remained the heavily favored frontrunner for the three years leading up to 1972.

Universal expectations had Muskie winning New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary. George McGovern, still largely unknown after over a year of campaigning, straggled far behind in the polls. On primary night, Muskie did very well. He won almost 50 percent of the vote in a field of five contenders. McGovern lost, but his grass-roots campaign did better than expected with a second-place finish at 37 percent. Immediately the pundits and network anchors proclaimed the meaning of the New Hampshire results in their peculiar version of political algebra:

Muskie won

+

McGovern lost, but he did much better than the pundits expected

=

Muskie lost; McGovern won

The following morning, McGovern's name, and not Muskie's, splashed across the headlines. In the upcoming Wisconsin primary, McGovern parlayed his New Hampshire momentum into a stunning first-place victory. This catapulted the near-anonymous candidate only days earlier into the frontrunner position.

The day after his Wisconsin win, McGovern brought his now-energized campaign back to San Francisco. For weeks his local headquarters couldn't give away tickets to his scheduled $25 per person fundraising dinner at the Hilton Hotel. Within minutes of Wisconsin's vote tabulation, the event sold out.

Today, we live in an era where tickets to political events cost thousands of dollars. It's hard to conceive that in 1972 the price tag for admission to a sit-down dinner for the leading presidential candidate at a major venue cost $25. Yet, for my brother Pat and me, the price might as well have been $25,000. We had no money for a ticket, but that didn't dissuade us from trying to get inside.

We took the Greyhound bus from the East Bay (where we now lived) to San Francisco and arrived at the Hilton three hours before the dinner began. We sat in the lobby hoping to see McGovern when he arrived. Not long after we parked ourselves, I saw a chunky man with a buzz haircut and wearing a Hilton blazer staring at us from across the room. He approached, identified himself as hotel security, and he asked what we were doing there. I explained that we had taken the bus from Pinole to see McGovern. Once he learned that we had no dinner ticket, his already unpleasant attitude grew nasty. "Let me give you boys some advice," he said sarcastically. "Get back on your bus to Pinole and get the hell out of here. You aren't meeting anybody in this hotel tonight." Before we knew it, we found ourselves outside on the sidewalk.

Pat and I didn't surrender easily. We snuck back inside at another entrance, but the same guard nabbed us. Tossing us out once again, he warned that any further entry would result in our arrest.

I had an idea. Finding a pay telephone, I called the hotel switchboard, dropped my voice to the deepest baritone a 14 year-old could muster, and I told the operator that I was Senator McGovern's speech writer. I commanded her to put me through to his suite. To my surprise, she routed the call.

Dick Dougherty, McGovern's national campaign press secretary, answered. I explained our situation and he proved sympathetic. He arranged for us to get freelance photographer passes and complimentary dinner tickets at the press table. Dougherty told us to have the hotel security guard call him directly if he gave us any more problems.

We returned to the hotel and waited. It didn't take long for Inspector Javert to find us. He grabbed our arms and started yanking us across the lobby while saying that the police were on the way to arrest us for trespassing. When I told him to call Dougherty to confirm that we had tickets, he refused. Amid the yelling and the tugging, the hotel manager rushed over to investigate the disturbance. After hearing our explanation, the manager picked up a courtesy phone in the foyer and called McGovern's suite. A few moments later, the manager summoned the guard to join him over in the corner. I couldn't hear their discussion, but I saw the guard's face redden as the manager spoke with him harshly while poking an index finger into his chest. The guard stalked away.

The manager returned to where we waited. "Personal guests of Senator McGovern are always welcome in this hotel," he said.

With the event still two hours away, and while we continued our lobby stakeout, I saw McGovern alone and unrecognized strolling from the elevator bank. Pat and I introduced ourselves, and the candidate (in no apparent hurry) settled into a high-backed lobby chair and invited us to visit with him for a few minutes. "I was just going to take a walk around the block," he said with a chuckle, "so I've got some time to kill." When we told him the story of the guard and Dick Dougherty, he laughed. "So—you're the boys, eh? Dick told me about your enterprising effort to join us tonight. We're glad to have you."

I asked how he felt about his sudden vault to the front of the presidential pack. He said he felt reluctant to claim frontrunner status just yet, but yesterday's Wisconsin result gratified him, and he hoped to continue his momentum.

Before resuming his walk, he obliged an autograph request. On an index card he wrote out in longhand and signed his campaign slogan for me: "For Jim, I make one pledge above all others—to seek and speak the truth. With kindest regards, George McGovern."

After thanking him and wishing him luck, we watched as McGovern rode the escalator down to O'Farrell Street for his constitutional.

Later that evening, and shortly before the dinner began, two couples chatting nearby came over to talk to Pat and me. One man in the group said they saw us in the lobby with McGovern earlier and he asked if we had gotten his autograph. I showed him the quotation, and they passed it around and congratulated me on the acquisition. It wasn't until they introduced themselves that we realized with whom we were speaking—movie stars Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, along with pop singer Michelle Phillips from the 1960s rock group The Mamas and the Papas.

Following dinner, Congressman Don Edwards (D-CA) introduced McGovern to the packed and enthusiastic ballroom. I moved from the press table to the stage to snap a few photographs as the candidate urged his supporters to help him win the California primary and clinch the nomination.

At the end of the dinner, and as the crowd departed, I saw California State Assemblyman (later Congressman) John Burton standing nearby. He wore on his lapel a type of McGovern campaign button incorporating the American flag and a peace symbol that I had never seen before (or since). After introducing myself, I told him I collected political memorabilia and asked him to give me the badge. Burton didn't want to part with it, but my zeal wore him down and he relented.

Twenty-four years after he gave me the badge, John Burton and I served together in the State Assembly as colleagues. One day I wore his old McGovern button in my lapel and struck up a conversation with him in the chamber while waiting to see if he recognized my vintage treasure. Sure enough, after a few moments he asked about it. I recounted the story for him. "Those were the good old days," he sighed.

I sought to draw him out: "You mean the good old days when liberalism was on the rise? You mean the days when liberals believed they could solve the ills of the world, and when idealistic antiwar activists marched for world peace?"

He looked at me dismissively. "No," he said. "I don't mean any of that shit. I mean the good old days—when we could take money out of the Assembly Rules Committee budget and use it to pay for our fuckin' campaign buttons!"

• • •

In writing this memoir over 40 years after Dick Dougherty helped create a fond memory for two grateful boys crashing the San Francisco Hilton, I thought he might enjoy this story. I wanted to send him a copy of it to renew my thanks for his help. I looked for his address on the Internet and found this entry, dated January 2, 1987: "Richard Dougherty, former New York bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times and press secretary for Senator George McGovern, died of lung cancer Tuesday. He was 65."

Thanks again, Dick. I never forgot your kindness.

• • •

A few years after McGovern's presidential campaign ended, I attended his speech on Cuban-American relations before the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. To a sold-out audience, he  called for lifting the longstanding embargo against Cuba, describing it as a "foolish sanction that has weakened [Cuban president Fidel] Castro, but forced a stronger Cuban reliance on the Soviet Union." He also described his recent visit to Cuba by saying that he and Castro made an impromptu visit to the local marketplace: "The warmth of the reception given Castro was enough to bring envy to the heart of every American politician," he said.

Following his prepared remarks, he took a few questions from the floor. When asked if he might seek the presidency again in 1976, he smiled and said, "I knew that question was coming. The chances are 100-to-1 against my running. In all candor, I have no plans to run. I have sought the advice of a few close friends as to what role I should play in the 1976 elections, whether I should speak on behalf of other candidates or whatever, but I will not be a candidate again."

Another questioner noted that Alabama Governor George Wallace, a former segregationist, led most polls for the 1976 Democrat presidential nomination. When asked if he would support Wallace if he won the nomination, his response was emphatic and brief: "No."

At the end of the lunch, he spoke with me about his 1976 decision. I asked under what circumstances he might reconsider. "Oh, I don't know," he said with a shrug. "I'll just have to wait and see what these other guys do."

Three years earlier, as the presidential nominee, reporters and security guards had crowded every inch of his path. Now, just as it was back in the early days of his race, when today's event ended, McGovern left the ballroom and walked through the lobby—alone and anonymous.

• • •

Before I began college classes in 1975, I made my first visit to Washington, and McGovern invited me to visit him when I arrived. A delay in floor votes pushed back our scheduled meeting by two hours, so I waited for him in his Senate office. Finally, his secretary told me he had returned. She took me into the public hallway, unlocked an unmarked door, and escorted me into his private quarters.

McGovern sat behind his desk at the far end of the room. Dressed in a cream-colored suit, he rose from his chair and welcomed me while offering repeated apologies for keeping me waiting so long. "When you do the people's business," he said with a smile, "sometimes the people aren't in a big hurry to get their matters brought to a vote!"

He wanted to know about my trip and my impressions of the Capitol, and he put me at ease with his friendly and unhurried manner. We talked about the upcoming 1976 presidential race as well as his decision not to run again. He said the main reason he had opted out of the race was because his 1972 run had caused deep divisions in the Party and he felt it needed a unifier in 1976. "I'm not sure that my being a candidate and being nominated would do that because several factions of the Party were alienated by my candidacy in 1972," he said. "I do not expect to run for president again."

I mentioned that I had seen a recent Gallup poll (taken after Nixon resigned the presidency). It showed that in a rematch, McGovern would have prevailed over Nixon handily. A wan smile crossed his face. He stepped back and leaned against his desk. "Yes, I saw the poll when it came out," he said. "I was very gratified by it. Do you know why? Because it vindicated me." Then he dropped his voice to a whisper and looked out the window as he said it again:

"It vindicated me."

I brought along the photograph I had taken of him at the Commonwealth Club a few months earlier and asked him to autograph it. He took the photo from me, sat behind his desk, slid on his reading glasses, and studied it carefully. "You took this?" he asked with a touch of surprise at my youthful effort. "You know, it's a very, very good picture."

As he began to inscribe it, I raised my camera to take a couple of candid photos while he signed. When he noticed my camera, he quickly slid off his reading glasses and placed them on his desk. Apparently, even with a humble man like McGovern, vanity prevailed over good penmanship.

• • •

I stayed in touch with McGovern over the years. In 1994, after I won a seat in the California legislature, he remembered his old campaign volunteer of long ago and called to congratulate me on my victory.

Later that year we reunited at a couple of conferences hosted by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a national forum for conservative state legislators. The liberal McGovern proved an unlikely but very popular speaker before this group.

In August 1994, at one of these conferences, McGovern joined Newt Gingrich (still a relatively unknown Georgia congressman but destined for political superstardom two months later when he led Republicans to seize control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years). More than 1,000 conferees crowded into the breakfast, with many there out of sheer curiosity as to why ALEC had paired this leading American liberal with a black-belt conservative champion.

A Democrat legislator (one of the few at the conference) introduced McGovern, who joked about the dearth of liberals in attendance: "I am pleased to be introduced by one of the select few at this conference who voted right in 1972!" He then related a story about his presidential run:

"One of the joys of running for president is that it gives one the opportunity to visit every state in the Union. In 1972 I carried only one state, but I fell in love with all of them. Pardon me if I say I carry a special place in my heart for Massachusetts [the only state McGovern carried], but I love them all. I remember a time during the 1972 Florida primary when I was to fly in for a large airport rally. When we landed, only a few mechanics were on the tarmac. We later learned that our problem was that we landed in the wrong town. As one of my rivals later noted, "If McGovern can't find the right town, how can he run the country?" America will never know! My parents were old-fashioned conservatives who believed that the least government is the best government. I have often wondered if they had lived to 1972 whether they would have voted for me. I am sure they might have been sympathetic, but it would have been a hard sell!"

Alluding to his famous bent for liberalism, he recalled, "When last I spoke at one of your conferences, I had my arm in a sling. I had fallen down on a slippery Washington street outside the Avalon Theater on a rainy day and broke my shoulder. A Republican neighbor asked me what shoulder I broke. I told him it was my left shoulder. He said, 'McGovern, you're so liberal you can't even fall to the right!'"

After the laughter subsided, he shared that after leaving the Senate in 1981 he had taken his life's savings and bought a small hotel in Connecticut. The hotel failed despite his hiring an adept manager:

"The experience taught me that a small businessman faces a plethora of federal, state and local regulations. My manager burned the midnight oil not trying to make the hotel profitable but to keep up with the compliance requirements of regulations. I was also sued over an injury at the hotel. A drunk left the hotel bar and got into a fight in the parking lot. He was hurt and he sued me, saying the hotel should have provided him more security. We did have a security guard and lights outside, but a small business cannot afford to station the Marine Corps in its parking lot. We won the lawsuit, but not without a large expenditure of money. I was later sued when a lady tripped and broke her hip. These fraudulent and frivolous lawsuits are hurting small businesses."

McGovern called for comprehensive tort reform and suggested three ways it might occur: "The first way would be for self-correction by the American Bar Association, but I do not expect that to happen [laughter]. The second alternative would be for Congress to enact it, but I am not optimistic that will happen. The third route is tort reform in the states, and this is where it has to happen. These excessive lawsuits take the civility out of society. When I fell and broke my shoulder, it was an accident. It never occurred to me to sue someone over it."

The conferees greeted McGovern's remarks with a standing ovation. When Gingrich spoke, he shook his head in disbelief and said, "I never thought I would hear myself say this, but I agree with everything George McGovern just said!"

Following his speech, McGovern and I visited outside of the hotel bar. He wanted to hear my impressions of life in the legislature and how it compared to my years as a trial court judge. He said he took pride in my having started in politics as a boy volunteering on his campaign a quarter century earlier. However, when he told my colleague, Assemblyman Curt Pringle (then assistant Republican Assembly leader and later speaker) that I was one of his favorite Republicans, it caused Curt to question my conservative bona fides—then and now.

A few months later, McGovern and Gingrich brought their act on the road to the ALEC winter conference in Washington. This time Gingrich received a reception reserved normally for rock stars. After having delivered a crushing defeat to House Democrats a few weeks earlier, Gingrich prepared to become the first GOP speaker since 1954.

McGovern reiterated to the audience his thoughts on tort reform, and he cited his failed hotel venture in Connecticut as the policy wake-up call he received. Then, shifting his tone, he took Gingrich to task over comments the speaker-designate had made recently: "Newt and I have become good friends," he said, "but I was bothered when he recently called President and Mrs. Clinton a couple of 'counter-culture McGovernites.' Over the years, I have heard people accused of being radical liberals called 'McGovernites' or 'McGoverniks.' I started as a noun, and now I am an adjective! I must confess I never really understood it. I served in World War II and flew 35 bombing missions. I have gone to war, I was the son of a Methodist minister, and I have been married to the same woman for 50 years. I do not feel I am part of any counterculture."

Lightening the mood, he joked about the results of the Republican sweep of Congress a few weeks earlier. "Judging from your broad smiles," he told the conservative audience, "I can tell most of you enjoyed the results of November 8!" Referring to his own presidential loss in 1972, he related this story:

"In 1972 I lost 49 of 50 states. The first Senate colleague I had run into after my defeat was Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, who had also lost in a landslide. Barry later sent over a cartoon to me with the caption, 'If you must lose, lose big!' I thought it was a joke, but Barry later told me that he was serious. Barry explained what he meant by the cartoon: 'In 1960 Dick Nixon lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy by less than 100,000 votes,' he said. 'Nixon spent the next eight years torturing himself and saying things like, 'If only I had gone to Chicago that last weekend instead of Alaska, I might have won.' George, in our case, it wouldn't have mattered how many times we went to Chicago!"

At the end of his speech, he remained at the head table signing autographs and posing for pictures. Before leaving, he came to my table and said he had heard that I might be running for Congress in the next cycle. "You know, Jim, if you run, as a Democrat I won't be able to endorse you," he said apologetically. "But the fact I can't endorse you doesn't mean I can't take great pride in you if you win."

That meant much more than an endorsement.

• • •

When I went to Congress in 1997, McGovern and I visited occasionally. I last saw him, of all places, when he spoke at the presidential library of the man who defeated him in 1972. At age 88 he gave a talk and did a book signing at the Richard Nixon Library in 2009. As an elegant touch, all the Nixon Library employees and docents wore vintage McGovern campaign buttons to welcome the Democrat Party's elder statesman.

• • •

George McGovern died of natural causes in a South Dakota hospice facility at age 90 on October 21, 2012. I consider it an honor to have known this decent man and devoted public servant.

(This story is adapted from my 2013 book, "And Then I Met....")

As a 14-year old boy attending the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, I waited in line to shake hands with President Richard Nixon on the last night of the convention, but my turn never came. In 1988, I came within a heartbeat of meeting him when he spoke at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, but again I suffered a near miss. Twenty years after Miami, my chance came finally. However, when I did meet Nixon, it wasn't over politics—it was over baseball. That was 30 years ago today, and it remains a fond memory.

In 1972, Nixon and his son-in-law David Eisenhower (grandson of President Eisenhower) collaborated in selecting their Major League Baseball all-time "dream teams." Twenty years later, they updated their selections and unveiled them at a fundraising event for Nixon's presidential library in Yorba Linda, California. Tickets for the luncheon cost $200 each; $500 donors received a special "Dugout Club" pass for a private reception with Nixon and his retired baseball player guests. After waiting decades to meet Nixon, I refused to let the opportunity pass. Despite the steep price, for the first (and last) time in my life I bought a $500 ticket to something.

• • •

On a table inside the Nixon Library I found the former president's private schedule left behind by an errant staffer. In flipping through it, I saw that he planned to depart Santa Barbara by helicopter at 9:30 a.m. and fly to Yorba Linda Middle School, where a car would pick him up and drive him to the "Eureka Entrance" of the Nixon Library. Once there, staff would escort him to the Marriott Room for makeup and rest before doing an interview. Whoever prepared the memo anticipated his comfort: handlers were directed to have Diet Pepsi, ice, yellow legal pads, and pens available for him in the room while he awaited the program's start time.

After checking in, I went to the lower-level Olin Room for the Dugout Club reception. As I entered, I heard a familiar voice to my left. I turned and saw Nixon entering the nearby Marriott Room with library director John Taylor and several private security guards. Amazingly, none of the arriving guests recognized Nixon as he lingered in the doorway receiving a last-minute event briefing from Taylor.

A few minutes later, Nixon entered the Olin Room with David Eisenhower for the private reception. He addressed the guests briefly, saying that he preferred to reserve his remarks for the luncheon program. He thanked everyone for coming, and then he took his place in the receiving line.

I was one of the first people to meet him. When my turn came—finally!—Taylor introduced me to him as "Judge Rogan."

"Nice to meet you, Judge," he said as he gripped my hand. Then, looking at me closely, he said, "Are you really a judge? You look too young!"

"Bless you for that, Mr. President," I said, and then the photographer memorialized my $500 moment.

While welcoming guests, Nixon often wiped beads of perspiration from his brow and upper lip. Despite the uncomfortably warm temperature in the room, he smiled and greeted everyone, and he made a point to speak with each child moving through the line with their parents. Despite the "no autograph" rule printed on the reception and luncheon invitations, he signed every card, baseball, scrap of paper, and photograph thrust before him while ignoring library staff attempts to fend off the requests. I overheard one boy complain to his father that Nixon signed his baseball "RN" instead of penning a full signature. "That's the way he signs his name," the father growled, "so shut your ungrateful mouth and be glad you got it."

Following the private reception, ticketed luncheon guests assembled under an outdoor tent erected near the parking lot. American flags lined the stage decorated in red, white, and blue. A banner revealed the updated selections for the "Nixon–Eisenhower All Time Baseball Greats." A box of Cracker Jack served as each table's centerpiece, and the Los Angeles Dodgers organist played baseball-themed musical selections. Behind a rope line waited dozens of young boys in Little League uniforms, along with hundreds of additional spectators and fans hoping to see Nixon and the baseball stars when they entered.

Library director John Taylor introduced each current and former baseball player individually: Johnny Bench, Bob Feller, Brooks Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Johnny Mize, George Kell, Rollie Fingers, Maury Wills, Buck Rodgers, and Tony LaRussa; also introduced was Babe Ruth's daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens.  Nixon stood at the tent entrance awaiting his cue. When it came, a standing ovation greeted his entry while the USC marching band played a medley of patriotic tunes. He smiled and shook hands as he walked to his table. Once he took his seat, Roger Owens, the vendor famous for throwing bags of roasted peanuts with deadly accuracy (and with rocket-like speed) to customers at the Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium, threw a bag to Nixon from 100 feet away. Nixon caught it on the first attempt.

During lunch, a small ring of private security guards kept a watchful eye on Nixon as he chatted with his tablemates. During a break, John Taylor waved me over to Nixon's table. During our brief chat, I showed the former president a rare item from my political memorabilia collection: a campaign brochure from his 1950 U.S. Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas. It bore the caption, "Let's Elect Congressman Richard Nixon United States Senator—The Man who Broke the Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case."

"Where on earth did you get this?" he asked as he studied the vintage flyer. He pointed to the young picture of himself on the cover and looked at it for several seconds. When I asked jokingly if he had used his high school yearbook picture for it, he laughed. "It sure looks like it!" he said. "This pamphlet takes me back a long, long time." He picked up a pen and wrote his signature across the front of the brochure.

A sudden line of people wanting autographs formed behind me, and I don't think he enjoyed another bite of his food. He signed for fans throughout the rest of the luncheon. With him setting the example, the baseball players got into the signing act, too. Only Johnny Bench did so grudgingly, griping to fans about them breaking the no-autograph rule.

After lunch, David Eisenhower began the program by announcing the Nixon–Eisenhower picks for the greatest ballplayers, and he explained their reasons for each selection. Eisenhower then invited each visiting player to join him onstage for commentary.

Johnny Bench remembered playing one game in 1968 and seeing Eisenhower and his fiancée (later wife) Julie Nixon in the stands. "I only had eyes for Julie that day," Bench quipped.

Other players shared brief insights: Bob Feller described his lost playing time because of his military service in World War II ("At least we won that one!"). Rollie Fingers compared modern pitchers to those in his heyday, Tony LaRussa shared his philosophy of what it takes to keep a great team together, and George Kell talked about his years as a third baseman for the New York Yankees. Harmon Killebrew reminisced about meeting President Dwight D. Eisenhower at a baseball game in 1959. Turning to David Eisenhower, he said, "Your grandfather asked me to sign a ball for you that day. I asked him to sign one for me. We traded autographed balls, and I still have his."

"And I still have yours!" Eisenhower replied.

Maury Wills told of driving to Tijuana with friends in the mid-1970s. After a few drinks, he and his friends decided to stop by Nixon's San Clemente home and ring the bell. "Let's see if Dick is home," he said in jest. He had no expectation of seeing Nixon, but when the gates opened and a staffer ushered his group into the former president's study, they all registered shock. "Mr. President," Wills noted, "you were bigger than life then, and you still are."

Eisenhower asked Wills what it takes to win a baseball game. Before Wills could answer, Nixon walked to the stage and answered for him: "Steal!" he thundered.

When Nixon rose to speak, the 79 year-old former president received another standing ovation. Two aides removed the lectern that the previous speakers had used and replaced it with a stand-alone microphone. In his later years, Nixon eschewed notes and made a practice of speaking extemporaneously.

In his opening remarks, he mentioned the presence of Anaheim Angels manager Buck Rodgers and his recent injury while riding in the team's bus. "Now you know why I am opposed to busing," he quipped. "And I want you to know I always root for the home team. I want the Angels to win the World Series while [owner and former cowboy star] Gene Autry is still around."

For almost 30 minutes, he reminisced about his love for baseball and sports. He said he attended his first baseball game in 1925 and became addicted ever since. His love of baseball even affected his thinking on signing autographs. "I signed lots of autographs today," he noted. "I try never to refuse a request, and I will tell you why. Back in 1942, I was eating dinner with my wife, Pat, in a restaurant in New York. Seated across the room from us was the legendary baseball star Babe Ruth. Pat went over to Ruth and asked him for his autograph for my little brother Eddie. As busy and as famous as the Babe was, he took the time to sign that autograph. When I came to a position in my life where people wanted my autograph, I have always tried to remember that if Babe Ruth had time to sign an autograph, then so do I."

Nixon said the first home run he ever saw hit in a baseball game was in the 1940s when Joe DiMaggio smashed one out near the stands where he sat. "But the greatest player I ever saw," he added, "was Jackie Robinson. In fact, Jackie was the greatest all-around athlete ever. He could have played professional football, basketball, or been an Olympic athlete. One of my fond memories was in attending a UCLA–Oregon game with Jackie."

Nixon recalled attending another game with legendary New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel. "Had Casey lived," Nixon joked, "I might have made him Secretary of State. The first rule of politics is to confound the opposition. When Casey spoke, nobody could understand him! Only he could understand himself."

He noted that this year (1992) all the major presidential candidates (Republican George Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton, and Independent Ross Perot) were left-handed. "So it is settled," he concluded, "that our next president will be a southpaw. Any baseball man will tell you that left-handers tend to be a little wild. Our next president will be a left-hander, but we hope he isn't wild and that he will emulate one of baseball's best left handers and hit home runs for America the way Babe Ruth hit them for the New York Yankees!"

He returned to his seat amid another ovation. Jo Lasorda, wife of Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, presented him with one of her husband's jerseys. As the luncheon adjourned, he joined the players onstage for a group photograph. Guests surrounded Nixon, and he remained for another 20 minutes shaking hands and signing autographs.

With the event over, I went inside the library to tour a special exhibit of baseball-related presidential memorabilia. About an hour later, as I was viewing George H.W. Bush's first baseman's mitt from his days as captain of the Yale baseball team, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I still say you look too young to be a judge!" I turned. There stood a smiling Nixon as he gripped my hand and thanked me for coming.

"Mr. President," I teased, "it's that sort of narrow thinking that kept you from becoming governor of California!"

He roared at my joke. "You might be right!" he replied.

Before leaving, he signed for me an engraved White House vignette with his famous "RN" initials. Unlike the little boy earlier in the day, I was not disappointed to receive the abbreviated version of his autograph—the in-person signature I waited 20 years to collect.

• • •

Eighteen months later, on January 20, 1994, I attended a private reunion with Nixon and all of his living cabinet members on the 25th anniversary of his presidential inauguration. At the end of Nixon's remarks that day, his administration alumni joined him onstage for a group photograph. When the program adjourned, Nixon stood at the side of the stage greeting guests and signing autographs. I was in his receiving line and (yet again) just about to meet him when my friend Bob Finch, Nixon's former Secretary of Health education, and Welfare (and the man who gave me the ticket to the event) called me aside to introduce me to some of his former White House colleagues. While I spoke with Bob and his friends, Nixon's security detail led him away. Once again, I had missed meeting Nixon, which was becoming a monotonous habit.

My disappointment evaporated when Bob gave me some great news. He said that he had talked to Nixon about me earlier that morning and of my oft-frustrated desire to meet him to discuss his career in politics and seek his advice for a contemplated future in elective office. Bob said that Nixon planned to return to the library for an intimate dinner with a few friends on June 16, and that the former president had invited me personally to join him. "Nixon told me to tell you that at your dinner, you can ask him questions until you get bored!" Bob said.

Finally, my chance to not just meet Richard Nixon, but to spend time talking with him, would come, and the opportunity couldn't be timelier. A little more than a month after this Nixon Library reunion, I stepped down from the bench and announced my candidacy for the California legislature in a special election to fill a vacant seat. I couldn't wait for the day to come.

• • •

When Richard Nixon left the stage at his presidential library on that 25th anniversary of his inaugural, he walked to the nearby courtyard to visit his wife's grave before departing. Three months later, he rested beside her. He died at age 81 on April 22, 1994 of complications following a stroke. The speech Nixon delivered at that anniversary celebration was his final public address. Sadly, our June 1994 dinner never occurred.

Once again, I had missed him.

Sonny Barger, the founder of the Hells Angels motorcycle group, died today of cancer at age 83.

In my book "Rough Edges: My Unlikely Road from Welfare to Washington," there are a couple of chapters of my bartending years in various Hollywood dive bars and strip clubs--places I worked to pay my way through law school at UCLA. In that book I told this story of my unlikely encounter with Sonny over 40 years ago--and why I hope a very bad dude now rests in peace.
Here is an excerpt from that book:

* * * * *

... I got the new bartending job at The Tarzana Inn, located near the intersection of Reseda and Ventura Boulevards in the San Fernando Valley. On my first night, I learned why the owner needed a bartender so badly—they always quit when they encountered the regulars. The owner had neglected to mention before I started that the Tarzana Inn was a hangout for the local chapter of the Hell's Angels and a couple other outlaw motorcycle gang. When their screaming bike engines roared into the parking lot, the neighborhood customers fled.

On my first night, about an hour into the shift, a dozen or more raucous bikers arrived. I called the owner at home and told him I might need help. "Throw them all out," he barked, "and then call me back when you've done it." As the now-off duty day shift bartender quickly gulped his drink and got up to leave, he asked me what the owner had said. When I repeated my orders, he advised me to ignore it. "Do you know why he told you to do it, and why he won't come down and help? It's because once he ordered the Hells Angels to get out. After they beat the shit out of him, they threw him on the ground and started bouncing the balls from the pool table off his head. He won't ever come down when the biker gangs are here."

I served the bikers their drink orders.

Since the Tarzana Inn operated as a one-man bar, I ended up as the only employee there each night. This made the shift more menacing if trouble started because I had no backup. With the biker gangs, I concentrated on getting through the night in one piece. I walked a fine line treating them respectfully yet still doing my job. It got hairy every time I tried to explain why I couldn't serve alcohol to some runaway teenage girl with a fake ID hanging out with them. Serving a minor would cost me my job (and possibly get me prosecuted for a crime). Refusing service risked a lethal response. I tried to avoid the latter, but a joke and a smile rarely assuaged some pride-stoked biker. Threatened many times, I started carrying a second gun in an ankle holster along with the one holstered under my left armpit. My pockets rattled with speed-loaders for both—just in case. If ever I shot one of them, I knew I'd have to shoot them all or they'd kill me.

I found it nearly impossible to study my law books while serving swarms of bikers. Still, I tried gamely to read my casebooks under the red sink lamps whenever there was a lull in the orders. One night I was pouring drinks while trying to absorb my Civil Procedure text. A big ugly biker asked me what I was reading. I told him it was a law book. "What the fuck are you reading a fuckin' law book for, you fuckhead?" he asked. (I found that many bikers had a universal vocabulary.)

"I'm in law school," I replied.

The biker next to him asked what I had just said. My inquisitive customer shared what he learned about me, and that guy passed along the information to the next, who passed it to the next, and so on down the line. When I went into the men's room a while later, three bikers followed me. One threw me against a wall while another pulled a knife. "So, we hear you're a fuckin' narc," my assailant said.

"What are you talking about?" I gasped. Somehow, through the Tarzana Inn version of the "telephone" parlor game, the bikers mutated the occupation of "law student" into "undercover narcotics cop" as they relayed my avocation down the bar. My assailant put away his knife only after I took out my student ID card to prove my claim.

"Hey," one of them suggested optimistically, "maybe when you finish law school you can defend bikers in court." I told him nothing would please me more than to see him and his friends in court someday.

"Yeah, that'd be pretty fuckin' cool," he said with a nod.

As scary as these marauders acted, they paled in comparison to some of their feminine sidekicks. Most of the biker chicks I saw were drop-dead gorgeous, but some looked like they belonged in the circus. One night, two in the latter category entered dressed in black leathers and chains. One woman (closing in on three hundred pounds) sat at the bar and shouted to me, "Hey, bartender, get your ass over here." She demanded to know my name, and then she told me hers. "I'm Faith," she said as she raised her upper lip toward her nose with her fingers to reveal a smattering of rotting teeth and a gum line bearing a homemade tattoo of her first name. "Listen," she said in a husky voice, "I know you bartenders get off work at 2:00, so that's when I'll be back to pick you up. You're coming home with me tonight."

Faith made it clear this wasn't a solicitation for sex. She sought a command performance. When I treated it like a joke, she grew angry and smashed a beer bottle on the floor. That got my attention. This two-ton bitch looked like she could mop the floor with me if riled. "Don't get me wrong, Faith. You're, uh, very attractive, and your offer is tempting, but I can't—you see, I'm, uh—I'm married." That one sentence contained no less than three separate lies.

"So what?" she blustered. "Hey, I got an old lady, too." With that Faith pointed to her fat lesbian girlfriend seated at a corner table, smiling at me through another mouthful of patina-green teeth. "You're coming home with me or I'm gonna have your skinny ass killed. Take your pick. I'll be waiting for you later tonight outside in the parking lot." With that pledge, Faith and her companions left.

Given a choice, I preferred the throes of death to the arms of Faith. Hoping to avoid both and not knowing what else to do, as my shift neared its end, I called the police. To describe the desk sergeant as unsympathetic is an understatement. When I finished explaining my predicament, he laughed. "Let me get this straight," he said. "You're reporting that you want LAPD to protect you from some fat biker chick with her name tattooed on her gums that wants to take you home and screw you?" He put me on the speakerphone and asked me to repeat the story. I heard his fellow officers guffawing on the other end as I repeated the details. I told him to forget it and hung up.

I closed the bar at 2:00 a.m. and locked the doors from the inside. I wasn't risking Faith and her friends waiting outside for her proposed lovefest. I spent the night curled up in a booth. When the morning bartender opened the tavern, I made him scout the parking lot to make sure it was Faithless. As I drove away at sunrise, I was grateful that Faith had given up hope on getting some charity.

Another night I heard a loud commotion coming from the men's room. "He's in there raping that bitch," one biker from a Valley club told his friend as he motioned with his head toward the noise. I rushed from behind the bar to investigate. Pushing open the bathroom door, I walked in and saw a pretty, petite blonde flat on her back on the filthy floor. Her jeans and panties were down below her knees. She cried and struggled underneath a large bearded hulk who had her pinned down by the wrists. He never looked up until I shoved the barrel of a cocked .38 into his forehead.

"Get off her. Now."

Unbelievably, the woman started screaming—at me: "Don't shoot him, you asshole! It's my father! Get the hell out of here! Leave us alone! What's your fuckin' problem? Get out!" With my gun still drawn, I tried making sense of the macabre scene. The biker got off her slowly and raised his hands while pleading for me to stay calm. The woman jumped from the floor, pulled up her pants, and screamed for me to get out. Shaking my head in disbelief, I backed out of the restroom. A few minutes later they emerged, still calling me names for pulling a gun and breaking up their toilet tryst. They collected their friends and left.

A week or so later I had a rare night with no customers in the bar. Toward midnight, a man and woman entered, ordered beers, and went to shoot a few games of pool. They looked like older bikers; they were quiet and kept to themselves. When the woman grew bored, the guy asked me to shoot a couple of games with him. While we played, we talked about my law school efforts and the continuing trouble I had from various biker gangs. "They won't bother you anymore," he said. "I'll take care of it." With an air of cynicism, I asked what he could do about it. He chugged on his beer bottle and then replied, "My name's Sonny Barger. I'm the founder of the Oakland chapter of the Hell's Angels."

For the rest of the time that I worked at the Tarzana Inn, no biker ever threatened me again.

... My last night at the Tarzana Inn was like so many others. A cluster of Hell's Angels arrived and started their usual ruckus. I poured drinks and in between tried to study my books, but it was so noisy that I didn't hear the first few rings of the telephone. The owner's voice sounded angry and drunk when I answered. "Goddamn you," he slurred. "I just drove by and saw all those motorcycles outside. Get those Hell's Angels out of my lounge. You throw them out or you're fired." I told him I wasn't going to 86 a dozen bikers all by myself. If he wanted them bounced out then he needed to come down and help me do it. "You're fired!" he screamed as he hung up in my ear.

Picking up my walking stick, I rapped on the bar for silence. With everyone's attention I announced, "Gentlemen, we're running the bar on the honor system tonight. The owner just fired me so I'm leaving. Be sure you leave the correct amount of money in the cash register for any drinks you pour for yourself after I'm gone."

I could hear the bikers still laughing as I drove away.

* * * * *

(This story is adapted from my 2013 book, "And Then I Met....")

In 1948, only one in 150 Americans owned a television set. Then a brash comedian named Milton Berle became host of a new program called The Texaco Star Theater. Within a year, TV sales soared, largely because of viewer addiction to his outlandish antics. He so dominated the airwaves (the Nielsen ratings showed that 80 percent of every U.S. household with a set tuned in to him) that movie theaters and restaurants closed their doors on Tuesday nights, because they couldn't compete with the man dubbed "Mr. Television" and "Uncle Miltie." Years later, he related in his autobiography that one study showed Detroit's water reservoir level sank on Tuesday nights between 9:00 and 9:05: "It turned out that everyone waited until the end of the Texaco Star Theater before going to the bathroom," he wrote.

Berle's star power appeared so enduring that in 1951 Texaco signed him to an unprecedented 30-year television contract. However, with the new medium's exploding popularity, the comedy competition grew more potent. His popularity dropped as new programs challenged his supremacy, and in 1953 Texaco canceled his show. During the ensuing years, he remained a fixture in television, and he continued performing in feature films, on Broadway, and in nightclubs.

When I met him, he was decades removed from his early television success, but he remained very much a star and showed no signs of slowing down. Indeed, the Guinness Book of World Records claimed he performed the greatest number of charity benefit performances of anyone in show business history. It was at one such benefit that we met. In 1992, I attended a youth program fundraising luncheon at Burbank's Castaway restaurant where he entertained.

The audience rose and cheered for the 84 year-old comic legend when he appeared at the dais. Chomping on his cigar, he quipped, "Who am I, Ross Perot?" (At the time, Perot was a third-party presidential candidate.) He then launched into a rapid-fire Borscht Belt routine filled with ethnic humor for which modern standards of political correctness required frowns of disapproval in 1992 (and a far worse response these days). For him, political correctness gave way. "Hey," he asked the crowd as he pointed to the Hispanic waiter serving coffee at a front table, "How did that Mexican kid know I'm a Hebrew? Each time he waited on me, he kept asking [imitating a Spanish accent], Jew want more chicken? Jew want more water?" He then pushed his fist to his stomach feigning indigestion: "I've got so much gas that I'm being chased by the Arabs."

Other Berle gems:

•           "I'm so unlucky. I loaned my friend $30,000 to have plastic surgery. Now I can't find the son of a bitch!"

•           "Anytime someone goes into a deli and orders pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies."

•           "At my age, I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's sixth husband. I know what I'm supposed to do, but I don't know how to make it interesting."

•           "I recently married a woman who's 30 years younger than I. Three months ago we made love for one hour and three minutes. Of course, that was the night they turned the clocks back."

•           "We owe a lot to Thomas Edison. If it wasn't for him, we'd be watching TV by candlelight."

•           "Experience is what you get after you've forgotten her name."

And on it went: a repertoire of one-liners from an old vaudevillian who did the show without a note before him. After rocking the room with unrestrained laughter for 30 minutes, he finished to another standing ovation.

As people filed out of the banquet hall, the event producer, my friend Norman Mamey, invited me to meet Berle, who now wolfed down his untouched lunch before the waiters cleared the table. I felt awkward visiting with him while he tried to eat, but he insisted that I join him. He talked while chewing food, and pieces of broccoli kept falling from his mouth and onto his coat during our conversation. What the heck—at his age he deserved a little table etiquette slack. That minor distraction aside, he was delightful.

I gave Berle an old movie still from a film he made more than 50 years earlier. He thanked me as he studied the picture: "Now just one question," he asked: "Who the hell are these other people in it with me?"

When Mamey told Berle that I was a great public speaker, his eyes lit up. "If you speak in public a lot," he insisted, "then you need to buy my book Milton Berle's Private Joke File. There are over 10,000 jokes in it and it will be a valuable reference for you. It's only $20. Let's go—I'll give you a ride to the book store right now so you can buy it!"

Remembering that Berle had a reputation throughout his career for comedians suing him for stealing their material, I chided, "I'll buy your book if you will indemnify me if I get sued using your jokes."

"Buy my book and I'll give you a waiver!" he promised.

A photographer snapped a picture of us. Moments later, as we shook hands and said goodbye, he took a step back. His foot slipped from the stage, he reeled and began falling backward from the riser. I grabbed his arm and caught him just in time.  He was unharmed, but the experience left him shaken. I helped him to his chair until he felt steady. After regaining his composure, he said somberly, "Thanks for saving me. That's how Bing Crosby died. Crosby fell backward off a stage and it led to his heart attack a few months later."

That instance was the only time during this Burbank appearance that Berle—and everyone else—didn't have a smile on his face.

• • •

Milton Berle died of cancer at age 93 on March 27, 2002.

Producer and Grammy Award winner Norman Mamey died at age 66 after a long illness on January 22, 2015.

* * * * *

Going through some old photo albums, I smiled when I recalled the story behind this apparently unremarkable shot (from a frame of 8mm film that I took) of the "Happy Warrior," former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey (1913-1978), the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee who lost the White House by a whisker to Richard Nixon in 1968. 

Four years after his defeat, and hoping for a rematch against Nixon, Humphrey declared his candidacy for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. As the primary season that year winnowed out most of the dozen or so contenders, the battle narrowed down to Humphrey and Senator George McGovern (D-SD). California's June 6th Democratic primary that year proved critical to victory because of the state's cache of 271 "winner take all" delegates to the upcoming nominating convention. 

As a teen, I cut school to see Humphrey when he brought his campaign to downtown San Francisco a few days before  our state's do-or-die primary. One of his early stops was a scheduled television studio interview at KPIX, then located at 2655 Van Ness Avenue (the building has since been demolished and replaced with a modern office building).

Prior to HHH's arrival, a bevy of nervous Secret Service agents paced outside the studio while studying rooftops, windows, passing cars, and onlookers. Only two weeks earlier, a would-be assassin gunned down presidential candidate George Wallace, leaving him paralyzed and near death.

When Humphrey's motorcade arrived at the studio entrance, I pulled out my new Bell and Howell "Super 8" battery-operated movie camera and filmed the candidate as he shook hands with the spectators and gave an interview with a reporter standing on the sidewalk. Humphrey then entered the studio for his scheduled hourlong television appearance.

Forty minutes later and ahead of schedule, Humphrey exited KPIX and walked out to Van Ness Avenue—one of the city's busiest thoroughfares—and discovered his motorcade missing! In his absence, the drivers took the cars to a gas station on the corner of Greenwich and Van Ness for fill-ups. Finding his motorcade missing, Humphrey laughed and waved off the pleas of his detail and staff to remain inside the studio's locked lobby.

"It's a grand and glorious day out today!" Humphrey exclaimed. "Let's just walk to the hotel!"

A frantic aide shook his head. "Oh, Senator, it's miles away. We can't do that."

"Well, then let's walk to the gas station." Without waiting for anyone to veto the idea, he turned to his right and started down the street leading a coterie of scurrying Secret Service agents, reporters, cameramen, and a few onlookers (including me).

At the gas station (on the southwest corner of Van Ness and Filbert--now a small parking lot), Humphrey again ignored the pleas from his detail to get inside the bullet-proof limousine while attendants serviced the vehicles. He calmly waited outside the car whistling, chatting with spectators, and waving to passing buses and taxicabs hurling down the busy street.

Standing a few feet from the candidate, I took some film footage of him alongside the gasoline pumps as service station attendants (no self-serve back then) tanked up the cars in his motorcade. When I put down my camera, he asked where I lived and went to school, and he talked about the joys and rigors of another presidential campaign.

"Okay, we're filled up," a harried agent announced. With handshakes and a wave, Humphrey climbed back into his car. The police sirens blared as the procession turned onto Van Ness and proceeded to the next event.

When one considers the army of Secret Service agents and aides that surround modern presidential candidates during the campaign season, along with the sophisticated operations behind their every movement, this picture of Hubert Humphrey waiting for his motorcade cars to get gassed up—and chatting merrily with anyone standing nearby—echoes a day from the long-gone past. Politics aside, I just can't imagine the repercussions for the Secret Service agents or staff if Donald Trump or Joe Biden exited their events and had to walk to the nearby gas station to catch up to their motorcades!

Both the building that housed KPIX and the gas station are gone, but the memory remains.

I was a freshman high school student in the San Francisco Bay Area when the California Republican Party held its annual state convention at the downtown St. Francis Hotel. A week earlier, and with youthful chutzpah, I played a longshot and called their office. When the press secretary came on the line, I told him that I wanted to cover the event for my school's FM radio station. (Although I had no connection to the station, I took the liberty of appointing myself a reporter to get both a press pass and the story.) To my surprise, he agreed. "No problem," he told me. "You can pick up your credentials at the hotel that morning. I'll put you on the media list." Sometimes, brashness pays off.

On Saturday, May 13, 1972, I arrived at the hotel in the early morning. Several hundred protesters had already assembled across the street in Union Square chanting profanities and slogans against the Republicans in general and the Vietnam War in particular. Their presence brought a ring of police encircling the hotel.  After picking up my press pass and meal tickets at the credentials desk (the Republicans paid for lunch and dinner! To a school kid, this largesse, standing alone, warranted serious consideration of my future partisan loyalty….), I walked over to Union Square to investigate the protest. I found myself in the middle of the throng just as the protest turned ugly. Radicals attacked police with rocks and bottles. Officers in full riot gear waded into the mob to restore order. I turned on my amateur home movie camera to shoot footage of the fracas, but before I could begin filming a rock thrown from the crowd bounced off my lens and knocked the camera out of my hands. My boldness at age 14 matched my stupidity—I picked up my camera to try shooting again. A policeman who noticed both my press pass and my age grabbed my arm and hustled me back to the safety of the hotel.

I made my way into the Grand Ballroom and took a seat at the press table in time to see Governor Reagan arrive for his opening remarks. The delegates jumped to their feet and cheered when he appeared. I positioned myself alongside the stage. From this angle, I witnessed Reagan's "trick" that his longtime press secretary Lyn Nofziger explained to me two decades later when we had become friends: "Reagan wore contact lenses. Just before he entered a ballroom for a speech, he'd pop out one of his contacts and leave in the other. He usually spoke from 4x6 index cards that he carried in his outer suit jacket pocket. When the emcee introduced him, he walked boldly to the stage and waved with both hands. He wanted everyone to see that he carried no speech. When he got behind the lectern where no one could see, he slid one hand into his outer coat pocket and retrieved the cards. Here was the trick: when he gave his speech, he looked at his notes with the one eye wearing the lens, and he looked at the audience with the other eye. It gave the illusion that he spoke extemporaneously and maintained complete eye contact with everyone. I've never known any other person who could do that."

After urging his fellow California Republicans to work hard for President Richard Nixon's reelection that year, he accused Democratic presidential candidate (and eventual Party nominee) George McGovern of being "quite explicit in his plans for regimenting all of us into the ranks of a social order where individuality will have no place…. The domination of our lives is presented to us as liberalism." He pulled out a document and said that the modern Democrat platform reads almost identically to what he held in his hands. He rattled off several key planks, such as nationalizing businesses and focusing less on the individual and more on the collective good. "What I have just read to you," he declared, "was the platform of Germany's Nazi Party." Then, referring to the rioters across the street, he added that their activities were "nothing more than a revival of Hitler's Storm Troopers."

When Reagan concluded his speech, a thicket of security agents moved in to whisk him out of the hotel. I had hoped to meet him, but given this heavy guard and the crush of fans around him, the odds appeared insurmountable. Resigned to missing my chance, I moved to the far side of the ballroom to avoid the people surging toward him.

As Reagan's detail made for the exit, the governor turned and reversed course suddenly. I looked up and saw him coming toward me. I don't recall if I stepped forward or someone shoved me, but I found myself bounced inside his security wedge and standing next to him. There stood Ronald Reagan, big as life, smiling and extending his hand toward me. I shook it and asked for an autograph.

"Sure," he said. "Walk with me while I sign it." As we moved through the hotel lobby, a phalanx of press photographers kept their cameras trained on us. Although I never saw a picture of us taken together from that day, in a newspaper morgue file somewhere is a picture depicting my first meeting with the man who went on to change the destiny of the world, and who also had a profound impact on my own calling as I described in my book, "And Then I Met…."

I walked with Reagan to his waiting motorcade where he handed back the autograph, shook my hand again, wished me luck in school, and then he climbed into his limousine. Throughout the rest of the day, convention delegates kept asking in awe, "Aren't you the boy that I saw walking with the governor this morning?"

• • •

The next scheduled event was the luncheon speech of Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), who at the time also served as chairman of the Republican National Committee. With an hour to kill before Dole's appearance, I returned to Union Square and watched the mob's antics. When another scuffle broke out with police and more rocks began flying, I didn't need another police officer to push me back inside the hotel. I retreated on my own.

Workers had decorated the Grand Ballroom for the luncheon with flags, bunting, and elephant centerpieces on each table.  Dole arrived as lunch ended. He acknowledged the standing ovation as he moved to the dais, and then began brief remarks that mirrored Reagan's earlier comments by attacking the Democrats and extolling the Nixon Administration, His greatest applause came when he blasted the New York Times for their daily "attempted media sabotage" of Nixon's Vietnam policies.

 I met Dole at the end of the luncheon. He asked me how I liked his speech.  Impressed with his fiery presentation, I said, "Senator, if you keep making speeches like that you'll be president someday."

"No danger of that!" he said.

A few minutes later, I wandered into the hotel lobby where vendors set up tables filled with Nixon campaign items for sale.  As a collector of political campaign memorabilia, I was inspecting swag when Dole joined me. I told him about my collection and that I planned to add to it with some of these things. He picked up a cigarette lighter emblazoned with a GOP elephant on the side, examined it, and then put it back. "I was going to buy this for you," he quipped, "but I don't want you to take up smoking!"

After saying goodbye, I watched as Dole exited the hotel unescorted. He walked by the demonstrators across the street.

Not one of them recognized him.

• • •

U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) didn't invent the modern conservative political movement, but his presidential campaign brought it out of the shadows and started its march to the mainstream. As the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, he railed against socialism, communism, New Deal liberalism, and the welfare state while arguing for a return to constitutional principles of individual liberty and self-government. Although he led the GOP that year to a landslide defeat against President Lyndon B. Johnson, his army of young conservative warriors in that race learned how to organize, fight, and win. The DNA of Barry Goldwater's 1964 loss ran through the 1980 victory of his ideological heir, Ronald Reagan. Eight years before Reagan's triumphant march to the White House, at this 1972 GOP cavalcade, he remained the warm-up act; Goldwater came as the headliner.

I received an unexpected treat that evening when I returned to the ballroom for the Goldwater dinner and recognized the evening's emcee, Edgar Bergen, seated alone at the head table. Born in 1903, the ventriloquist toured the vaudeville circuits with his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Moving to radio in the 1930s, he and Charlie starred in one of the top-rated comedy shows for 20 years. His stage, radio, television, and motion picture career stretched over 60 years, and he co-starred alongside Hollywood luminaries ranging from W.C. Fields to Marilyn Monroe.

When I introduced myself to Bergen, he said that he was surprised to have a fan recognize him who was born long after his heyday. I told him that I was a longtime aficionado of the Golden Age of Radio, and I asked if he had a favorite memory from those days.

"Well," he said, "I once caused a national panic by taking a commercial break during a 1938 broadcast." He explained that his top-rated NBC show competed for the 8:00 p.m. time slot with CBS's "Mercury Theatre on the Air" starring Orson Welles. During Bergen's broadcast, he broke for a commercial midway through the program. Many in his radio audience turned the dial during the lull. Those listeners that tuned to CBS heard Welles's adaptation of "The War of the Worlds" already in progress. Because Welles presented the drama in a modern "breaking news" format, thousands believed the fictional bulletins reporting that an invading army of Martians had landed in New Jersey. As one writer noted, latecomers to the Welles broadcast "greatly misinterpreted what they heard. The next day, newspapers nationwide reported that thousands of people across the country had taken the fake news to be true and fled their homes in terror—grabbing firearms, putting on gas masks, and clogging the highways in a mad rush to escape imaginary Martians."[1] "War of the Worlds" remains one of the most famous radio broadcasts in history, and by cutting to a scheduled commercial break, Bergen added to his already substantial contribution to radio history.

Just as I returned to the press table, people in the rear of the ballroom started shouting and cheering. Barry Goldwater had arrived, and the audience reception equaled that given to a conquering military hero. He walked to the head table, greeted Bergen, waved to the crowd, and then motioned for everyone to take their seats.

While the waiters served dinner, Bergen caught my eye and beckoned me to the head table. He introduced me to Goldwater, who said how pleased he was to see a young person attending the GOP conference. I told him that when I was a small boy, his presidential campaign was the first political race of which I became aware. "Well," he laughed, "I'm sorry that's the race that introduced you to politics!"

Taking a sip from his water glass, he continued, "I didn't plan it to go the way it went. In 1964, I had planned to run against Jack Kennedy. Kennedy and I understood each other. We even talked about traveling the country together on the same plane and debating at various cities. We would have run a hell of a campaign."

He said that he had known Lyndon Johnson since their days together in the Senate, but his fondness for President Kennedy did not extend to JFK's successor. He called Johnson a contemptable politician who would do whatever it took to win: "He had no principles. He wrapped himself in Kennedy's martyrdom and the voters bought it. I don't think Abe Lincoln could have won in 1964 if he had run against Johnson—especially running less than a year after the assassination. Once Kennedy died, I knew I had no chance of winning."

I asked if he might ever try again for the White House. "No," he said, "I'm too old now."

After savoring these few uninterrupted minutes with Goldwater, I noticed that other people now lined up behind me to meet him. Before saying goodbye, I asked a final question: What was it was like to be the presidential nominee of his Party?

He grinned. "Son," he replied, "the main lesson I learned from the experience is this—you've never been beaten in your life until you've been beaten for the presidency of the United States."

• • •

Ronald Reagan served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. After leaving office, he wrote his memoirs, oversaw the construction of his presidential library, and maintained an active speaking and travel schedule until doctors diagnosed him with Alzheimer's disease in 1994. Over the next decade, he faded gracefully from the public scene. When he died at age 93 on June 5, 2004, the world mourned the passing of one of that generation's most consequential leaders.

After his 1964 presidential campaign defeat, Barry Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1968, where he continued serving until his retirement in 1987. He remained involved politically until sidelined by a massive stroke in 1996, which was followed by an Alzheimer's diagnosis. He died at age 89 on May 29, 1998.

When I met Bob Dole in 1972, I told him about my campaign button collection. A quarter-century later, our images appeared on a "Dole for President-Rogan for Congress" campaign button. He campaigned for me in each of my three congressional races, and he became a treasured friend. My prediction that one day he would be president fell short, but he did become his Party's standard bearer in the 1996 presidential campaign. In his post-political years, he enjoyed a varied career, which included lobbyist, author, and television commercial pitchman. The man who didn't want me to start smoking as a kid died of lung cancer at age 98 on December 5, 2021.

On September 21, 1978, comedian and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen announced his retirement after 60 years in show business. Nine days later, he played his farewell engagement at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas and received six standing ovations during his performance. Before taking his final bow, he closed his career by telling the audience, "Every vaudeville act must have an opening and a closing, so I'll pack up my jokes and my little friends and now say goodbye." Later that evening, he died in his sleep at age 75. His wooden sidekick for over five decades, Charlie McCarthy, now sits on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

 [1] A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (2015), 7.

The 1928 Democratic Party's presidential nominee, New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, was one of America's most colorful political figures. Born in 1873 and growing up in New York's Lower East Side, he rose from humble beginnings to winning four terms as his state's governor. Capturing his Party's presidential nomination in 1928, he made history as America's first Catholic major party nominee.

Addressing his fellow Democrats at their national Jefferson Day Dinner in Washington, D.C. on April 13, 1932, he identified a divisive problem in America that persists to this day. When I read this, it made me wish we had more Al Smiths in politics today:

I will take off my coat and fight to the end any candidate who persists in any demagogic appeal to the masses of working people of the country to destroy themselves by setting class against class and rich against poor."

I am saddened to hear that my friend and former colleague, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who served in the U.S. Senate from 1977-2019, died today at age 88. His 42-year tenure made him the longest serving Republican senator in U.S. history. Although I often bristled over his need to compromise on bad legislation rather than killing it, he was the consummate gentleman to all with whom he worked.

I remember the time we crossed swords during the height of the Clinton impeachment trial. He and I appeared on the Sunday morning ABC News program, "This Week." Orrin kept professing his public support for our team of House Managers (prosecutors), but he kept trying to negotiate a quick exit with the Democrats that precluded us from putting on any evidence and shutting down the so-called trial without giving us a chance to show why the House of Representatives, with five Democrats voting aye, impeached the first president in 135 years. 

I wrote about one encounter with Orrin in my book on the Clinton impeachment, "Catching Our Flag":

On Sunday, January 10, 1999, an intern escorted me to the greenroom at ABC to join Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and John Breaux (D-LA), all of whom were scheduled for a separate interview segment on the show. Hatch seemed especially worried about what I might say regarding the Senate's "bipartisan" trial procedures. He also expressed his deep concern over Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) being one of our House Manager presenters. Hatch said Barr wouldn't be effective because the senators view him as a lightning rod.

Before we went into the studio for the interview, Hatch put his arm around my shoulder and asked if he could speak to me privately. We walked out in the hallway together. "I'm on your side," he said (despite his joining in the senatorial chorus approving the fast exit plan). Then Hatch hit me with an unexpected request: "I'm seriously thinking of running for president in 2000," he told me. "Having smart and respected fellows like you on my side would make a big difference. What do you think? Do you think I could do it, and do you think you could support a guy like me?"

Taken aback by the unexpected plea, I smiled: "Orrin, ask me that question later—after you vote in the Senate on whether we get to call witnesses."

Oblivious to the backhanded shot I took for him not backing us on witnesses, he replied, "Great! When this is all over, come by my office and get together with me on this. I really want to talk to you about it."

Walking away, I shook my head in amazement. I liked Orrin Hatch—then and now. In fact, he came to my district and campaigned for me when I first ran for Congress. However, asking someone to help make you president while you stab him confirmed my view that breathing the Senate air for too long can seriously distort one's judgment.

Orrin did run for president--briefly--in 2000, but his campaign never got off the blocks. He returned to the Senate where he served until his 2019 retirement. Despite our occasional political differences, and notwithstanding my unsuccessful battle against him and the Senate's GOP leadership during the Clinton trial, Orrin Hatch loved his family, loved his country, and loved the Lord. I mourn his loss today, and I join with thousands of others in paying my respects to a man who devoted his life to public service.

As the gun sounded for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination race, Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME), who had run as Hubert Humphrey's running mate for vice president in 1968, remained the heavily favored frontrunner during the three years leading up to 1972. Universal expectations had Muskie winning New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary. Senator George McGovern (D-SD), largely unknown after over a year of campaigning, straggled far behind in the polls. On primary night, Muskie did very well. He won almost 50 percent of the vote in a field of five contenders. McGovern lost, but his grass-roots campaign did better than expected with a second-place finish at 37 percent. Immediately the pundits and network anchors proclaimed the meaning of the New Hampshire results in their peculiar version of political algebra:

Muskie won

+

McGovern lost, but he did much better than the pundits expected

=

Muskie lost; McGovern won

The following morning, McGovern's name, and not Muskie's, splashed across the headlines. In the upcoming Wisconsin primary on April 4, McGovern parlayed his New Hampshire momentum into a stunning and unexpected first-place victory. This catapulted the near-anonymous candidate only days earlier into the frontrunner position.

The day after his Wisconsin win, McGovern brought his now-noticed campaign to San Francisco. For weeks his local headquarters couldn't give away tickets to his scheduled $25 per person fundraising dinner at the Hilton Hotel. Within minutes of Wisconsin's vote tabulation, the event sold out.

Today, we live in an era where tickets to political events cost thousands of dollars. It's hard to conceive that in 1972 the price tag for admission to a sit-down dinner for the leading presidential candidate at a major venue cost $25. Yet, for myself (age 14 at the time), the price might as well have been $25,000. Along with my 12-year-old brother Pat, we had no money for a ticket, but that didn't dissuade us from trying to get inside to meet McGovern.

We took the Greyhound bus from the East Bay to San Francisco and arrived at the Hilton three hours before the dinner began. We sat in the lobby hoping to see McGovern when he arrived. Not long after we parked ourselves, I saw a chunky man with a buzz haircut and wearing a Hilton blazer staring at us from across the room. He approached, identified himself as hotel security, and he asked what we were doing there. I explained that we had taken the near two-hour bus ride from Pinole to see McGovern. Once he learned that we had no dinner ticket, his already unpleasant attitude grew nasty. "Let me give you boys some advice," he said sarcastically. "Get back on your bus to Pinole and get the hell out of here. You aren't meeting anybody in this hotel tonight." Before we knew it, we found ourselves outside on the sidewalk.

Pat and I didn't surrender easily. We snuck back inside at another entrance, but the same guard nabbed us. Tossing us out once again, he warned that any further entry would result in our arrest.

I had an idea. Finding a pay telephone, I called the hotel switchboard, dropped my voice to the deepest baritone a 14 year-old could muster, and I told the operator that I was Senator McGovern's speech writer. I commanded her to put me through to his suite. To my surprise, she routed the call.

Dick Dougherty, McGovern's national campaign press secretary, answered. I explained our situation and he proved sympathetic. He arranged for us to get freelance photographer passes and complimentary dinner tickets at the press table. Dougherty told us to have the hotel security guard call him directly if he gave us any more problems.

We returned to the hotel and waited. It didn't take long for Inspector Javert to find us. He grabbed our arms and started yanking us across the lobby while saying that the police were on the way to arrest us for trespassing. When I told him to call Dougherty to confirm that we had tickets, he refused. Amid the yelling and the tugging, the hotel manager rushed over to investigate the disturbance. After hearing our explanation, the manager picked up a courtesy phone in the foyer and called McGovern's suite. A few moments later, the manager summoned the guard to join him over in the corner. I couldn't hear their discussion, but I saw the guard's face redden as the manager spoke with him harshly while poking an index finger into his chest. The guard stalked away.

The manager returned. "Personal guests of Senator McGovern are always welcome in this hotel," he said.

With the event still two hours away, and while we continued our lobby stakeout, I saw McGovern alone and unrecognized strolling from the elevator bank. Pat and I introduced ourselves, and the candidate (in no apparent hurry) settled into a high-backed lobby chair and invited us to visit with him for a few minutes. "I was just going to take a walk around the block," he said with a chuckle, "so I've got some time to kill." When we told him the story of the guard and Dick Dougherty, he laughed. "So—you're the boys, eh? Dick told me about your enterprising effort to join us tonight. We're glad to have you."

I asked how he felt about his sudden vault to the front of the presidential pack. He said he felt reluctant to claim frontrunner status just yet, but yesterday's Wisconsin result gratified him, and he hoped to continue his momentum.

Before resuming his walk, he obliged an autograph request. On an index card he wrote out in longhand and signed his campaign slogan for me: "For Jim, I make one pledge above all others—to seek and speak the truth. With kindest regards, George McGovern."

Presidential candidate George McGovern put his campaign pledge in writing for me, April 5, 1972. (Author's collection)

After thanking him and wishing him luck, we watched as McGovern rode the escalator down to O'Farrell Street for his constitutional.

Later that evening, and shortly before the dinner began, two couples chatting nearby came over to talk to Pat and me. One man in the group said they saw us in the lobby with McGovern earlier and he asked if we had gotten his autograph. I showed him the quotation, and they passed it around and congratulated me on the acquisition. It wasn't until they introduced themselves that we realized with whom we were speaking—movie stars Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, along with pop singer Michelle Phillips from the 1960s rock group The Mamas and the Papas.

Following dinner, Congressman Don Edwards (D-CA) introduced McGovern to the packed and enthusiastic ballroom. I moved from the press table to the stage to snap a few photographs as the candidate urged his supporters to help him win the California primary and clinch the nomination.

At the end of the dinner, and as the crowd departed, I saw California State Assemblyman (later Congressman) John Burton standing nearby. He wore on his lapel a type of McGovern campaign button incorporating the American flag and a peace symbol that I had never seen before (or since). After introducing myself, I told him I collected political memorabilia and asked him to give me the badge. Burton didn't want to part with it, but my zeal wore him down and he relented.

Twenty-four years after he gave me the badge, John Burton and I served together in the State Assembly as colleagues. One day I wore his old McGovern button in my lapel and struck up a conversation with him in the chamber while waiting to see if he recognized my vintage treasure. Sure enough, after a few moments he asked about it. I recounted the story for him. "Those were the good old days," he sighed.

I sought to draw him out: "You mean the good old days when liberalism was on the rise? You mean the days when liberals believed they could solve the ills of the world, and when idealistic antiwar activists marched for world peace?"

He looked at me dismissively. "No," he said. "I don't mean any of that shit. I mean the good old days—when we could take money out of the Assembly Rules Committee budget and use it to pay for our fucking campaign buttons!"

Assemblyman John Burton's 1972 memento of "The Good Old Days" that he gave me at the McGovern for president dinner, Hilton Hotel, April 5, 1972. (Author's collection)

• • •

Senator George McGovern won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, but he lost the election in a landslide to Richard Nixon. Decades later, during my own time in politics, I became friends with the man who gave me his autograph in the Hilton hotel in 1972. When I was in the state legislature, he told me after a luncheon we both attended that he had heard that I might be running for Congress in the next cycle. "You know, Jim, if you run, as a Democrat I won't be able to endorse you," he said apologetically. "But the fact I can't endorse you doesn't mean I can't take great pride in you if you win."

That meant much more than an endorsement.

When I went to Congress in 1997, with both of us back in Washington, he and I visited occasionally. I last saw him, of all places, when he spoke at the presidential library of the man who defeated him in 1972. At age 88 he gave a talk and did a book signing at the Richard Nixon Library in 2009. As an elegant touch, all the Nixon Library employees and docents wore vintage McGovern campaign buttons to welcome the Democrat Party's elder statesman. He died of natural causes in a South Dakota hospice facility at age 90 on October 21, 2012. Although we had little in common politically, I consider it an honor to have known this decent man and devoted public servant.

California State Assembly Majority Leader James Rogan and his friend George McGovern, 1995

• • •

When writing this remembrance of my night at the Hilton with Senator McGovern, I wanted to track down Dick Dougherty and thank him for helping to create a fond memory for two grateful boys who tried crashing his event. In looking him up on the Internet I found this entry dated January 2, 1987: "Richard Dougherty, former New York bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times and press secretary for Senator George McGovern, died of lung cancer Tuesday. He was 65." Thanks again, Dick. I never forgot your kindness.

+ + + + +

Writing this story five decades later, I am mindful that with each passing year Hubert Humphrey's name registers with fewer people. That was not true when I was young. A Washington heavyweight for decades, the former pharmacist and Minneapolis mayor first won election to the U.S. Senate in 1948. He ran unsuccessfully against John F. Kennedy for the 1960 Democrat presidential nomination, but four years later President Lyndon Johnson tapped him as his running mate. As the 1968 Democrat presidential nominee, Humphrey lost the White House to Richard Nixon by a whisker. After recapturing his old Senate seat two years later, and with the 1972 presidential campaign around the corner, he itched for a rematch with the Republican president.

When I was a boy, Humphrey was more than a politician to me. He was an early inspiration. As a fifth grader during his 1968 presidential run, I read a Life magazine profile on him. It told of his experience as a young Midwestern pharmacist making his first visit to 1930s Washington and the newfound passion for politics he found there. One night, after an exhilarating tour of the monuments, he rushed off an excited letter to his fiancée back home. After pleading with her not to laugh at him, he wrote that if he applied himself then maybe he could return one day as a congressman. She didn't laugh, they married, and along the way he helped shape almost every landmark law of his era. That magazine profile on HHH showed me that if an ordinary Midwestern druggist could accomplish such great things through politics, then maybe one day I could do the same. Once I connected those dots, I set my compass.

I was 14 when Humphrey entered the race for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. When I saw that he planned to make a daylong campaign swing through San Francisco on March 24, 1972, my younger brother Pat and I grabbed our cameras and waited for the candidate outside station KPIX, located at 2655 Van Ness Avenue, a busy street that cut through downtown. Pat and I each had pinned to our jackets two jumbo-sized Humphrey for president badges.

Humphrey exited the studio and waved to the small cheering crowd waiting for him. When he saw Pat and me wearing the oversized badges, he made a beeline straight for us while exclaiming, "Oh, boy! Am I for you!" I had brought a typescript quotation from one of his major 1968 campaign speeches for him to sign, but he went one better. Ignoring the increasingly frantic pleas of his Secret Service detail to return to the safety of his car, he led Pat and me (along with a parade of security agents and reporters) down to Filbert Street so that he could use the mailbox at the northwest corner as his writing desk.

He took several minutes to write out the quote in slow and careful longhand strokes. Unhappy and fidgety agents nervously watched the nearby rooftops, passing cars, and gathering spectators with good reason: Two weeks earlier, a would-be assassin pumped four bullets into Alabama Governor George Wallace as he campaigned for the presidency. Tossing aside safety concerns, HHH created what remains one of the sentimental favorites in my political memorabilia collection.

"If I am permitted to be president, I intend to be president. I've noticed most presidents are like that. They don't take orders from vice presidents or anyone else. Hubert Humphrey as vice president is a member of a team. Hubert Humphrey as president is captain of a team. There's a lot of difference. —Hubert H. Humphrey." HHH wrote out this quotation for me using a mailbox on a busy street corner while agitated Secret Service agents tried to hurry him along, March 24, 1972. (Author's collection)

Later that evening, Pat and I snuck into Humphrey's private reception for his California Democrat National Convention delegation slate in the Fairmont Hotel's Crystal Room. Near the end of his brief campaign speech, a group of young and pretty stewardesses staying at the hotel peeked inside the room and recognized him. Sheepishly, one of them asked a campaign aide if they could come in and meet the candidate. When Humphrey saw them talking to his aide, he strode over and escorted them personally into his reception. After shaking their hands and posing for a photo, he announced that he had a gift for each. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a fistful of brass "HHH" pins that fastened in the back with a butterfly clutch. "These are our special campaign pins that we give to special friends," he told the flight attendants, "and I would like to give one to each of you."

The first stewardess reached out her hand to receive the gift. He ignored her outstretched palm and said, "Here, let me pin it on you!" With the practiced speed of a teenage boy in the backseat of an old Buick, he slid his hand down and inside the young woman's blouse while he fastened the clasp. The startled stewardess blushed through saucer-sized eyes, but her giggling smile never wavered. Onlookers chuckled while two campaign workers exchanged awkward glances as HHH moved down the line and, with unfettered gusto, pinned one to each woman's top.

As he fastened the last pin, someone in the crowd called out, "Muriel [Mrs. Humphrey] will give you hell for this!" He ignored the crack and completed the task. As the last flushed attendant straightened her disheveled blouse and thanked him, he looked over at Pat and me and gave us a wink. "Ahh," he exclaimed with a grin, "the joys of running for president!"

He shook my hand as he prepared to leave. I said, "You know, Senator, you were the envy of every guy in this room a minute ago." Then I leaned in and whispered, "And if you give me one of those HHH pins for my collection, I'll keep my mouth shut!" Humphrey looked down at me, smiled, and then reached into his pocket and produced pins for Pat and me.

Fifty years later, I still treasure the pin, which is on display in my office to this day.

• • •

Humphrey lost the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. He never again sought the presidency. During a routine medical checkup in the fall of 1976, doctors found a tumor and diagnosed it as terminal.

He refused to surrender. "Life was not meant to be endured," he said. "Life was meant to be enjoyed." He gamely resumed his duties in the U.S. Senate and helped lead the battle for President Carter's legislative agenda. Despite this brave determination, news clips throughout 1977 depicted a progressively haggard and dying man. He spent his final days calling old friends and political enemies to say goodbye. He made one such call to the man who had vanquished his dream in 1968, Richard Nixon, and invited him to attend his funeral.

Hubert H. Humphrey died at age 66 on January 13, 1978.

In the final letter he sent me a few months before the end, he encouraged me to press on with my goals for a life of public service. He closed it with this advice: "We need good, progressive, honorable young people in government and politics. So, go to it. Work hard; study hard; fight the good fight; and, my friend, be of good cheer."

Even though our political philosophies parted long before I returned to Washington as a congressman, I always tried to live by Hubert Humphrey's advice—and by his example.

* * *

As a fifth grade student, my interest in politics and government coincided with that year's 1968 presidential campaign. I followed the primary races, the national nominating conventions, and the lead-up to Election Day with the same level of enthusiasm that most boys give to major sporting events. In what ended up as one of the closest elections in American history, the Republican ticket of former Vice President Richard Nixon and Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew defeated the Democratic nominees, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Edmund Muskie. Although a virtual unknown at the time Humphrey selected him as his running mate, Muskie developed a strong national following for his calm and steady demeanor in a year that exhausted the electorate from months of tumult and ongoing overseas war. Following their loss to Nixon, as the national Democrats regrouped and assessed their situation, many saw Muskie as the perfect presidential candidate to carry their banner against President Nixon four years later.

Born in 1914, Muskie served in the Navy during World War II. After the war, he returned to his native Maine, where he won a seat in the state legislature. In 1954 he became the state's first Democrat governor in 100 years. In 1959, voters sent him to the U.S. Senate. 

Following his nearly-successful vice presidential campaign in 1968, by late 1971 and early 1972, Muskie rode high in the presidential preference polls, and he held steady leads over all potential rivals. He declared his candidacy on January 4, 1972.  When he brought his campaign to San Francisco for a fund-raising event the following month, he remained the man to beat.

On February 22, 1972, while indulging our youthful passion for politics, my younger brother Pat and I rode the bus into downtown San Francisco. We walked up Nob Hill to the Fairmont Hotel with a plan to sneak into Muskie's big fundraising dinner and try meeting the man who might be the next president. With tickets for the event priced at $250 (the equivalent of $1,600 in 2022), and at age 14, crashing the party offered my only chance of attending.

We waited outside the hotel's main entrance for a couple of hours on that blustery evening. At 7:30 p.m., a line of cars pulled into the main driveway. Flanked by a few aides, Muskie climbed out of the lead car and headed for the entrance. 

I snapped this picture of Senator Muskie as he arrived at the Fairmont Hotel, February 22, 1972.

The candidate shook hands with Pat and me, and he invited us to walk with him through the lobby while he autographed a campaign pamphlet for me. He then boarded an elevator and went to his suite on the eighth floor to freshen up before the event. 

1972 Muskie campaign brochure inscribed for me by the candidate

Half an hour later, Muskie and his entourage returned to the lobby and walked to the hotel's Gold Room, the ballroom reserved for that night's big event. The waiting audience rose and cheered as he waved and shook hands on his way to a reserved table, where he joined his California campaign manager, former U.S. Trade Representative William Matson Roth. During the excitement caused by Muskie's arrival, Pat and I managed to sneak inside by walking briskly alongside Muskie's aides as they swept into the ballroom. Somehow, we eluded the otherwise watchful eyes of security guards posted at the doors.

We stood in the rear of the room trying to look inconspicuous while hoping to hear Muskie's speech before security detected our uninvited presence and ejected us. I almost blew my luck just before the formal program began when I walked over to Muskie's table and snapped a photo just as he shoved a forkful of salad into his mouth. An irate security guard rushed over, grabbed my arm, and shouted at me, "Don't come close to the senator again!"  before he released his grip. Counting myself lucky to have suffered only a stern admonishment and not a trespass arrest, I retreated to the corner of the ballroom, where Pat and I hid throughout the remainder of the evening.

 The offending picture: Muskie masticating his salad! He autographed this

later in the year.

We had not eaten anything since lunch nine hours earlier, so by now we had grown hungry. With just enough money for bus fare home, buying food was no option. We sauntered over to where the hotel waiters stacked their serving trays, and when nobody was looking, we filled our pockets with leftover dinner rolls.

We watched from our position in the back of the ballroom as Roth introduced Muskie, who received another standing ovation as he walked to the lectern to deliver a brief stump speech asking for support in his White House quest.

When he concluded, he posed for photographs with donors and signed autographs. As he and his party exited, he walked over to where Pat and I stood and again shook our hands. "Let's have a picture together," he said to me, and then he took my camera and handed it to his aide with directions to take one.

Muskie and me at the Fairmont, February 22, 1972

Waiters continued to clear the dishes while Pat and I collected the remainder of the campaign buttons left on the tables, each of which proclaimed, "President Muskie (Don't You Feel Better Already?)"  Meanwhile, Pat scooped up a unique souvenir: he took Muskie's dinner fork.

• • •

When I met Edmund Muskie that night at the Fairmont Hotel, his then-domination of the presidential preference polls was only hours away from derailment.  Four days later, he delivered a speech in New Hampshire that marked the beginning of the end of his White House aspirations. As reported in Britannica.com: "Mounting the bed of a truck parked outside the offices of the conservative Manchester Union Leader, [New Hampshire's] largest newspaper, Muskie launched an attack on the paper's publisher, William Loeb. As he spoke of Loeb's unflattering remarks about Mrs. Muskie, the senator's voice cracked, and the crowd saw tears form in his eyes. The spectacle badly dented the image Muskie had tried all year to present—that of a calm, trustworthy, serene candidate. When New Hampshire voted [in their presidential primary] on March 7, Muskie won the hollowest of victories, 46 percent of the vote, far below the predicted 65 percent. [Longshot Democratic presidential candidate George] McGovern, reaping the benefit of his early start and vigorous organization, was close behind with 37 percent." https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1972

Fifty years after meeting Muskie in San Francisco, I still have the memorabilia from that night. If you want to see the salad fork, the next time you visit my brother Pat's home, you might try opening his kitchen utensil drawer.

• • •

After spending over 20 years in the Senate, Edmund Muskie resigned in 1980 to serve as President Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State. With Carter's defeat the following year, Muskie retired from elective office. He practiced law and remained active in governmental affairs. He died at age 81 of congestive heart failure on March 26, 1996.

* * * * *

Let your imagination take you back to the 1950s. You are a military pilot who flew combat missions during World War II and in Korea, and you live in an era when rocketry and missile technology remains primitive. A new government agency approaches you with a proposal:

They have designed a seven-foot-by-nine-foot metal container with only enough room inside for a man to squeeze into the coffin-tight compartment. They want to attach that capsule (with the man inside) atop a long-range missile designed for nuclear warheads, and then launch the missile into outer space. If the missile makes it that far, they hope to have the capsule break away, orbit the Earth repeatedly, reenter the atmosphere, and splash down into the ocean using pop-up parachutes. Of course, there are some problems. They have never sent a man into outer space, and they have no validated research available on how to do it and bring him back safely. Of their five previous missile tests, two of them failed on the launch pad and exploded into fireballs. Also, without any available medical testing, they worry that prolonged exposure to G-forces and zero gravity will crush his eyeballs or make them pop out of their sockets, as well as cause severe brain and skeletal damage. Mostly, they fret that the estimated 10,000-degree Fahrenheit reentry heat might vaporize both capsule and passenger. After explaining these multiple dangers, and in the interest of science and exploration, they ask you to climb into that glorified tin can atop the missile and let them light the fuse.

What kind of man would take such a catastrophe-beckoning gamble?

Meet John Glenn.

Born in 1921, as a Marine Corps pilot he flew fifty-nine combat missions during World War II, and ninety more in Korea. In 1959, NASA named him to its first group of astronauts, the Mercury 7. After two earlier launches completed successful suborbital flights, on February 20, 1962, he became the first American to orbit the Earth. His spaceship, Friendship 7, completed three revolutions in under five hours. Returning to a hero's welcome and tickertape parades, Ohio voters elected him to the U.S. Senate a dozen years later.

Glenn ranked as one of my earliest boyhood heroes. I wasn't yet five years old when he launched, but I still remember his death-defying, Buck Rogers-styled adventure. During his flight, I watched the live television coverage of his elderly mother waving at the sky as her son's capsule soared 162 miles above. When the TV newsman reported that in some cities people could view a glint from his spaceship as it passed, I begged my grandmother to bring me outside our San Francisco flat to see him sail across the heavens. As I stood on the sidewalk in front of 2718 Bryant Street holding Grandma's hand and staring upward, she never imagined that one day Little Jimmy would serve in Congress with the astronaut orbiting overhead.

When I made my first trip to Washington as a teen in 1975, rookie U.S. Senator John Glenn had arrived at the Capitol only eight months earlier. With no expectation of success, I wrote him and asked if I could drop by and meet him. To my delight, he said yes.

I arrived at his Senate office on a muggy afternoon and told his young and bubbly secretary that I was nervous about meeting her boss. "Relax," she said. "He's the nicest man in town. The word's already out among the staffers. They all want to work for him." After she led me into our meeting, I understood why.

He sat behind his desk reading a document when I entered. He looked up, removed his eyeglasses, and sprinted across the room to welcome me. Instead of having his aide rush me in and out for a perfunctory handshake and photo, he invited me to join him on the couch while he asked about my background and future ambitions (a paternal grin crossed his face when I told him I wanted to run for Congress someday).

After sharing with him my childhood recollections of his 1962 flight, he led me over to a table displaying a model of Friendship 7. "This is a 1/10 scale replica," he said, "which gives you an idea of how small the original was when it was flying over you and your grandmother."

"How did you ever fit inside?"

He laughed while pointing to his thinning hairline. "I don't know how I got in, but I think I lost a few hairs climbing out!" We walked over to the mantel over which hung an oil painting of Friendship 7 orbiting Earth. Moving his finger over the painting, he traced the course of his three orbits while describing its various stages for me.

"Were you ever afraid?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I had so many procedures and tasks to accomplish before and after the launch that I really didn't have much time to think about that. The one time I grew concerned was near the end of the flight. Our ground station received an alert that the heat shield on my capsule had come loose. If it fell off, the ship would burn up during reentry. In the original flight plan, I was supposed to jettison the capsule's retro-pack before reentry, but once they got the warning signal, NASA engineers told me to leave it in place. They hoped that it might help secure the heat shield if it were loose. As it turned out, the ground signal was faulty. The heat shield remained secure. Still, it was quite a sight watching chunks of that retro-pack burn off and fly by my small window during reentry."

He signed a few autographs, we posed together for a photo, and I left awed at spending over twenty minutes alone with an icon. He couldn't have been more gracious to a young fan who wasn't even a constituent.

Over twenty years later, when I joined him in Congress, I looked forward to telling him so.

John Glenn and I posed for this photo in his Senate office in front of an oil painting depicting his 1962 Friendship 7 capsule orbiting Earth. He used this painting to illustrate his flight description for me, September 10, 1975 (Author's collection)

• • •

After leaving the Senate in 1999, John Glenn helped to educate future leaders through the John Glenn College for Public Service, as well as continuing his advocacy for America's space program. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, the last surviving member of the original Mercury 7 astronauts died at age 95 on December 8, 2016 from complications following a stroke. When Marine Corps pallbearers laid him to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, a nation in mourning recalled Scott Carpenter's 1962 prayer as Friendship 7 cleared the launch pad:

Godspeed, John Glenn.

(The above was adapted from my book, "Shaking Hands With History.")

* * * * *

Eugene McCarthy was Central Casting's version of how a senator or president looked. He stood over six feet, with silver hair swept back, and he carried himself with a regal bearing. Well-versed in classic literature and with urbane manners, he read and wrote poetry, but any highbrow comparison ended there. He grew up a farm boy in Watkins, Minnesota (population 760) playing baseball and ice hockey. After high school and college, he worked at a variety of jobs, joined a monastery briefly, and later returned to his alma mater as an economics and sociology professor.

McCarthy's political entry was fortuitous. Because nobody else wanted the job, he accepted the local Democratic Party's county chairmanship. In 1948 he won a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives, which was the same year his fellow Minnesotan, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, won election to the U.S. Senate.

In Congress, McCarthy proved himself the ultimate anti-politician. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed that McCarthy admired poets, but he showed contempt for his colleagues. Others noted that he felt it beneath himself to engage in the ritualistic glad-handing, fundraising, and support-seeking of retail politics.

McCarthy joined Humphrey in the Senate in 1958, but the chamber's slow pace and stodgy formalities bored him. He mocked the Senate publicly, calling it, "The last primitive society left on earth," and he compared its traditions to a savage New Guinea settlement: "Both societies are obsessed with seniority, taboos, and precedent. In that regard, the Senate is like a leper colony." He tweaked senior colleagues publicly and they reciprocated his disdain. Despite a decade of seniority, he never gained (nor wanted) admittance to the Senate's insider club. Among those who found McCarthy's shtick less than sincere was Humphrey, who later described him as "handsome, witty, teacher, poet, Irish mystic, and a clever politician—cleverer for denying it…. Gene is more vain and arrogant than his admirers want to admit[.]"

• • •

By late 1967, with bloodshed in Vietnam raging for over three years, antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein concluded that collecting signatures on "end the war" petitions at various colleges was a meaningless protest. Instead he sought to recruit an intraparty challenger to the war's root cause, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his expected 1968 reelection bid. Lowenstein calculated that a nationwide movement might mobilize around a "peace" candidate. With no money, and working off old antiwar mailing lists, he launched his "Dump Johnson" drive. The likelihood of success was so remote that the proposition seemed absurd to all but a handful of like-minded objectors.

Lowenstein lobbied Senator Robert F. Kennedy repeatedly to take on the incumbent president of his own Democratic Party. Each time RFK rebuffed him and insisted that nobody could stop Johnson. Kennedy not only refused to run, but he said that if an antiwar challenger surfaced, he would probably endorse Johnson. In desperation Lowenstein went down his short list of antiwar Democratic senators and asked each to run. They laughed off the proposition for the same reason RFK gave: Johnson was unbeatable. Senator George McGovern also refused to run, but as an afterthought he suggested that Lowenstein go and talk to McCarthy.

Soon thereafter, McGovern ran into McCarthy and apologized for siccing Lowenstein on him with such a wacky idea. McCarthy brushed off the apology, saying that he had talked to Lowenstein and, to McGovern's astonishment, he added casually, "I think I may do it."

In retrospect, McCarthy's cavalier decision to run for president fit his persona. If the road to New Hampshire—the first 1968 primary state—appeared a discouragingly lonely one for an insurgent outsider, who better to trod it than the political world's biggest loner?

McCarthy's campaign style drove his staff mad. He entered the race at the end of November 1967, but he didn't bother showing up to campaign in New Hampshire until two months later—only six weeks before the crucial March 12th vote. When he finally sauntered up there, he campaigned with such indifference that reporters dismissed his effort as a joke. He cancelled events arbitrarily and at the last minute.  Once a huge audience gathered in an auditorium for his heavily promoted speech. On the way there McCarthy blithely told his driver to take him back to the hotel. He just didn't feel like talking politics that evening; he felt like writing poetry instead. On another occasion an aide arrived early one morning to pick up the candidate for a packed schedule. McCarthy was gone, having left instructions to cancel all of that day's events. Why? McCarthy had discovered that there was a nearby monastery, so he decided to blow off the campaign to go there and meditate all day. Then there was the time his staff set up a private meet-and-greet with local bigwigs; McCarthy arrived to find over a hundred prominent people anxious to see him. He entered the room, shook a few hands, and then he turned to an aide and said, "Okay, I'm bored now." With that, he blew past everyone in the ballroom, walked over to the bar and ordered a drink, and he remained there until the room emptied.  The day a wealthy donor arrived at McCarthy's campaign office to deliver a personal check for $10,000—a monumental sum in 1968—the candidate refused to walk down the hall to thank him. He explained to his flabbergasted manager that since the donor was giving money to a cause, and not to McCarthy personally, the donor shouldn't expect any thanks.

And so it went.

Still, there was something about McCarthy's aloofness and contempt for the political rulebook that created its own bizarre appeal. As one former colleague remembered, when Gene was "on," nobody was more articulate and elegant. And when it came to expressing his opposition to the Vietnam War, he was at his best.

During those six weeks leading to the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy's message began resonating with college students across America, many of whom faced impending military induction notices because of Johnson's continued war escalation. First dozens, and then hundreds, and finally thousands of them rode buses or hitchhiked east. When they arrived at his headquarters they cut their long hair, put on conservative clothes, and blanketed every New Hampshire neighborhood on his behalf. The now-common nationwide mobilization of students on college campuses for liberal causes began with the McCarthy phenomenon—dubbed by the press back then as "The Children's Crusade."

When New Hampshire voted, the nonconformist senator came within 200 votes of outpolling Johnson statewide, which sent shockwaves across the political establishment. A few days later Robert Kennedy reversed course and jumped into the race against LBJ. His last-minute entry infuriated McCarthy's supporters. They viewed RFK's earlier refusal to run as cowardly, and his sudden entry as an opportunistic and selfish act guaranteeing to split the peace vote.

Two weeks later, and facing more humiliation with an outright defeat by McCarthy in the upcoming Wisconsin primary, Johnson stunned the nation and announced he would not seek reelection. With LBJ bowing out, McCarthy's erstwhile friend Hubert Humphrey (now LBJ's vice president) entered the race, but he was too late to file for the remaining primary contests. Thus, the battle across the primary map was fought between the two peace candidates—McCarthy and Kennedy—and the warfare between them grew increasingly bitter right up to Kennedy's assassination the night of the California primary in early June.

With the almost unanimous support of the Party establishment, Humphrey beat McCarthy for the presidential nomination. Following the Democratic National Convention, McCarthy shattered both tradition and expectations by refusing to endorse Humphrey until (literally) the closing hours of the fall campaign. Humphrey lost the election to Richard Nixon, and he blamed his agonizingly narrow defeat on McCarthy. Humphrey believed that an early endorsement would have motivated McCarthy's tens of thousands of disillusioned young followers to turn out for the Democratic ticket. For his part, McCarthy found it hard, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to ask his legions of draft–age antiwar supporters to go out and work for the man who had been Johnson's foremost Vietnam War cheerleader for the last four years.

McCarthy retired from the Senate in January 1971, but in December of that year he announced that he would seek the presidency in 1972. Again directing his message to his strongest base of support—the college campuses—he scheduled a visit to the College of Marin on February 19, 1972. However, in keeping to his quirky style, he did not bill his appearance as a campaign event. Instead, his campaign listed it as a chance to hear him read poetry selections.

I was 14 years old at the time. Along with my younger brother Pat, we took the bus from Pinole to the Santa Rosa campus—a three-hour one-way ordeal. When we arrived at the Fine Arts Theater box office two hours before McCarthy's scheduled 7:00 p.m. visit, we were the only people in line to buy $2 tickets, and we remained so until the box office opened 30 minutes before the event began.

When the doors opened, an usher collected each ticket and tore them in half. I prevailed upon him to let me keep mine for my political memorabilia collection   It was the only one to survive the mass destruction. Because we were first in line, Pat and I secured the best seats in the house: front row center. 

The program began with poetry readings from a local author.  During this presentation, I saw McCarthy appear in the darkened stage wings.  He looked tired and kept rubbing his eyes.  When introduced, he walked out and received a standing ovation. 

During his hour-long poetry reading, McCarthy was unable to conceal his fatigue: he yawned, faltered on his lines occasionally, and rubbed his eyes frequently.  From my seat, I raised my $10 plastic Kodak Instamatic camera and snapped a picture of the candidate. A long-haired flower child left over from the 1960s seated next to me turned and growled, "Hey, man, can't you see your goddamned flashbulb is bothering Gene's eyes?  Knock it off, man." 

"Get a haircut, hippie," my young brother replied.

The snapshot I took that set off the hippie seated next to me: McCarthy delivering his poetry reading, College of Marin, February 19, 1972

Earlier in the evening, while we waited in the ticket line, I had overheard the theater employee also mention that McCarthy would tape an interview in an upstairs classroom following his public reading. As he appeared to be wrapping up his auditorium presentation, Pat and I exited the theater and wandered the darkened hall looking for the door to the classrooms.  Opening and walking through a door that I thought was an exit, I found myself on stage with McCarthy, who stood only a few feet away! He did not notice the intrusion as I backed up and closed the door softly.

When his poetry reading ended, McCarthy appeared backstage. Other than a student escort, he had no entourage. We followed as a student escorted him to the upstairs classroom for his interview.  He emerged twenty minutes later looking drained.  We walked with him to the parking lot where his driver awaited. Before squeezing his long, lanky frame into the subcompact car, he shook hands with us, thanked us for coming, passed out small "Gene Lives" campaign buttons, and he signed and dated for me my salvaged admission ticket to his poetry reading session. As the presidential candidate drove off into the night, I noticed that the sticker on the bumper of his car bore an old and fading 1968 legend: "McCarthy for President."

Campaign button given to me by Eugene McCarthy, February 19, 1972

I took this photograph of McCarthy and a fellow poet in the Marin College college classroom after McCarthy completed his interview, February 19, 1972. McCarthy autographed it for me a few months later when we met again. 

• • •

Early 1972 polls showed McCarthy maintaining substantial Democrat support from his 1968 effort, but those figures never translated into primary victories once he entered the race. By late May of that year, he had withdrawn from the contest. The 1968 primary season was McCarthy's political high-water mark. In later years, he ran for the presidency three more times: in 1976, 1988, and 1992. These later national efforts went largely (and increasingly) unnoticed. Still the rebel, in 1980 he endorsed Republican challenger Ronald Reagan over incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, explaining that Carter was too incompetent to remain as president. When he sought to reclaim his Minnesota Senate seat in a 1982 comeback, he received a mere twenty-four percent of the Democratic primary vote.

McCarthy retired to his home in the Virginia countryside, wrote books, gave public poetry readings, and spoke out for his various causes until declining health sidelined him. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease at age eighty-nine on December 10, 2005.

Today, few people below the Medicare eligibility age remember Gene McCarthy. But over a half century ago, in his 1968 campaign against Lyndon Johnson, he lit a powder keg that changed the dynamic of American politics, and along the way he midwifed a modern progressive movement that still resonates with millions of voters.

* * * * *

Gloria McMillan, an actress who worked primarily during radio's Golden Age, died this week at age 88. Old fans best remembered Gloria from the 1950s television sitcom, Our Miss Brooks starring Eve Arden. During her radio career, she appeared on a variety of top shows, including Big Town, Dr. Christian, Meet Corlis Archer, and many others.

I had the chance to act with Gloria about five years ago. Act, you say? Well, yes. Since I seem to be attracted to various enterprises for which I have no innate talent (e.g., writing best-selling books), about six years ago I decided to try my chops at acting—something for which I have no training at all (unless one counts elective office).

In 2017, I was honored to rejoin a troupe of great professional actors at the Pantages Theater of the Long Beach Veterans Hospital to recreate (on the 70th anniversary of the original broadcast) the original 1947 Lux Radio Theater's old time radio production of It's a Wonderful Life. Amazingly, it was on that very stage 70 years earlier to the day that James Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore performed and broadcast the original radio show. The Pantages Theater, by the way, hosted many of the great old radio shows during the World War II era, such as Jack Benny and Bob Hope, 

When we did our broadcast, we had a wonderful cast join in for the recreation, including Gloria. Among my other co-stars (I count myself in that category very loosely: in the broadcast I played Nick the Bartender—the mean guy who tosses George Bailey and Clarence the Angel out onto the snow-covered sidewalk) were Paul Petersen (The Donna Reed Show), and fabulous actors from OTR's (old time radio's) heyday—Stuffy Singer, Ivan Cury, and Tommy Cook--Tommy played one of the Bailey children in that original broadcast seven decades earlier! In our production, he took over Lionel Barrymore's role as the mean Mr. Potter. It was great fun, and the elderly vets for whom we performed could not have been a more wonderful audience.

During our read-through rehearsals, throughout the broadcast, and post-broadcast, Gloria McMillan was charming, warm, and filled with stories from her days in radio and early television. She was a pure delight to meet and work with that day.

Rest in peace, dear Gloria. It was an honor performing alongside you you that day in Long Beach.

* * * * *

A couple of years before he died, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower published an informal memoir filled with stories of his early life: At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967). As a longtime collector of political campaign memorabilia, I found the passage below of interest.

Writing about his boyhood in Abilene, Kansas, in the 1890s, the future five-star general, World War II hero, and Commander-In Chief shared his first encounter with both marching in formation and a political campaign:

"Somewhere back in that golden time, I had my first experience in a political campaign. I know that some people have always thought that I was not much interested in politics but my debut took place in the fall of 1896, after my entry into grade school. Everybody in school had a button. [Ohio Governor and Republican presidential nominee William] McKinley buttons, bright yellow, predominated because there were few Democrats in the region. Such [Nebraska Congressman and 1896 Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings] Bryan buttons featured the candidate and the figures 16-1.

"Excitement in the town grew rapidly. Many people were concerned about what they called The Gold Standard. Of course this meant nothing to me; I had neither gold nor much concern about it. But it seemed to mean a lot to my elders. Though most of them were of the same party, discussions were both continuous and heated. One evening we learned that a big torchlight parade was to take place.

"Because I was only six, my mother was loath for me to go town to see the parade. Assured by [older Eisenhower brothers] Arthur, now a lordly ten, and Ed, a self-assured eight, that they would take care of me, we started off in the dusk. We were not satisfied to take a place in the middle of the town where the parade would pass. We insisted on going up Buckeye Avenue and into the north end, where it was to start.

"The torches were intriguing. They seemed to be nothing but a rod, and a can of liquid at the end with a wick sticking out. As these were lighted, they threw a smoky flame into the evening air. One was to be carried by each person in the parade, then mustering in a column of fours facing the town. As each torch-lighting took place, it soon became clear that there were more torches than bearers.

"Spying a group of boys standing wide-eyed on the edge of the formation, the parade managers commanded us to come over. We offered no resistance. Each of us was handed a torch and mine was exactly my own height. We were told to shoulder torches, somewhat like shouldering arms. Off we went.

"The town band of a dozen pieces at the head of the procession was supposed to keep us all looking soldierly and marching in cadence. But my short legs presented a problem and the group at the end of the parade was more like a cavorting crowd of lambs. There was a certain amount of disrespectful laughter but we got through the parade in our fashion, with no singed hair and without undoing McKinley. The torches were gathered for return to wherever they had been rented. But my parents missed not only my first appearance in parade formation but my first successful venture into politics. They were among those who were not impressed by the importance of the affair. At least they hadn't taken the trouble to walk the three or four blocks to the parade. It was just as well. There was a tiresome speech underway when my brothers and I took off for home. We wanted to get there before it was too late, for we needed no speeches upon our arrival. Safely concluded, that was one of my few brushes with political life until I found myself drawn into another campaign, half a century later."

Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967), 74-75.

* * * * *

I read in today's newspaper that Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) is expected to announce today that he will retire from Congress after 30 years of service there. Aside from his congressional duties, Bobby is the ordained minister of Chicago's Beloved Community Christian Church of God in Christ. He wants to devote this new season in his life to his church and his ministry.

Bobby and I became acquainted during our service together in the House . It was hard for me to conceive that this soft-spoken, kindly, church pastor was, in the late 1960s, the co-founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. He served as the Panthers' defense minister, and in that capacity he urged blacks to take "offensive violence" against the "power structure." (Growing up in San Francisco during this time, I remember the Oakland Black Panthers for their resistance to power—multiple shootouts with police.)

In 2000, Bobby and I talked occasionally about our respective tough reelection campaigns that year. I faced a Democrat challenger in California flogging me for my role in the Clinton impeachment; back in Chicago, Bobby faced a Democrat primary challenger—a legislator decrying Bobby as a relic of the past who was "unable to build bridges" with white officials and "get things done." Bobby and I exchanged reports on occasion about our respective races back home.

Ultimately, I lost my reelection that year, but Bobby prevailed over his upstart primary challenger—

—A young and ambitious Illinois state senator named Barack Obama.

Congratulations on your pending retirement, Bobby, and may God continue to bless you in your ministry. 

* * * * *

Remembering my friend and colleague, former Congressman George Gekas (R-PA), who died last week at age 91.

George represented his district from 1983 to 2003. George was one of our 13 House Managers (prosecutors) in the impeachment trial of President Clinton. In that capacity I came to know him well. We worked closely together and I respected him greatly. He was a selfless leader who loved his country and his constituents.

After the Democrat-controlled legislature redistricted him into a Republican-minority district, he lost his reelection in 2002. George felt devastated by the rejection. He didn't show up at his office to pack his things; he failed to return after the election to cast votes in the lame duck congressional session, and he wouldn't return phone calls. When I learned of his severe depression, I called him daily for weeks. Finally, I got him on the line. He told me he felt ashamed to have been turned out of office after 20 years of faithful service, and because of that he didn't want to face anybody at the Capitol. . His voice cracked with emotion as he explained his sorrow. I knew I had to try and cheer him up.

 "Listen, George," I told him, "you won ten consecutive elections because your district knew and loved you. You had a connection to your voters, and it's because they knew you that they wanted you to be their voice in Washington. The only way the Democrats could beat you was to push you into a district where people didn't know you. If that were not the case, you'd be back in Washington for another term. Now take my case: I was my constituents' deputy county prosecutor, municipal court judge, state legislator, and congressman for almost seventeen years. When my heavily Dem district voted me out of office two years ago, it's because they knew me--and they were mad at me for impeaching Clinton. They booted me from office for doing what they disliked. The Democrats didn't need to redistrict me to beat me--but that was the only way they could beat you. They had to move you to an area where people didn't know you. That's a big difference."

George brightened. "You know," he told me, "you're right! I hadn't thought about it that way. Thanks so much, Jim--I feel so much better now!"

"You're welcome, George," I told him. "I'm glad I was able to help. I just have one question for you."

"What's that?" he asked.

I replied: "How come all of the sudden I feel like shit?"

Rest in peace, old friend.

* * * * *

This coming May will be the 50th anniversary of the day I cut classes in high school, took the bus into downtown San Francisco, and snuck into the St. Francis Hotel to hear Kansas Senator Bob Dole, the then-Republican National Committee Chairman, give a speech in support of President Nixon's reelection effort. When he concluded, I hung around for him to leave so that I could shake his hand and get his autograph.

A very blurry snapshot of Senator Bob Dole at left; me (age 14), and

California Lt. Governor Ed Reinecke (right), May 13, 1972

Little did I imagine on that long-ago day that a quarter-century later, as the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, he would fly to California and campaign for me when I was my district's GOP congressional nominee.

Bob failed in his bid to unseat Bill Clinton by almost nine points. That same year he lost my county (Los Angeles County) by a whopping 20 points. Meanwhile, I won election to Congress that same day by squeaking out 50.1 percent of the vote in my Democrat-heavy district. After I moved to Washington, I saw Bob occasionally, and he did several events for me when I ran in each of my later reelection efforts. Whenever I needed any help from him, politically or advice-wise, he always was there.

I asked him in later years why he came to California repeatedly so late in the 1996 race to do rallies like the one he did for me when he knew he couldn't win California. He replied that if he couldn't win there, at least he could try and help the down-ticket candidates. Most nominees running behind would have blown off the loser states—and us. When it came to California in 1996, Bob Dole took one for the team. Because he did, I went to Congress. I'm forever grateful to him.

From that time until his death today at age 98, Bob had been a friend. He was a patriot who loved his country and who sacrificed immeasurably in her service. Even his political enemies came to love him, and the affection was reciprocated.

Rest in peace, thou good and faithful servant.

Senator Bob Dole with a very rookie Congressman James Rogan, February 1997.

* * * * *

"I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes." -- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.

As a boy growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, my grandmother and great-aunt regaled me with the story of how their father (my great-grandfather) was a San Francisco trolley car driver who rode with then-Mayor James Rolph (later California governor) on the inaugural public trolley car ride through the newly-constructed Twin Peaks Tunnel in 1918—and how the happily-celebrating Mayor Rolph was clearly inebriated when he took over the motorman's controls for this festive trip.

This weekend I was reading former President Herbert Hoover's memoirs, and this story of the future president's encounter with Mayor Rolph amused me greatly.

In October 1919, the King and Queen of the Belgians paid a visit to America as guests of the United States government. At the request of the State Department, Hoover (at the time famous for organizing relief for millions of starving Europeans before and during World War I) escorted the King and Queen on their California tour. In his 1952 memoir, Hoover related this story about his visit with the royals to San Francisco:

"Mayor Rolph of San Francisco had called upon me to reveal a personal difficulty [over the royal visit]. He was up for reelection in a few days, and he worried over the effect that consorting with Kings and Queens might have on the South of Market Street vote. I offered to take over the chairmanship of the reception in San Francisco and let him play as large or as small a part as he thought advisable. This was arranged by getting the Governor to appoint me official host. I worked up the program and presided.

"We decided to have a parade escorting the King and Queen up Market Street from the Ferry Building to the City Hall, where the Mayor could make a short address of welcome…. With the help of Army and Navy contingents and their bands, we made a good showing in the parade and, in time, arrived at the City Hall with plaudits from the great crowds. I duly presented the King to the Mayor, who stood on a little platform under the dome of the City Hall. Mr. Rolph at once noticed that all the galleries around the dome were crowded—an opportunity that no good politician would overlook. After a few words of welcome he delivered a few minutes of well-chosen remarks upon our municipal issues and the virtues of the common man. A good time was had by all…. From the City Hall we went to the Palace Hotel, where we had engaged rooms for the King's use prior to a public luncheon in his honor…. I had no sooner returned to the King's rooms than the Mayor descended upon me with the Order of the Crown, second class—glittering star, red ribbon, and all—in his hand, and a troubled look. The King had just put it on him. And the very next day, he was coming up for reelection. He felt certain that if he faced over a thousand people and reporters at a luncheon with this display of feudalism on his breast, he would lose thousands of votes. It was an emergency that called for quick action. I suggested to His Honor that certain European cities had been decorated for valor; Verdun, for example, had received the Croix de Guerre. Why should he not speak at the luncheon, refer to this precedent, and go on to grow eloquent over the great honor conferred on the City of San Francisco? The Mayor thought this a stroke of genius. When he rose to speak, he held up the Order for all to see and in most eloquent terms accepted it on behalf of the city of which he had the honor to be chief magistrate. I sat next to the King, who turned to me and said, sotto voce, and in the colloquialism of his youthful period as an American railroad man: 'What in blank is he talking about?'

"'Pay no attention to the Mayor,' I replied. 'He has his troubles. I'll explain later on.' Which I did. The King was so interested that he asked me to telegraph him the results of the election. I was happy to inform him next night that the Mayor had been retained in office by an unusually handsome majority.

"I had forgotten this episode when later I was called on to serve as a pallbearer at Mr. Rolph's funeral—he died Governor of California."

When looking into Rolph's casket, Hoover saw that pinned to the breast of the late governor's body for his journey into eternity was the Belgian Order of the Crown. -- Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover 1920-1933: The Cabinet and the Presidency (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), 7- 9.

The 1928 presidential campaign was no different than any other campaign where slurs and mud are flung from both sides. That race pitted Republican Herbert Hoover against Alfred E. Smith. The minions of both campaigns fired baseless charges back and forth as happens in politics. Accusations against Smith (the first Catholic major party nominee) included his supposed secret plan to build a tunnel from Washington to the Vatican so he could take his orders from the Pope; against Hoover was heard the false claim that he was secretly a British citizen planning on taking his orders from King George V.

Despite all this, how refreshing it is to read what Hoover later said about the man he defeated for the presidency:

"Governor Alfred E Smith, the Democratic candidate, was a natural born gentleman. Both of us had come up from the grass roots or the pavements, and from boyhood had learned the elements of sportsmanship. During the campaign he said no word and engaged in no action that did not comport with the highest levels. I paid a natural tribute to him when speaking in New York during the campaign, and he did so to me when speaking in California. In after years, when I was often associated with him in public matters, we mutually agreed that we had one deep satisfaction from the battle. No word had been spoken or misrepresentation made by either of us which prevented sincere friendship the day after the election." -- The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover 1920-1933: The Cabinet and the Presidency (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), 198.

Near the end of his life, former President Ulysses S. Grant made a prescient prediction regarding slavery. In his 1885 memoir (published posthumously), he wrote, "The justice of the [Union] cause which in the end prevailed, will, I doubt not, come to be acknowledged by every citizen of the land, in time. For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the [Civil War], there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man." -- Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1990), 115-116.

Last week I posted a quotation I found buried in William Jennings Bryan's published memoir of his campaign as the 1896 Democratic presidential nominee.

This week I read former U.S. Senator James E. Watson's memoir, published in 1936, of his 40 years in Congress. As it turns out, Watson knew Bryan and met him a few times.

Below is an amusing recollection of Bryan that Watson shared publicly 85 years ago. It made me wonder if, in this era of presidential nominees and their political campaigns now raising and spending upwards of a billion dollars for a White House run, maybe we should go back to basics and let them adopt Bryan's manner of raising campaign funds for a presidential run!

Watson (then a U.S. congressman from Indiana) wrote that during Bryan's 1896 campaign as the Democratic presidential nominee, Bryan "charged so much for every speech he made and collected the money on the ground before uttering a word. At Connersville in my [congressional] district, he was paid $200, and at Shelbyville, $225. He caused much difficulty at Rushville, my home town. My law partner was John D. Magee, a member of the Democratic State Central Committee from that district, and from him I learned the real inwardness of the situation.

"When the train carrying Bryan reached Rushville and stopped, he failed to appear, and the great crowd which had assembled kept yelling and shouting for him. It was some considerable time before he descended and went to the temporary stand fixed up for his meeting about 200 feet from the railroad. I afterward learned that his regular price was $150 if he spoke from the rear platform of the railway car, and $200 if he was taken to a platform somewhere else. The Democratic Committee had provided $150 on this occasion, and Bryan refused absolutely to go out to the stand unless the other $50 were paid beforehand. After much wrangling and disputation Magee gave his personal check for the extra $50, and Bryan consented to make the shift. So much of his time had been taken up in quibbling [over the $50 balance] that he made a very short speech, much to the disappointment of all who had swarmed out to hear him, and to the deep chagrin of all the Democrats in the crowd.

"My partner told me all this within an hour after the meeting, and he was very irate over the episode.

"Permit me to remark here, in justice to Colonel Bryan, that he always claimed that the Democrats had been able to collect no money for their campaign, that all the wealthy were arrayed against them, and that the only way cash could be raised was in this manner: that is, by his charging for his speeches."--Watson, James, "As I Knew Them" (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1936), 180–181.

By the way, it was Watson who was credited with first uttering an oft-used comment. When Wendell Willkie won the 1940 Republican presidential nomination, Watson refused to endorse the former Democrat (Willkie had supported Franklin D. Roosevelt previously before Willkie changed parties and challenged Roosevelt for a third term that year). When asked why he refused to endorse his own party's presidential nominee, Watson reportedly replied, "I may welcome a whore into my church, but I don't want him to lead the choir on his first visit there."

In reading William Jennings Bryan's published account of his campaign as the 1896 Democratic presidential nominee , I am struck by how far afield we have come from what passed as popular sentiment in those days gone by.

In one of his first campaign rally speeches after winning the nomination, Bryan said, "We differ in opinion and we differ in party politics, but we meet today recognizing these differences and yet each charitable toward the other. We were all imbued with the same spirit; we all possess the same ambition; we are all endeavoring to carry out the same great purpose. We all want a government of the people, by the people and for the people. However we may differ as to the means of securing that kind of government, we can differ as honest citizens – apart in judgment but together in purpose. I thank the Republicans who have assembled here; I thank the Populists; and I thank the Prohibitionists as well as the Democrats, because while we dispute about the questions which rise to the surface from time to time and agitate the people, we all agree in those great fundamental principles which underlie our form of government. We believe that all men are created equal – not that they are equal in talents or in virtue or in merit, but that wherever the government comes into contact with the citizen, all must stand equal before the law. We agree in the belief that the government should be no respecter of persons – that its strength must be used for the protection of the fortunes of the great and the possessions of the poor, and that it must stand as an impartial arbiter between citizens. We agree in the belief that there are certain inalienable rights – rights which government did not give, rights which government should not take away. We agree in the belief that governments are instituted among men to secure and to preserve these rights, and that they derive their just powers from the consent of the [governed]. We know no divine right of kings; the people are the sovereign source of all power." -- William J. Bryan, "The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896" (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1896), 234.

Sixteen years after the end of America's Civil War, General William T. Sherman was greeted by a group of fellow Union Army soldiers during his visit to Mansfield, Ohio. In a brief and impromptu speech to them, he reminded us of the sacrifice made by every citizen who wears the uniform of the United States Armed Forces--and he reminded us of each generation's continuing obligation if we are to preserve our Republic:

"We fought, not for ourselves alone, but for those who are to come after us. The dear old flag we carried through the storm of many battles, ready to die, if need be, that it might still wave over the government of our fathers… Teach your children to honor the flag, to respect the laws, and love and understand our institutions, and our glorious country will be safe with them." General William T. Sherman, July 20, 1881, As quoted in John Sherman, "John Sherman's Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet "(Chicago: Werner Company, Popular Edition, 1896), 649–650.

When Colin Powell died yesterday at 84, he left behind a remarkable legacy as an Army general, war veteran, National Security Advisor, U.S. Secretary of State, best-selling author, and role model to millions. Although our political views did not always mesh, I worked with General Powell on a couple of projects during my time in Washington. I always found him to be bright, insightful, creative, very down to earth, and utterly charming to my family when he invited them to his office for a visit. Despite our policy differences, when I ran my final race for Congress in 2000, he sent my campaign a personal check for $1,000—the maximum amount allowed under the law. I appreciated his friendship and support, I appreciated his lifelong service to our country, and I mourn his passing. 

When I attended law school in the late 1970s-early 1980s, I stumbled across a 1913 copy of former congressman, Wisconsin governor, U.S. senator, and 1924 Progressive Party presidential nominee Robert M. La Follette's autobiography. I read it 40 years ago; I am rereading it now.

In writing about his three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1885-1891), he penned these words:

"It seems to me now, as I look back upon those [House of Representatives] years, that most of the lawmakers and indeed most of the public, looked upon Congress and the government as a means of getting some sort of advantage for themselves or for their hometowns or home states. River and harbor improvements without merit, public buildings without limit, raids upon the public lands and forests, subsidies and tariffs, very largely occupied the attention of Congressmen. Lobbyists for all manner of private interests... crowded the corridors of the capitol and the Washington hotels and not only argued for favorable legislation, but demanded it.... It was easier to grow rich by gifts from the government than by efficient service and honest effort." Robert M. La Follette, A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (6th edition 1913), pp. 86, 88.

Nearly fifty years ago (January 13, 1972), I cut school with my brother Pat. We took the bus into downtown San Francisco because I wanted to attend a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing at the Federal Courthouse. I had read that a couple of US Senators would be holding the hearings, and I wanted to see them in person, take their picture, and maybe get a chance to ask their advice on how to enter politics. They were the sons of two legendary 20th Century political leaders: Senator Robert A. Taft, Jr., who was the son of the late Senator (and three-time GOP presidential candidate) Robert A. Taft; and Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III, son of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson, the 1952 and 1956 Democratic presidential nominee. I took this Kodak Instamatic snapshot of Taft and Stevenson during the hearing; they both signed it for me later. Taft died at age 76 on December 7, 1993. Stevenson died two days ago at age 90. Rest in peace. 

Remembering my old friend, former Congressman Jerry Lewis, the longest serving Californian to serve in the House of Representatives (34 years), who died on July 15th at the age of 86. At one time the third-ranking Republican in the House, Jerry served as the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. My former constituents who have benefitted from the NASA Science Center at Glendale Community College can thank Jerry for steering the money to the college.

Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, who (along with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin) flew into history with mankind's first Moon landing in July 1969, died today of cancer at age 90.

I had the incredible honor of knowing all three Apollo 11 astronauts and also attending with them the private ceremony on the 30th anniversary of their Moon landing. Here is a brief excerpt from my newest book, "Shaking Hands with History: My Encounters with the Famous, the Infamous, and the Once-Famous but Now Forgotten" that tells of my meeting Collins for the first time. It was at the funeral service for Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad at Arlington National Cemetery, which coincidentally was the day before Apollo 11's 30th Moon landing anniversary. After the chapel and graveside service, we were at a private reception for guests following the burial:

* * * * *

The Conrad family hosted a reception for invited guests at nearby Spates Hall, located a few hundred feet from the chapel. All three of the Apollo 11 crew members attended: Armstrong and Collins stood alone in quiet, private conversation, while Aldrin and his wife moved through the buffet line.

It was there that I met Collins. "Congressman Rogan, I know you by reputation quite well," he said as he walked over and shook my hand, leaving me flattered that he knew me. I told him I could prove I was a longtime admirer: on my first trip to Washington as a teenager I wandered back and forth throughout the public floors of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. "I knew you were the museum director at the time," I explained, "so I was hoping to get a glimpse of you in person!"

Collins laughed. "You should have just knocked on my office door!" Then, with a sigh, he added, "That was a long time ago. Now I spend most of my time down in Florida where I live."

As the reception wound down, it was time for me to return to the Capitol. I was leaving when Aldrin grabbed my elbow. "See you at the breakfast tomorrow morning?" he asked. I told him that I would not miss that event for anything. Tomorrow's "breakfast" was a private NASA reception at the Air and Space Museum commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Originally only crew members Aldrin and Collins planned to attend. Now, with Armstrong in town for the funeral and staying overnight, all three Apollo 11 members would reunite on the historic anniversary. And, thanks to NASA's congressional liaison office, I had one of the hottest breakfast tickets in town.

For a space and history buff, it promised to be the photo op of a lifetime.

G. Gordon Liddy, the unrepentant Watergate burglar who oversaw the burglary operation that brought down Richard Nixon's presidency, died yesterday at age 90.

In my newest book, "Shaking Hands with History," I have a chapter reflecting on the many players I met who were involved in the Watergate scandal, and the stories that they shared with me about their roles. Below is an excerpt of this chapter (now updated) that tells of my encounter with the "G-Man," G. Gordon Liddy:

* * *

I was a freshman congressman in 1997 when a Washington producer for a radio talk show called and invited me for an in-studio interview with the host, G. Gordon Liddy, the former head of the Nixon White House's so-called "Plumbers Unit"—a group of political operatives tasked with investigating enemies and plugging press leaks. Would I be willing to appear?

Hell, yes.

I arrived at the WJFK studio a few minutes before my segment began. While waiting in the control room I watched Liddy at the microphone excoriating liberals, squishy Republicans, and any number of my colleagues he deemed cowardly for voting for various government expansions. During a commercial break, the producer escorted me into the broadcast booth and introduced me to Liddy. He welcomed me, asked an assistant to get me coffee, and then he directed me to put on the pair of nearby headphones. The director threw him the cue and we went live on the air.

We did a couple of segments covering various current issues, none of which I remember now. When my interview ended, I took off my headphones as he broke for news and a round of commercials. While off the air he thanked me for coming, and as we said goodbye I told him, "I know that there are a lot of G-Man fans [Liddy's radio nickname], but I think these make me the original." Then I handed him two old letters that he wrote to me from his prison cell when I was a teenager in the 1970s. As he read them, his face registered shock.

"I sent these to you?"

Yes, I told him. I felt his sentence unfair and I wrote and told him so. I also offered to send him magazines or cigarettes if he needed them. Liddy had written me those two letters from prison thanking me for my kindnesses to a prisoner.

Putting down the letters, he exclaimed, "I just can't believe this," and then he asked me to put back on the headphones. He held me over for another few segments while he read the letters to his audience, and then he had me recount the circumstances of our correspondence. He seemed genuinely moved by the letters, and his gratitude overflowed.

When our interview ended finally, the show broke for a final commercial. He embraced me, shook my hand enthusiastically, and told me, "You always have a home at this station. I'm here for you—no matter what."

"Gordon, given the mysterious legends that surround you, I am very glad to have you for me instead of against me."

Still gripping my hand, he leaned in close and locked his dark, intense eyes on mine. "You can count on it, my friend. I'm here for you for anything."

A few weeks after our interview, he sent me two signed photos taken of us. My favorite was the one on which he wrote, "When Jim Rogan speaks the G-Man listens!" I called and thanked him for his thoughtfulness. During our conversation, I got in a Watergate question that I had wanted to ask during our interview, but the opportunity never arose: with the burglary in progress, how did he learn that the jig was up?

"When McCord and the Cubans [the other four burglars] went in, I was in a nearby hotel monitoring the operation," he told me. "I stayed in communication with both the burglars inside the DNC offices and with the lookouts watching for police from across the street.

"At one point my lookout asked me if any of our Cubans were dressed like hippies. I told him no. 'Well,' he said, 'there are guys in the building dressed like hippies and they're carrying guns. They're moving upstairs to the offices.' That's when I knew that undercover police had arrived and that we had been compromised. I tried to radio the Cubans to tell them to abort the operation and get the hell out of there, but they had turned down their radios and couldn't hear my warnings. After a few tense minutes, I heard the voice of one of the Cubans over my radio. He whispered, 'They got us.'

"When Baldwin [Alfred C. Baldwin III, a lookout] radioed to me that police were converging around the building, I took as much of our electronics gear out of my command post that I could carry. The next day I went to my office at the Committee to Reelect the President and shredded everything, including a stack of consecutively serial-numbered $100 bills."

I asked how much it worried him that an accomplice might implicate him in the crime once the police arrested the burglars and foiled the operation. He replied, "Late that night, when I finally got home, my wife was in bed asleep. She awakened and asked me what kind of day I had. I told her, 'Not so good,' and that I might be going to jail." When I asked how she reacted to the stunning news, he laughed and said, "You know, I really don't remember. After I told her that, I climbed into bed, and I went right to sleep."

* * * * *

Aside from his two decades as a syndicated radio talk show host, G. Gordon Liddy's post-prison career included best-selling author, popular lecture circuit habitué, television and motion picture actor, and founder of a counter-surveillance firm. I appeared on his radio show a couple of times more, with the last time in 2012. During that final interview, he sounded old and tired, and his edginess was gone. Retiring soon afterward, he died of natural causes at age 90 on March 30, 2021.

During my Washington years I appeared several times on the Larry King Live show on CNN. What I always appreciated about his interviewing style is that he asked a question, and then he listened while you answered. He didn't jump in, talk over you, or try to make himself part of the story. I suspect that accounts for why he had a successful 50-year career in broadcasting. He died on January 23 at age 87.

I was saddened to see that one of the greatest baseball players of all time, Hank Aaron, died just a few days shy of his 87th birthday. I met Hammerin' Hank a couple of times; this photo was taken of us at the US Capitol in 1999. Back then a few of my congressional colleagues and I held a private reception for him to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the day he broke Babe Ruth's home run record.

The stories surrounding these encounters (and many, many other subjects) are in my newest book released last month, "Shaking Hands With History."

George Shultz served his country in World War II as a Marine Corps artillery captain. He went on to serve America in three cabinet positions: Secretary of Labor and Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon, and later as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State. The Associated Press reported that, "as Secretary of State in the 1980s he shaped U.S. foreign policy in the closing phase of the Cold War when a dangerous nuclear-armed stalemate gave way to peaceful — if not quite cordial — relations between the superpowers." He died yesterday at age 100. It was a privilege knowing this titan of politics, government, business, and economics, and I remain grateful that he joined Speaker Newt Gingrich in campaigning for me in my district during my 1996 congressional campaign.

I'm saddened to learn of the death last night of Los Angeles Dodgers legend Tommy LaSorda at age 93. Tommy was close friends with another California icon, former Governor George Deukmejian (1928-2018), the governor who first appointed me to the bench over 30 years ago. In fact, both men used to go together for their haircuts at their favorite barber's.

A few years ago, the governor decided to surprise me with a gift. He had Tommy pose for this picture of the governor giving the ballplayer a haircut. He and Tommy signed it for me, and then the governor presented it to me.

Today seems an appropriate day to publish the photograph for the first time.

Requiescat in pace to both of these great gentlemen.

In memory of one of the world's greatest pilots and one of America's great heroes, General Chuck Yeager, who died today at age 97.

A combat pilot becomes an air "ace" after five confirmed enemy kills. During aerial combat with German planes in World War II, Yeager accomplished that feat in a single day. After the war, in 1947, he entered aviation's pantheon when he became the first test pilot in history to break the speed of sound. 

Thirty years ago today—My first tour of duty as a state court judge thanks to one of California's greatest governors, George Deukmejian, who appointed me to the Municipal Court of California, Glendale Judicial District, on this date in 1990.

During this presidential election season I thought my fellow Californians might enjoy seeing the newest addition to my political memorabilia collection. This is from California's gubernatorial election of 1918--102 years ago. It depicts two governors (one current and one future). William D. Stephens served during World War I (as indicated on the card) from 1917 to 1923. C.C. Young later served as governor from 1927 to 1931. They just don't make campaign items with such great graphics as they did in this lost era.

Remembering today the courage and sacrifice of my friend and former House colleague, Sam Johnson (R-TX), who died last week at age 89. A former POW who spent almost 7 years in the "Hanoi Hilton," Sam's crippled fingers bore daily witness to the brutal physical torture he underwent while serving his country. He was a true gentleman and a great statesman, and I will always remember his support and kindnesses shown me.

This photograph was taken in Pasadena, CA during the waning days of my 2000 reelection campaign, when Sam came to my district (along with several other colleagues) to campaign for me.

From left: Sam, Congressman Duke Cunningham (the first "ace" fighter pilot in the Vietnam War whose military career was the inspiration for Tom Cruise's movie "Top Gun"--Duke later went to prison for bribery), me, Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona, and Congressman (now Arkansas Governor) Asa Hutchinson.

My former colleague on the House Judiciary Committee during the Clinton impeachment, John Conyers (D-MI)--the founder of the Congressional Black Caucus--died this morning at age 90. After serving almost 53 years in Congress (1965-2017), he resigned two years ago under unhappy circumstances relating to previous sexual harassment allegations.

Despite our vast political differences, I had a wonderful relationship with John, which I related in my 2011 book, "Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment." It showed how my boyhood hobby of collecting political memorabilia created a friendship between us. The story is excerpted below:

In the world of veteran congressmen, they just didn't come much grumpier than John Conyers.

Republicans disliked the cranky senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and the feelings appeared to be mutual. First elected to the House in 1964, the 69-year-old Michigan liberal knew that the only thing now standing between him and the chairman's gavel was a switch of six Republican House seats to the Democratic column. John waited a long time for this chairmanship, so it wasn't surprising that he brushed off Republican gatecrashers responsible for displacing him.

None of that mattered to me. As a teenager, I sat spellbound watching the 1973-1974 televised Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings against President Nixon. Now, 24 years later, John remained the last Watergate member still serving on the committee. As a lifelong political junkie, I longed to hear him share his first-hand account of that historic period. Yet whenever I tried talking to him, he offered me little more than a discontented grunt.

I formulated a plan to crack through his unresponsiveness. Having collected old political campaign memorabilia since the age of ten, I knew from experience that most politicians never save their own campaign items, and years later they regret it. While serving in my state legislature, I created a wealth of bipartisan goodwill giving colleagues items from my collection. Determined to find an icebreaker with John, I rummaged through my collection for a relation-building opportunity.

The next time I saw John sitting alone on the House floor, I invited myself to join him. Before he could run me off, I asked if he remembered doing a campaign rally with Senator Edward Kennedy in Michigan almost 30 years earlier. He said he had thought about it just the other day: "This was back when everyone believed Ted Kennedy would be the next president," John said. "It was the biggest rally I ever had in my district!" I asked John if he remembered seeing yellow campaign badges there with the legend, "The People's Choice in 1972: Edward Kennedy for President - John Conyers for Vice President."

"I remember those badges!" John said excitedly. "In fact, I wanted my staff to save me one, but they never did."

Before John could ask his next obvious question ("How do you know about that badge?"), I reached into my pocket. "I saved one for you, John." Pressing the badge into his hand, I smiled and walked away.

My childhood passion forged a new friendship.

John's later kindness toward me caused more than a few raised eyebrows at my maiden appearance as a member of the House Judiciary Committee [after the Monica Lewinsky story broke and the nation geared up for a possible presidential impeachment--partisan tensions were already at the breaking point by this time]. On March 3, 1998, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), another new committee member, and I attended our first hearing. As the senior Republican, Chairman Hyde drew the duty of making the welcome speech for Lindsey and me. After Henry finished and then called up the first bill, John Conyers interrupted unexpectedly: "Mr. Chairman, will you yield to me?"

Everyone looked around nervously. "Here it comes," remarked a congressman seated behind me. Republicans hunkered down for another Conyers partisan tirade. Instead, jaws dropped as John made a lovely speech embracing my membership on Judiciary. As he extolled my virtues, Republican members began eyeing me suspiciously. Even Henry looked baffled. To make things worse, after John finished praising me, he gazed icily at Lindsey and remarked, "Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time."

Rest in peace, John. 

Today marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, becoming the first men to set foot on the Moon.

As an 11-year old boy, I watched them take those historic first steps on an old black-and-white Magnavox TV with my great aunt, Della Glover, who was born before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. To watch space history made with someone whose life predated manned flight added to the thrill and appreciation of the moment.

Little did I dream that on the 30th anniversary of those historic steps, July 20, 1999, I would spend the day with Neil and Buzz, along with their command module pilot Mike Collins, at a private reception for them at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, and later at NASA's DC headquarters.

The small Apollo 11 flag on the NASA certificate was flown in space on the Space Shuttle Columbia on the 25th anniversary of the Moon landing. July 20, 1994. The director of NASA presented the flag to me five years earlier. On the 30th anniversary, I had both Neil and Buzz autograph and date it for me. It remains one of my treasured mementos.

God bless our Apollo 11 crew, and God bless America--the nation that conquered the Moon.

One of the U.S. Senate's most prominent liberals of the 1960s and 1970s, Birch Bayh (D-IN, 1963-1981) died today of pneumonia at age 91.

Twice a candidate for president (1972 and 1976), he authored two constitutional amendments: the Twenty-Fifth (presidential succession) and the Twenty-Sixth (giving 18-year olds the vote), which gave him the distinction of being the only non-Founding Father to have authored two constitutional amendments.

News of Birch's death leaves me deeply saddened. It might seem odd that a conservative former GOP congressman would mourn (in the eyes of most other conservatives) a liberal bogeyman, but I do.

In 2001, a couple of months after I left Congress and became a partner in the Maryland-based law firm of Venable LLP, I was asked to help form a government relations practice. As I sifted through resumes, one came across my desk that caught my eye—former Senator Birch Bayh, who was by then out of office for two decades, in his mid-70s, and desirous of leaving his current law firm and joining us.

We set up a "meet-and-greet" breakfast for him, which was very pleasant but somewhat formal. It was a chance for a few of my partners to get a feel for whether we wanted to pursue further discussions with the former lawmaker, and for him to size up our firm. All went well that morning, but when breakfast was over, he approached me and asked if we might meet privately before he left. I invited him to my office down the hall.

We sat alone and he said to me, "Congressman, may I be candid with you? I know you are a hard-core conservative, and you know that I am a hard-core liberal. I'm also an old man, so I am asking you to do me a personal favor. If you plan to veto my joining the firm because of our political disagreements, would you be kind enough to tell me right now? At my age I really don't want to go through a series of interviews with the other practice groups if it is all going to be for nothing. I won't take it personally, and in fact, I would respect your position if that is what you feel you need to do."

"Senator," I replied, "I don't know why, but for some reason I had a feeling that might be a concern for you. Maybe this will answer your question." I opened my desk drawer, retrieved a manila envelope, and handed it to him. He opened it and pulled out a dark Kodak snapshot (dark because the flashbulb failed) from August 1971 – – 30 years earlier. It was a photograph taken of him signing an autograph for me when I was in junior high school. Also in the envelope was a letter he had written me 30 years earlier thanking me for my interest in his upcoming presidential campaign, and sending me an autographed photograph.

"Birch," I smiled, "I'm your original fan! Does that answer your question?"

Birch stood up, came around my desk, and threw a bear hug around me. From that moment, we were the best of friends. We hired Birch, he became my law partner, and I was thrilled when he asked to have the office directly next to mine.

In time, the firm wanted to separate our offices, because whenever he and I didn't feel like billing hours (which was often), we would wander into each others' offices and talk about politics—especially the politics of the tumultuous 1960s. Almost always Birch did the talking and I was his eager listener and student.

Far too many times I wandered into Birch's office, plopped down on his couch, and threw out questions such as, "Hey Birch, when you were first running for the Senate in 1962 and John F. Kennedy came out to campaign for you in Indiana, and then he cut short his appearance because he said he had a cold and flew back to Washington, did you have any inkling that he was really heading back because he had gotten word that the Soviets had put missiles in Cuba at the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis?" Then I would sit back for the next couple of hours and listen to Birch regale me with stories, all of which I loved and absorbed.

During our time together Birch was a fountain of political history, and I relished his first-person accounts of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Hubert Humphrey, Everett Dirksen--the yarns were endless, and so was my delight.

Christine and I moved home to California 15 years ago. I stayed in touch with Birch for many years, but as he grew older the contacts became less frequent. When he died this week, all of my memories of that warm, friendly, and lovable Hoosier flooded back. Regardless of party, America lost a gifted and tenacious legislator, and a patriot who loved his country deeply.

And I lost a pal. Requiescat in pace.

https://www.nytimes.com/.../obituaries/birch-bayh-dead.html

Twenty years ago this evening, February 8, 1999, I delivered my closing argument before the United States Senate on live worldwide television in the impeachment trial of President Clinton.

For reasons explained on pages 390-398 of my book, "Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment," the closing argument I prepared - - and the closing argument I gave at the very last minute -- ended up differently. In later weeks and months my congressional staff began teasing me about "The Lost Closing Argument" that I intended to give (later I lamented my brash act of jettisoning it) to deliver a mostly extemporized version.

To salve my continuing regrets, in 1999 my campaign committee surprised me by printing up a large supply of 8-page glossy brochures of the "lost" closing argument.

This weekend I found a stack of them in my garage. They are vintage and original items from my last congressional race and distributed to fans and supporters between 1999 and 2000.

I will be happy to send a free original of one of these brochures (signed or unsigned) to anyone who might like it--so long as you send me a self-addressed return envelope with sufficient postage (two stamps without cardboard). They are about 5x7 in size, so you will need to send an envelope large enough to accommodate the brochure. Mail to my webmaster at P.O. Box 33, Yorba Linda CA 92885, and it will reach me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJr_w23bdI...

Of the millions of dollars I raised in my final campaign for reelection to Congress back in 2000, this was the one check I never could bring myself to cash--and after he stuffed it into my pocket I told him so. Then he insisted on writing me a second check that I would cash (I told him if he did, it would just end up framed on the wall along with this one).

In memory of a great patriot who became a cherished friend to my entire family.

Earlier this week, and for one night only, the world famous Palomino Club--along with the Grand Ole' Opry it was America's premiere country western venue--reopened for a museum fundraiser in its original North Hollywood location. The Palomino closed its doors almost a quarter century ago.

For me it was a trip back in time. I bartended there 1979-1982 while a law student at UCLA. It brought back a flood of memories stepping inside that cavernous old hall one last time.

To commemorate the occasion I wore my original Palomino Club jersey. The last time I wore it I was 25, and it was the last night I bartended there. Today I'm 61--and it still fits!

Thanks to the Valley Relics Museum for making this wonderful memory for the hundreds who joined me this week.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-palomino-club-benefit-revival-20181009-story.html?fbclid=IwAR2SAnLcMvzW6MC9vNEajyOudOqWMJiTKR2WqG9RAejElLgGklnhY3bmTsw

During my service in Congress, I had my differences with John McCain (as did every other Republican), who died yesterday at age 81. Still, I never forgot that he helped in my reelection--even when we did a joint press conference and I criticized his signature McCain-Feingold campaign finance proposal while he stood at my elbow (that explains the grimace on his face in this photograph).

He was an American original and a true war hero. Requiem in pacem.

"So my thanks to all of you – and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there." – Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, 12:15 a.m., June 5, 1968

The most tragic part of the story is that he was not supposed to go that way. The pantry was a last-second decision. His staff had earlier prompted him to turn to his right when he finished his victory speech, exit through the ballroom crowd, do a quick press conference next door, and then leave for a private party at a nearby discothèque to celebrate his presidential primary victory.

On countless occasions over the last 50 years I have seen the film of that speech. Now, whenever it airs, I no longer watch the jubilant candidate. My eyes always drift to the right corner of the footage. It is where I know there are two unobtrusive swinging doors behind the curtain and off to the side of the stage.

"And now it's on to Chicago. …" Bobby flashed a thumbs-up and V-for-victory sign, brushed aside a lock of hair, and then moved to his right to exit the stage as prearranged. That was the plan.

And then it happens:

"This way, Senator …"

Eyeing the thick crowd through which the candidate's entourage must navigate to attend the press conference, a well-meaning aide called to his boss, "This way, Senator …" RFK stopped, pivoted and backtracked toward the voice calling to his left. Kennedy's staff had a standby plan if the throng was too dense: Exit behind the stage backdrop curtain, pass through the two swinging doors, and cut through the kitchen pantry.

Every time I see that footage and hear the aide call to him, I find myself pleading silently: Press on through the crowd – don't go into the pantry.

But he always does.

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy stood before 1,500 cheering supporters in the Embassy Room at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. There he declared victory over Sen. Eugene McCarthy in a hard-fought California primary battle for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. A few minutes later, Kennedy closed his speech with these words: "So my thanks to all of you – and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there." Kennedy exited the stage, went through the swinging doors and walked halfway across the short pantry. As he stopped to shake hands with a teenage busboy, a young drifter stepped from behind a serving table, raised his pistol and fired. His first shot struck Kennedy behind the right ear and crashed through his brain.

Ironically, one of Kennedy's surgeons from that night said years later that if the fatal shot had struck just a centimeter off, Kennedy would have recovered and resumed his campaign. Because it did not, 50 years ago today Robert Kennedy died at age 42, leaving behind a pregnant widow and 10 young children.

He left behind something else. Because millions of voters that year – those who loved and hated him – were denied the final judgment of their ballots, his death left a gaping hole in political history.

 
I was finishing the fifth grade in June 1968. As a 10-year-old boy, I had already developed what would remain a lifelong fascination for American history and politics, and I followed that year's presidential campaign the way other boys my age followed baseball statistics.

As I related in a previous column, our teacher that year, Miss Firpo, encouraged those interests. In the weeks leading up to the end of the 1968 primary season, she had us studying the campaigns of the White House contenders. Living in California brought added excitement to the race: our state's June 4 presidential primary was touted as the one that might well decide the Democratic contest (there was no meaningful GOP primary in California that year). Miss Firpo let us decorate the classroom with campaign posters and bumper stickers for our favorite candidates.

On the morning of the primary, we boys were betting our best baseball cards on who would win. That evening I stayed up late watching the lead between Kennedy and his California opponent, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, seesaw back and forth. As midnight neared, and as I struggled to stay awake, McCarthy appeared before his supporters, conceded his narrow defeat and vowed to continue his campaign for the presidential nomination all the way to Chicago's Democratic National Convention that August. I kept the TV on a while longer and watched as the coverage now cut across town, where camera crews broadcast live images of the excited crowd at the Ambassador Hotel awaiting RFK's victory speech.

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, a beaming Kennedy and his wife stepped before their cheering supporters. After making a brief speech of thanks, he made a plea for party unity, and then he closed with his "on to Chicago" pledge.

As Bobby and his entourage made their way off the stage, I turned off the TV, climbed into bed and fell fast asleep.

The next morning, as I got ready for school, my classmate Mike Dittman called and asked if I had heard about Kennedy. Yes, I told him, I knew Kennedy had won. When Mike broke the news of what had happened moments after I turned off the television, I couldn't believe it. I turned on a new household novelty – our first-ever color television – and watched the news broadcasts replay unendingly the footage of the fallen candidate, his head resting in a spreading pool of maroon blood.

I had never seen anything so graphic or so tragic.

In class that morning, as Kennedy's life ebbed away, yesterday's friendly Kennedy vs. McCarthy schoolyard rivalry gave way to confusion and profound sadness. Miss Firpo tried to comfort her students seated in a room still decorated with a dozen Kennedy posters. I remember looking at Bobby's picture gazing down on us from those posters as she spoke, his black-and-white image frozen with a half-smile. Yesterday that image suggested confidence. Now it bore the haunting aura of death.

Today, on what is the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's assassination, I still reflect on what his neurosurgeon said: The shot that killed him was a fluke. Had it been just a fraction to the right, it is likely he would have survived. Since reading of that sad irony decades ago I have often wondered – what if someone in that crowded pantry had shouted a warning and Bobby flinched – even slightly? What if something – anything – had deviated that bullet's fatal trajectory? What if millions of voters didn't lose their hopes in a pool of blood on a concrete pantry floor? What if he had survived his wound?

What if Bobby had gone on to Chicago?

That is the premise of my new book, which was released yesterday: "On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968." In it I make a historian's best effort to answer that "what if?" question – based on facts, not on romanticism or wishful thinking. It is, technically, a work of historical fiction – but it is far more heavy on the history as opposed to the fiction.

Childhood Camelot sentimentalities notwithstanding, the ensuing years have long ago disabused me of the notion that Bobby Kennedy was a saint. In fact, as one who (30 years after his death) went on to serve as a conservative Republican in Congress – and as one of the prosecutors who helped lead the impeachment of President Clinton – RFK was hardly a political role model for me. Had I served with him back then, I would have opposed him politically – and there is a decent chance I would have disliked him personally for his legendary traits of expediency and ruthlessness.

Still, in that frenetic 85 day presidential campaign of 1968, Bobby Kennedy did more than capture a fifth-grade boy's attention: He helped ignite a lifelong passion for public service. In the end, that is the lasting legacy of any great political leader – the ability to motivate both his own and the next generation.

That was RFK's gift to many of the idealistic youths of yesteryear who remain of my now-graying generation. I hope that, in my new book, I have repaid the gift in one small way: For better or for worse, he will finish his journey.

Through the marriage of the author's pen and the readers' imagination, half a century later, Robert Francis Kennedy will go on to Chicago.

(Excerpted from James Rogan's 2018 book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968)  

I was finishing the fifth grade in the spring of 1968. Although only a 10-year-old boy, no political pundit awaited the start of that presidential campaign year more eagerly than I. Since Ronald Reagan's election to our state's governorship, I had developed an unquenchable fascination for American history and politics, and 1968 would be my first national election to follow with great passion.

My elementary school teacher, Miss Firpo, encouraged these interests. In the weeks leading up to the end of the primary season, our class studied the campaigns of the major White House contenders. On the Democratic side were Vice President Hubert Humphrey (who entered the race after President Johnson dropped out – too late to file for any primaries), and the two "peace" candidates, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, both of whom ran in opposition to the Johnson administration's Vietnam War escalation. On the Republican side, the presidential nomination looked like it was former Vice President (and GOP front-runner) Richard Nixon's to lose. The Nixon campaign chugged through the primaries and swept almost every one, but along the way they kept a wary eye on Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Reagan – both of whom stood in the wings looking to exploit any Nixon slippage before the Republican convention.

Living in California brought added excitement to the race: Our state's June 4 primary was touted as the one that might well decide the Democratic presidential contest. Humphrey wasn't on the ballot, but for Kennedy and McCarthy, California might well prove "make or break." After losing the Oregon primary to McCarthy a week earlier, Kennedy said he would drop out of the race if he suffered a back-to-back defeat in California.

Miss Firpo urged us to visit the campaign headquarters of our favorite candidates and bring back posters and stickers to decorate the classroom. I rooted for McCarthy only because Cheryl Briones, the freckle-faced girl on whom I had a secret crush, was for him. We were in the minority; most of the kids at Fairmont Elementary School in Pacifica were going "All the Way with RFK," and an overabundance of Bobby Kennedy posters dominated our classroom walls.

On primary day, we boys were betting our best baseball cards on who would win. That morning, and as a joke, my classmate Mike Dittman (an ardent RFK fan) pinned to my coat a blue Kennedy badge. I yanked off the contraband button and stuffed it into my pocket before Cheryl saw it and thought me a traitor to the cause.

That evening I stayed up late watching the lead between Kennedy and McCarthy seesaw back and forth. In between election returns I channel-surfed to the baseball game and watched snippets of Dodgers superstar Don Drysdale make history by pitching his sixth straight shutout, which broke the record held since 1904.

As midnight neared, and as I struggled to stay awake, McCarthy appeared in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton hotel, conceded his narrow defeat and vowed to continue his campaign for the presidential nomination all the way to Chicago's Democratic National Convention that August. Feeling deflated at Cheryl's and my loss, I kept the TV on a while longer. The election coverage now cut across town, where camera crews broadcast live the excited crowd at the Ambassador Hotel awaiting RFK's victory speech.

And so, 50 years ago today, shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, a beaming Kennedy and his wife stepped before 1,500 cheering supporters in the Embassy Room of Los Angeles' Ambassador. After making a brief speech of thanks – and tossing in congratulations to local hero Drysdale, Bobby made a plea for party unity, and then he closed with these final words:

"My thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there."

 
Bobby smiled and waved, gave a V-for-victory salute, and then made his way off the stage.

Deflated by my first taste of political defeat, I turned off the portable black-and-white TV my mother let me keep in my room for this special night, climbed into bed and fell fast asleep. I had never before stayed up past midnight on a school night, and I nodded off knowing that I would have deep regrets about going to bed so late when the morning came.

But in that moment, I had no conception of how overwhelming tomorrow's regrets would be, or that the pain of the morning would remain – half a century later.

(Excerpted from James Rogan's 2018 book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968)

It was supposed to be easy.

By late 1967, with the Vietnam War raging for over three years, antiwar activists sought to recruit an intraparty challenger to the incumbent president they blamed for the conflict, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, in his expected 1968 re-election bid. Their favored candidate to take on Johnson for renomination, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (brother of the slain president and the man who selected Johnson as his vice president in 1960) repeatedly refused to run, telling advisers LBJ was unbeatable. After burning through a list of second-string potential challengers – all of whom turned down their entreaties – the activists found only one taker – Eugene McCarthy, a virtually unknown U.S. Senate backbencher who preferred writing poetry to the glad-handing world of politics.

McCarthy's candidacy drew a yawn from the political establishment. Demonstrating his nonconformist reputation at his announcement press conference, when a reporter asked why he wanted to be president, McCarthy corrected him: "I didn't say I wanted to be president. I'm willing to be president." Taken aback by that answer, another reporter asked what kind of president he would make. McCarthy replied, "Oh, I'd be adequate." During the lead-up to his first primary confrontation with LBJ, McCarthy's most favorable poll showed the president clobbering him 3-to-1 (one poll showed LBJ drubbing him 10-to-1).

Still, there was attraction to McCarthy's unconventional style. During his six week seemingly impossible New Hampshire primary race, college students across America drawn to his antiwar message and his aura of integrity hitchhiked or rode buses to the Granite State to volunteer. On primary day, McCarthy rocked the establishment by coming within 200 votes of outpolling Johnson statewide.

During the preceding weeks, Robert Kennedy and his team never viewed McCarthy as a serious contender. They believed, along with most others, that McCarthy could never provide Johnson any meaningful opposition. Besides, according to Kennedy senior campaign aide Richard Goodwin, they all knew that if Kennedy later changed his mind and entered the race, McCarthy would step aside for him. After the New Hampshire shock, and with LBJ stripped of his invincibility cloak, Kennedy reversed course and jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination. McCarthy, who challenged Goliath when nobody else would, refused to yield. His supporters viewed Kennedy's earlier and repeated refusals to run against Johnson as cowardly, and his sudden entry following their man's stunner as an opportunistic and selfish act guaranteeing to split the peace vote.

A second political shock came two weeks after New Hampshire. Facing more humiliation from a likely outright win over him by McCarthy in the upcoming Wisconsin primary, Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. This set the stage for Vice President Hubert Humphrey's entry into the race a month later as the administration's Vietnam defender. Since Humphrey declared too late to file for any primary, Kennedy and McCarthy scrambled for votes in those handful of states selecting delegates in the 1968 primaries.

According to historian Theodore H. White, Kennedy's strategy was to blitz McCarthy in the primaries but avoid attacking him personally. This created a conundrum: Privately, Kennedy detested McCarthy and felt him unfit to be president, but he feared attacking McCarthy would alienate the thousands of young people who already rallied to his cause. Kennedy needed those "McCarthy kids" in his corner once he dispatched "Clean Gene." Kennedy hoped that by rolling over McCarthy comfortably in every primary, he could win enough delegates to make the argument at Chicago's Democratic National Convention in August that he, not McCarthy or Humphrey, was the more electable nominee.

Over the next two months Kennedy and McCarthy battled their way across the primary map. They faced off first in Indiana on May 7, where Kennedy beat McCarthy, but he did so with an unimpressive 42 percent in a three-man race – and that was after McCarthy pulled out of the state completely. The same thing happened in Nebraska a week later: Kennedy poured in huge amounts of time and money, McCarthy spent one day campaigning there, and Kennedy barely cleared 50 percent. The Kennedy team tried to put a game face on their modest Nebraska margin – aide Pierre Salinger spun their 51.5 percent majority as proof that McCarthy's candidacy was not "credible." But inside their campaign bubble Kennedy forces knew the opportunity for a knockout was diminishing. It was the next primary, Oregon, where Kennedy needed to flatten McCarthy to end his effort.

And so, 50 years ago today, May 28, 1968, Oregon Democrats voted. When the dust settled, it was McCarthy who walloped Kennedy by 6 points, thereby derailing Kennedy's blitz strategy. The surprising loss also unnerved Kennedy's pride – Oregon made RFK the first Kennedy ever to lose an election, which galled the competitive candidate greatly.

With his two unimpressive victories, and then a sobering defeat in Oregon, a chastened Kennedy privately told his staff that if he lost the next big primary the following week he would drop out of the race. All eyes thus turned to California, where the warfare between Kennedy and McCarthy grew increasingly hostile right up to that fateful election night, June 4, 1968.

What was the ultimate impact of this make-or-break California primary on both the 1968 presidential campaign and on history? I will offer a reflection on that topic one week from today – on the 50th anniversary of that epic race.

My new book has struck a chord with the historian-DNA embedded deeply within my friend and former House colleague, Speaker Newt Gingrich. He posted this article to the FoxNews.com website this last weekend: 

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/05/19/newt-gingrich-learning-our-history-and-why-it-matters-for-americas-future.html

(Excerpted from James Rogan's 2018 book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968)

On April 23, 1968, three weeks after declaring – again – that he would not run for the presidency, the New York governor entered the White House quietly through a side door for a private dinner with the occupant – Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, who himself announced recently that he would not seek re-election that year.

During dinner, LBJ revealed that his first choice for the presidency was not a member of his own party – it was his Republican guest. Johnson regarded the governor as a sensible moderate and, far more importantly, the one man who could beat either of LBJ's bitter foes should they win their respective party's nominations: Democrat Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Republican former Vice President Richard Nixon. LBJ urged his guest to reconsider his decision and, to sweeten the pot, promised that if he ran, LBJ would support him privately and not campaign against him publicly.

Not many presidential contenders could consider such a course change only three months before the nominating convention convened, but then, not many political leaders were like Nelson A. Rockefeller, the three-term governor of New York, grandson of John D. Rockefeller, heir to the greatest wealth accumulation in history and the leader of the GOP's liberal wing. Over many months prior to his clandestine White House dinner, the middle-aged, sturdily built governor met repeatedly with the Republican Party's liberal and moderate major domos over whether, in 1968, he should make a third try for the GOP presidential nomination. At each of these meetings, the leaders pleaded with him to challenge the more conservative Nixon, but at the end of every session, his answer remained the same: no.

Rocky (a nickname so universally identified with him that he used it when signing autographs) did not suffer from timidity – he wanted to be president. After considering a challenge to Nixon for the 1960 nomination, he made a vigorous play for it four years later promoting his brand of Republicanism – free enterprise and massive government spending. Theodore H. White noted that of all the big-spending governors, "Nelson Rockefeller was the biggest spender of them all –in his decade [as governor] spending in the state budget had almost quadrupled. … Rockefeller's dreams dazzled large scale planners – but the costs shocked ordinary Republicans."

If Rocky's freewheeling spending shocked ordinary Republicans, it positively enraged the party's conservative base, who registered their disapproval by supporting Barry Goldwater over him for the 1964 presidential nomination. Goldwater was the anti-Rockefeller, opposing virtually every federal income redistribution program from compulsory government-controlled Social Security to Medicare to welfare. During their primary campaign, Rocky attacked Goldwater as a tightfisted, trigger-happy, anti-civil rights kook. Conservatives returned fire, slamming Rocky for both his obscene big-government profligacy and his moral deficiencies (citing his recent divorce and remarriage to his mistress). After a bitterly divisive fight ended with Goldwater's nomination, Rocky refused to endorse him. When Rocky addressed the convention, conservative delegates booed him for 16 uninterrupted minutes. On Election Day, with Lyndon Johnson's utter destruction of Goldwater and many down-ticket Republicans, conservatives blamed Rocky for the catastrophic losses.

Now, four years after the Goldwater challenge, Rocky understood (even if his supporters did not) that the aftertaste of 1964 likely dashed his national prospects, at least for now. However, by 1968, many rank-and-file Republicans started giving him a second look. Following the Goldwater debacle, this time around Republicans wanted a winner, and they had nagging concerns that Richard Nixon was a perpetual loser after his back-to-back defeats for president in 1960 and for California governor in 1962. With polls showing Rocky beating every Democrat in head-to-head matchups, and with Nixon often lagging behind them, forgiving his previous heresy remained a possibility worth considering.

Even with LBJ's tempting pledge ringing in his ears, Rocky knew he had to overcome other hurdles to pull off a successful 11th-hour run. He was too late to enter any primaries, but that limitation was not fatal. In 1968, the primary states picked only a small percentage of the delegates needed to win the nomination – and, in many of those states, the GOP governors controlled their delegations as "favorite son" candidates. The selection of most convention delegates would occur in caucuses, state conventions and smoke-filled rooms – the places where politicians understood the meaning of winners and losers. If Rocky entered now, he would need to convince the delegates of two things: 1) he could beat any Democratic Party nominee, and 2) Nixon could not. True, every poll showed that most delegates preferred Nixon over Rocky, but they qualified this preference: They wanted Nixon only if he could win in November.

With the temptation proving too great, Rocky threw the dice. And so, 50 years ago today, on April 30, 1968, Nelson Rockefeller declared his candidacy for president of the United States.

Rocky's 1968 blitz followed a three-prong underdog strategy: First, barnstorm to as many states as possible between now and the convention to meet delegates and urge them to "stay loose" – keep an open mind. The second prong involved influencing public opinion directly with an unrelenting media and direct mail saturation campaign to drive up and maintain his favorable poll numbers. The third prong was trickier: entice California Gov. Ronald Reagan (already holding more than 80 delegate votes automatically as California's favorite son) into the race to challenge Nixon's right flank, especially among Southern delegations that loved Reagan and where Nixon's support was soft. If Rocky could bring 400 delegates to Miami, and Reagan added a couple hundred more Southern delegates to his California pledges, their combined forces would block Nixon's first ballot nomination and resurrect his fatal "loser" image. Once the pledged delegates cast Nixon adrift, that would leave the final nomination showdown between these two powerhouse governors.

Lest anyone not take Rocky's candidacy seriously, the day after announcing his entry, and without appearing on the ballot, he beat both Nixon and the favorite son governor in the Massachusetts Republican presidential primary, and he did it with write-in votes (since he declared too late to appear on the ballot). Rocky pocketed every one of the 34 delegates the Bay State would send to the Republican National Convention.

In Miami three months later, and despite the combined Rockefeller-Reagan effort to block Nixon, the former vice president held his Southern flank and won the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. Nelson Rockefeller went on to win re-election to a fourth term as New York governor in 1970; after Nixon's 1974 resignation, President Gerald Ford selected him as his vice president. Declining to seek the 1976 GOP vice presidential nomination for a full term, Rocky retired from public life in 1977 and returned to his philanthropic and business interests. He died of a heart attack at age 70 on Jan. 26, 1979.

Nelson Rockefeller's memory remains a Republican Party presence. Forty years after his death, GOP activists still identify themselves by – or hurl as an epithet – the defining phrase:

"A Rockefeller Republican."

(Excerpted from James Rogan's 2018 book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968) 

On March 31, 1968, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey spent the evening in Mexico City trying to focus on the dinner given in his honor at the home of the ambassador to the United States, but through it all he kept one eye on the clock. Twelve hours earlier he was packing for this trip when a sudden commotion outside his Washington apartment caught his attention. He looked out the window and saw a motorcade parked outside. Walking toward the building entrance was the tall, lumbering figure of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Humphrey rushed to open the door; Johnson blew in, greeted Mrs. Humphrey and then asked to meet privately in the bedroom with his vice president.

When they were alone, Johnson told Humphrey that he would deliver a nationally televised speech on the Vietnam War that evening. Johnson then handed Humphrey two sheets of paper with alternative speech endings. Humphrey reviewed the first, which contained two brief paragraphs with Johnson's formal announcement that he would seek re-election in 1968 – an announcement Humphrey (and the rest of America) anticipated. The second possible ending, which declared that Johnson would forgo re-election, left Humphrey speechless. As Humphrey handed back the papers to the president, Johnson said that he had not decided which ending to use, and that Humphrey would have to listen to his speech that night to learn the answer. After swearing Humphrey to secrecy, Johnson returned to the White House; a few minutes later the Humphreys departed on their diplomatic mission.

Later that afternoon, on the flight to Mexico, Humphrey reflected on Johnson's threat to withdraw from re-election. He dismissed it summarily as yet another example of LBJ's famous theatrical streak. With Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's recently announced challenge to Johnson's renomination, anybody who knew the president knew with certainty that he would never surrender the presidency to a man he hated.

In Mexico that night after dinner, Humphrey and the other guests gathered in the ambassador's library to hear Johnson's speech. Pandemonium broke out when, in the last minute of a 40-minute address, and after telling listeners that he wanted to devote all of his efforts to ending the war, Johnson stated firmly, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Within seconds of this bombshell announcement, scores of reporters seeking comment overloaded the embassy's switchboard, while in the outside lobby the press pool covering the trip pounded on the library door and shouted questions to the official party on the other side: Was Hubert Humphrey now a candidate for president?

Hubert Horatio Humphrey. By 1968 he was perhaps one of the most recognizable political figures in America. As mayor of Minneapolis, Humphrey first won election to the U.S. Senate in 1948 – the same year he caused a walkout of Southern delegates to the Democratic National Convention when he rammed a civil rights plank into the national party platform. As one of the leading liberals in Congress throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he sponsored landmark legislation such as Medicare, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Peace Corps and nuclear disarmament. When President Kennedy signed the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, he gave Humphrey (the man JFK defeated for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination) the pen as a souvenir and told him, "Hubert, this is your treaty. It had better work." Chosen by Johnson as his 1964 running mate, Humphrey remained a loyal vice president, but by 1968 he felt deeply conflicted between private concerns over Johnson's Vietnam policies and personal loyalty to his mentor.

Now, in Mexico, and despite the warning Humphrey received at his apartment meeting that morning, Johnson's announcement caught him off guard. He delayed making any decision about a second presidential candidacy that night – and for almost a month thereafter. With most primary filing deadlines having expired already, Humphrey understood that the election calendar would force him to bypass that route and seek delegates in the states where selection was governed not by primary voters, but by party elders in caucuses and state conventions. In 1968, only a small percentage of national convention delegates were chosen through the primaries, so a potential late start did not concern him terribly.

During this interval, the public's attention diverted to the Democratic primary states where the two "peace" candidates, Kennedy and Sen. Eugene McCarthy (both of whom entered the race earlier to challenge Johnson for renomination), slugged it out. Humphrey ceded the spotlight to them, gambling that Kennedy had far less organizational support than most imagined, and that the gadfly McCarthy had even less.

It was 50 years ago today, April 27, 1968, that Hubert Humphrey formally entered the presidential race. His announcement received only passing notice, but the media's indifference mattered little. Kennedy and McCarthy might have held the hearts of the party's antiwar wing and the college students, but (with Johnson's grudging acquiescence) Humphrey had the establishment. While Kennedy and McCarthy ramped up their mutual attacks on each other in their quest for the small pockets of primary delegates, a few days after Humphrey's entry, his private poll showed that without contesting a single primary he already had 900 of the 1,312 delegates he needed to win the nomination. By June 5 of that year, the night Kennedy won the California primary and then was cut down by an assassin, Humphrey had enough votes to lock up the nomination.

After losing the presidency to Richard Nixon that November in one of the closest elections in U.S. history, Humphrey left politics briefly after his vice presidential term ended in January 1969. When Eugene McCarthy declined to seek re-election to the Senate the next year, Humphrey jumped into the race to succeed him and won the seat.

Returning to Washington and itching for a rematch against Nixon, Humphrey ran for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, but lost out to Sen. George McGovern. (Stories of my many boyhood meetings with HHH, and with scores of other notables, are in my third book, "And Then I Met … Stories of Growing Up, Meeting Famous People, and Annoying the Hell Out of Them," available at the WND Superstore).

Re-elected to the Senate in 1976, doctors diagnosed Humphrey late that year with terminal cancer. He fought the disease bravely while maintaining his Senate duties until death claimed him at age 66 on Jan. 13, 1978.

A passion for justice, an unfailing love of country and an infectious optimism earned Humphrey the sobriquet for which he was known in life, and which still conjures his memory 50 years after his greatest quest: The Happy Warrior.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's new book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized approximately 35,000 bombing raids on enemy targets in Southeast Asia. Fifty years ago tonight, March 31, 1968, he dropped a political bomb on America.

First elected to the Congress in 1937, Johnson later served in the Senate as majority leader, vice president under John F. Kennedy and succeeded to the presidency upon Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The following year, LBJ won a landslide election by beating conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in a 44-state rout. Soon thereafter, Johnson ordered U.S. combat forces into Vietnam in an effort to halt the spread of Soviet and Red Chinese-backed communist aggression.

By late 1967 the Vietnam War had raged for over three years and grew increasingly unpopular. With no end in sight, antiwar activists sought to recruit an intraparty challenger to Johnson's anticipated 1968 re-election. Working off old "end the war" mailing lists, they launched a "Dump Johnson" drive. The likelihood of success was so remote that the proposition seemed absurd to all but a handful of like-minded objectors.

Allard Lowenstein, the founder of the fledgling movement, visited every antiwar Democratic senator – including Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, whom he lobbied repeatedly to run. Lowenstein's pleas with all (but one) were in vain, and each gave the same reason Kennedy gave in refusing to take on the president of his own party: Johnson was unbeatable in 1968. Only Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a quirky congressional backbencher who preferred writing poetry to the grubby political world, agreed to challenge LBJ for the Democratic presidential nomination. With no major funding, no organizational base, almost zero name identification, and with Johnson holding a monopoly on party establishment support, McCarthy filed for the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary. Party elders and the press treated his quest as a national joke.

During his six week New Hampshire campaign, McCarthy's message began resonating with college students across America, many of whom faced impending military induction notices because of Johnson's continued war escalation. First dozens, and then hundreds, and finally thousands of them rode buses or hitchhiked east. Arriving at McCarthy headquarters, they cut their long hair, put on conservative clothes and then blanketed every New Hampshire neighborhood on his behalf.

For his part, Johnson ignored McCarthy. Once Johnson's main potential competitor for the nomination – Kennedy – announced he would not run, Johnson did not bother filing for the New Hampshire primary ballot. After McCarthy jumped into the race at the last minute, Johnson decided that filing would give his challenger credibility, so he again passed. Instead, he allowed the state's leading Democrat, Gov. John King, to initiate a formal write-in campaign for Johnson to energize the party's base and to coax back some of the press attention now focused almost exclusively on the contested Republican primary between Richard Nixon and George Romney.

From the man who led the effort to oust Bill Clinton from office, Rep. James Rogan's "Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment"

When New Hampshire voted on March 12, 1968, the nonconformist senator expected to draw no more than 10 or 15 percent came within 200 votes of out-polling Johnson statewide, sending shockwaves across the political establishment. With LBJ now showing unexpected vulnerability, and after McCarthy did the heavy lifting, Robert Kennedy jumped into the race against Johnson a few days later.

With Johnson next facing McCarthy in a head-to-head matchup in the April 2 Wisconsin primary, the White House dispatched Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Cabinet members, various administration officials and members of Congress to the Badger State. Local party officials coordinated their efforts through the Democratic National Committee to crush the McCarthy insurgency.

A few days before the primary, Johnson met with his campaign manager, Postmaster General Lawrence F. O'Brien, whom he had sent to Wisconsin to assess their operation. O'Brien stunned LBJ with the news: Their polls showed that McCarthy would beat the president by as high as 60 percent. It was hopeless.

With his earlier embarrassing New Hampshire showing, a likely humiliation coming in Wisconsin and a new Gallup poll showing he had cratered to a 35 percent approval rating, Johnson knew that his once-iron grip on the nomination might slip quickly if party leaders concluded that he was beatable. After sharing O'Brien's field report with a longtime aide, Johnson lamented, "If a president has to spend 10 million dollars to get the renomination of his party, then it's time for [he] and his party and everybody else to go some other way. I don't want to go that way. … I can't get peace in Vietnam and be president, too."

Johnson reserved network airtime for an address to the nation on Vietnam for the evening of March 31, 1968, which was two days before the Wisconsin primary. Speaking from the Oval Office, LBJ announced a partial bombing halt over North Vietnam and indicated the U.S. was prepared to engage in peace talks. Then, in the last minute of a 40-minute speech, and after telling listeners that he wanted to devote all his efforts to ending the war, he pulled the pin on his grenade: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."

Unexpectedly, Johnson went from victim to victor. His approval rating shot up an unprecedented 13 points – from 36 percent to 49 percent – in one night. After the speech, millions of anti-LBJ partisans jettisoned nearly four years of anger and now hailed him as a statesman. This newfound popularity made him regret privately removing himself from the campaign. For a time he even toyed with the idea of having his supporters start a "Draft Johnson" movement at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, but in the end he let the cup pass.

LBJ's exit from the campaign threw open the race to succeed him. Ahead that year awaited divisive primaries, riots, assassinations, a bloody nominating convention and a hard-fought three-way race to the November finish line.

Yet all of that turmoil remained down the road 50 years ago tonight – the night President Lyndon Johnson, one of the fiercest political competitors of the 20th century, laid down his sword.

Johnson left the White House in January 1969 and retired to his Texas ranch. In later years he oversaw the building of his presidential library, wrote his memoirs, raised his cattle and spent time with his grandchildren. He died of a heart attack at age 64 on Jan. 22, 1973.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's new book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

Robert Kennedy: The man, the myth, the truth

Each generation produces a handful of universally known political figures who arouse deep-seated love or blinding disdain, and with almost no middle ground between either passion. In my grandparents' day, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt: People loved him or hated him, but very few had no opinion of him. One might argue today that the names Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton provoke the same polarized feelings. During my boyhood, there wasn't one or two such leaders – there were eight, and they all squared off against each other in the 1968 presidential campaign. Those to whom public indifference failed to attach back then were Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace, Nelson Rockefeller, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and the charismatic young candidate whose murder that year shielded him from the continued harsh spotlight of contemporary scrutiny and into the realm of martyrdom and legend.

That final metamorphosis began 50 years ago today, March 16, 1968, when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

RFK for president – you had to be there to understand the excitement he ignited. As a San Francisco boy growing up in the 1960s in a blue-collar, part-Irish and all-Roman Catholic family, John and Robert Kennedy were heroes to our generation of immigrant and denominational descendants. We admired them in life and mourned them in death – deeply. I was too young to remember Jack Kennedy's 1960 race, but I was all over Bobby Kennedy's 1968 drive for the White House. Although only in the fifth grade, I followed it with the same enthusiasm other boys my age reserved for that day's baseball standings. His landmark campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against Sen. Eugene McCarthy infused me with such an intense interest in history and government that it led to my own eventual path into law and politics.

The excitement of Kennedy's battle, and then the horrible violence that ended it instantly the very night he beat McCarthy in their hard-fought California primary, left a profound impact on me that never waned. Decades later, during my service as a Republican congressman, I still held Kennedy in awe – a sentiment no other conservative House colleague apparently shared. In 1998, Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, D-Mass., and I co-sponsored a bill to name the U.S. Department of Justice building after his late father. Republicans killed the bill in committee. Thirty years after RFK's death, his memory still aroused so much GOP disdain that they would not have named the DOJ outhouse after him. When I tried raising the issue with Speaker Newt Gingrich directly, he cut me off. "That bill is dead – dead," he snapped irritably. Later, when my friend Lyn Nofziger, Ronald Reagan's longtime spokesman and adviser, visited my Capitol Hill office, I saw him staring at a large autographed photo of Bobby Kennedy hanging on my wall. Turning to me and looking both confused and disgusted, he asked, "What the hell is that thing doing here?"

This leads to my next point: Fascination does not cause blindness.

Like two other supermen with whom he shared the crowded stage in 1968, Robert Kennedy shares a common fate with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon: over the ensuing decades all three have been the subject of countless biographies teeming with pseudo-psychological interpretations of what made them tick. Here the comparison ends. With LBJ and Nixon, the pop-culture consensus is that their power-grasping temperaments sprang from sinister motives and deep-seated personal inferiorities. Bobby's biographers usually promote loftier interpretations. For example, Arthur Schlesinger softened for history Bobby's hard-edged, knee-to-the-groin political style, writing, "Because he wanted to get things done, because he was often impatient and combative, because he felt simply and cared deeply, he made his share of mistakes, and enemies. He was a romantic and an idealist. …"

Romance and idealism aside, many of RFK's ardent supporters never knew, or chose to ignore, that Bobby started his political career in the 1950s as one of the lead investigators for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose last name became – fairly or unfairly – a synonym for reckless and career-destroying witch hunts. After leaving McCarthy's staff, Bobby became chief counsel to the Senate committee investigating labor union racketeering. He dragged in over 1,500 witnesses before the committee in a vendetta to "get" those he perceived as enemies, especially Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa – an obsession that carried over into his tenure as President John F. Kennedy's attorney general. During Bobby's stint at the Justice Department, he supported covert foreign assassinations and coups. He ordered wiretaps on enemies and friends alike, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he knew cavorted with communists. Incidentally, these wiretaps disclosed King's many marital infidelities, which FBI agents later used to harass and threaten King. Revisionist histories notwithstanding, Attorney General Robert Kennedy did not champion the cause of Southern civil rights marchers – he viewed them as irritants creating escalating nuisances to his brother's 1964 re-election prospects. Right up to the end of his life, in private conversations, sometimes he used ethnic vulgarities when talking about blacks and Jews.

Just as those of us who venerate Thomas Jefferson – the man who gave voice to freedom's greatest proclamation – must live uncomfortably with the fact that he owned slaves, one would think that the venerators of Robert Kennedy would live uncomfortably with his stark and often disturbing record.

Wrong.

Instead, RFK's post-assassination biographers overwhelmingly offer a more forgiving explanation – his brother's 1963 assassination changed Bobby Kennedy. Dallas supposedly transfigured him from vicious street-fighter into Greek tragedian: deeper, sensitive, selfless. Bobby helped in this rehabilitation by peppering his post-JFK era speeches and interviews with quotations from Camus, Emerson and Aeschylus. He dined with poets, strikers and migrant workers. He walked the ghettos. Those perpetuating the RFK myth excuse his calculated back flips on Vietnam. This renovated RFK meets us in history books as one who "grew" in his opposition when he saw an unjust war and its aftermath, and upon whom fate forced leadership, which he accepted for duty, not ambition.

The truth: Robert Kennedy, both before and after his brother's death, was a calculating politician who fought dirty, played for keeps and (when politically expedient) took various sides of an issue to please specific and often conflicting interest groups. Strip Bobby Kennedy of the sentimental hogwash that bathes his memory and we find that he and his brother had the same cunning ambitions and methods as their non-idealized counterparts. We forgive the Kennedys, but not the graceless LBJ or the sweat-beaded and shifty-eyed Nixon, because the Kennedys had a cultured, smooth veneer when cutting an opponent's throat.

Doubtless Dallas and its aftermath changed Robert Kennedy. All the evidence suggests that Bobby did become more soulful, patient, thoughtful and empathetic for the underclass, but his darker political side never wandered far. Of Bobby's 1968 opponents – Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Eugene McCarthy, George Romney – if any were alive today, they would tell you that RFK understood the family business perhaps better than any other member of his clan. When Bobby fought you on the political battlefield, he fought to win, and if that meant leaving your corpse rotting in the dust, tough luck.

Still, RFK represented more than a political contender. To millions he was their voice and, more importantly, their hope – a symbolic resurrection from that cruel Dallas motorcade five years earlier. One need not have been a Camelot sentimentalist to have shared the grief at his own violent death.

His frenetic 85-day campaign for the presidency proved all the more Shakespearean when his neurosurgeon later reported that if the fatal shot had struck just one centimeter to the right, Bobby would have recovered and resumed his campaign. Because it did not he died at age 42, leaving a pregnant widow, 10 young children and a gaping hole in American history.

Many of us old enough to remember that tragic night have defaulted repeatedly over the years to the question that still haunts: What if?

What if someone in that crowded pantry shouted a warning and Bobby flinched – even slightly? What if something – anything – had deviated that bullet's fatal trajectory? What if millions of voters didn't lose their hopes in a pool of blood on the pantry floor of a Los Angeles hotel? What if Bobby survived his wounds and finished his journey?

As we approach the 50 anniversary of RFK's death later this June, these thoughts remind us, ever so painfully, of the poet's lament: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these – It might have been."

[Excerpted from James Rogan's new book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

Ralph Pill left a filthy mess when he vacated the old three-story red brick building that formerly housed his electrical supply company in Concord, New Hampshire. In early January 1968, two anti-Vietnam War activists rented it for $100 a month. They entered to find rats, rubbish piles, wooden boards covering floor holes, exposed plumbing pipes and bare lightbulbs hanging from ceiling cords. They began by sweeping up the trash. Six weeks later, with their purpose completed, they had helped topple a president of the United States, and also set in motion the founding of the Democratic Party's modern progressive movement.

And it all happened 50 years ago today.

On Nov. 30, 1967, an almost-unknown U.S. senator with no funding or organizational base, Eugene McCarthy, announced he would challenge incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic Party nomination. McCarthy chose New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary, as the place where he would make his opening stand against LBJ. The quirky senator who preferred writing poetry to the grubby world of politics seemed an unlikely giant killer. Johnson held a monopoly on New Hampshire Democratic Party endorsements, including the governor, the U.S. senator and every noteworthy official. Aside from some low-level peacenik officeholders, McCarthy at first had little more than a small coterie of volunteers backing his antiwar endeavor, but the challenger soon caught a couple of unexpected breaks.

The first opening came on Jan. 31, when communist North Vietnam violated an agreed-upon cease-fire with U.S.-backed South Vietnam on "Tet," the Vietnamese new year. Seventy thousand Northern communists and their Vietcong allies launched surprise attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and over 100 South Vietnamese cities. Although U.S. and South Vietnamese troops repelled the attackers with relative ease, it took over a month to drive back the enemy. Despite this victory, the three major U.S. networks highlighted the brutal fighting on their evening news broadcasts each night, which caused a major slide in continued public support for U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Before Tet, a majority of Americans approved of Johnson's war policies. Two weeks after Tet, Gallup reported that 50 percent disapproved. When LBJ suggested that the Pentagon might draft an additional 200,000 young men to supplement the 500,000 U.S. troops already stationed in combat zones, draft-age college students responded. First a handful, and then dozens, and then hundreds, and finally thousands of them made their way to the Granite State. They cut their long hair, donned conservative clothing, and blanketed every New Hampshire precinct on McCarthy's behalf. The nationwide mobilization of students for liberal causes began with this 1968 McCarthy phenomenon – dubbed by the press back then as "The Children's Crusade."

McCarthy's second break came courtesy of New Hampshire Gov. John W. King, a staunch LBJ supporter.

From the man who led the effort to oust Bill Clinton from office, Rep. James Rogan's "Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment"

Once Johnson's main potential competitor for the nomination, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, announced he would not challenge LBJ for re-election (Kennedy told friends privately that Johnson was unbeatable), Johnson did not bother filing for the New Hampshire primary ballot. After McCarthy jumped into the race at the last minute, Johnson decided that filing would give the challenger credibility, so he again passed.

With LBJ not participating, the state's leading Democrat, Gov. King, resented that press attention focused on the Republican primary between Richard Nixon and George Romney. To bring some excitement to the Democrats' ledger, he initiated a formal write-in campaign for Johnson. King ordered printed tens of thousands of pledge cards, and he distributed them to every government employee and registered Democrat in the state. The three-part, serially numbered perforated cards, captioned, "N.H. Democrats are 90,000 Strong," were designed for the voter to sign an LBJ write-in pledge with their personal identifying information included. The card indicated that state party officials would collect and record the pledges, and then forward the data to the Johnson White House.

The pledge cards angered and offended thousands of recipients. Because the cards bore a serial number, many thought these were the actual primary ballots – violating the secrecy of their choice. Voters also resented providing their names and addresses on pledge cards going to state and national party officials who could track and (presumably) punish those balking. King aggravated these suspicions when he told the press the reason for the pledge cards: "Now is the time for Democrats to stand up and be counted – or be counted out."

 
The McCarthy campaign pounced. They nailed up posters around the state with a picture of the pledge card and the slogan "Whatever Happened to the Secret Ballot?" McCarthy said LBJ was using the pledge cards on voters the same way he used branding irons on his Texas cattle. He urged voters to reject this intimidation tactic and to show their independent spirit, reminding them that they need not pledge anything to his campaign. By primary day, thousands of those pledge cards had been returned to McCarthy's Concord campaign office – with Johnson's name scratched out and McCarthy's name written in.

And so, 50 years ago today, March 12, 1968, New Hampshire voted. The nonconformist senator expected to draw no more than 10 or 15 percent came within 200 votes of outpolling Johnson statewide. This sent shockwaves across the political establishment. With LBJ showing unexpected vulnerability, Robert Kennedy jumped into the race a few days later. McCarthy's furious supporters viewed Kennedy's last-minute entry as ruthless opportunism that threatened to split the peace vote – after they had done the heavy lifting against Johnson. They dubbed him "Bobby Come Lately," and their bitterness toward him lasted throughout the remaining state contests.

In the weeks following New Hampshire came Johnson's eventual withdrawal from the race, the entry of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy's assassination, the bloody riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the fall campaign against Republican Richard Nixon and third-party candidate George Wallace. The long road that lay ahead all started in an abandoned, $100-a-month warehouse, which became Eugene McCarthy's campaign headquarters for the New Hampshire primary.

And so, if you ever stroll through downtown Concord, New Hampshire, pause for a moment at the old red brick building that still stands on the northeast corner of Main Street at 3 Pleasant Street Extension. It will probably be abandoned – just as it was 50 years ago when the McCarthy campaign assembled a political atom bomb within its walls. Be respectful as you walk by …

History was made there.

When a reporter once asked Frank Sinatra who was the best male vocalist of that day, the Chairman of the Board didn't hesitate when he answered: he said the singer with "the best pipes in the business" was Vic Damone.

Long ago, when I attended a charity event with Vic and another legend, comedian Bob Newhart, Vic proved Sinatra was on to something. He was an amazing and beloved entertainer whose career covered seven decades

When Vic died this weekend at the age of 89, we lost one of the few remaining stars from the golden age of the Great American Songbook.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's new book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

"Hitler go home!"

The heckler in the audience screamed out the insult to the presidential candidate standing on the rally stage below. Cohorts who also came to disrupt the event cheered, and then they booed loudly at the candidate's reaction to it. Instead of appearing agitated, he smirked at the catcaller and replied, "Somebody needs to show that child where the little boys' room is!" That set the galleries afire – now the hostile mob screamed obscenities while the candidate's just-as-passionate supporters, albeit a substantial audience minority, tried to drown them out with cheers and chants of "USA! USA!"

Signaling to the troublemakers, the candidate roared into the microphones, "These young punks are the ones that decent people are sick and tired of. These little Nazis talk about free speech but won't allow it to others." More jeers and applause as he drove home his point: "You can't really blame these kids. This is what their professors are teaching them. So let me tell all you college professors something – you'd better get your protesting done right now, because when I become president, I'm going to ask my attorney general to indict every one of you who supports publicly a military victory over American troops fighting overseas. That's not dissent. That's not free speech. That's treason – and we're seeing the fruits of that treason at this college here today." (The quotations are adapted from actual speech remarks made by the candidate at various campaign rallies.)

If this sounds like a Donald Trump campaign rally, your guess is 50 years off. Long before President Trump began throwing rhetorical gasoline on the political fires burning around him, there was former Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

 
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, repeated violent police confrontations with peaceful black civil rights marchers in the South shocked white Americans, who responded to those outrages by supporting President Lyndon Johnson and his "Great Society." After winning his landslide 1964 election, Johnson and a Democratic Congress committed billions of dollars to welfare and social programs to help the poor and minorities work their way out of poverty. However, starting with the Watts riots of 1965, increasing militancy among newly rising black leaders gained heightened press coverage. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and Huey Newton (among others) became household names. They rejected Martin Luther King's calls for peaceful civil disobedience; some preached armed resistance and revolution.

Over the next three tense years, the evening news broadcasts showed riots, looting and arson in over 100 major cities. These haunting images from black neighborhoods ablaze left many whites believing that mobs of "ghetto radicals" wanted to burn down America. By 1968, an increasing number of these previously sympathetic white voters grew both scared and angry. Just as state-sanctioned abuses against earlier nonviolent civil rights marchers shocked them into demanding an end to segregation, this ongoing wave of violence stirred them once again, but in another direction. Polls showed that they responded to presidential candidates promising to restore law and order.

Many of them responded to George Wallace.

From the man who led the effort to oust Bill Clinton from office, Rep. James Rogan's "Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment"

The short, wiry farm boy from Clio, Alabama, grew up so poor that the first home he shared with his new bride was a converted chicken coop. After working his way through college and law school, he entered the Army and saw combat in World War II. Upon returning home he became a prosecutor, a state legislator and a circuit court judge. During an unsuccessful run for governor in 1958, Wallace's comparatively moderate views earned him the endorsement of the NAACP, while the Ku Klux Klan supported his opponent.

Four years later, with federal court decisions ordering desegregation in the Deep South, Wallace ran again and challenged the U.S. Supreme Court's legal right to force its unelected will upon the states. Winning 96 percent of the vote (no Republican filed against him), he became the national symbol of Southern defiance by proclaiming in his 1963 inaugural address, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Wallace went on to make his point defiantly: When Attorney General Robert Kennedy's Justice Department sought to integrate the University of Alabama with federal troops, Wallace stood in front of the college's door and confronted Kennedy's deputy as cameras recorded the temporary standoff.

Wanting to test his populist message outside the South, in 1964 Wallace entered three Democratic presidential primaries. Hammering away on states' rights, a strong national defense, and law and order to combat violent racial and campus protests, he showed surprising strength with primary voters in Indiana, Wisconsin and Maryland. Those states gave him 34 percent, 30 percent and 43 percent, respectively. With his ideas now resonating beyond Dixie, he set his sights on the 1968 presidential election.

And so, 50 years ago today, Feb. 8, 1968, George Wallace announced he would seek the White House as a third-party candidate leading his newly formed American Independent Party. Wallace's was the first third-party presidential campaign to qualify for the ballot in all 50 states. The specter of him on every state ballot terrified both the Republican and Democratic Party establishments. The GOP feared Wallace would siphon votes from conservative Southerners, while Democrats feared a hemorrhage of their union and blue-collar voters from every region.

By 1968 Wallace had long since jettisoned his earlier segregationist message and instead focused on the populist themes he had used in 1964, adding to them a call for a complete military victory for U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam. "When I'm president," he declared, "you good people will be able to walk any street in Washington, D.C., safely, even if I have to keep 30,000 troops standing on those streets two feet apart with two-foot-long bayonets. And I'll throw in jail every rioter and every treasonous college professor supporting our enemies in Vietnam. The day for these anarchists, revolutionaries and communists is coming to an end."

 
How did his message resonate with a national audience? In October 1967, polls showed him with 10 percent of the vote. By the summer of 1968 he hit 16 percent, and pollster George Gallup reported, "If the presidential election were being held today, the strong possibility exists that… George Wallace would deny either major party candidate the electoral votes needed to win." It grew worse for the establishment: By the end of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in late August, a new poll reported that a surging Wallace ran only 7 points behind Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey – with the gap closing.

George Wallace never reached the White House, but he denied it to Humphrey, a diehard liberal and a recent Vietnam peace convert. On Election Day, Wallace racked up 10 million popular votes and 46 electoral votes. He put five states in his American Independent Party's column, and the electoral map that he divided put Richard Nixon (a moderate-conservative and a Vietnam War hawk) in the White House.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's new book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

People exiting their cars in the parking lot of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Holiday Inn that snowy night felt the biting cold as they hurried inside. That was true of the five unobtrusive men who entered the motel through a side door. Four of them were young – late 20s and early 30s. The fifth man, in his mid-50s, held the block of room reservations under the name given the desk clerk: Benjamin Chapman. After finding their rooms, the younger men went down to the bar for drinks while the older man remained upstairs to polish his speech for tomorrow's event.

In that speech, delivered 50 years ago today, Feb. 1, 1968, Richard Nixon (traveling incognito as "Benjamin Chapman" the night before) began his long climb out of dual electoral defeats by announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. What his longtime aide Pat Buchanan later called "the greatest comeback" had begun.

First elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1946, Congressman Nixon gained national fame for doggedly exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent. Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, later went to prison. The liberal establishment who defended Hiss never forgave Nixon for bringing down one of their favorites, despite Soviet archival evidence proving decades later that Hiss was a traitor. Capitalizing on this notoriety, Nixon won election to the U.S. Senate in 1950. Two years later, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower tapped him (at age 39) as his running mate. After serving eight years as Ike's vice president, he won the 1960 Republican presidential nomination and squared off against John F. Kennedy, who claimed victory that November in one of America's closest White House races. Evidence of massive voter fraud in Illinois and Texas left the legitimacy of Kennedy's win in doubt – then and now. In a remarkably unselfish display of sacrifice for the sake of national unity, and one for which the media and historians almost never give him credit, Nixon refused to contest the results. Two years later Nixon ran unsuccessfully for California governor. In a concession speech legendary for its bitter tone, Nixon announced that he was through with politics.

Leaving California for New York, Nixon practiced law, wrote articles, gave speeches and eased back into political life. In 1964, when many Republican leaders avoided campaigning with GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, Nixon stumped the country for the ticket, covering 36 states and making more than 150 appearances. Two years later, during the 1966 midterm elections, he became the party's most peripatetic campaigner, traveling 127,000 miles, visiting 40 states and delivering over 400 speeches for GOP candidates and causes. Republicans won stunning gains that November, picking up 47 House seats, three U.S. Senate seats, eight governorships and 557 state legislative seats. Around the country, countless winning and losing candidates credited Nixon for helping them in 1964 and 1966, and from this large pool would come delegates to the 1968 Republican National Convention.

As the next presidential election year approached, Nixon's popularity soared within the party establishment and with its rank-and-file members. However, these same leaders also worried about Nixon making another White House run. He had not won an election in his own right since 1950, and after suffering defeat in two back-to-back major races, they feared he couldn't go the distance in 1968. For his part, Nixon understood that a successful return to the arena required that he shed this "loser" image.

These days, when presidential candidates mobilize their White House efforts four or more years in advance, it seems almost inconceivable that a leading presidential candidate would take a six-month moratorium from all political activity in the year leading up to the campaign. It is equally unimaginable that the same aspirant would wait until six weeks before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary before declaring his candidacy. In a doubly risky move, Nixon did both.

With this self-imposed moratorium, Nixon ceded the national stage intentionally to the then-front-runner for the nomination, Michigan Gov. George Romney. A moderate Republican, Romney enjoyed the backing of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and was a proven vote-getter with minority and blue-collar Democrats. Running as a Republican in one of the nation's most heavily Democratic states, Romney won three terms as governor and rolled up increasing majorities each time. Romney showed such broad support that President Kennedy confided to a friend shortly before his assassination that the only Republican he didn't want to face in his anticipated 1964 re-election race was Romney.

By giving Romney the stage, Nixon wagered that Romney would prove himself unready for the Oval Office. The gamble paid off. When Romney's campaign imploded after a string of candidate gaffes, Nixon claimed victory in New Hampshire, beginning his long climb out of the slump.

During the next six months, from his candidacy announcement to the Republican National Convention in August, Nixon ran the gauntlet of the other major contenders for the nomination. After dispatching Romney, he took on Rockefeller, the formidable two-term Republican governor of New York. Later still, on the eve of the convention, a new conservative rock star, California Gov. Ronald Reagan, threw his hat into the ring. During the convention, with neither Rockefeller nor Reagan securing enough votes to win outright, the former vice president faced a fourth challenge: a combined Rockefeller-Reagan "Stop Nixon" effort that sought to peel off enough moderate and conservative Nixon delegates to block his first-ballot victory. If that happened it would revive the "loser" mantra and precipitate a rush of Nixon delegates to either camp, leaving Rockefeller and Reagan as the last two men standing to battle for the nomination and, ultimately, for control of the Republican Party.

All these hurdles loomed as Nixon stepped before the microphones at the Holiday Inn that day. Beyond New Hampshire lay more primaries, the convention and a general election faceoff against the Democratic presidential nominee and a populist third-party candidate. Ahead of victory awaited the Vietnam War, a faltering economy, campus riots and urban unrest, Supreme Court vacancies, major diplomatic coups, a stunning re-election victory in 1972 and an even more stunning collapse of his presidency from the Watergate scandal. Further still, beyond the ashes of defeat and humiliation, lay regeneration, reformation and, in the end, the earned mantle of elder statesman.

The fuse igniting that incredible journey was lit in a motel room 50 years ago today. On its anniversary, we remember Richard Nixon, a man wholly gifted, wholly flawed, wholly undaunted – wholly American.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's new book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

On Jan. 31, 1968 – 50 years ago today – in a jungle country 9,000 miles from Washington, a horde of communist soldiers and sympathetic guerrilla fighters launched a massive attack against a nascent democratic republic across their southern border. The democratic forces and their allies repelled the invaders easily and crushed the assault. However, that raid became the first falling domino that led to the destruction of an American presidency, the murder of a leading presidential candidate, over a decade of politicians degrading the U.S. military and a permanent reconfiguration of America.

Modern historians refer to that failed attack as the "Tet Offensive," and they often cite its aftermath as America's only lost war – Vietnam. We will return to that latter claim momentarily.

The vast majority of Americans living today were not yet born when the Vietnam War ended, yet thanks to what they have been taught in school, most believe it was a "bad" war – but they don't know why. Explain to them that the U.S. went into Vietnam to blunt Soviet and Red Chinese communist domination of Southeast Asia, and they blink in confusion. The Soviet Union? That totalitarian empire crumbled when they were in diapers. "Red" China? Is that like today's "red state-blue state" political distinction? Don't bother trying to explain the "Domino Theory" to a generation that never played Dominoes – or any other game not accessible on a video screen. To the "bad war" crowd, Vietnam was just bad – period – and everyone knows it. What's your next question?

Summarizing the origins and legacy of the Vietnam War in a few paragraphs is an exercise in farce, but for those opinionated latecomers, a brief explanation of why America fought there might help lift the fog.

After a century of occupation by various countries, in the post-World War II years a peace agreement divided Vietnam into two states – the communist North and the democratic South. Later, the North attacked the South to force a reunification under Stalinist domination. The Soviet Union and Red China (so called in those days to distinguish it from the non-communist Republic of China, which relocated to Taiwan during China's civil war in 1949) supported their fellow communists in the North. Since South Vietnam was ill-equipped to defend itself against this troika, the U.S. faced two choices: let them fall to the communists and risk the spread of totalitarianism in the region, or step in and help.

We chose to help.

President Eisenhower sent advisers; President Kennedy sent military personnel disguised as more advisers. Formal combat operations began in 1964 under President Lyndon B. Johnson after communist guerillas reportedly fired on two U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress approved a resolution authorizing the president to respond militarily to such aggression, but over the next four years, Johnson treated the Gulf of Tonkin resolution as a de facto declaration of war. From 1965 until the end of his presidency in January 1969, Johnson ordered his generals to attack, but not obliterate, the North and their Vietcong guerrilla allies. Johnson's policy was not to defeat the communists, but rather to coerce them into signing a peace treaty. Johnson feared an all-out attack on the North might bring Red China into the war directly and precipitate a nuclear  confrontation.

From the man who led the effort to oust Bill Clinton from office, Rep. James Rogan's "Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment"

LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, later recalled the night in 1966 when Johnson told neutralist Burmese President Ne Win that he was doing everything he could for peace, and then he asked Ne Win why that goal eluded him. Ne Win replied, "What you are doing wrong is asking for peace. The North Vietnamese view that as a sign of weakness." Johnson insisted that, as president, he must do everything possible for peace. Ne Win told LBJ, "The North Vietnamese do not hear your peace overtures as an honest, legitimate desire for peace, but as weakness. You must make them believe there will be no peace until they are defeated. When they understand you are going to destroy them, then there will be peace."

Johnson shook his head glumly. "I can't do that," he replied, thus dooming any prospect for military success during his tenure.

Despite its increasing cost in American lives and tax dollars, throughout most of his presidency Johnson's Vietnam policies enjoyed bipartisan congressional and public support. In 1966, when Sen. Morse offered an amendment to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Democrat-controlled Senate defeated his proposal 92-5. Even as late as 1967, with Johnson escalating militarily, antiwar congressional forces mustered a meager five votes in the Senate to end American involvement. In 1968, one from their ranks, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, challenged Johnson for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, promising to end all U.S. military action in Vietnam if elected. When the unknown senator announced his candidacy, Johnson enjoyed a 50 percent favorable rating in the polls, McCarthy's name identification registered a blip, and Americans overwhelmingly favored the administration's Vietnam policies. Most political analysts expected Johnson to coast to an easy re-election victory in 1968.

Then came the Tet Offensive.

 
In late January 1968, North and South Vietnam agreed to a cease-fire so both sides could celebrate "Tet," the Vietnamese new year. On Jan. 31, the day of the agreed truce, Northern communist troops and Vietcong guerrillas launched a massive sneak attack on over 100 South Vietnamese cities. They succeeded in blasting their way into the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon. Although the Tet assault took U.S. and South Vietnamese forces by surprise, they repelled it in a few weeks with relative ease and inflicted heavy enemy casualties on the North.

Before Tet, Johnson and his generals had been assuring Americans for a year that we were on the verge of victory and peace in Vietnam, and most believed the claim. Once the Tet assault began, and for the several weeks that it lasted, the U.S. network news broadcasts aired nightly footage of heavy enemy fire on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. Americans watching this on television were shocked that our "defeated" enemy could launch such widespread attacks – even hitting our embassy. These images produced a rapid public backlash against the war. Although U.S. and South Vietnamese troops defeated the communists militarily, the reds inflicted a psychological wound on the American voter. Public opinion shifted, and many people adopted what a small minority of antiwar activists had been preaching for years: LBJ and the Pentagon were lying about our military prospects in Southeast Asia.

Next, LBJ magnified this simmering public displeasure by suggesting he might need to call up 200,000 more U.S. troops for Vietnam – on top of the 500,000 already there. Once high school seniors and college students learned that a quarter million new induction notices might issue, they hitchhiked or took Greyhound buses by the thousands to New Hampshire to help McCarthy battle Johnson in that state's presidential primary.

Six weeks after Tet, on the day of the first-in-the-nation primary, McCarthy came within 200 votes of outpolling Johnson in perhaps the most pro-Vietnam War state in America. LBJ's now-exposed vulnerability proved too irresistible: Sen. Robert Kennedy, who had refused repeatedly to challenge Johnson for the nomination, jumped into the race and offered himself as an alternative peace candidate to McCarthy.

With fresh polls showing another likely humiliation in the upcoming Wisconsin primary only two weeks later, Johnson stunned America and announced he would not seek re-election. The man who wanted to be remembered for his Great Society social programs and public works spending frenzy saw his presidency run aground on the shoals of Vietnam.

Vice President Humphrey joined McCarthy and Kennedy in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two months after LBJ withdrew, and while campaigning in California, Kennedy was assassinated. Humphrey beat McCarthy for the nomination at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and then he went on to lose the November election narrowly to Richard Nixon.

Over the next four years, President Nixon succeeded in turning over more of the responsibility for the war to South Vietnam. He began a steady drawdown of American forces overseas while maintaining strategic and aggressive U.S. bombing campaigns against the communists. Nixon's "Vietnamization" policies finally brought the North to heel, and the communists signed a peace treaty with the United States and South Vietnam in early 1973. Soon after Nixon brought peace, however, his presidency began unraveling from Watergate. With Nixon's and America's attention diverted by this domestic specter, and showing as much fidelity to their 1973 peace treaty as they showed to their 1968 Tet cease-fire, the North Vietnamese quietly rebuilt their military during this interlude and prepared for another invasion.

In 1974 Nixon resigned and Vice President Gerald Ford succeeded him. During the Ford administration the Democrat-controlled Congress set in motion an end to South Vietnamese military aid. By 1975, with no further likelihood of U.S. retaliation facing them, the heavily fortified and re-armed communists once again overran their neighbor. The Democratic Republic of South Vietnam collapsed and the communists took control of the nation.

Are the historians correct when they cite Vietnam as America's first defeat in war?

No.

America didn't lose the Vietnam War. America ended the war with South Vietnam relatively secure from communist aggression, and then withdrew from the battlefield after Nixon brought peace. When communist aggression again arose, and the South looked to her ally to honor their prior commitment of help, the overwhelming post-Watergate Democratic congressional majority followed through on a campaign promise to end U.S. involvement there.

In Vietnam, America did suffer a defeat, but it was not a defeat inflicted by superior military might. It was the psychological defeat of our will to win. But for an indecisive president who squandered countless opportunities for victory in the name of limited warfare, and then later a war-weary Congress with the political muscle to overrun an unelected president, it might have been otherwise.

The seed of that defeat was sown 50 years ago today, and on this black anniversary of the Tet Offensive we remember the 58,200 Americans who died in the jungles of Vietnam, the 300,000 Americans wounded there, the 1,600 Americans still missing in action, and the nearly 2 million South Vietnamese casualties killed or wounded in the battle for a worthy cause – living free.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's book, Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment]

Twenty years ago today, Jan. 21, 1998, I was a freshman congressman sitting at my kitchen table pouring a cup of coffee and preparing to leave for the airport. An article on the front page of the Washington Post caught my eye: "Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie." It wasn't until I got to the bottom of the lead paragraph that I learned the supposed lie involved a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky with whom the president might have had an affair.

I shrugged off the revelation. During Clinton's presidential campaign, cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers disclosed her 12-year affair with him. After he denied it vehemently, she produced audiotapes of their phone conversations confirming the relationship. In later years other women came forward with claims against him ranging from adulterous liaisons to sexual assault. These stories were a small part of the Clinton scandal mosaic that disrupted his administration almost from his first day in office: Whitewater, cattle futures and the unending "gates" – Chinagate, Travelgate, Filegate, Pardongate, Troopergate, Donorgate, Hubbellgate and so forth.

"No big deal," I thought when I read of this new allegation. If America didn't care about Clinton's private life before they twice elected him president, why would one more girlfriend matter? Thinking this story rated no special notice, I finished my coffee and headed out the door without bothering to read the article.

I was wrong. Over the next year, as the layers peeled back slowly from this newest indignity, it did rate – and its significance changed more than a presidency. It changed our culture.

Why did Clinton's affair with an intern mutate into a constitutional confrontation?

Early in Clinton's presidency, several of his former state trooper bodyguards revealed that he used them to procure women when he was Arkansas' governor. After a trooper outed Paula Jones as one of these women, she filed a lawsuit against Clinton. Jones, a low-level Arkansas state clerk, was at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel during one of Gov. Clinton's appearances there. A member of his security detail approached and told her that the governor wanted to see her privately. The bodyguard escorted her to Clinton's hotel suite, where she claimed that Clinton touched her and tried to kiss her, and then he propositioned her while exposing himself. When Jones rebuffed his advances he reminded her that her employer was his buddy, and then he added, "You're smart. Let's keep this between ourselves." In May 1994, when Jones went public and filed her lawsuit, and as Clinton issued a stern denial, his political operatives hit the airwaves and depicted her as lying trailer park trash.

A year after Jones filed her claim, Clinton's White House chief of staff hired 21-year-old Monica Lewinsky as an intern. Five months later, after Clinton espied her, they began a two-year sexual relationship. During this time Lewinsky transferred to the Pentagon where a coworker, Linda Tripp, befriended her. As the two women grew closer, Lewinsky shared with Tripp the intimate details of her continuing extracurricular romps with Clinton.

Meanwhile, on the Jones front, Clinton fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the case from proceeding. When the Court ruled against Clinton, he knew that his sexual behavior would be subjected to heightened scrutiny, so he dumped Lewinsky. Lewinsky bemoaned to Tripp that Clinton had jilted her, and she continued sharing details of her relationship with the president, unaware that Tripp was now taping their conversations.

While preparing for trial, Jones' lawyers learned about Lewinsky through Tripp. This improved Jones' chances substantially: Before this discovery, their case revolved around the uncorroborated word of a nobody against that of the president of the United States. The Lewinsky factor gave Jones evidentiary corroboration of Clinton chumming for sexual favors with female subordinate employees. Jones' lawyers subpoenaed Lewinsky as well as all gifts exchanged between her and Clinton.

Undermining a court order to turn over those gifts, Clinton directed his White House secretary, Betty Currie, to go to Lewinsky's home and collect them. Currie drove to her home, fetched the gifts and then hid them under her own bed. Currie then called Vernon Jordan, a well-connected lawyer and Clinton intimate, and relayed that Clinton wanted him to find Lewinsky an out-of-town job. Jordan landed the inexperienced intern a well-paying position in New York with a corporation upon whose board of directors he sat.

Lewinsky discussed her upcoming testimony in the Jones case at least twice with Clinton. He coached her to lie when answering questions under oath. With Clinton's direct guidance, on Jan. 5, 1998, Lewinsky testified in the Jones case and declared under penalty of perjury that she never had a sexual relationship with him.

One week later Linda Tripp turned over to law enforcement the tapes she made of her conversations with Lewinsky, which revealed not only detailed accounts of the affair, but also how both Clinton and Vernon Jordan told her to lie under oath about it. On Jan. 16, Clinton's own attorney general ordered investigators assigned under the direction of former federal Judge Kenneth W. Starr to determine if Clinton used Lewinsky to suborn perjury and obstruct justice in the Jones lawsuit. Judge Starr's investigators intercepted and questioned Lewinsky, and then gave her immunity from perjury prosecution in exchange for her cooperation.

Clinton remained unaware that his Lewinsky scheme was now undone, so he went ahead with his plan to lie about their relationship during his own deposition testimony in the Jones case. Clinton understood that losing to Jones exposed him to more than personal and political humiliation – he might have to pay her millions of dollars in damages and legal fees out of his own pocket. Still, a financial hit was not his biggest risk. Public denials, if later proven untrue, might cost him popular support. If he lied under oath during his deposition testimony, he faced impeachment, felony criminal charges and potential imprisonment. Nobody had to explain this to the Yale-trained lawyer, constitutional law professor, former state attorney general and governor, and as president the only federal official charged by the U.S. Constitution to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

The table stakes for Clinton were high, but with Lewinsky's under-oath denial already on record, with Vernon Jordan having shuffled her out of town safely, and unaware that Linda Tripp had turned over the damning tapes, Clinton assumed he held the winning hand.

On Jan. 17, 1998, after taking an oath to tell the truth, Clinton pushed in all of his chips and called the dealer when he testified in the Jones case:

Q. Did you have an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky?

A. No.

Q. If she told someone that she had a sexual affair with you beginning in November of 1995, would that be a lie?

A. It's certainly not the truth. It would not be the truth.

Q. I think I used the term "sexual affair." And so the record is completely clear, have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky?

A. I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I've never had an affair with her. …

Q. At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky alone together in the Oval Office?

A. I don't recall. … It seems to me she brought things to me once or twice on the weekends. In that case, whatever time she would be there, [she'd] drop it off, exchange a few words and go.

Q. So your testimony is that it was possible that you were alone with her, but you have no specific recollection of that ever happening?

A. Yes, that is correct. It's possible that while she was working there, she brought something to me and that at the time she was the only person there. That's possible. …

Q. Have you ever met with Monica Lewinsky in the White House between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m.?

A. I certainly don't think so. Now, let me just say, when she was working there, there may have been a time when we were all working late. On any given night, when the Congress is in session, there are always several people around until late in the night, but I don't have any memory of that. I just can't say that there could have been a time when that occurred. I don't remember it.

Q. Certainly if it happened, nothing remarkable would have occurred?

A. No, nothing remarkable. I don't remember it. …

Clinton's cluelessness about his now-compromised Lewinsky perjury strategy was short-lived. On Jan. 19, after Newsweek magazine spiked their investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's story about the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship (Tripp had tipped off Isikoff previously), internet news maverick Matt Drudge broke it first. His scoop received almost no mainstream media attention for two days. Then, on Jan. 21, the story exploded across America's front pages.

The White House revved into uber-damage control mode. Clinton gave multiple interviews over the next few days in which he denied flatly any sexual relationship with Lewinsky. First lady Hillary Clinton rushed before television cameras and branded the Lewinsky story a lie concocted by a "vast right-wing conspiracy." In a now-iconic video clip, the president wagged his finger at America and intoned solemnly, "I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time – never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people."

While the president and first lady worked the media, their political hatchet men planted stories with friendly reporters that Lewinsky had a White House reputation as an imbalanced stalker who kept throwing herself at the beleaguered president. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd later wrote, "Even some veteran Clinton henchmen felt a little nauseated about the debate inside the White House on a slander strategy for Lewinsky: Should they paint her as a friendly fantasist or a malicious stalker?" Incidentally, the ability to shred Lewinsky as a nut-job ended abruptly once Clinton learned that investigators possessed her blue dress stained by his telltale DNA.

Clinton's operation of lies and press manipulation worked: Americans believed their president. His poll numbers at first held steady, and then increased to a whopping 67 percent approval rating, allowing much-relieved congressional Democrats to defend him not just through the yearlong scandal and his later impeachment trial, but through the remainder of his term of office – and for years thereafter.

Did the Lewinsky story matter?

Was it, as congressional Democrats and the mainstream media sang in unison back then, "just about sex," and "a private indiscretion" that shouldn't count because, after all, "everybody lies about sex"? Or did it have a greater meaning?

It had a greater meaning. It wasn't about sex – it was about the rule of law.

By late 1998, Judge Starr's meticulous investigation proved beyond a doubt that Clinton committed serial acts of perjury, subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice to crush Paula Jones and her federal civil rights action against him – and most people yawned as they ignored the evidence. Clinton completed his term of office with a high approval rating he still enjoys today. Those people also didn't care (or care to know) that he avoided a post-presidency felony indictment for his criminal behavior by signing a plea bargain with prosecutors on his last day in office. In exchange for admitting that he lied under oath in the Jones case, surrendering his United States Supreme Court and Arkansas Supreme Court law licenses to avoid disbarment, paying the Arkansas court a $25,000 fine and agreeing to a five-year suspension of his state court law license, federal prosecutors agreed not to indict him. Earlier, Clinton also paid Paula Jones $850,000 to settle her lawsuit – without conceding her allegations.

Today, 20 years after sipping coffee while skimming that Washington Post article, I still wonder why people back then didn't care, but this confusion is not directed to my former congressional colleagues. Their behavior was predicated on indulging the polls, protecting Clinton's presidency and warding off collateral political damage caused by impeachment's overwhelming unpopularity.

No, my question isn't to them. It is to the 67 percent of you who, 20 years ago, tolerated, enabled and rewarded this repeated assault on the Constitution and the rule of law:

Why didn't you care?

In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost the presidency to Richard Nixon in one of the closest elections in American history. Regardless of party, he was one of the most accomplished legislators and political leaders of the twentieth century. And, having met him too many times to count when I was a kid, he was one of the nicest men I have ever encountered.

He died 40 years ago today, January 13, 1978.

In my book, And Then I Met...Stories of Growing Up, Meeting Famous People, and Annoying the Hell Out of Them, I recounted my first meeting with "The Happy Warrior." This is an excerpt from that book:

* * *

In 1960s and 1970s San Francisco, newsman Jim Dunbar's AM Show on station KGO was a staple of local morning television. From 6:30 to 8:30 a.m., Dunbar hosted a live call-in program with newsmakers. While watching the station one Saturday in 1971, I heard an announcement that Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN) one of the most recognizable political titans of that generation, would appear with Dunbar the following Monday morning. I called my classmates and fellow political junkies Dan Swanson and Roger Mahan. Together we concocted a plan to cut eighth grade classes and try to meet Humphrey when he arrived at the studio.

Writing this story five decades later, I am mindful that with each passing year Hubert Humphrey's name registers with fewer people. That was not true when I was young. A Washington heavyweight for decades, the former pharmacist and Minneapolis mayor first won election to the U.S. Senate in 1948. He ran unsuccessfully against John F. Kennedy for the 1960 Democrat presidential nomination, but four years later President Lyndon Johnson tapped him as his running mate. As the 1968 Democrat presidential nominee, Humphrey lost the White House to Richard Nixon by a whisker. After recapturing his old Senate seat two years later, and with the 1972 presidential campaign around the corner, he itched for a rematch with the Republican president.

Humphrey was more than a politician to me. He was an early inspiration. As a fifth grade boy during his 1968 presidential run, I read a Life magazine profile on him. It told of his experience as a young Midwestern pharmacist making his first visit to 1930s Washington and the newfound passion for politics he found there. One night, after an exhilarating tour of the monuments, he rushed off an excited letter to his fiancée back home. After pleading with her not to laugh at him, he wrote that if he applied himself then maybe he could return one day as a congressman. She didn't laugh, they married, and along the way he helped shape almost every landmark law of his era. That magazine profile on HHH showed me that if an ordinary Midwestern druggist could accomplish such great things through politics, then maybe one day I could do the same. Once I connected those dots, I set my compass.

• • •

Well before daybreak that Monday morning, Dan, Roger, and I caught the trolley to downtown San Francisco. To get to KGO, we walked many long blocks down dark streets while passing hobos sleeping in doorways and winos urinating in the gutter. It was a spooky journey for three boys, but we arrived safely. A friendly studio doorman told us that if we waited by the front entrance we would encounter the senator coming into the building.

Whenever I saw television coverage of famous political leaders making public appearances, they always had Secret Service, police motorcycle escorts, and photographers wedged between them and their throngs of fans. Expecting this setting for Humphrey's arrival, I assumed that every distant siren signaled their approaching motorcade. I watched for him while I studied people riding in every passing car. Thankfully, I was ready when a plain sedan double-parked in front of the studio and dropped off its passenger. I raised my camera and snapped a picture of Humphrey as he stepped unescorted from the car.

He bounded toward us with a broad smile and a friendly greeting. While signing autographs, he showed a genuine and unhurried interest in each us. He asked our names and he wanted to know where we came from. When Dan told him that we lived and went to school in nearby Daly City, Humphrey chuckled, "Daly City—that sounds like Chicago!" [A reference to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley.]

When he heard that we liked politics, he beamed with enthusiasm. While the KGO doorman tried to hurry him along, he stood on the sidewalk and spoke of his love of public service. He encouraged us to work hard in school, and he expressed the hope that we would one day join him in Washington. He wished us luck, waved goodbye, and then he headed inside the studio.

Here was my first political hero in the flesh—a man who almost became president—now encouraging me to keep up my interest in government. He left me so tongue-tied that I could only mumble thanks. I don't think I had a bigger thrill as a boy. Half a century later, the memory of that excitement remains undiminished.

• • •

Back at our junior high school Advanced Government class, our chutzpah in meeting Humphrey became the stuff of classroom legend. It so impressed our teacher Mr. Lasley that he ran interference with the principal to help clear our unexcused truancy.

• • •

Over the next few years, Dan, Roger, and I became regular fixtures outside KGO. Whenever newsman Jim Dunbar scheduled an interview with any national political figure, we rode the predawn trolley into town, ran the gauntlet of street derelicts, and waited outside to get autographs, take pictures, and seek advice on politics. Thanks to the studio staff, we met many notables making their way through San Francisco in the early to mid-1970s. We became so familiar to Dunbar and his crew that they sometimes let us watch his interviews from inside the control booth.

Each visit there proved memorable, and making these connections with famous leaders at an early age taught me an important lesson beyond autograph collecting. In sizing up so many of them personally, I developed the confidence that someday—someday—I could do this, too.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

A United States Senate backbencher with a reputation for quirkiness and a fervent opposition to an ongoing war sought the presidency. With no major funding, no organizational base, and almost zero name identification, he challenged the presumptive Democratic nominee who held a virtual monopoly on establishment support. Party elders and the press treated his quest as a national joke. After a long campaign, as expected, he fell short of winning the nomination. The establishment candidate who beat him went on to lose the White House to an unlikely Republican that year. However, from the ashes of the backbencher's defeat was born the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Surprise: This is not a column about Bernie Sanders. It is about the real father of the modern progressives, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, and he launched this movement 50 years ago today, on Nov. 30, 1967.

Eugene McCarthy was Central Casting's version of how a senator or president looked. He stood over 6 feet, with silver hair swept back, and he carried himself with a regal bearing. Well-versed in classic literature and with urbane manners, he read and wrote poetry, but any highbrow comparison ended there. He grew up a farm boy in Watkins, Minnesota (population 760), playing baseball and ice hockey. After high school and college, he worked at a variety of jobs, joined a monastery briefly and later returned to his alma mater as an economics and sociology professor.

McCarthy's political entry was fortuitous. Because nobody else wanted the job, he accepted the local Democratic Party county chairmanship. In 1948 he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which was the same year his fellow Minnesotan, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, won election to the U.S. Senate.

In Congress, McCarthy proved himself the ultimate anti-politician. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed that McCarthy admired poets but he showed contempt for his colleagues. Others noted that he felt it beneath him to engage in the ritualistic glad-handing, fundraising and support-seeking of retail politics.

McCarthy joined Humphrey in the Senate in 1958, but the chamber's slow pace and stodgy formalities bored him. He mocked the Senate publicly, calling it, "The last primitive society left on earth," and he compared its traditions to a savage New Guinea settlement: "Both societies are obsessed with seniority, taboos, and precedent. In that regard, the Senate is like a leper colony." He tweaked senior colleagues publicly, and they reciprocated his disdain. Despite a decade of seniority, he never gained (nor wanted) admittance to the Senate's insider club. Among those who found McCarthy's shtick less than sincere was Humphrey, who later described him as "handsome, witty, teacher, poet, Irish mystic, and a clever politician – cleverer for denying it. … Gene is more vain and arrogant than his admirers want to admit[.]"

By late 1967, with bloodshed in Vietnam raging for over three years, antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein concluded that collecting signatures on "end the war" petitions at various colleges was a meaningless protest. Instead he sought to recruit an intraparty challenger to the war's root cause, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his expected 1968 re-election bid. Lowenstein calculated that a nationwide movement might mobilize around a "peace" candidate. With no money, and working off old antiwar mailing lists, he launched his "Dump Johnson" drive. The likelihood of success was so remote that the proposition seemed absurd to all but a handful of like-minded objectors.

Lowenstein lobbied Sen. Robert F. Kennedy repeatedly to take on the incumbent president of his own Democratic Party. Each time RFK rebuffed him summarily, insisting that nobody could stop Johnson. Kennedy not only refused to run, but he said that if an antiwar challenger surfaced, he would probably endorse Johnson. In desperation Lowenstein went down his short list of antiwar Democratic senators and asked each to run. They laughed off the proposition for the same reason RFK gave: Johnson was unbeatable. Sen. George McGovern also refused to run, but as an afterthought he suggested that Lowenstein go and talk to McCarthy.

Soon thereafter, McGovern ran into McCarthy and apologized for siccing Lowenstein on him with such a wacky idea. McCarthy brushed off the apology, saying that he had talked to Lowenstein and, to McGovern's astonishment, he added casually, "I think I may do it."

 
In retrospect, McCarthy's cavalier decision to run for president fit his persona. If the road to New Hampshire – the first 1968 primary state – appeared a discouragingly lonely one for an insurgent outsider, who better to trod it than the political world's biggest loner?

It was at a press conference half a century ago today, and to the collective yawn of the political establishment, that McCarthy announced that he would challenge Johnson in the primaries for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. Even in this solemn ritual he proved iconoclastic. At the end of his opening remarks, when a reporter asked why he wanted to be president, McCarthy corrected him: "I didn't say I wanted to be president. I'm willing to be president." Taken aback by that answer, another reporter asked what kind of president he thought he would make. McCarthy replied, "Oh, I'd be adequate."

McCarthy's campaign style drove his staff mad. He entered the race at the end of November, but he didn't bother showing up to campaign in New Hampshire until two months later – only six weeks before the crucial March 12 vote. When he finally sauntered up there, he campaigned with such indifference that reporters dismissed his effort as a joke. He canceled events arbitrarily and at the last minute. Once a huge audience gathered in an auditorium for his heavily promoted speech. On the way there McCarthy blithely told his driver to take him back to the hotel. He just didn't feel like talking politics that evening; he felt like writing poetry instead. On another occasion an aide arrived early one morning to pick up the candidate for a packed schedule. McCarthy was gone, having left instructions to cancel all of that day's events. Why? McCarthy had discovered that there was a nearby monastery, so he decided to blow off the campaign to go there and meditate all day. Then there was the time his staff set up a private meet-and-greet with local bigwigs; McCarthy arrived to find over a hundred prominent people anxious to see him. He entered the room, shook a few hands, and then he turned to an aide and said, "OK, I'm bored now." With that, he blew past everyone in the ballroom, walked over to the bar and ordered a drink, and he remained there until the room emptied. The day a wealthy donor arrived at McCarthy's campaign office to deliver a personal check for $10,000 – a monumental sum in 1968 – the candidate refused to walk down the hall to thank him. He explained to his flabbergasted manager that since the donor was giving money to a cause, and not to McCarthy personally, the donor shouldn't expect any thanks.

And so it went.

 
Still, there was something about McCarthy's aloofness and contempt for the political rulebook that created its own bizarre appeal. As one former colleague remembered, when Gene was "on," nobody was more articulate and elegant. And when it came to expressing his opposition to the Vietnam War, he was at his articulate and elegant best.

As those six weeks rolled by, McCarthy's message began resonating with college students across America, many of whom faced impending military induction notices because of Johnson's continued war escalation. First dozens, and then hundreds, and finally thousands of them rode buses or hitchhiked east. When they arrived at his headquarters they cut their long hair, put on conservative clothes, and blanketed every New Hampshire neighborhood on his behalf. The now-common nationwide mobilization of students on college campuses for liberal causes began with the McCarthy phenomenon – dubbed by the press back then as "The Children's Crusade."

When New Hampshire voted, the nonconformist senator came within 200 votes of outpolling Johnson statewide, which sent shockwaves across the political establishment. A few days later Robert Kennedy reversed course and jumped into the race against LBJ. His last-minute entry infuriated McCarthy's supporters who viewed RFK's earlier refusal to run as cowardly, and his sudden entry as an opportunistic and selfish act guaranteeing to split the peace vote.

Two weeks later, and facing more humiliation with an outright defeat by McCarthy in the upcoming Wisconsin primary, Johnson stunned the nation and announced he would not seek re-election. With LBJ bowing out, McCarthy's erstwhile friend Hubert Humphrey (now LBJ's vice president) entered the race, but he was too late to file for the remaining primary contests. Thus, the battle across the primary map was fought between the two peace candidates – McCarthy and Kennedy – and the warfare between them grew increasingly bitter right up to Kennedy's assassination the night of the California primary in early June.

With the almost unanimous support of the party establishment, Humphrey beat McCarthy for the nomination. Following the Democratic National Convention, McCarthy shattered both tradition and expectations by refusing to endorse Humphrey until (literally) the closing hours of the fall campaign. Humphrey lost the election to Richard Nixon and blamed his agonizingly narrow defeat on McCarthy. Humphrey believed that an early endorsement would have motivated McCarthy's tens of thousands of disillusioned young followers to turn out for the Democratic ticket. For his part, McCarthy found it hard, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to ask his legions of draft–age antiwar supporters to go out and work for the man who had been Johnson's foremost Vietnam War cheerleader for the last four years.

The 1968 primary season was McCarthy's political high-water mark. He left the Senate after declining to seek re-election in 1970. In later years, he ran for the presidency four more times: in 1972, 1976, 1988 and 1992. Unlike 1968, his later national efforts went largely (and increasingly) unnoticed. Still the rebel, in 1980 he endorsed Republican challenger Ronald Reagan over incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, explaining that Carter was too incompetent to remain as president. When he sought to reclaim his Minnesota Senate seat in a 1982 comeback, he received a mere 24 percent of the Democratic primary vote.

McCarthy retired to his home in the Virginia countryside, wrote books, gave public poetry readings, and spoke out for his various causes until declining health sidelined him. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease at age 89 on Dec. 10, 2005.

Today, few people below the Medicare eligibility age remember Gene McCarthy. But half a century ago, in his campaign against Lyndon Johnson, he lit a powder keg that changed the dynamic of American politics, and along the way he midwifed a modern movement that dominates his Democratic Party's activist base today.

And so, on this half-century anniversary of his presidential candidacy, we remember an American original.

[Excerpted from James Rogan's book, On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968]

Shortly before leaving for his fateful Dallas visit, President John F. Kennedy surveyed the field of potential Republican candidates who might challenge him for re-election in 1964. JFK dismissed any concerns over GOP powerhouses like former Vice President Richard Nixon, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater. A single potential competitor, in JFK's estimation, threatened his 1964 prospects. "The one fellow I don't want to run against," he confided to a close friend, "is George Romney."

Kennedy had cause for his unease. Romney was the living embodiment of the Horatio Alger spirit: a devout former missionary from a poor family who never finished college and, as a young man, worked as a stenographer before landing an entry-level job in the automobile industry. Later moving into management, Romney worked his way up the corporate ladder to become chairman of the Board of American Motors. In 1962, as a political novice, he won the first of three terms as Michigan governor, and he was the only Republican candidate that year to win in the heavily Democratic state.

Lyndon Johnson became president following Kennedy's assassination, and Romney declined to seek the White House in 1964. That left liberal Rockefeller and conservative Goldwater to fight a nasty primary battle for the GOP nomination (after losing his 1962 California governor race, Nixon sat out a 1964 run). Johnson crushed eventual nominee Goldwater in a 44 state landslide.

By early 1967, after three years of Johnson blowing through billions of dollars on his "Great Society" welfare and social programs, as well as America suffering tens of thousands of casualties in LBJ's floundering Vietnam War escalation, the GOP saw their opportunity to retake the White House in 1968. However, the two best-known Republicans most often mentioned as likely contenders had significant electability problems. In 1964 an embittered Rockefeller infuriated GOP conservatives when he refused to endorse Goldwater against Johnson in the general election, and their ire still raged. Republican regulars liked and respected Nixon for his party loyalty and strong anti-communist credentials, but he had not won an election in his own right since 1950, and after two successive defeats, the "loser" image dogged him. The Republicans were in no mood for another fumbled White House run – they wanted a winner against Johnson.

Enter George Romney.

Romney's increasingly impressive 1964 and 1966 re-election victories in a solidly blue state made him the early favorite for the GOP presidential nomination. Rockefeller endorsed him, and Romney's strong support among independents, ethnics and blue-collar voters gave him a broad crossover appeal. Beyond that, Romney held an irresistible hand: polls showed him as the only potential Republican challenger beating Lyndon Johnson.

And so, 50 years ago today, on Nov. 18, 1967, George Romney announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

As it turned out, early assessments of Romney's electoral prowess, and Kennedy's previous anxiety about him, proved premature. In one of the most hapless campaigns on record, the Romney for President juggernaut set a record for implosion.

What happened?

Throughout most of 1967, with Rockefeller not running and Nixon taking a half-year moratorium from all politics, Romney held the national stage – and the media's bullseye – alone. Despite his experience in the business world and his Michigan successes, he was unprepared in dealing with the heightened scrutiny that attended his front-runner status. When his interviews demonstrated that he had not mastered the various issues with which a potential president must be conversant, the national press corps portrayed him as an empty suit. Reporters delighted in magnifying each gaffe he made on the campaign trail. However, no media exaggeration was necessary when it came to reporting on Romney's self-inflicted fatal wound.

In an interview with a local reporter, when asked why he had moderated his position on Vietnam and had become more skeptical of America's role in the war, Romney declared that during his last visit there he had received "the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job."

 
"I was brainwashed …"

With the Soviet Union and Red China expanding their international communist threat to America's security, nobody wanted a weak-minded president susceptible to brainwashing, or so the argument went. In a rare act of clemency, the press gave Romney a chance to walk back his comment by asking if he had been misquoted or misunderstood. Instead of grabbing the life preserver, he doubled-down stubbornly and insisted, "Yes, I was brainwashed. We're all brainwashed. The [Johnson] administration simply does not tell us the truth about Vietnam. ... I'm glad I used that word. It woke up the country. Nobody was paying any attention when I only used words like 'snow job.'"

The fallout came quickly. Editorial cartoonists depicted a befuddled or glassy-eyed Romney with soapsuds covering his noggin. Newspapers that had been his strongest supporters now called on him to drop out of the race. The most devastating comment came from Democratic presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy, who, when asked about Romney's ill-advised statement, suggested that the intellectually challenged Romney didn't need a full brainwashing when "a light rinse" would have done the job.

 
Romney descended rapidly from serious contender to object of ridicule, and the daggers in his back proved bipartisan. Despite Rockefeller's continued public expressions of support (and Rocky's repeated private insistence that Romney not drop out of the race as the beleaguered candidate now begged to do), Rocky undercut his man repeatedly. Rocky told the press several times that he would be pleased to accept the GOP nomination if the convention drafted him, and he made gratuitously hurtful public comments on Romney's travails. When a reporter asked Rocky to explain Romney's string of bloopers, he replied with a laugh, "I don't know – go ask a psychiatrist."

Humiliated, Romney euthanized his own campaign three days before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary. His last-minute withdrawal infuriated Nixon privately, who had hoped to beat back his loser image by shredding Romney in New Hampshire and in the later primaries in which they were competing. When told on the eve of their first showdown that Romney had quit, Nixon grumbled that Romney's exit had cheated him out of his earned triumph. "That's just like a businessman," Nixon fumed to an aide. "No guts."

After winning the White House in 1968, President Nixon named Romney to his Cabinet as secretary of housing and urban development, where he served for four years before retiring to private life, charitable work and church activities. Stricken by a heart attack while doing his morning treadmill exercise, he died at age 88 on July 26, 1995. His son, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, partially avenged his father's 1968 loss by winning the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Although his White House candidacy proved short-lived, George Romney's entry into the presidential sweepstakes fired off the starting gun for the historic and fateful 1968 campaign. He helped set the stage for Richard Nixon's unlikely and dramatic comeback in a race that may have been our nation's most divisive, bitter and bloody – and one that clearly changed permanently the arc of American history and politics.

On the evening of January 12, 1966, every kid in my third grade class waited anxiously to tune in on prime time television to the ABC Network. On that night, "Batman" premiered, starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Originally, the show aired two nights a week; the first episode always ended in a cliffhanger. The morning after the initial story aired, much schoolyard recess time was expended recapping the excitement of last night's adventure, while also speculating about how the Dynamic Duo might escape what appeared to be certain doom.

Fifty years later, I still love the show--as do my daughters, and as will future generations. The great morality and responsibility that Batman and Robin taught--obey the law, be a good citizen, listen to your parents, do your homework--is sadly missing from much of the trash that passes for youthful television entertainment today.

I had the chance to meet Adam and Burt a couple of times when I was in the state legislature and they visited my district for a fan show. Adam was very interested in my own experiences as a "crime-fighting" Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney, and also the cases I heard as a municipal court judge. At one such meeting, they signed this photo for me, which I still treasure.

Adam West died this week at age 88. May he rest in peace. Through their show, he and Burt are still teaching the next generation of young fans the rules of good citizenship and exemplary service.

This morning a Fox News crew from DC and New York descended on my home. They arrived at 10 am; they were packing up at 4 pm. Mine was the first in a series of many interviews they are doing with survivors of the Clinton impeachment trial for a news retrospective set to air later in the year. They were well prepared and consummate professionals, and Christine and I enjoyed having them spend the day with us.

They were so nice that I won't care if (as I always anticipate when dealing with the press) I get shivved in the final product!

They did promise that the faded jeans and sneakers I was wearing during the two hour interview wouldn't show in the camera shot....

Over 20 years ago, I served in the U.S. House of Representatives with Jim Bunning and Steve Largent (both Hall of Fame members—Jim was a member of the MLB Baseball Hall of Fame, and Steve was a member of the Football Hall of Fame). Jim later went on and represented Kentucky in the United States Senate. 

One day my wife Christine, our girls, and I were shopping at a mall in Northern Virginia. While they poked around in a clothing store, I wandered over to a sports memorabilia shop. There I saw in a glass case old baseball and football player cards for sale. On the top shelf of the display case, side-by-side, were cards for both Jim and Steve. I decided to buy them and have my colleagues autograph them for me.

The next day I saw Jim sitting alone in the House chamber. I sidled up to him and asked that he sign my baseball card. As he got out his pen, he asked where I found it. I told him that coincidentally I found one for both him and Largent side-by-side at a memorabilia store, and that I bought them both. Jim asked me how much they cost.

"I got a deal on them because I bought both."

"That's great. How much did you pay?"

"Well," I told him, "I asked the shopkeeper how much he wanted for the Largent card. He quoted a price of $10."

"So how much was mine?" Jim asked.

"That's the best part of the story!" I told him grinning. "The owner told me if I bought the Largent card, he'd throw in yours for free!"

I should have held back that answer, which came just as Jim's pen was about to make contact with the card. He looked up, replied to me in a way that I need not repeat here, flung the card onto my lap, and stormed away in a huff.

I had to wait a couple of years until Jim was in the Senate and I was involved in the Clinton impeachment (which redeemed me in his eyes) to get that card signed.

Jim died today at age 85 from complications after sufferiing a stroke. He was 85. 

Requiem en pace, old friend.

Yesterday at the Nixon Library I was reunited with my old congressional colleague, now Ohio Governor John Kasich, when I was invited to introduce him for his speech (and later book signing). It was the first time that John and I have seen each other since we both left Congress in 2001.

The gavel we are holding is from my collection. It was the gavel used by me to preside over the House of Representatives (as Speaker Pro Tem) on May 21, 1997 during debate and vote on the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. Speaker Newt Gingrich later signed and presented the gavel to me.

As chairman of the House Budget Committee in 1997, John was the author of that historic bill, which gave America's her first balanced federal budget in thirty years. I feared that I might have to pry it loose from John's hand to get it back! I would not have faulted him if he had thought--correctly--that the gavel rightfully should have belonged to him. 

Photos courtesy of Christine Rogan's iphone....

Since I seem to be attracted to various enterprises for which I have no innate talent (e.g., writing best-selling books), I decided last year to try my chops at acting—something for which I have no training at all (unless one counts elective office). Anyway, last month I was honored to rejoin a troupe of great professional actors at the Pantages Theater of the Long Beach Veterans Hospital to recreate (on the seventieth anniversary of the original broadcast) the original 1947 Lux Radio Theater old time radio production of "It's a Wonderful Life." The theater, by the way, hosted many of the great old radio shows during the World War II era, such as Jack Benny and Bob Hope.

In this picture, I am looking at the director waiting for my cue to read my part of Nick the Bartender—the mean guy who tosses George Bailey and Clarence the Angel out onto the snow-covered sidewalk. Looking at me—and not needing any cue from anyone—is one of the great voice actors in America today, Bryan Hendrickson, who played the soon-to-be manhandled Clarence.

Starring in the Jimmy Stewart role of our production was the fantastic (and friend of many decades) Paul Petersen, who is best remembered for playing son Jeff Stone on the long-running iconic TV program, The Donna Reed Show. As a movie star, Paul played opposite such legends as Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. Now Paul plays opposite me, which proves the old Hollywood maxim—when you fall in this town, you fall hard! Also in the cast were fabulous actors from OTR's (old time radio's) heyday—Stuffy Singer, Ivan Cury, Tommy Cook, Gloria McMillan, and a host of other fine talents such as Camden Singer ("Mary"--our female lead--tremendous!), Bobb Lynes, Barbara Watkins, the mighty Gassman brothers (John Gassman and Larry Gassman), and an up-and-coming kid—Jeff Ferguson (aka Judge Jeff Ferguson, Superior Court of California). I brought Jeff along so that I wouldn't be the only actor who stank. In that regard, Jeff (who was good) let me down.

As they say in the biz, there are no small parts, only small actors. In my case, they might amend the phrase: there are no small parts, only lousy actors—no matter what size the part.

In memory of one of America's great space heroes, John Glenn, who died today at age 95.

When I first met him over forty years ago as a teenage fan, I never dreamed one day I would come to know him when we served together in Congress, and in later years.

 Newly-elected Senator John Glenn and me, 1975

John and Annie Glenn with Dana and Claire Rogan, along with their dad, 2003

This photo of us in tuxedos and at dinner shows me beginning to tell him that President Bush wanted me to collect the control stick from John's 1962 spacecraft Friendship 7 (John told me earlier he kept as a souvenir). I told him that the attorney general wanted it back, or else they'd swear out a warrant for him removing government property! I thought he was going to choke on his rubber chicken dinner before he realized I was just kidding him...

Rest in peace.

As it turns out, way back in 1999 our now-President-elect Trump wrote this book in anticipation of running for president in 2000 (a race on which he took a pass). The above quotations are found on pages 200-201:

I just saw this for the first time after the recent election when someone sent it to me. Until then, I didn't know it existed.

The lesson for all of you: if you want to win the presidency, you need to crib from my homework…

In memory of one of the great sports legends of my youth, Arnold Palmer, who died today at age 87. Here we are almost twenty years ago when I first met him during my time in Washington, D.C. The golf ball he signed for me that day is still on display in a cabinet in my office.

Remembering a truly lovely man and great sports icon, Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion, who died today at age 74.

When my daughters were little, they adored The Champ--and as you can see from these photos of them with him, the affection was reciprocated. 

With (from left) Claire, Christine (partially hidden) and Dana Rogan

With Dana Rogan

Rest in peace. 

Imagine a beat-up bar in North Hollywood, California, that looked like an old barn dumped in the middle of a crummy neighborhood. Now imagine that in the decades it was opened, it was considered the Mecca of Country-Western music, second only to the Grand Ole Opry. Imagine being a college kid working in a bar like that, where, among the people who played there over the years, were George Harrison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams SENIOR, Patsy Cline, Linda Ronstadt, Waylon Jennings, Marty Robbins, Johnny Paycheck, George Jones, Elton John, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, and too many thousands more to mention.

Such a place once existed. Welcome to the world famous Palomino Club, closed forever about twenty-five years ago. Among my most fond memories were the years I bartended there while a law student at UCLA. I never saw a more wild and exciting place in my life.

On a Palomino Club fan page, someone posted this youtube documentary on that iconic showplace, now lost to the ages except in the memories of those of us who worked there, drank there, fought there, sang there, romanced there, broke up there, laughed and cried there, and had one hell of a time--all while listening to some of the greatest musical talent on the planet.

Here's to the Pal. I'm honored to have been a small part of its history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&feature=share&v=1jvE5QEnxZg&fbclid=IwAR1Wm8jghl8f_5d7C41tQesPP8rp7OeNAShn3NKg4LA5px6ekc2ryrxGrFY

In the heyday of Hollywood's Sunset Strip, Filthy McNasty's was one of the premiere hangouts. Filthy and his brother Wolfgang hired me as a bartender at both their Sunset Strip and North Hollywood nightclubs almost forty years ago, and I worked there (and at another iconic landmark, the Palomino Club) during my UCLA Law School days. There were so many wild stories of my adventures at Filthy's and the Pal that they comprised my favorite chapters in my first book, "Rough Edges." After rocking Hollywood for a quarter-century, Filthy sold the Sunset Strip club in the early 1990s, and it reopened as the now also-famous Viper Room.

Filthy McNasty, died of cancer this month at age 73. RIP boss--those of us who were part of the history of Filthy's (on the Strip) and FM Station (in North Hollywood) will never forget those times.

Many thanks to all my friends at the Reagan Library and Foundation, and the Reagan Library docents for all their hospitality during my book signing and speech there on May 11th. I look forward to a return visit soon.

When I was in seventh grade in 1969, I spent untold hours at the Daly City Public Library, looking up the addresses of retired government leaders so I could write them for both autographs and advice on entering politics. Getting former president Harry Truman's address came in handy for one particular middle-school project, although not without causing some indigestion along the way.

That year my history teacher, Mr. Puhr, assigned us to write a biography of a historic person. This was my first long-term homework assignment: our paper had to be typed, researched, and at least seven pages long. In the pre-personal computer era, few twelve-year-olds were keyboard literate, so Mr. Puhr gave us three months to complete this monumental task. "But you'd better have it ready to turn in on the due date," he warned us ominously, "or there will be consequences."

For my subject, I picked the eighty-six-year old Truman, who was then two decades removed from his White House service. I approached my task in earnest, and instead of spending three months on the project, I finished it in three days. With so much time to spare, and having learned during my research that Truman once said his only obligation in retirement was to answer personally the letters he received from young people, I decided to mail my report to Truman and ask him to look it over. Long before readily available copy machines (and the invention of hard drives), I had no duplicate of my homework. It never dawned on me that Truman wouldn't return it.

Months passed; when the paper came due, I was empty-handed. Mr. Puhr rejected my explanation: he called me a liar in front of the class, accused me of never doing the report, and gave me an F. "Besides," he announced to everyone, "Truman's dead – I watched his funeral on television twenty years ago!"

More months went by, and I forgot about the incident. Then one afternoon, I returned home from school and found a large envelope postmarked from Independence, Missouri. Inside I found my report returned, an autographed picture of the great man, and this letter:

The next day in class, I walked up to Mr. Puhr's desk and placed on it silently my proof. His face reddened as he looked over the documents.

"Take your seat," he said sternly.

"Is that all you have to say to me, Mr. Puhr?" I asked in surprise. "I said, 'take your seat'."

After humiliating me earlier, Mr. Puhr now refused to acknowledge his mistake. I fumed over this injustice for the rest of class. When the recess bell rang, I exacted my own vindication: jumping from my desk, I rushed to the door and blocked the exit. Holding aloft my treasures, I called to my classmates, "Hey, if anybody wants to see the letter and autographed picture I got yesterday from the late President Harry Truman, I'll show it to you on the playground!"

Despite my protests, Mr. Puhr refused to accept my paper. I went to the principal, Mrs. Zenovich, and presented my case. Marching me back to class, Mrs. Zenovich confronted Mr. Puhr and ordered him to accept it.

Later, Mr. Puhr handed back my paper in front of the entire class and announced that he marked me down for "repeated punctuation errors" because I kept failing to put a period after Truman's middle initial "S." I told him the omission was intentional, because the S didn't get a period – S was his middle name. Mr. Puhr grabbed volume T of the Encyclopedia Britannica, turned to Truman's entry, and cackled aloud, "The encyclopedia lists him as Harry S-with-a-period Truman! What do you say to that, Mr. Rogan?"

"The encyclopedia's wrong."

Mr. Puhr chortled, "So! The encyclopedia is wrong and Mr. Rogan is right! My, aren't we lucky to have such a brilliant student in our midst!" Students laughed as Mr. Puhr mocked me for the rest of class. For days afterward, he called on me to "confirm" facts, like our first president was George Washington, or that Columbus discovered America in 1492 ("Or was it in 1493, Mr. Rogan?"). Growing tired of the abuse, I took matters into my own hands:

"Dear President Truman," my new letter began, "You won't believe this teacher of mine . . . ." I asked Truman to settle the issue.

Sadly, the school year ended without any reply, and again I forgot about it. Then one day, as my 1970 summer vacation ended, another letter from Missouri arrived.

Now, for the first time, I noticed Truman's engraved letterhead: sure enough, it bore the name "Harry S Truman" with no period after the middle initial.

On the first day of the new school year, I tracked down my former teacher. Mr. Puhr looked baffled when I entered his classroom, as if I had made another mistake. I walked to his desk and showed him the second Truman letter. Again he refused to re-grade my report, but changed his mind when I threatened him with more Mrs. Zenovich therapy.

As I walked away, Mr. Puhr called to me sharply: "Rogan," he said, "I'm very glad you won't be in my class this year."

*****

Former president Harry S Truman died at age eighty-eight on December 26, 1972. In the early 1990s, American Heritage magazine first published my story about Harry Truman helping me with my homework. A few years later, I gave Reader's Digest permission to republish it in its April 1995 issue, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Truman's presidency.

A couple of weeks later, while on a trip to Missouri, I toured Truman's house in Independence (now a national historic site). The guide led about twenty of us to the rear porch and said, "Here's where Mr. Truman sat each morning, answering his mail. In fact, in this month's Reader's Digest, there is a story of how he helped a young boy with his homework. This porch is where he would have read the boy's letter and wrote his reply."

When the tour ended, I mentioned to the guide that I was the author. He asked me to wait while he called his wife (who worked at the nearby Truman Presidential Library). A few minutes later, a couple of cars arrived with staff and docents from the library. They led me back to the porch and asked me to recount the entire story for them, and it pleased me greatly to do so.

Some years later, I attended a weekend legislative retreat with fellow members of Congress. The guest speaker was one of my generation's preeminent historians, David McCullough, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on Truman. When I asked McCullough to autograph my copy of his book, I mentioned with a grin that I was pleased to meet a fellow Truman "scholar." He asked me in seriousness what Truman work I penned; I laughed and told him about my little story of Truman helping me with my homework when I was a boy. McCullough's eyes brightened. "The 'homework' story in American Heritage!" he said. "Truman wrote you back about the S in his middle name! I not only read it – it helped me win a bet on that S issue!"

It seems that when Harry Truman took the time to help a young admirer long ago, both David McCullough and I came out winners.

(This story is from my second book, "And Then I Met … Stories of Growing Up, Meeting Famous People, and Annoying the Hell Out of Them.")

This autograph in my political memorabilia collection is worth a look, especially today. Of all the memorabilia in my collection, one of my favorites is this clipped document signed by President Abraham Lincoln on April 11, 1865--three days before his assassination. Today is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln signing this precious clip, which granted yet another pardon for a young Confederate soldier.

I took this photograph under fading daylight this evening, so sorry for the less-than-professional shots.

By the way, this autograph has more authentication "pedigrees" from world-renowned auction houses, experts, and national archivists than you possess for your AKC dog!

My pound rescue dog Sparky just got in trouble: she growled at our cat Tootsie and chased her out of the kitchen. She knew she was in immediate trouble when I approached and grabbed her by the collar. I scolded her; she skulked away into the family room. After a few minutes, it was time to go make up. When I walked in the room I found her on the couch with her head propped on a pillow. When I walked over to pet her, she buried her head under the pillow and wouldn't come out despite my coaxing her repeatedly

I wish other wrongdoers shared a dog's noble sense of shame when caught in the act.

I was invited by the Carter Political Items Collectors to address their annual banquet this last weekend in Plains, Georgia. The guests of honor were former President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter, with whom I had dinner before my speech.

After I mildly roasted our 39th president during my banquet speech on Saturday night, he invited us to join him for the Sunday School class he taught the next morning at Maranatha Baptist Church. The smile on his face in the picture of the Carters with me (taken after the service) shows he got even! When I heard him open his class with, "Is Jim Rogan here this morning?" I knew it was going to go downhill for me! He then proceeded to explain to everyone that not only was I a famous congressman and judge, but that I was also a recognized Biblical scholar - - and then he invited me to come up and teach his 45 minute class on the Book of Hezekiah!

Touche, Mr. President! You gave as good as you got, and it was all in good fun on both sides. Regardless of party, I trust all my friends join me in wishing a very happy 90th birthday to President Carter today.

Here is the new 90-second video trailer for my new book, "And Then I Met... Stories of Growing Up, Meeting Famous People, and Annoying the Hell Out of Them."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuCH2ALW940

This photograph of California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown swearing me in as a new member of the legislature was taken 20 years ago today. It's hard to believe that two decades have passed since that momentous day in Christine's and my life.