The Kennedy Curse: WI JFK Jr had lived?

[dcharles]

“Now we can’t say that the aircraft has even crashed. We don’t know that. What we do know, it’s been missing now for quite a long time, because it was due to arrive in Martha’s Vineyard--according to the best available information--sometime before midnight last night. So it has been missing on the order of eight hours...What was the flight plan? So far as is known, they didn’t file a flight plan. They were not required to file a flight plan for this kind of flight--that is, in ostensibly clear weather, noting that it was hazy--but, clear weather. And you’re supposed to keep airports sort of informed about where they are, but no flight plan as such was required, and so far as we can make out, none was filed. This was a line of sight kind of flight, and that’s why we keep coming back to these hazy conditions...That haze could--could--have been big trouble, particularly if a relatively inexperienced pilot was at the controls. But keep in mind, we don’t know who was flying the aircraft. Was it John F. Kennedy, Jr...was it the flight instructor? There’s simply no way to know...right now we’ve got the FAA, the Air National Guard, and the Coast Guard searching for the plane, a single engine Piper Saratoga... It is believed that there were four people on the plane, John F. Kennedy, his wife, his sister in law, Lauren Bessette, and his flight instructor and--excuse me, excuse me--getting an update...and it does appear that there was at least one survivor. I repeat, I am getting reports from the Coast Guard that they have recovered one survivor. Now, we do not have the identity of that survivor confirmed yet, as of this moment--no, excuse me, excuse me now--excuse me, I can now confirm--and this is breaking news--that John F. Kennedy Jr. has been recovered, and he appears to be the lone survivor at this time. As to what his condition is, we do not know, but we can assume it is serious…”
--Dan Rather, reporting on the morning of July 17th, 1999.

“Listeners, I think I’m gonna get in trouble for this one. Really! No joke--I had a woman call in the other day--longtime listener, big fan--and she said had heard us do Ted Kennedy’s rendition of ‘The Philanderer’ (you know, like ‘The Wanderer’). And she said--get this!-- ‘you can’t saaaay things like that about the Kennedys in public! You’re gonna get arrested.’ And folks, she believed it. Now, it got me thinking, she’s just a common citizen, but she really thinks that you can’t say anything about the Kennedys in public without getting arrested for it, or at least paying a price. But the thing is, folks, I exist outside of their little ecosystem. They can’t touch me! They know that if they come for me, they’re gonna have to deal with all of you folks.

“So the other day--I know you all saw--but I saw JFK Jr., little John-John, with the neck brace on. And didn’t it just remind you--I know it did me--of ‘69, after Chappaquiddick, when Ted Kennedy was skulking around with that little neck brace on. He must have been wearing that thing from July until October. And the thing is, Chappaquiddick happened exactly thirty years --to the day-- before John-John took his joyride.

“Now, I hear you saying 'Rush, that’s just a meaningless coincidence,' and I hear you. But you know...Sherlock Holmes didn’t believe in coincidence. And Rush Limbaugh says, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But even if--even if--you want to play Devil’s Advocate, you have to say, there are some similarities. Questionable driving skills. Dead girls. And I wonder about John-John’s blood alcohol--or am I not allowed to bring that up because he’s a Kennedy? Because he’s supposedly grieving? You know who else is grieving? The Bessette family! And if I’m the Bessettes, I’ve got a lot of questions that I want answered. Mark Twain used to say that ‘history didn’t repeat itself, it just rhymed.’ And this is some Shakespearean level rhyming…”
--Rush Limbaugh, September 17th, 1999


Watch this space, y'all.

 

[dcharles]

August 12th, 1999
Camp David, Maryland


Anthony died three weeks and three days after the crash.

John was convalescing at Walter Reed when he passed. John had been there for the whole thing, in a bed not six feet away from him. Anthony had been close enough for John to talk to, and would have been close enough for him to see, if John hadn’t been too injured to turn his head. He supposed it was a good thing--or maybe it was just supposed to be a good thing--that he’d been with Anthony when he’d died. John had told him he would be there, all those months ago when they’d found out Anthony was finally, actually terminal. That it was for real this time. John had said he would be there, and he had been. He’d kept his word, and that was supposed to be good.

He knew, though, what he’d been thinking in the moment--that he was thankful for the injury, because it meant that he didn’t have to look at Anthony’s face--and he knew he had nothing to congratulate himself for. Carole, Anthony’s widow, had said that it was peaceful, but she was the widow, and he was...John-John the widower. What else was she going to say? With Carolyn, Lauren and Ed, Anthony made four. Four people dead in three weeks. That seemed like a lot.

It felt like a lot.

But he was lucky, he told himself. That’s what you were supposed to tell yourself, wasn’t it? It was true, in a way. He was luckier than them. He’d survived, and the President’s own doctors were looking after him. He’d gotten to be at his best friend’s side when he died. That was a certain kind of luck, he supposed. It was fortune of a kind. It was just that whenever he told himself that he was lucky, an echo always answered back: A lot of his luck was mostly bad.

“Call me Bill” had made it all happen--the good parts, anyway--and Kennedy reminded himself to focus on that. The President was coming by soon, and John didn’t want to seem ungrateful, even if ungrateful was exactly how he felt. Even if gratitude seemed more like a novel theory than an emotion he’d felt hundreds of times before. He pushed the thought away. Tried to.

He’d just have to pretend. He’d just have to act.

Act as if ye have gratitude, and gratitude will be given.
Focus. Focus on Clinton.

Clinton. He was the one who had insisted that John be transferred to Walter Reed to recover, and put his doctors in charge of John’s recovery. When Mario had mentioned that Anthony only had weeks, and John would be in the hospital at least that long, it was Call-me-Bill that had a room prepared at Walter Reed for the both of them. And finally, when he was due to be released and he’d told Clinton that he was dreading Hyannisport, that he couldn’t imagine going back to New York right now, Clinton had offered up Camp David without hesitation. And even if he wanted to be alone right now--as alone as you could be at a place like Camp David, which was basically a resort staffed by the military--he could grin and bear it for a little while.

A soft knocking at the door. One of the staff came in before John said anything.

“The photographer’s here, sir. Let me tidy up a little bit.” The man, whose name Kennedy could never quite remember--Sergeant Collins, or Connor, something Irish--came in and started to straighten a room that didn’t need straightening.

“How many times do I have to tell you you don’t need to call me ‘sir’?” Kennedy meant to sound affable, but the doctors had given him a lot of Oxycontin, and he thought that he might have sounded bitchy. Who knew? Who cared?

“Sorry Mr. Kennedy,” said Something Irish.

“You don’t have to call me ‘Mr Kennedy’ either--could you hand me that crutch?”

He set the crutch down next to John gently, as if one of the two was going to break, and headed for the door. “Mr. Kennedy, you’re crazy if you think I’m going to call you ‘John,’” he said with a half smile.

The sergeant left as the photographer came in. She was a skeptical looking woman about ten years older than John, dressed in jeans and a black button up. She wore thick glasses, and her wispy but plentiful brown hair was pulled back.

Of course they got her.

“Annie Leibovitz,” said John. He tried to whistle. His mouth was too dry. “Christ...This is what I’ve gotta do to get you away from Anna Wintour? I wish I’d known.”

She smirked.

“Wouldn’t have done it, but at least I’d have known to stop trying,” he said. He tried to shrug. It hurt.

She chuckled for form’s sake. “You couldn’t afford me, John,” she said as she walked to a window and opened the blinds. She just stated it like it was a fact like any other. “Or at least you wouldn’t. I’m shooting this in black and white. So, natural light.”

“Better for this, at least.” John gestured to his eyes. The black eyes he had from the crash were fading, and they’d taken the stitches out of the gash on his browline. His face didn’t look as much like a parody of itself as it had a week ago, but living color wasn’t likely to do him any favors, either.

“You can hardly tell,” said Annie without even the flicker of an eyelash. “You just look tired, which you are. I’ll make you look good.” She pressed her lips together, making that half smile, half frown kind of face that people make when they don’t know how they should be acting. John had seen a lot of that these days. “It won’t be hard,” she added hopefully. “Can we lose the neck brace though?”

Annie did her thing. It was for the best. Her comment had irked him--he knew she was just trying to be nice--but still. He wanted five minutes without someone reminding him that he was just so handsome, and after all, so very fucking lucky.

Soon the Vice President arrived, wearing an off the rack suit that was a half size too tight. Kennedy was wearing basketball shorts and a t-shirt--they were easy to get over his cast--and felt oddly underdressed for the position of jolly good invalid. He wondered why Gore was wearing a suit at Camp David, was going to say something witty about it, but the Oxy was making it hard to keep up with the conversation. Or maybe it was just Gore. He always seemed to say the right things, but like an actor who’d forgotten his lines and was trying to hide it, he just came across as awkward and halting.

Then Clinton came in--khakis and a button-down, naturally--and the room seemed to get smaller. Secret Service details had a way of doing that.

Elvis has entered the building.

The thought made John smile. It’s what Mom had called Clinton when she’d heard someone compare him to JFK senior. She’d said it was like someone comparing Elvis to Sinatra. She’d hated Elvis. Not her kind of thing. Never got the appeal.

John got it.

Annie took some snaps of Gore and John and Call-me-Bill praying together around the coffee table, and then a few while they all shot the shit, and then Gore left, and Annie got some shots of just Clinton and Kennedy praying, and then some of Clinton looking concerned and John looking wistful, and then she was gone, too, and it was just Bill, John, and the Secret Service.

“Any word on Carolyn?” asked John.

Clinton bit his lip, his expression grave but compassionate. He shook his head sadly and placed his hand on John’s. “You’ll be the first to know,” he said.

Kennedy sighed. “It’s been weeks, but...You know. Can’t give up.”

“We’ll keep looking. Every day, long as we can.” Clinton took a deep breath and sucked his teeth. “Long as we can. There’s actually a storm system--NWS has it strengthening over the Bahamas today. Listen---and it might not--but there are some projections that have it hitting the New York area within the week.”

“Ah.” John nodded and took a deep breath. He’d been expecting something like this, already told himself that they couldn’t just keep looking forever. But he’d been hoping. Hoping secretly, the way you do when you know it’s probably a lost cause, but hey, there’s still a chance.

Clinton nodded along with John. John could tell he was sizing him up, trying to see if it had sunk in. “Realistically, the chances of recovery are...slim. Getting slimmer. She was probably--the currents do unpredictable things. If she had been strapped in like the other two--”

“Ed and Lauren.” John held up a hand, asking for a moment. He tried to rub his eyes, but his face was still sore. His neck was just fucking killing him. “So you’re telling me that if I hadn’t tried to save my wife, she’d have gotten to have a real funeral.”

“You did the right thing, John.”

“Are the Bessettes okay with it? Calling off the search?”

Clinton smoothed his khakis out as if he was at a loss for words, then looked John square in the eye. “We wanted to come to you first,” he said.

“Yeah.” John knew without even asking that the Bessettes were out of the loop. Christ. He’d asked for them to be looped in on everything. But it was all second-hand requests, relying on intermediaries. He should have checked. Should have known. John had been in a medically induced coma when the Bessettes had stopped in to see him. Hadn’t heard anything directly from them since he’d come to. He should have known something was up.

They’d had the funeral for Lauren with him still abed.

Rescuers from the Coast Guard recover the body of Kennedy sister-in-law Lauren Bessette as Sen. Edwardy Kennedy looks on.


“You did the right thing. You made--it was a heroic effort.”

“A hero saves the girl.” John heard the irritation and weariness in his own voice and realized the statement was truer than he’d even meant it to be. His father had been a hero once, and he hadn’t just saved one. He’d saved them all.

John hadn’t even been able to keep his wife afloat.

“Sometimes they do,” said Clinton. He placed a hand on John’s shoulder and squeezed with just enough force to communicate that he was there for John. That he understood. “And sometimes they damn near kill themselves trying.”

Clinton walked to the window and let the silence mellow.

He was good, there was no denying it. John’s life had been lousy with politicians from the get-go, and he would be the first to tell anyone that most of them had about as much charisma as a pile of dirty clothes. Clinton had that thing that average joes thought all politicians had. In reality, the average joes had it exactly backwards. Politicians made careers out of begging the right favors from the right people.

When was the last time anyone met a charming beggar?

Still facing the window, Clinton cleared his throat to speak. “Without belittling the courage with which men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men have lived.”

“Mr. President, you can’t quote my father to me.” John cracked a tiny, tired smile. Nixon had done that, too. “Not even you.”

When Clinton turned around, his eyes were twinkling. “I thought I might get in trouble for that,” he said in a tone of voice that suggested the reality of the situation--that he was a man that trouble never seemed to stick to and wasn’t about to start. “Fact is, your father meant a great deal to me. To the country. Hell, John, your whole family--y’all are a national institution. And this is...It’s just a tragedy. Senseless. But you’ve got to ask yourself, how are you going to live going forward? How are you going to live, and act with courage while you do it?”

It was probably the Oxy, but John had no idea what hell the President was talking about.

“I don’t know that I follow you, sir,” said John. “Probably my fault though. Still a little woozy,” he explained.

Clinton came back to the couch. “Listen John, I’m just gonna give you the facts: your approvals right now, they’re in the nineties. That’s better than mine--and mine are better than they’ve ever been!”

John looked at Clinton incredulously. No way. No fucking way. “My approvals, Mr. President?”

“Call me Bill,” he corrected. “Your approval ratings, John. Today, they were at ninety-one percent. Ninety. One. Percent. I’ve never seen anything like it. Listen, if there was ever a time for you to run for office... John, VP is yours.” Clinton clapped his hands together as if he was closing a book.

“Look,” John stammered, trying to think of a polite way to tell Clinton to fuck off. “I’m sure that Gore wants to pick his own VP.”

“I can handle Al,” said Clinton. And there was something--maybe the hint of an eye roll, maybe the edge in his voice--that changed, that gave the suggestion that there was much more to Clinton than charm. “He’d be lucky to have you! Probably be the only thing that drags his ass over--”

“I don’t want it.”

Clinton’s eyes narrowed and he folded his arms, scrutinizing John. “It’s a shit job,” said Clinton. He sighed with his whole body, as if reality was finally sinking in. “But I get it. You want to be the youngest ever. Youngest ever. You want the brass ring. It’s gonna mean a convention battle, but if we get to the superdelegates early, lean on the big donors to freeze out Gore, I think it’s doable.”

Christ. He’s like the god damned Terminator. “You’re not hearing me. I don’t want it. Not President, not VP, not any of it,” said John. “I’m not running for anything.”

Clinton said something about opportunity in tragedy, and John tuned him out by the third or fourth word. By way of excuses, John might have offered something about his wife being dead, or that his best friend had died right after her. He might have mentioned his re-broken ankle, or his newly broken ribs. He might have brought up that his right lung had recently collapsed, or that he had two herniated discs in his neck. He may have brought them all up. Or he might have just been thinking about them while Clinton talked. He never really could remember how the second half of that conversation had gone.

Just how it ended.

Clinton told John that he might one day count himself “lucky for the opportunities that come from tragedies” like he’d seen.

“Bill,” he’d said, and his voice must have been louder than he’d meant, because the Secret Service guy shot him a look. “I’m done. It’s time for me to go back to New York.”

 

[dcharles]

“She was the easiest woman in the world to fall in love with…Even now, to this day, with all the coverage, all the tributes after the crash, I’ve never seen a photograph that did her justice. Not even one. There’s no photograph that captures the traces of perfume that lingered in the air after she’d left a room. There’s no photograph that captures the strength of her embraces. The pictures don’t show how her laugh rang like a bell, or how the moments with her seemed more electric than the moments without her... ”

---- John F. Kennedy, Jr., in eulogy of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Aug 21, 1999

* * * * *
​

August 26th, 1999


The numbers were through the roof. The September[1] issue of George sold a month’s worth of magazines in six days. In Boston, it only took two days before extra copies had to be trucked in from New York. Baltimore and New Orleans were picked clean in three, and the DC newsstands were all denuded within thirty-six hours of publication. While John was still under, Liz* and Matt had pulled the trigger on bumping the initial run from just over 400,000 copies to a cool half million. Liz had argued for eight, but a half million was as high as Hachette--John’s publisher--would go. No surprises to John, Liz had been right, and there was a four day period--longer in some places--where there was not a single copy of George for sale on any newsstand, anywhere. Hachette went ahead with another 400,000 copies. Liz argued for five. In a couple weeks, those sold out, too.

For the month, George was--by far--the best selling political magazine in the United States. His uncle Ted had penned a heartwarming eulogy to the memory of Carolyn, her marriage to John, and their love for one another. Calvin Klein wrote a short article sharing a series of dubious anecdotes about Carolyn, an employee-- for the moment his most famous--John knew had only met Klein in passing before their engagement. They ran long, deeply personal obits on the other two deceased, his sister-in-law Lauren and his flight instructor, Ed. They even did something unusual for George, and did a long piece about one of the rescue divers, a young guy from Massachusetts who’d grown up idolizing the Kennedys.

By any metric--newsstand sales, subscriptions, ad sales--it was their most successful month ever. Of course, John had fuck all to do with it, and in his eyes, it was a radical deviation from the George he needed the magazine to be at that moment. Supposedly a magazine devoted to the intersection of celebrity and politics, their September issue devoted half of it’s pagecount to people no one had ever heard of, it mythologized a marriage so far on the rocks it might as well have been in the quarry, and it celebrified a woman who’d resented even the periphery of John’s fame. It was hardly the stuff of Pultizers. Even worse, it supported the notion that George didn’t know its own identity and was too shallow to recognize how out of its depth it was. That it was a scattershot effort by an attention-deficit dilettante to make himself look smarter than he was; a journalistic embodiment of the Dunning-Krueger effect.

Normally, he would have allowed himself more than a little celebration for the magazine having its best month ever, almost regardless of the provenance. But nothing was normal anymore. His wife’s death had literally put money in his pocket, a thought so ghoulish as to be unthinkable, rendering it inevitable that he would think of nothing else. The high-minded thing to do would have been to find some way to give it back, like setting up a scholarship in Carolyn’s name. John had been raised to be high-minded, and he would have loved nothing more than to be then. But before the crash, George was on track to lose 4 million dollars in 1999. A company on track to lose 4 million dollars could not afford to be high-minded about money, whether it was good money or bad.

It was that four million dollar hole, along with Hachette’s embarrassing foot-dragging, that convinced him that it was time to jump ship. John had been flirting with Conde Nast about buying out Hachette’s stake in George for months now. Now, at the Century Association, John was going to get a handshake deal or kill himself trying.

The Century was one of those old-style Manhattan social clubs with mahogany walls, hand-carved wainscoting, and help that knew how to step quietly. It smelled like old leather and decaying moral fiber, and to call the membership merely elite would have been a droll understatement. They weren’t just elite. They were the ruling class.

John hated the place, of course. It didn’t change the fact that he had nowhere else to go. Thanks to the paparazzi, a normal restaurant was out of the question, and the offices weren’t right either. John didn’t want to be seen by every hack and hackette at Conde Nast, and he didn’t want Steve Florio, the CEO of Conde Nast, to see what a crappy building Hachette put them in. That left the Century, or someplace like it. John was grandfathered in at the Century--his mother had been part of the first group of women ever invited, back in ‘88--and best of all, there were no cell phones allowed. That meant that the gossiping aristocrats would at least have to leave the premises before the subject of this lunch would be the talk of Manhattan.

It was hard to find a pair of suit pants that would fit over his cast, and John arrived several minutes late. Even at the Century, he got stopped three times on the way to his table. Everyone wanted to offer condolences for Carolyn, and they wanted to be seen doing it badly enough to keep a hobbled man on his feet. John accepted the awkward handshakes and the sympathetic nods with warmth and grace. He was a Kennedy, after all, and the Kennedys knew nothing if not how to grieve in public with iron dignity.

Steve was already at the table with a glass of red. It was a corner spot, away from the windows and away from the rest of the club members. The waiter brought over a glass of Middleton, poured neat, without John having to ask. Steve eased into the small talk. He praised John’s eulogy of Carolyn and said the memorial service was stately and poised. He inquired about John’s recovery and asked about Camp David. He told John that the Clintons had settled on a house Upstate, and pegged Giuliani’s chances of being in the race come May at “precisely zero.” He even complimented John on George’s numbers for the month.

It was only then they started talking business.

“Obviously, the situation has changed,” said Florio. “Not just your personal situation, either, and my condolences again. Your whole public profile is on a different level than it was before. You realize that Soledad O’Brien was camped out in front of Walter Reed for three days while you were in a coma? I mean, who gets that treatment? You were in bed--freaking unconscious--and that was the biggest news all week. Then--boom--you wake up. Same day, some guy named Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France. First American since Greg LeMond, and nobody’s even paying attention.”

“Which should make us more attractive to you,” said John.

“It’s going to make you expensive, is what it’s going to make you. Listen, Hachette may be a French company, the offices may be in Manhattan. But the mindset is pure Coney Island, okay?”

“You might be surprised. They never cared before.”

“That’s because they didn’t realize who you were. What you are. You had David Pecker, on the one hand, who’s probably the cheapest s.o.b. in publishing--and that says a lot--and foreign ownership on the other hand. It’s a recipe for undervaluation. But Pecker’s out, and now we’ve got...this thing...the crash situation.”

“And the ensuing media attention.”

“The debacle--and I’m sorry John, but that’s what it was--where you run out of copy twice in one month? If they didn’t understand what they had before, they do now.”

“Steve, we’ve been talking about this, what, for weeks now? You’re trying to tell me now that you’re not interested?”

Florio made a “slow down” gesture. “First of all, we were chatting before. Now, we’re talking. And second of all, what we were interested in before doesn’t exist anymore. Mid-to-large size political book with an owner/editor who’s a draw, but not the story? Gone. Political book? Half your last issue was human interest. Not the story? You’re the biggest story! That doesn’t mean we’re not interested in what George is now, but the expense, the return, the timeline to profitability--all of that’s changed.”

“It hasn’t changed me wanting to get out from under Hachette.. And now, I’ve got a magazine that’s got more subscribers, more circulation, more ads, and you’re telling me that’s a problem?”

Steve swirled the wine in his glass and smiled. “It means the investment has gotten bigger. The profile is higher. The consequences of failure are more severe. It means we’re going to want more control over editorial, and it means your magazine is going to have to change.”

Absolutely not.

“I’m not stepping down as editor,” said John.

“That’s--and you have to keep in mind that I’m not the only person we have to satisfy here--but that’s probably not going to be necessary.”

John wasn’t about to let Florio use the threat of SI Newhouse’s disapproval--Newhouse was the owner of Conde Nast--to weasel his way out of committing to anything. He downed the rest of his whiskey. “Let me clarify. I’m not going to step down in terms of my title or my workload. That’s non-negotiable.”

Florio gave a shadow of a nod. With his dark complexion and his pinstripe suit, the effect was Godfather-esque. “I can appreciate that.”

It wasn’t quite yes, but it was close enough--for now.

“What did you mean when you said ‘the magazine is going to have to change?’” asked John. “‘Change.’ That’s a word that covers all kinds of sins.”

“Well, that’s one of our non-negotiables. Right now, George is too close to Vanity Fair--”

“George is sexier than Vanity Fair.”

Steve chuckled, but he didn’t miss a beat. “And we want to keep that. Play it up, even. But what Vanity Fair can’t do--what no one can do like you--is cover politics as personality. Politics as relationships.”

“I don’t want to do a bunch of fluff pieces.”

“It’s already too--listen, George has too many soft edges as it is. That’s not what we mean. Politics as personality doesn’t have to be soft. We like George’s irreverence. We want to bring that irreverence to the scrutiny of these political personas. A lot of these guys haven't had an original idea in their entire lives. Every policy position they take is a function of their ambition and their connections. We want to open that up. Your background is tailor-made for it. Here’s my question: why haven’t you already?”

“What--why haven’t I been reading your mind?”

“Like the Lewinksy thing. You barely covered it. You run a political magazine a lot like a guy who doesn’t want to upset any powerful Democrats. Why would that be?” he said with a wink.

“Is that what this is about?” asked John. Everything in his life always seemed to come back to this question. When would John assume Camelot’s crown? He rolled his eyes and made sure Steve saw him do it.

“That’s not an answer, and it’s a fair question. People are saying you might want to take a shot at Pataki.”

John's sense of disappointment was familiar yet surprising, like an unexpectedly cold shower. There were four, maybe five people in the room when he’d talked about that, Carolyn being one of them. If Steve knew...well, the President and CEO of Conde Nast wasn’t exactly the proverbial man on the street, but he wasn’t part of John’s circle, either. “I thought about it.” John shrugged. “Pataki’s not FDR or anything. A third term? C’mon.” John shook his head at the thought of another four years of a stiff like Pataki. “But like you pointed out, the situation’s changed. I’m a widower.” John gestured towards his crutch. “I’m still healing. I’m not running for anything, Steve. Not governor, not president, not vice president. Not for my building’s co-op board.”

Steve looked mildly surprised. “I don’t-- that covers the next three-four years?”

At least. “I’d say so.”

“For argument’s sake, we’ll say I believe you. Let me circle back to George’s focus for a second. Politics and celebrity are both creatures of the media, and the consumers are picking up on it more. We’d like to see more coverage of the media as myth-makers. You can bring an intimacy to that subject that I can’t get from another editor.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. “Whenever we’ve tried to do that with Hachette, there’s been blowback.”

“Respectfully, Hachette’s not in our league. They think of you as a novelty. We think of you as a coup. We make the books the other publishers wish they made, and if we can get SI on board with this, George is going to be one of those books.”

“Is there some reason SI wouldn’t be on board?” asked John.

Florio smiled. “SI didn’t even think we’d get this far. He didn’t think you’d commit to not running.”

John signaled for the waiter to bring him another glass of whiskey. “Let’s bring him a deal, then.”

Over the next couple hours, the two men negotiated. They ironed out enough details so that the lawyers could flesh out the rest. Since John wasn’t going to step back from editorial, he agreed to add two editors--picked by Conde Nast--to the masthead, bringing the total to four. Six writers would be added to the staff, though they would go through the normal hiring process. John agreed to reorient the focus as Steve suggested, and found that he didn’t mind the reorientation itself as much as he resented himself for not having the discipline to recognize that George was a flabbier publication than he’d meant to create. They would shoot to complete the deal by January. It was an optimistic timeline, but Hachette wouldn’t be able to drag their feet too long without incurring bad press.

As the black Town Car slithered through traffic to take him home, John reclined in the back seat and let his mind wander, the whiskey macerating his brain like a warm bath. His whole life, he’d kept one eye on a vision of his destiny that was not his own. And what had that gotten him? A dud of a law career, an unhappy marriage, and a glossy magazine, of late pimped out by David Pecker, a tabloid hack.

Fuck that.

It was time to raise some hell.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“So I am going to form a presidential exploratory committee, I might as well announce that on your show, everyone else does... But, the president has to be a great leader, and you have to lead by example. But, you need leadership in this country. And we're just not having it right now.”

----Donald Trump, announcing his pursuit of the Reform Party presidential nomination on “Larry King Live,” October 8, 1999

Next up: America's Toughest Sheriff

[1] For those readers too young to remember print magazines--which at one time, were everywhere, I swear--for some reason, monthlies often published a month ahead of the actual calendar month. No idea why. So that's why we're talking about how well the September issue has done, while in the timeline, we're still in August.

 

[dcharles]

"I just recently learned this, but believe it or not, those two interviews happened on the same day. Of course, the piece in George didn't run for another couple of weeks, but if you want to try and trace it back--where things started to really shift--there you go. I mean, the Imus thing was all anyone was talking about that Thanksgiving. Before the Imus interview, everybody thought Trump was a joke. After the interview, all the people who thought they were smart--myself included--still thought he was a joke. But really, he was a phenomenon. And the whole Arpaio saga, that piece was the genesis of it all. I mean, Dougherty had been covering Arpaio for years, and eventually he was the one who ended up taking him down. But that piece was how Dougherty and Kennedy hooked up. So yeah, Imus and Kennedy, strange as it may seem , are kind of the ones who helped turn the Reform Party into a prairie-fire."

-----Anderson Cooper, 2017, in Burned: the Rise, Fall, and Undeath of the Reform Party, by Matt Taibbi


November 19th, 1999

* * * *

When November began, John had no intention of interviewing Joe Arpaio on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Until that Friday, in fact, John had no intention of interviewing Joe Arpaio at all.

On Friday the 19th, John was eating lunch with Richard Blow, one of the staff writers at George, and thinking of the infinite dread with which he contemplated joining the extended Kennedy clan for the holiday week. It wasn’t just the typical anxieties one might expect from a recent widower at a big family gathering that preyed on his mind. Most recent widowers didn’t have to deal with the prospect of paparazzi hiding in the oyster stuffing, and most recent widowers weren’t getting anonymous death threats mailed to their offices every week.

The death threats began about a month after John returned from Camp David. It started when some jackasses on talk radio started claiming that the plane had gone down on the thirtieth anniversary of Chappaquiddick. It hadn’t gone down on the anniversary--and John wasn’t sure what it would prove if it had--but the truth had never gotten in the way of people believing nefarious things about the Kennedys. Soon after, a minor talk radio personality named Ken Hamblin questioned whether Carolyn had actually been in the plane at all. He didn’t answer his question--he didn't need to. The callers provided the theories and accusations. All Hamblin had to do was provide the innuendo. After that, it was only a matter of time before the most marginal of John and Carolyn’s hangers-on were slipping salacious items about the state of his marriage to the tabloids, including The National Enquirer--now run by David Pecker, his old boss at Hachette. Beginning with the “revelation” that John was living alone in the Stanhope Hotel in the months before the crash, a slow, steady drip of embarrassing details about the breakdown of his marriage leaked to the press. Every shitty detail leaked to a tabloid seemed to fertilize the corresponding fever-swamp of conspiratorial innuendo in talk radio circles. A couple weeks back, Bob Grant, the Tri-State area’s answer to Rush Limbaugh, had a supposed expert on his show who claimed that it was “impossible” that Carolyn’s body could have been swept to sea.

The mainstream media wouldn’t touch the story--at least not directly. But the same companies that owned CBS and NBC News also owned Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight. Although the Inside Editions of the world weren’t reporting on all the conspiracy crap that was floating around on talk radio, they scarfed up every succulent morsel of gossip they could, often hinting that John was a more controversial figure than they were letting on.

Case in point: earlier in the week, Deborah Norville called him the “beleaguered heir to the Kennedy Dynasty” in response to a story that Carolyn had used cocaine.

It wasn’t helping matters that John had not publicly spoken to the media at all since the memorial, and that he hadn’t done anything in-depth since the crash itself. Not that he hadn’t had opportunities. Barbara Walters, in her own very polite way, was becoming a huge pain in his ass with the weekly requests for a long sit-down.

“Just you and me. Minimal crew,” she’d said in her last request. Just John, Barbara, “minimal crew,” and about 200 million viewers was a better way to put it. Truthfully, John couldn’t be bothered. With the impending buyout, his slowly mending body, and his interview with Castro in January, he just didn’t have the energy to attend to his public image. SI Newhouse, for example, had insisted on no less than four separate meetings with John before he agreed to basically the same deal as the one John and Florio had worked out. He was doing physical therapy three times a week, and the doctors were now telling him he might always walk with a limp, even with the therapy. In addition to the mountains of background he was doing on Castro, he’d hired a tutor to help him brush up on his Spanish, on the off-chance that John might catch something the interpreter translated too generously. All of this was in addition to the normal duties he had as Editor-in-Chief. With all of that, he didn’t even have the energy to have a public image, much less cultivate one.

The advent of the death threats was another incentive for him to lower his profile. He told himself that if he starved the media, the crazies would eventually go away. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was just telling himself what he wanted to hear, but he knew that his grief and stress weren’t going to let him act any differently. So he tried not to think too hard on whether or not he was being truthful with himself. It just seemed like a dead end.

The latest death threat was a doozy. It was illustrated with pictures of the fight John and Carolyn had right after they’d been engaged--pictures that had run years ago in People magazine--and lettered with cutouts from previous issues of George. As John was preoccupied with the pictures, Richard had noticed that particular detail himself.

“Do you think it’s a subscriber?” asked Richard.

“That would be one reason someone would have multiple issues of George,” said John, his inner lawyer kicking in. Try as he may, he wasn’t entirely sure what the other reasons would be. “The overlap between George subscribers and people who think I killed my wife has gotta be pretty small though. Right?”

Richard, who was an ivy league Ken-doll in the form of a journalist--no obvious flaws, no obvious problems, no obvious personality--looked down at his chopped salad awkwardly. The death threats seemed to throw him off balance even more than they did John. “Where’s the postmark saying it’s from?”

“Huh,” said John. “Good question. Phoenix--let’s get a list of Phoenix subs.”

“Oh, sure. What’s that going to tell you though?”

“Not going to tell me anything.” John pushed away the take-out container. “Might tell the Phoenix police who’s sending me death threats, though.”

Richard caught the hint, and began to clear his own place setting. “You’ll want the sheriff though. In case they’re outside city limits.”

“Sure,” said John, who was still staring at the pictures pasted on the death threat. He kept coming back to the one where he had tried to yank the engagement ring off Carolyn’s finger. That had left a bruise. “Just let Rosemarie know about the subscriber thing on your way out.”

Richard stopped short at the door. “Wait. Have you heard about this thing with the Phoenix Sheriff?”

“Isn’t he the pink underwear guy? The tent guy?”

“No,” said Richard. “I mean yes--he is that guy, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Have you heard about the assassination attempt?”

“Assassination attempt? What?”

“That’s not even the best part, John. There’s a paper down there, a weekly called The New Times, they’re saying he set the whole thing up.”

“Where was I when this--nevermind--when did this happen?" John asked.

“Well, the story got forwarded to me right around the time you left the hospital.” Richard scratched at his chin as he tried to remember. “Mid-August? Something like that. I think the attempt happened in July. It’s wild. I don’t know why no one’s covering it.”

“Rich, we’re the press. Why aren’t you covering it?”

Richard shrugged and kept his mouth shut, but the expression on his face read something like “because of the fucking crash, man.”

John slumped in his chair. “Just go ahead and forward me the story when you get back to your desk.”

* * * *

As it turned out, the story was everything Richard claimed.

James Saville, a somewhat feebleminded 18 year old high school dropout, had been jailed for vandalizing and attempting to burn down his old high school in 1998. He’d been sentenced to 18 months, a sentence which he’d served without any serious problems. The trouble came when he made the acquaintance of a criminal informant and jailhouse snitch--given a pseudonym in the article--who managed to spin Saville’s idle boasts to get even with the prosecutor into an assassination plot against Sheriff Arpaio. While Saville was incarcerated, the snitch, who’d been working with the Sheriff’s Department, not only gave Saville the idea for the crime, he told him that if he did it, there would be--Christ--parades in his honor. The snitch also put him in touch with an undercover deputy who he claimed was a mob hitman. A mob hitman, who--coincidentally--wanted to pay Saville to commit the very crime the snitch had been telling him to commit. Within hours of release, the undercover had met with Saville, taken him to various hardware stores where the deputy bought the bomb-making materials, had him assemble the bomb, and then, once he had done, arrested him with news cameras rolling.

John did not love the law, as many lawyers did, and there wasn’t a day that went by that he wasn’t happy that he’d left the miserable profession. But he was still a trained lawyer with years of experience in criminal law; he’d won numerous convictions. And as a lawyer, he could say that this stunk of entrapment. It wasn’t just that the defense attorney was making a case for entrapment and presenting it well to the media. It was more than that. Not only was the defense claiming entrapment, the publicly available facts and the department's own statements supported it. James Saville was a nonviolent offender, given the idea for and the means to commit murder by the department itself. They’d created a crime where there was none, for the apparent purposes of raising the Sheriff’s public profile. In other words, Arpaio was incarcerating and indicting a teenager for a murder plot that Arpaio himself had cooked up, all so it could make him famous.

So Joe Arpaio could be a fucking celebrity.

Politics and celebrity. That’s what George was supposed to be about, wasn’t it?

* * * *

“John Dougherty? This is John Kennedy, from George magazine. Got a minute?”

“Is this--”

“No joke. I’m calling from Manhattan. Check the area code on your caller ID, if you’ve got it. You free?”

“Uh...yeah. What’s up?”

“Just read your article about the whole Saville-Arpaio assassination fiasco. It’s good work. How long have you been covering him?”

“Oh, Arpaio…” said Dougherty as if it were all starting to make sense. “Yeah, thanks...Been covering him since he was elected, more or less. He was elected in ‘92. I started at the New Times in early ‘93. So me and Joe go way back.”

“You’ve done a lot of investigative work?” asked John.

Dougherty chuckled. “Little bit. Broke the Keating Five story back when I was in Dayton. Got the Governor arrested a couple years ago. Took me ten years, but I got him. Why do you ask?”

“Because I want to run it. I’d like to run the story.”

“I see,” said Dougherty.

It wasn’t the response John had hoped for. “Problem?”

“I just, ah, didn’t think you guys did stories like that.”

“Investigative stuff? We usually don’t. But we’re reorienting our focus a little. Still politics and celebrity--but from what I can tell, this guy wants to be a celebrity more than any local politician in the country. And Rudy Giuliani is the mayor of my hometown, so it’s not like he’s got no competition. You know, you’d have to rework it a little bit--it’s got no national context--but we can credit The New Times on the reporting. You interested?”

Dougherty hesitated. “Well, I guess my question is--if you’re crediting us for the reporting, what does George bring to the piece?”

“Good question.” It was John’s turn to chuckle. “So, long story short: it looks like someone from Phoenix is sending me death threats. I talked to Sheriff Joe about it this afternoon--very accommodating--and while we got to talking, I told him I was going to be in Phoenix early this week. He agreed to give me a tour of the jail and sit down with me for a couple of hours on Tuesday. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ll bet he won’t talk to you for shit.”

“Hates me,” said Dougherty.

“And I’ll bet you’ve got some questions you’d like to ask him.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” said John. Silence on the other line. “You in?”

“Hell yeah I’m in,” said Dougherty. “This Tuesday? Two days before Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah, but I fly in on Monday. Meet me at my hotel, brief me on Monday night. It’ll be fresh when I talk to Joe.”

Maybe Thanksgiving wasn't going to be such a drag after all.

* * * *

KENNEDY/ARPAIO INTERVIEW
TRANSCRIPT OF TAPE 2
NOVEMBER 23, 1999



KENNEDY: So you were wrongfully accused of murder, is that right?

ARPAIO: Excuse me?

KENNEDY: In Turkey, back when you were a DEA agent. I’ve got a quote from you--

ARPAIO: Oh, Turkey. Yeah. That’s a different story.

KENNEDY: A different story? You’ve only been arrested for murder once, right?

ARPAIO: Oh, of course, just the once. [ laughs ] It was several decades ago. I don’t need to play Wyatt Earp anymore. Still could though--I haven’t lost a step.

KENNEDY: You were incarcerated for that?

ARPAIO: Briefly. You know, it was me and four other guys--four other agents--and we got into a gun battle with some dope-pushers--

KENNEDY: And you saw a lot of action over there?

ARPAIO: Oh, it was a hot zone. A real hot zone. You seen The French Connection? That movie was about what we were doing. They based that character--Popeye Doyle, the one Gene Hackman played--partly on me, you know. I’ve got more hair though. [ laughs ]

KENNEDY: Yeah, you’ve got more of a John Wayne thing happening. Anyway, a lot of action. “Weekly gun battles,” is the quote I’ve got here.

ARPAIO: Well, I don’t know that uh, that was a direct quote.

KENNEDY: Misquote?

ARPAIO: Exactly.

KENNEDY: It came from the transcript from when you testified before Congress. So anyway, who were the deceased?

ARPAIO: Who? Oh--the deceased. He was just some dope peddler. Dime a dozen, really. I mean, there were more than one that probably took bullets from me. I never killed nobody in the United States though.

KENNEDY: You said there were two, back in ‘89. You don’t remember their names?

ARPAIO: It was a long time ago. I can’t remember every little detail--

KENNEDY: But you shot them.

ARPAIO: --about every scumbag I’ve taken down. I’m not losing a bit of sleep about it. I’ve had a long career. Things happen. Shot him? Yeah. I was the only one with a gun.

KENNEDY: In the gun battle... And you can’t remember who they were? We wanted to do a little background on them. Give the readers some context, so they know the kind of dangers you were dealing with. Anyway, what was it like in Turkish jail? You ever seen The Midnight Express?

ARPAIO: [ Laughs ] They actually treated me pretty good. You know, I was an American, and I was with the DEA. They knew they had to be decent.

KENNEDY: And it’s an inquisitorial system over there, so I was thinking it might have been pretty rough. Anyway, you’ve got a reputation as being tough-on-crime. You’ve got the tent city, you’ve re-introduced chain gangs, you’ve taken away the tv, the salt-and-pepper from the cafeteria. What’s the philosophy behind all this?

ARPAIO: Don’t forget about the coffee. Saved a hundred and something thousand a year on that. You pay for your coffee, I pay for my coffee. Why should criminals get free coffee? The philosophy? You can’t coddle criminals, is the philosophy! Jail’s not supposed to be the Holiday Inn. It should be a humiliating experience. I believe in humiliation. I want to make jail the worst place in the world, so they know not to come back for a visit. People talk about prisoner’s rights--but the fact is, what I hear from the public over and over again is that prisoners should have no rights. Deterrence is the name of the game, and if I’ve gotta make it as bad as a concentration camp to achieve that, that’s what we’re going to do to protect the people of Arizona from these animals.

KENNEDY: But a lot of people in jail haven’t been convicted of anything. A lot of them will be, but a lot of your inmates are awaiting trial, right? Three-quarters, right? You were wrongfully accused yourself--

ARPAIO: You can’t compare me to the convicts. Period. Apples to oranges.

KENNEDY: But I’m talking about the ones who aren’t convicts--

ARPAIO: Next question.

KENNEDY: Okay. I’ve got a case here. Felix Bordallo Ruiz. Arrested on 7-7-97 on suspicion of DUI. Bordallo claimed that he was on a new medication. He was field sobriety tested and arrested, never given a breathalyzer. He was awaiting trial for 73 days. In that time, he lost his job, was evicted from his apartment, and his car was repossessed. Turns out, he was on the medication, not drunk. Charges dismissed. Did Felix deserve a concentration camp?

ARPAIO: There’s always going to be isolated exceptions. What we’re trying to do is create a culture. It’s about hard knocks. Tough love. And making sure that the criminal element is not welcome in Maricopa County.

KENNEDY: Isolated? I’ve got quite a few of these. There’s Scott Norberg--died in detention after your deputies, what, asphyxiated him with a towel? Tough love?

ARPAIO: Those deputies did nothing wrong! They followed the policy, is what they did. It was a freak accident. Norberg was resisting! The Norberg case was--

KENNEDY: Norberg was handcuffed to a chair. How much resistance was he putting up?

ARPAIO: The Norberg case was an accident, and we’ve already changed policies to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Sounds like you’re talking to the enemy, frankly. Crime is down! You want evidence that the policies are working, look at that. Crime is down under my tenure--way down. End of story.

KENNEDY: But crime is down everywhere. And I’m glad you brought this up. Crime overall is down in Phoenix. But the murder rate is way up. Phoenix and Baltimore are the only two metros in the country that didn’t see a drop in the murder rate in the past decade. Baltimore’s is pretty much where it was ten years ago--but Phoenix’s increased from 14 per hundred thousand to over 16 per hundred thousand. How do you account for that?

ARPAIO: We’re not the only law enforcement agency in the metro, you know--

KENNEDY: But you’re the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the county. Doesn’t the buck stop with you?

ARPAIO: --there’s the Phoenix Police. Now there’s an agency you need to look--

KENNEDY: How did hiring James Saville to build a bomb--to kill you--a few hours after his release further deterrence?

ARPAIO: Saville? I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation, and I’m sure you know it. What the hell kind of interview is this supposed to be?

KENNEDY: Just a question. With the spike in the murder rate, how does the department have the time to concoct their own murder plots?

ARPAIO: This is over. This is bullshit. This interview is done. [ Storms Out ]

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

IMUS/TRUMP INTERVIEW
TRANSCRIPT, PART 2 OF 3
IMUS IN THE MORNING
NOVEMBER 23, 1999

TRUMP: You know I like women, Don. I’m a man, so I like women--you should see my girlfriend Melania. Trump likes women, okay? No problems in that department. But you know, the way I look at Clinton--I see a man who’s weak minded. Very weak minded. It’s not like he’s picking the quality, okay?

IMUS: Ooooh, no. Definitely not picking the quality. Woof.

TRUMP: Right? You look at these women--and you know, at first I didn’t even believe it, cause he’s the Governor, right? He’s the President, right? And you should see these women, Don. Paula Jones? When I first heard it, and then I saw her, I said “that can’t be right.” And I look at it, and you’ve got Lewinsky, and I think he’s a very sick man. I’m not sure he can help himself. He’s like an animal or something, Don.

IMUS: Woof woof. So you think he’s got problems?

TRUMP: It’s sad--sad. When you think about it, you know, he’s got a lot of problems with self-control. And he had a chance to do some things, you know. A lot of people don’t realize, but Clinton had a chance to do a lot of things. Because the President, you know, is really more powerful than most people imagine. And he wasted it.

IMUS: For a plump co-ed--

TRUMP: A little too plump.

IMUS: --and an Arkansaw Lot Lizard!

TRUMP: And maybe that’s why Hillary--you know, she’s had to put up with a lot, very troubled marriage--you know, maybe that’s why she’s such a nasty woman sometimes. Who knows? It’s sad. Sad for the country, really. Sad for the families. And they’re laughing at us--all the other countries--they’re laughing.

IMUS: So we’ve got Clinton the sex-maniac for the Dems--

TRUMP: I never called him that. [laughs] Imus is trying to get me in trouble.

IMUS: Would you leave your daughters alone with him?

TRUMP: Ivanka? No way. He wouldn’t be able to control himself.

IMUS: So, Clinton for the Dems. What are your thoughts on the Republicans?

TRUMP: Well, you know, some of them you can barely even remember. But I guess you’ve got the main ones. There’s Bush, and with him, you wonder if the guy’s really all there. I mean, you’ve got that book, about the monkey, Curious George, and really with Bush, it’s like a not-so-curious George. I mean, you know, that’s what the people are saying. And you know, Bush--the original Bush, not Junior--he’s a real New World Order kind of guy. That’s his thing. And so I guess that Junior’s probably the same. And who else is there?

IMUS: You’ve got Forbes--

TRUMP: Oh, Forbes. Well--and he’s kind of a smart guy, thinks he’s a real smart guy--and well, you know, the thing is with Forbes, his father was a real flamboyant kind of character. You just wonder with Forbes, is he really the kind of guy you want sitting across from Khrushchev? You need a leader in the White House, really. You need leadership.

IMUS: And then there’s McCain.

TRUMP: And McCain, you know, there’s a guy I really feel sorry for. Because--and he was some kind of war hero, you know--they’re never going to let him win.

IMUS: So you’re saying it’s rigged against him?

TRUMP: You think I don’t know? Rigged--these guys all come to me. Democrats, Republicans. All got their hands out. You think if I put in a call these guys don’t take it? They’re begging to take my calls. I know how it works--and I tell you now Don, they’re never going to let McCain win. McCain’s onto them. He knows about the corruption. I think a guy like that, a year or two, and he’s going to be looking really hard at the Reform Party, because he’s going to see. He’s going to see that the New World Order guys are never going to let a guy like him get anywhere. And he’s going to have to take a hard look at it.

IMUS: Would you consider him for VP?

TRUMP: Only if you and Oprah turn me down, Don.

IMUS: You heard it here first, folks. “John McCain on Trump’s VP shortlist.” It is 8:26 a.m. here in the studio, that’s thirty-four minutes till the hour, Imus in the Morning.

 

[dcharles]

"That's ridiculous. It's nothing but a vicious rumor. Governor Bush has always defended the right of Malcom Forbes, Jr. to be in this race."

----Karl Rove, appearing on Meet the Press, Jan 30th, 2000.


"I mean, I've heard the rumor before, but I don't know that I believe it. It does sound like him, but you know, it's always old Bush guys that I've heard [repeating the story]. It's always like, what does Stone have to gain here? He was already with Trump at that point. Why in the world would he meddle around in Iowa Republican Caucus?"

-----Anderson Cooper, 2017, in Burned: the Rise, Fall, and Undeath of the Reform Party, by Matt Taibbi

"Roger Stone... What an utter piece of shit."

----- Karl Rove, 2008, in The Dangers of Faction: Election 2000 and the End of the Sixth Party System, by Douglas Brinkley



January 20th, 2000
Miami Beach FL

A dreary day. Dishwater skies; clouds the color of dryer lint. A rare winter storm, rolling into Miami Beach.

Roger Stone leaned back, put his feet on the glass-topped desk, and grinned. Fuck the weather.

He wasn’t sure what made him happier--the the brand new pair of Gucci loafers on his feet, or the mailer in his hand. The shoes were almost a work of art: full Goodyear welted sole, interior of kid leather, and an exterior of oxblood cordovan. Practically impossible to crease. They followed his three c’s of style--classy, classic, and customized--a corollary of Stone’s Rules, to the letter.

None of that gaudy “G” logo business, either.

That kind of ghetto shit was for thugs--and trophy wives from Bergen County who didn’t know better.

The shoes were perfect. But the mailer was gold.

It purported to be from the Log Cabin Republicans, and it had a picture of Steve Forbes, wearing the kind of smile one might display when they were about to get mugged, above a caption that read “Forbes: the Gay Rights Republican.” It looked professional, too. Glossy cardstock. Bright, crisp colors. The margins were right. It even had the little Log Cabin logo right on top. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

A lazy baritone drawled over the speakerphone. “Is Rove taking the bait?”

“Like a fucking large-mouth bass. Plan Nightcrawler is rolling.” The “Plan Nightcrawler” moniker was an inside joke--Stone’s pet name for his plan to bait George W. Bush into running to the right in Iowa and sinking Steve Forbes in the process. “You should see this mailer Rove’s putting out in Iowa--it’s a fake endorsement of Forbes from the Log Cabin Republicans--fucking beautiful.”

“How do you know it’s Rove?” asked Manafort.

“It’s too professional for it to be any of those other clowns,” said Stone. “Keys is too stupid to think of something like this, Bauer wouldn’t be able to pull off something that looks this good, and McCain’s not contesting the state.”

Manafort made a bored chuckling sound. “What about part three?”

“In the mail. Just in time for church on Sunday.” The caucus was Monday.

Part one of Plan Nightcrawler was the whispering campaign. That had all started when Trump dropped the hints about Forbes’ “flamboyant” father on Imus. Since the Imus interview was all anyone was talking about over the Thanksgiving holidays, pretty soon people started to wonder what exactly Trump had meant by “flamboyant.” Gary Bauer, the moralizing little gnome, was the first one to say the quiet part loud when--in the December debate--he asked if a “man who had grown up so close to the gay lifestyle” was qualified to be the moral leader of the nation.

Forbes had actually gasped a little bit.

Bush smirked, but he cut in on behalf of Forbes anyway, saying that “just because Malcolm Forbes, Sr. was gay, doesn’t mean Malcolm Forbes, Jr. shouldn’t run in the primary.” All the same, over the next two weeks, Bush never missed an opportunity to call Steve Forbes “Malcolm Forbes, Jr.” Then in early January, the Des Moines Register published a poll that put Bush at 38%, Bauer and Keys at 15% each, and Forbes at 9%, with the rest uncommitted or holding fast for McCain. Bush had lost over ten points in a little less than a month, and he changed his tune fast. Pretty soon he had come out for a Federal Marriage Amendment, was loudly declining to meet the Log Cabin Republicans, and expressing principled ambivalence at the thought of appointing any gays or lesbians to any posts in his administration. And now, the mailer.

So there was part two.

Part three was a piece of good old fashioned ratfucking. Even Roger Stone had to admit that it was vintage Roger Stone. It entailed a packet, anonymously mailed by Stone to everyone on the mailing lists for the Iowa Catholic Conference and the Baptist Convention of Iowa. Its contents? A full color copy of the cover (and cover story) for the 38th issue of OutWeek: the Lesbian and Gay News Magazine. The cover story for that issue was “The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes,” and it pictured Forbes, Sr. atop a motorcycle, in a biker jacket and a silk ascot, looking about as masculine as Truman Capote in a sundress. Inside was an unsigned letter that asked one question: “After Clinton, is this the family you want in the White House?”

Sure, it was an old story and OutWeek had been out of print for going on a decade, but that wasn’t the point. Even if it was an old story, it wasn’t the kind of story the folks in Sioux City had heard about. Hell, a lot of folks in Sioux City didn’t even know who Malcolm Forbes, Sr. was. They didn’t read Forbes in Sioux City. They went to church.

And this Sunday, at least some of the Catholic and Baptist clergy in Iowa would be talking to their congregations about Malcolm Forbes’ secret gay life.

“Do you think that Forbes will try and hang on for New Hampshire?” asked Manafort.

“I fucking hope not. You realize how much all those packets cost me?”

“Do you think I care? Your whole point is to get Forbes out and let the anti-Bush crowd coalesce around McCain. If Forbes stays in, he splits the vote. If you can’t get Forbes out, you’re better off staying out of it. Keep your nose clean, Roger.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” snapped Stone.

“Listen, I keep anything that needs to be off-book on the other side of an international border, okay? I’m just saying, you don’t want a repeat of ‘96.”

“Low blow.” In ‘96, Stone was been forced out of the Dole campaign after a personals ad he’d taken out in a swingers magazine was leaked to the media. Some--too many--said it was Stone finally getting a taste of his own medicine. But that was bullshit. Stone wasn’t a public figure. Dole was the public figure. Whether Stone and his wife were swingers wasn’t anyone’s business. “And quit worrying. It’ll work. Even if Forbes stays in, he won’t get shit. He’ll be out before South Carolina. I just want Bush to keep running to the right. Fucking Marriage Amendment. I want more shit like that. Then our boy--”

“Your boy.” corrected Manafort. “I’m still neutral--and officially, I’m still backing Bush, even if everyone does know it’s bullshit. But Rich is McCain’s campaign manager. He’s a partner too. I can’t be seen taking sides right now. Fingers in too many pies.”

“Our boy, your boy, whatever. Then Trump can dance in and start talking about states’ rights and how he wants to cut your taxes. Sidestep all that shit.”

“We’ll see. Anyway, what’s happening with the Buchanan situation?”

“Pat’s going to do just what the fuck I tell him to.”

“So Patrick has been a naughty boy--”

“Haven’t we all?” said Stone with a cackle. Speaking of--he opened his cigarette case and pulled out a joint. “I figure we keep him in the race long enough to make Trump look good--”

“Too cute,” said Manafort. Roger could practically hear his eyes rolling. “Just bounce him out of the race, and take care of him when the dust settles. There’s too many variables.”

“Maybe,” said Stone through an inhale. “But what the fuck am I supposed to promise him? We’re not bringing him onto the campaign. Not after all that Hitler-wasn’t-so-bad shit.”

“Not my problem. But Buchanan's a tar baby--”

“I’m sure he’d appreciate that analogy.” Stone went into a coughing fit. Lightning flashed on the water.

“Jesus, Roger--isn’t it like, ten in the morning over there?”

“Ten-seventeen,” Stone corrected. Trailing thunder rumbled through the clouds.

“The point is, you let him keep hanging around, and his sludge is going to stick to you. Listen, I’ve got to go. Abdul’s coming in.”

Manafort hung up.

When Roger had first convinced Trump to dip his toe into the presidential race, it was fifty-fifty as to whether Trump would decide to wade in. Stone had a plan either way. If Trump was leaning no, Stone could just use him to bludgeon Buchanan into irrelevance while Trump toyed with the idea. Although Buchanan would still end up with the nomination without Trump in the race, he would be the nominee of a burnt-out party, at which point Stone would blackmail him into burning down his candidacy along with whatever remained of the Reform Party. That would get him in good with whoever the Republican nominee ended up being--McCain or Bush--and he could claw his way back into relevance and respectability.

And if Trump did decide to wade on in, then Roger Stone was going to turn him into the biggest thing to hit American politics since Reagan. No one else could see it--not even Manafort--but Stone saw it. Trump was rough around the edges, but he was also larger than life.

Roger Stone knew politics, and he knew politicians. Most of them had the same level of charm as an undertaker with a case of the flu.

And Roger knew that being larger than life was the single greatest advantage that a person seeking elected office can have.

For the first few weeks of Trump’s flirtation, it seemed like he was leaning toward no. Trump was finding that the political media were a less tameable breed than the entertainment and local media types he was used to, and he didn’t particularly care for the change. A fight between him and Buchanan, both considered long-shot candidates, was always going to struggle for airtime against Kennedy gossip, the IRA putting down their guns, and the war in Chechnya. Trump’s patience--and attention span--was starting to dwindle, and Stone knew he needed to do something to shake things up.

Thus, the Imus interview.

Trump and Imus went way back. He had been on Imus probably a dozen times over the years, so Trump was relaxed going on the show. For his part, Imus knew how to get a good sound bite out of Trump. Stone hadn’t told Trump what to say--do that and it was liable to backfire--just that he needed to train his fire on the other candidates besides Buchanan. Before long, Trump had called the sitting president a lecher, said that Bush was mildly retarded, insinuated that Forbes was too effeminate to be president, and that McCain was a dupe in a rigged contest. Guys like Charlie Rose and Tim Russert had no idea how to cover it. It was too newsworthy to ignore, but too incendiary to take seriously. So they did what in Roger’s eyes was the very best thing they could do--they condemned Trump.

But they didn’t condemn the merits of his arguments--no one really wanted to go to the mat for Bush’s latent intellectualism or Clinton’s self-control--instead, they condemned Trump’s tone. They said that Trump was dragging politics down into the mud--ha!--and that serious candidates didn’t go on shows like Imus anyway. Call McCain a dupe? No, they said--it was the public that was being duped, and Trump doing the grifting.

It was just the kind of abstract, elitist criticism that struck people with less than two degrees as hollow and hypocritical. Didn’t like his tone? Well, Trump was just telling it like it was. Turning politics into a pigstye? Trump answered that it had always been a pigstye, and that he had personally delivered several buckets of slop to the trough.
But while the straight media was busy making sanctimonious pronouncements, the other media, the media that had to hustle for ratings, realized that Trump meant viewers. After a December poll put Trump at 14%--up from 10% in October, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher sent Trump a last minute invite. Trump was already booked to do Leno that night, but Stone agreed to cancel it as long as Maher did a one on one with Trump--presidents didn’t do panels. Trump, who was by now realizing that throwing bombs was a sure way to attract attention, had a full complement of Molotov cocktails at hand when he went to the studio in Burbank.

Gore, who was trailing Bush badly in the polls, was “low-energy, a born loser,” and a “Clinton stooge.” Scattered cheers erupted from the audience. “Not-so-curious George [was] getting crazier by the day.” He was “against the gays, against the women, against the states.” More cheers. McCain was “getting played.” And if the people thought Gore or McCain were the ones to beat Bush, they were getting played too. Cheers all around. Politically Incorrect’s audience--a liberal audience--had cheered whenever Trump landed a blow.

That they had cheered when Trump was dogging Gore, that was how Roger really knew that he had something. Even after the Imus interview, things had been touch and go with Trump’s attention span for a minute. Trump didn’t like playing third banana to dorks like Steve Forbes and Al Gore, much less to a swinging dick like W.
Trump made the media rounds, as any “prospective” candidate would, but Stone made a point to steer Trump to edgier, more serious programs, like Dennis Miller Live, or programs that had a wide audience but weren’t frequented by political types, like The View. The idea was to steer him away from forums where the main question would be whether or not the run was a publicity stunt. He wasn’t going to avoid guys like Dan Rather or Tim Russert forever. But when Stone did put Trump on Meet the Press, he was going to make sure the first question out of Russert’s mouth wasn’t “is this some kind of joke?”

Although Roger knew Trump could be big, he still wasn’t sure how far he could take him. A spate of polls released around the first of the year all put him at 15% or above--and Zogby had him at 17%--which would theoretically qualify him for the debates that fall. But debates weren’t elections--although Alan Keyes hadn’t gotten the memo--and 15% wasn’t the same thing as 50% + 1, even if the digits all added up to six.

Stone knew he could never get Trump to 50% + 1. Not in a three way race, not as a third party candidate. He didn’t see a way it was even theoretically possible, much less likely. But if a majority was out of the question, Stone was more bullish about the prospect of a third--or a little more than a third. In a three way split--theoretically--a little over a third was all he should need.

For all his strategizing and all his bravado with Manafort, Stone still wasn’t even sure whether forging ahead with Trump was the right thing to do. He had to keep reminding himself that while Trump was still on the fence, he still had a respectable out. Although he’d known Trump for going on twenty years at that point, Roger had been a party man for even longer. This was supposed to be his time in the wilderness. The party bigwigs had all told him he’d land on his feet after he’d been shown the door in ‘96. But none of them had lended a hand to help him get back up--not even Manafort. And if Bush won the election, Roger might as well go ahead and build a cabin out here in the wilderness, because he wouldn’t be coming home to the promised land any time soon.

The Bushes had never liked Roger, and the feeling was mutual. Stone was too flashy and in-your-face for an aristocrat like Bush, Sr. to ever do more than tolerate; he’d hated it when Lee Atwater--his old campaign manager--partnered with Black, Manafort, and Stone. For his part, Roger thought that Bush was an equivocating weenie who hadn’t deserved a stand-up guy like Atwater in the first place. Once Lee had died, the ties between the Bush faction and the lobbyists at Black, Manafort, and Stone had frayed. When Bush lost the election in ‘92, whatever institutional power they had left--along with Karl Rove--migrated down to Texas and Florida to prepare for the campaigns there.

As for W, all you really needed to know was this: The guy had been born with silver spoons coming out of his ears. His family was rich, powerful, and influential. In 1970, when Bush, Sr. was a sitting Congressman from Texas, W applied to the University of Texas Law School and got rejected. George W. Bush was even more a creation of Karl Rove than Trump was a creation of Roger Stone.

A lot of people would take that as criticism, but Rove was proud.

Stone didn’t even need to ask him to know.

Karl Rove (center), had long roots in Republican politics.​

Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Karl Rove went all the way back to the Nixon years. Roger didn’t loathe Rove the way Manafort did--those two had something like a blood feud--but he did think he was a fat, arrogant twerp. No matter what sized room he was in, Rove always thought he was the smartest guy in it. The problem was, he’d been playing down in Texas against a bunch of minor leaguers and thought it was the same thing as beating the All-Star Team.

It wasn’t.

Roger realized the joint had died while he was lost in thought. He got it going again and hotboxed it down. The storm had fallen off without him noticing, and blades of sunlight cut through the clouds and reflected the image of his face in the glass top of his desk. It occurred to him that all this time he’d been focused on winning, he’d been thinking of how to make Trump win and how to make Roger’s enemies lose. He’d been thinking that if Trump won, Roger would win.

And that was true enough. If Roger could drag Trump over the line with a little over a third of the vote, he would be a living legend among political strategists. He’d be able to name any fee he wanted.

But it wasn’t the only way.

Trump didn’t have to win for Roger to win. All Roger had to do was make sure Trump outperformed expectations. But that was understating it. Trump couldn’t just outperform his expectations. Trump would need to murder their expectations and throw the corpse into a storm drain.

If Roger could make that happen, he’d still be able to name his price.

But how many votes did that represent? How many states would Trump need to carry in order for Roger to make all the rest of them look like fools?

Roger took another joint from the cigarette case and walked over to his filing cabinet. He pulled election data--folder after folder--from ‘92 and ‘96. This is how it worked. This is how you did it, how you pulled off one of the most important of Stone’s Rules.

This is how you made your own luck.

 

[dcharles]

Russert: And now let's move to Karl Rove, joining us from Concord. First of all, Karl, good to have you here again, congratulations on your victory in Iowa this past Monday.

Rove: Good to be here, Tim.

Russert: Now, back in Iowa, Governor Bush got a very strong result. You got a 54% majority in a five way race. Now it was also a surprising result. The Des Moines Register put out its final poll the Friday before the election--you were almost five points back from where you ended up, and Mr. Forbes, who has since dropped out, was tied for second place with Alan Keyes. Then comes Monday and the result we got. A lot of people are laying this at the feet of an anonymous mailer that was sent to a number of Iowa Catholic and Baptist clergy over the weekend. This mailer was--and we'll get the graphic up on screen for you in a moment--a clipping from a magazine called OutWeek, a gay and lesbian themed publication, that "outed" Malcolm Forbes Sr. shortly after he died. As I said, this mailer was sent anonymously, but a lot of people are pointing the finger at your campaign--

Rove: Which is ridiculous. There's absolutely no evidence of that--and whoever did it obviously doesn't know Iowa. Baptists aren't even the largest Protestant denomination in Iowa. Listen, Governor Bush won a resounding victory back in Iowa last week. He's clearly the most qualified candidate and his message is resonating with the American people. What we've got here are some desperate attempts by also-rans to discredit the clear frontrunner. It's a shame to see, but what we're focused on right now is New Hampshire.

Russert: But it clearly seemed to have some effect on the outcome--

Rove: I would dispute that, Tim. What you're looking at is the result of one outlier poll. None of our internal polls matched what the Register--

Russert: Perhaps. But that's not the only--

Rove: I've got to correct this, Tim, correct this perception. The Register had a poll in early January that put Forbes at 9%. Well 9% is exactly what he ended up getting. This whole flap is the consequence of the media fixating on one outlier and this horse race coverage. It's not what the American people want, though, Tim. They want coverage of the real issues.

Russert: Speaking to the issue of the negative tone of the campaign in Iowa, Mr. Rove, that wasn't the only dirty trick that we've heard about. There's also the issue of another mailer, this time sent out to thousand of households, a fake endorsement of Forbes from the Log Cabin Republicans. People are calling this the roughest, the most negative Iowa Caucus in many years. Again, fingers are being pointed your way.

Rove: That's ridiculous. It's nothing but a vicious rumor. Governor Bush has always defended the right of Malcom Forbes, Jr. to be in this race. Again, where's the evidence?


----Karl Rove, appearing on Meet the Press, Jan 30th, 2000.


(Thought I'd throw in a little bonus. Next update is tomorrow.)

 

[dcharles]

"Of course, we had slavery in Cuba as well. It was abolished about twenty years after slavery was abolished in the US...What many Americans don't realize is that the most violent, the most extreme members of the so-called Exile community in the United States, the community from which so much of the violence, the terrorism, the assassination attempts--which are inflicted upon the Cuban people and the lawful government of Cuba--much of this so-called community is made up of the descendants of the enslavers, the exploiters, the kidnappers, the violators. For many years, you had a similar problem in the United States, with groups such as your Ku Klux Klan... So no, the opinions of this reactionary core--the descendants of the exploiters and the enslavers--are not of the least importance to me, or of the least importance of the people of Cuba. To many of them, I say 'good riddance.'"

----- Fidel Castro, quoted in George; March 2000 issue.

"What happened to John-John? We've always known that the liberal elites didn't share our values, but of course we thought he was different. He is no different. Castro is a tyrant and a thug. This is the height of irresponsibility and recklessness for him to use his magazine to give a platform to this murderer, this dictator, especially at such a delicate time, when the fate of a young boy hangs in the balance."

----- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, February 4th, 2000.


"This interview almost didn’t happen.

The team at George and I started negotiating with President Castro for an interview all the way back in the first half of 1999, and the terms were finalized in mid July. Not even a week later, my plane went down en route to Martha’s Vineyard. I lost my wife and two dear friends to the Atlantic, as all of you reading this surely know by now.

Although the crash itself did not jeopardize the interview, it changed the interviewer a great deal. I likely will not know for many years all the ways that terrible event has changed me, but I am different. The man who writes this today is a more confrontational man than the one who set out to attend my cousin’s wedding on that island in Vineyard Sound. Though it is even harder to write than it is to admit, I am more bitter now than I was then. I am angrier.

One day I may come to regret this self-assurance, but I do not feel it is bitterness alone that has changed me, though I am sure it has done its part. Entwined with the bitterness of loss is the simple fact that I came very close to death this past summer. As anyone who has been there can tell you, a scrape like the one I saw this summer forever changes your appetite for risk.
I don’t mean to give the wrong impression. In my own case, it isn’t that I’ve decided to eliminate all risks in my life. But today, I have an appreciation for consequence that I simply did not have eight or nine months ago. I doubt that I was even capable of it.

I almost lost everything, period.

I did lose almost everything.

Trust me when I say that the end can truly come from out of nowhere. That’s taught me two important lessons:

One, don’t take an unnecessary risk just to cut a corner. It might just turn out not to be worth it.

Two, don’t hesitate to take the right risk. You might never get another chance to.

Some of you are probably wondering what all this has to do with Fidel Castro. It’s a fair question. As recently as November, it had nothing to do with Fidel Castro. But on Thanksgiving Day, a five year old boy named Elián González was found floating in the Atlantic, clinging onto an innertube for dear life. Elián and two others were the only survivors of a group of fourteen brave but desperate souls who tried to cross the Florida Straits in an old aluminum fishing boat. As we’ve come to learn, the boat’s engine died somewhere along the way, and when a storm crossed their path, the group’s quixotic dash for a better life ended in tragedy. Among the eleven dead were Elián’s mother, Elizabeth, and the man who would have presumably become his stepfather, Lazaro Munero.

Like a lot of you, I didn’t find out about Elián until the day after Thanksgiving. But the story immediately moved and captivated me. After all, Elián and I had been through similar experiences. Like me, Elián had come close to losing everything. Like me, he did lose almost everything. And of course, Elián lost all he had lost in the rough, indifferent waters of the Atlantic, just as I had.

If I was fascinated by our similarities, I was equally transfixed by our differences. To say that we were born in different worlds would almost qualify as understatement. I won’t waste your time or mine on euphemisms. I was born into a family with wealth, power, and access.

Elián wasn’t.

After all, Elián’s mother was so strapped for money that an old shallow water fishing boat with a suspect engine was the best means of escape she could afford. She felt so powerless that the prospect of being a refugee in a strange land was an improvement. And she was so lacking in access that the dangerous path she chose for herself and her family seemed like the best option she had.

Ironically, it was our respective positions, perched as we are on opposite ends of the spectrum of privilege, that led us both to nearly being lost at sea. I have no illusions. If I had not been rich enough to afford a plane; if my family had not been rich enough to have a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, I wouldn’t have even been in the air that night. If Elián hadn’t been poor, he wouldn’t have been in that boat.

Still, my fascination with the case of Elián had no bearing on my upcoming interview with Castro until Friday, December 10th. That was the same day that the Florida Gonzálezes filed for political asylum on Elián’s behalf. As I was about to leave the office and head home, I got a message from Castro’s people that threw everything into jeopardy. President Castro wanted me to know that he had no intention of deviating from our original outline for the interview, which meant that he would not be “discussing the case of Elián González Brotons at this time.” As a display of my good faith, he “requested” that I didn’t contact any of the Florida Gonzálezes.

Our original outline for the interview was simple but broad. We wanted to have a conversation about the past and future of the US and Cuba. Why was it that ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when so much had changed, that US-Cuban relations hadn’t? Obviously, the case of Elián doesn’t directly answer that question. But just as obviously, Elián’s situation is emblematic of just how bad relations between our two countries are. And in case no one has noticed, Elián González is the #1 Cuba-related news item these days. So while it was theoretically possible to avoid the subject of Elián, it was practically impossible.

Castro’s second request was equally impossible. Although I had no intention of contacting the Florida Gonzálezes in connection to my interview with President Castro, I had in fact already been in contact with them eleven days before, for reasons unrelated to Castro. After the State Department announced that it was “recusing” itself from the issue earlier in the day, I realized that Elián was likely to be in the United States for longer than a week or two. So I reached out to Lazaro González, Elián’s great uncle and ersatz guardian, to talk with him about the importance of therapy for Elián; how important it’s been for me. I told him that if he found a therapist that he liked but money was an issue, he could send me the bill. We didn’t talk about embargoes or policies, or politics of any kind. It was a strictly personal call.

I don’t know how I would have responded to Castro’s requests eight or nine months ago. I suspect I would have tried to assuage his concerns. But Castro’s people weren’t talking to the version of me from eight or nine months ago. They were talking to me at the end of the day on a Friday in December, on a day that I needed to get home and take a prescription I had forgotten to take that morning. So I sent a short response back. The answer was no, I told them. They couldn’t expect me to interview Fidel Castro and not reference the biggest story in US-Cuba relations in years. And under no circumstances would I allow the Cuban government to dictate who I could and couldn’t use as a source, in this story or any other. There was some back and forth, but within an hour of the original message, the Cubans had cancelled the interview.

I was furious, of course, but there was little I could do. The situation remained the same through the weekend, until I got a call on Sunday evening. It was my office. A staff writer who had come in to work some extra hours on a piece told me that someone from the Cuban government was calling the office, insisting that the writer who took the call get in touch with me. I gave them my private number and told them to give me a call.

I expected to hear from Juan, the press commissar I’d been dealing with for the past few months. For several hours, I waited with increasing impatience for a phone call that did not come. I cancelled my dinner plans and ordered in. I waited some more. Still nothing. Finally, fuming at the thought of a wasted evening, I gave up. I decided to take a shower and call it a day.

A few minutes under the warm water and I began to relax.

Naturally, that was when the phone rang. I hesitated for a moment, deciding whether to get out of the shower and answer it, which only made it worse when I realized that I absolutely had to. In the end, the interview was going to mean a whole lot more to me than it would Castro. I had to sell a magazine, after all. Castro had no problems getting people to listen to him talk. If it wasn’t going to be me, it was going to be someone. I had to come to some kind of agreement with Juan about how we could do the interview without compromising my journalistic ethics. So in the name of journalistic ethics, I awkwardly slipped my way across the bathroom tiles to grab the phone in the next room.
I answered the phone.

“This is John?” went the voice from the other line. The voice was thickly accented and husky. The voice of an older man. Definitely not Juan’s.

I said that it was John.

“This is Fidel,” came the response.

So there I was, dripping water on my bedroom floor, talking to Fidel Castro. Despite what some people on talk radio may tell you, this is an unusual event, even for me.

He asked me if I knew what time it was.

There was a clock on my bedside table. “It’s 10:10.”

“Exactly,” he said. “And do you know what else is ten-ten?”

“I bet you’re going to tell me,” I said.

“Is Cuban Independence Day, of course.”

“Message received,” I laughed. The man does know how to make a statement. And really, what else do you do except laugh, when you’re standing in a puddle of shower water and the Maximum Leader is quizzing you on Cuban trivia?

The leader of Cuba is a famously talkative man, and that night was no exception. We talked for nearly three hours with numerous digressions, but the conversation began and ended with discussions about our scheduled interview. Castro first proposed that we scrap our extended interview altogether, and that I instead do an extended piece on Elián, Juan-Miguel, and the rest of the Cuban Gonzálezes. He told me that Lazaro Munero, the boyfriend of Elián’s mother, had already made the trip to Miami and back once before, and had an extensive criminal record. He said that Munero might have even been involved in drug running.

Castro offered to let me interview Munero’s associates, too.

Since I had no interest in letting George become an English-language version of Granma, much less doing a longform piece on the saga of Elián, this was a nonstarter, and I told him so. Fidel Castro gives the impression of a man who does not often hear the word “no,” so it probably comes as no surprise that I had to restate my refusal in several different ways, at several points throughout the conversation. But it wasn’t our major sticking point. Our major sticking point was my refusal to agree to being noncommunicative with the Florida Gonzálezes.
To the extent that I’m willing to get into the details of a background conversation that spanned three hours, Castro’s concerns boiled down to this:

He considered the Florida Gonzálezes to be deeply enmeshed in the extremist exile community in Miami. Castro thought that he had been burned by the American media before, and he was concerned that if the Florida Gonzálezes were involved in the story, he was going to get burned again. The interview might be in Fidel’s words, but they would be framed and pruned by extremist exiles. I sympathized with his position, but I dug my heels in. The fact was, I wasn’t going to let Castro dictate who I was and wasn’t going to talk to. It was out of the question, and the fact of his insistence only made me want to talk with them more, not less. Did he have something to hide? Did they have some special knowledge of Castro that I wasn’t aware of?
And while it was true that I wasn’t going to let Castro dictate my sources, I didn’t tell him that I’d already been in contact with Lazaro González. How could I? If he was already suspicious of the mere idea of me talking to them, I doubted that I would be able to reassure him if he found out I already had.

So we were at an impasse.

It was Castro who broke it, albeit unintentionally. He had launched into a digression about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how nothing in US-Cuban relations had been the same since. I asked him why.

“Because Khrushchev tried to sneak the missiles,” he said. “And I tell him not to. Why? The US have missiles in Turkey. They did not sneak them in. Why must we sneak and hide, like we are criminals? But Khrushchev tried to hide them. Then, he is discovered. Then your father trust us no more. Then your father died. His opinions become the opinions of the country.”

It seemed to me that my present impasse with Castro also stemmed from mistrust. He didn’t trust me to write a fair story, and I didn’t trust him not to react unfairly if he knew I had already been in contact with the Gonzálezes. And that was the crux of it. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, but I didn’t think he would see it that way. Getting the interview was so important to me that honesty seemed like a risk I couldn’t take. So I fell back on abstractions, like my right to choose my own sources for a story. But it was getting me nowhere. The more I stood on principle, the more he mistrusted me. The more he pushed, the more I mistrusted him.

So I came clean. It was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking. Did it work out? Since you’re reading this, you know I got my interview. But the payoff wasn’t immediate. I told him about my contacts with the González family about an hour into our conversation. We talked for two more hours, and for a portion of the remaining conversation, Castro was angry. He felt he’d been deceived, and it was hard to blame him, because I’d been hiding something from him. But eventually, he came around. The modicum of trust we’d established between the two of us allowed us to have the interview we had, which is an interview that I don’t mind telling you that I’m proud of.

At six hours held over three days, it’s the longest interview I’ve ever done by a large margin. The subject is one of the 20th century’s most charismatic, controversial, and contradictory personalities, loved and hated by millions alike. And it’s an opportunity that I wouldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t taken a risk on trust.

It turned out to be the right risk.

I think there’s a lesson in there for us all.


Sincerely,

John Kennedy"

-----George, March 2000 issue.

---

OOC: Since I didn't want to do a giant, 10,000 word interview of just Kennedy and Castro, I thought I would give the intro here, and then sprinkle the excerpts in throughout the next three or four updates. The interview is going to be one of those things that has small but important ripples for a good portion of the story.

BTW, I hope the first-person excerpt from Kennedy works. I thought it would take too long to describe and dramatize all of that info in 3rd person, so 1st person it was. However, Kennedy's writing style, syntactically, is very different from mine. I love punctuation--italics, dashes, parentheses, semi-colons, etc--but he didn't use much of that at all. So it took a little bit of getting used to. Hope I hit my stride with it.

 

[dcharles]

“Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment was ‘do not speak ill of another Republican,’ and I’m not about to break it here this morning. But I’ll say this much: a lot of mud was flying through the air in Iowa, and John’s got an ironclad alibi--he was here in New Hampshire, talking to you folks at town halls all over the state. If you think you’re going to get straight talk from any of the other candidates in this race, get real. John is the only candidate with a chance to win who can restore honor and integrity to the White House.”
-----Steve Forbes, Jan 29th, 2000.

“I think we finally have a poll without a margin of error…”
-----John McCain, Feb 1st, 2000.

“Koppel: John McCain has won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide. Nearly sixty percent of the vote, Peter, that’s better than two to one over Governor Bush. Has McCain destroyed Bush’s air of inevitability? Is there a new front-runner in town?

Jennings: Well, Ted, McCain has certainly made a statement here tonight, and his brand of retail politics is certainly very popular with Republicans here in New Hampshire. But Governor Bush does have substantial advantages in fundraising and endorsements. The question is, can McCain translate his retail appeal to South Carolina, a much larger state with a very different culture?”

-----Nightline, Feb 1st, 2000.

“Schieffer: Mr. Rove, this past Tuesday we had a shockingly close result in Delaware, a state where John McCain hardly campaigned at all. There, we’ve got the graphic up on the screen. Exactly one-hundred and fifty votes, Mr. Rove. Some of our sources in the Republican Party are saying that people associated with the Bush campaign are starting to look for the emergency exits.

Rove: A win is a win, Bob. We won in Iowa, we won in Delaware, and we’re going to win this nomination. We’ve always known that McCain was strong in some of the smaller, more liberal states. That’s not what the rest of the map looks like.”

-----Bob Schieffer and Karl Rove, on Face the Nation, February 13th, 2000.


“While Rove denies any connection to the infamous push-polls or “Negro child” flyers that came to dominate coverage of the South Carolina primary, even he admits that South Carolina was a turning point. ‘New Hampshire was bad,’ said Rove. ‘We knew John would do well...for our part, we were expecting mid-to-high thirties, maybe even low forties. The Forbes endorsement killed any hope of that. Twenty-eight percent? Worst loss of George’s career. He was pretty despondent. It was clear that the gentleman’s agreement between him and John had to go.’”

----- The Dangers of Faction: Election 2000 and the End of the Sixth Party System, by Douglas Brinkley, 2008.

“I’ve gotta give you some background on this one. So, we’re talking early 2000. I’m working over at ABC, and me and Juju Chang are anchoring World News Now, the overnight news broadcast. And I’m also working at 20/20 during the day. So I’m sleeping in like, three hour blocks, tired all the time. It was grueling shit.

Probably why I went gray so early.

Anyway, that specific night--the night of the debate--I had been up for twenty-nine hours or something. I was practically hallucinating, I was so tired, and during one of the breaks, I noticed this fax. It’s the flyer. The fucking “McCain has a Negro love child flyer.”

We get in touch with the correspondent who sent the fax. Apparently, during the debate, while Bush was inside talking about “restoring honor and dignity to the White House” and acting offended about some negative spot that McCain had run, his goons--his supporters at least--were outside in the parking lot putting these racist flyers on people’s windshields.

Especially back then, you wanted to avoid bringing up another network unless you really needed to--using their footage, anything like that. So from our standpoint, it was perfect. That debate had been on CNN, Larry King moderating, and it was a snoozefest. I mean, if you knew what to look for, you could tell that McCain and Bush hated each other, but they were keeping it under control. With the flyer, we get to talk about the debate without blowing up CNN.

So do we run the flyer?

Of course we do. Let’s put it this way.

It’s 1:30 in the morning, you’ve got two anchors who are tired and bored. One of your anchors is a gay guy, one is a Jewish Korean-American woman. Of course, we’re trying to be objective, but we’re human beings. We’re covering a candidate who is talking about compassionate conservatism, but at the same time is trying to profit from all these really old, ugly forces in American society. Homophobia, racism, all that. And it’s in the public interest to show that.

So I sign off at 3:30, catch a couple of hours of sleep, and at 6 am, I’m on the phone to Lindsey Graham to see if he wants to comment. Graham was a McCain surrogate, a South Carolinian, and an early riser. He says he’s willing to comment, but he wants to do it on GMA. Well unbeknownst to me, Juju, who was on the air all night, had continued to reference the story, and Antonio Mora, who was the newsreader for GMA, had already decided to put the flyer story in the morning news update. So by the time I talk to Shelly, the EP over at GMA, they’re already primed and looking for commentary.

It just fell into place after that. Graham went on GMA on Wednesday morning, and the vote was that Saturday. It was the last big story before the primary. Did it affect the outcome in South Carolina? Maybe. But it sure as hell didn't make Bush look good in Washington, Michigan, or Arizona.”

-----Anderson Cooper, 2017, in Burned: the Rise, Fall, and Undeath of the Reform Party, by Matt Taibbi.

“But Rove’s account stretches credibility. Forbes had already shown himself to be an electoral nonentity in Iowa. To claim his endorsement in New Hampshire was responsible for McCain’s landslide victory is refuted by Bush’s own strong showing in Iowa…

...Rove’s efforts to distance himself notwithstanding, it must be noted that the ‘dirty tricks,’ whether in Iowa, South Carolina, or elsewhere, always seemed to redound to the benefit of his candidate.”

-----The Dangers of Faction: Election 2000 and the End of the Sixth Party System, by Douglas Brinkley, 2008.

 

[dcharles]

"Russert: After two close losses in Delaware and South Carolina, John McCain this week notched two impressive victories in Arizona and Michigan to pull ahead of Governor Bush in the delegate count–110 to 88. This week, eyes turn to the contest being held today in Puerto Rico, where Bush is heavily favored to win, and the contests in North Dakota, Washington, and Virginia on Tuesday, where the outcomes are far less certain. Here to help us make sense of the situation is NBC News Correspondent David Gregory, who’s been covering the Bush campaign, and Rick Davis, Senator McCain’s campaign manager.

David, first to you. What’s the sense you’re getting in the Bush camp this weekend? Is it one of panic, or are they confident in their position going forward?

Gregory: Well Tim, the sense that I’m getting here in Lynchburg today is really one of all hands on deck. Governor Bush is going to be personally campaigning non-stop through the weekend here in Virginia, and where he can’t be, his surrogates will be. The campaign thinks that there’s potential to put the McCain insurgency to bed this week. That they can run the table in all three of the–ah, four, excuse me--ah, contests. A show of strength across regions…

…

Russert: And to you, Mr. Davis–first, congratulations on the wins in Michigan and Arizona–but you know what the critics are saying–

Davis: And what’s that, Tim?

Russert: That Senator McCain was expected to win Arizona, and that–well your counterpart, Karl Rove, has already been saying that you won Michigan on the votes of independents and Democrats.

Davis: I hardly think that support from all corners of the American public is a problem–

Russert: It might be in a Republican primary."


---Meet The Press, February 27th, 2000

"Matthews: Well, maybe this is a trick question, I don’t think so,–

McCain: Never would Chris Matthews ask a trick question… Never!

Matthews: [laughs] If you had gotten a better vote from this crowd, the Religious Right, would you be lacing into them now? You got a lousy vote from them down in South Carolina, another lousy vote from them down in Virginia yesterday…is that why you’re going after them, because they’ve already decided against you?

McCain: I made that speech before the vote in Virginia, and we were very close in both of those states, as you know.

Matthews: But you’ve got great tracking polls, you know that that demographic is pulling away from you. [laughs] I know you do.

McCain: Well, no–ah, Chris, this really is what, ah, about which direction is the Republican Party going in? Are we the party of addition, or division? Are we the party of inclusion, or exclusion? Are we the party of dirty tricks, or are we the party of straight talk?

Look, this campaign now has become bigger than John McCain–and with my ego that’s very hard to say. But the fact is–[laughs]--the fact is, this has become all about the direction and reform of the party, and politics in America. We have made reform the centerpiece of this campaign, and the question is, what party are we going to be?

The party of Reagan, or the party of Nixon?"

Hardball with Chris Matthews, March 2nd, 2000.



"Inmate # 69427-71, the bullshit artist formerly known as Rick Davis, is the kind of guy who never seemed to quite grow into himself. There’s a birdlike quality to his features and a gawky, hyperventilating rhythm to his laugh. Seeing him here in prison–even if it is minimum security–I can’t help but imagine that he’s said the words, “you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses?” on more than one occasion.

In spite of the nerdy demeanor, or maybe in some Freudian way, because of it, Davis has an ingratiating manner, and as we sit down and exchange pleasantries I feel myself starting to like the guy. Considering what I knew about him even then, I assure you, that surprised no one more than me.

At the time I didn’t understand it. Now I do.

Chasing this story, I’ve had to interview a lot of pols and a lot of people who think they’re pols. (ex)Campaign managers tend to have all the charm of narcissistic bloodworms. They think they’re just great, and they’re so busy being bloodsuckers or casting around for their next host that they’ve never stopped to think that most decent people find them disgusting. Davis though, knows he’s radioactive. Federal prison will do that to a man, but by all accounts, Davis’ awareness of himself and others runs deeper. He has an uncanny ability to divine what a person really wants–even when they don’t know themselves–and repeat it back to them, repackaged in a way that’s advantageous to Rick Davis.

For example, Davis was disarmingly candid about his motivations for talking to me.

“Lee [Atwater] always taught me,” he said within a few minutes of sitting down with me, “that the worst thing you could do [with the media] is hide from them. If you’re engaging with the media, you’ve got some input into the narrative. If you’re not, you’re making their life harder, and they’ll repay you in kind.”

In one fell swoop, barely more than a sentence, he managed to tickle all of the major journalistic pretensions. That everybody’s got an angle and that we’re clever enough to see what they are; that we’re writing the first draft of history; that we’re hardworking and maybe even underappreciated; most of all, that we’re powerful.
We must be, right?
Even big-brain guys like Lee Atwater and Rick Davis want to stay on our good side…

… “There’ve been whispers,” I said. “Rumors. You, Manafort, Stone. There’s a lot of close ties there.” I wanted him to fill in the blanks.

Davis’ eye betrayed a glimmer from behind his chunky, horn-rimmed glasses. “Technically,” he said with a smirk, “mine and Paul’s firm was a separate thing from Black, Manafort, Stone.”

“Sure, technically. But I’m not here for technicalities.”

“Yeah, but you’re not asking the right questions yet.”

He was right. I was beating around the bush. “Fine. When did you know you were going to lose?”

He didn’t answer right away. In fact, when I asked, he leaned away from the table as if he were about to get up. But then his posture relaxed, and holding his hands up like I was pointing a gun at him, he chuckled his awkward hyperventilating chuckle. “You got me, boss. That’s the right question.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“Super Tuesday,” he said with a shrug.

Super Tuesday was the high point of the campaign, when all things were possible for team McCain and the rest of the passengers on the Straight Talk Express.

“But–” I stammered. Ask the right questions, I reminded myself. “When did McCain know?”

Davis broke into a broad reptilian grin.

“Last ballot of the convention.”

----- Burned: the Rise, Fall, and Undeath of the Reform Party, by Matt Taibbi, 2017

 

[dcharles]

---

John Kennedy: I understand that you found yourself in a similar situation to Juan-Miguel some decades ago, Mr. President.

Fidel Castro: Yesterday’s news, and not the kind of news that was ever in the public interest. We are not here to recount familial disputes from years and years ago, to titillate the prurience of the American media, or to humor the voyeuristic impulses of capital. In a Revolutionary society, the private lives of leaders and comrades are not objects of commodification.

JK: But I think that people, especially people in the US, would benefit from this context. There’s a reason why Elian’s ordeal, why Juan-Miguel’s ordeal, strikes you so personally, isn't there?

FC: The ordeals of all Cubans affect me personally. This is what it means to be the head of state in a Revolutionary government. I am a steward of my people.

JK: Respectfully, I’m asking a more specific question. Let’s reorient here…allow me to rephrase. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, congressman from Miami, has been blistering in his criticism of you–generally, and of course, specifically in regards to the Elian issue. Many people in the United States might be under the impression that, aside from being Cuban-American, he is otherwise a disinterested party. Would that impression be correct?

FC: ::Castro chuckles:: No. He is not disinterested in the sense of being impartial, no.

JK: And he is–would have been, excuse me–your nephew, is that correct?

FC: By marriage.

JK: And his aunt, Mirta, was your wife at one time. And according to our research, there was a custody dispute regarding your son, Fidelito. Correct?

FC: Yes, this is information that can be found in many biographies.

JK: But she absconded to Miami with your son, did she not?

FC: Abscond... I would call it kidnapping–he was kidnapped twice, as a matter of fact! Once by his mother, once at gunpoint by men acting on the orders of her and the Diaz-Balart family–although the law at the time did not call it kidnapping. Mirta, all the Diaz-Balarts, were allies of the old regime. The Batista regime. While I followed the path of the Revolutionary, Mirta did not. Would not.

JK: What Elian’s mother did–would you also call that kidnapping?

FC: What I would call it is not important. Juan-Miguel can come to his own conclusions, give his own characterizations. But when my son was stolen from me, there was no one to help me. Until the Revolution of 1959 was successful, they had all the power. I had to fight for years for my son, and in this, yes, the Diaz-Balarts became some of my oldest antagonists. And of course, I cannot see my countryman suffer without being moved by their suffering, not when I experienced suffering of equal magnitude. I know the emptiness, the loneliness, the fury of one who has been robbed of his own blood. The injustice. I could not face the Cuban people, nor stand the scourge of my own conscience, if I did not fight for Juan-Miguel as I fought for myself. This is what it means, Mr. Kennedy, to be the steward of Revolution.

-----George; March 2000 issue

---

March 10, 2000
Miami, Florida


“I told you Clinton was going to fuck you,” said Roger Stone, sipping on his cortado. A southern breeze whispered along 8th Street–better known in this neighborhood as Calle Ocho–and softened an already idyllic morning. March in South Florida was a damn fine month for sidewalk breakfasts, even if the old man was making him be there at 8:00. “And if you don’t think Reno’s about to fuck you, well, let’s just say she’s got a whole closet full of strap-ons and a spare in her briefcase.”

“Language, Roger,” said the old man in his Cuban-accented baritone. “We are at Versailles, not some train-station cantina.”

Cafe Versailles was a Calle Ocho institution, a hangout for Cuban exiles and increasingly, thought Roger with distaste, tourists. Basically, it was a diner, but it was a diner with marble fixtures and etched glass on the wall. A diner with ambition. With gravitas. A diner with history. The only kind of diner that Roger Stone would be seen at, in other words.

Show some respect, was what the old man meant.

“Fine,” said Roger. “I told you Clinton was going to jam you up, and he did. And I’m telling you now that Reno’s going to jam you up too, harder than that English muffin you’re about to desecrate. Doesn’t matter that she hasn’t said anything yet. Doesn’t matter that she’s a hometown girl. Reno’s going to do what Clinton wants, and Clinton doesn’t have the cajones to stand up to Castro. You know it, and I know it.”

Stone pushed his chair from the table, emphasizing his point and giving himself enough room to cross his legs. He had a brand new pair of suede buckskins–Allen Edmonds–and he wanted to show them off. They were the perfect accent to his green and white seersucker, and he thought the waitress might have been flirting with him. Working girls liked a little bit of flash, after all, and Roger was always one to give the people what they wanted.

Or needed.

The old man murmured to himself as he worked up what he wanted to say. Armando Perez-Roura, voice of Radio Mambí and among the most adamantine of all the hardcore reactionaries in the Exile community, was a slow talker, even in Spanish. His pace while speaking English was positively languid. “Sí. We have expected this, but there is only so much we can do. We are going up against Washington, we are going up against federal courts…”

Stone could hardly believe his ears. Was the old man going soft? “That’s exactly why we’ve got to take it out of their hands, Armando!” Perez-Roura went back about as far as anyone on the reactionary right went, Cuban exile or no. He’d gotten his start back in the days of Batista himself, played it cool under Castro for a few years after the Revolution, and made his way to Miami back in ‘69. He’d been stirring up shit ever since, from fundraising for terrorists to showcasing local right-wing pols who had a yearning for Cuban votes and liberty, thank you and please. Even longtime associates called him an “oracle of hate.” If he was sitting on his hands because of what some fucking judge somewhere was saying, things really were hopeless.

“What you want me to do, eh Roger? Take on La Migra?” Perez-Roura pushed the brown gradient-lens sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. Like everything else he was wearing, his sunglasses were a dozen years out of style.

Still, they were Ray-Bans. Armando’s shit was quality, even if it was out of date. It was as if he had walked into a fine haberdashery one misty day back in ‘88, gotten the best of everything, and hadn’t been back to a store since.

Roger didn’t know how a person could live that way–especially not a person with a mug like Armando’s–but to each his own.

“Listen,” said Stone, gesturing at 8th Street. “What was it–five, six years ago–you got a hundred thousand people marching down this very fucking street when Clinton decided to lock the refugees up in Guantanamo Bay. You lose your wallet on this street and you can get a thousand people out here looking for it.”

“This is a different situation. This is one boy.”

“And how many people in Little Havana–on this street, right now–think that one boy is a gift from God?” said Stone, tapping on the table to make his point.

Armando ripped a piece from the English muffin, sneering. “After all the marching and the demonstrating, the Guantanamo policy is the same.”

“But we killed Clinton in the midterms,” said Stone. “And if he’d realized just how bad a beating he was going to take, he would have backed off. He’s trying to get Gore elected in eight months, and now Gore’s on track to get killed. Clinton knows what kind of muscle you’ve got. As 8th Street goes, so goes Florida, so goes the country. He’s going to try and stall, going to try and lull you into a false sense of security, then he’s going to pounce. You can’t let him. You raise the temperature, you keep escalating, until Gore turns on him. He’ll cave.”

“What do you mean, pounce?”

“I mean that the judge ruled against us. Unless the Gonzalezes take this to the Supreme Court, they either give Elian to La Migra, or La Migra comes and fucking takes him.”

“Language, cabron!” said Perez-Roura, flashing anger and then plastering it over with a simian grin. “There are ladies present,” he said, gesturing to the waitress rounding the corner and stepping onto the sidewalk, water pitcher in hand.

“Ah, Mariela’s cool,” said Roger with a wink. “She’s not offended, ” He raised a mischievous eyebrow in her direction and let his arm drift over to her elbow. “Are you, Mariela?”
She demurred with a laugh and said something something cariño before she left. He loved it when they called him that.

“...more publicity,” Armando was saying. “Different publicity, actually. Our problem is that this is seen as just a Cuban issue. But tyranny is not a Cuban issue.”

“You need an outsider,” said Roger. “Sure, maybe Bush and McCain are saying some of the right things, but they’re not going to do shit. They’re worried about your primary here in a few days. After that, you’re not going to hear a peep, and by the time inauguration rolls around, Elian’s going to be in Havana somewhere, bouncing on Papa Fidel’s knee. The hammer can come down any day. I know you saw that George interview. This is personal for Castro. He’s not budging. You want to stop this thing from going down, you’ve gotta lean on Clinton. You’ve gotta gear up now.”

“¡Comepinga Kennedy!” Perez-Roura’s mouth twisted into a grimace of disgust at the mention of the George interview. “What did you have in mind?”
Stone didn’t know what ‘comepinga’ meant, but it didn’t sound good. “Language, Armando,” he said with a smile. “I’m here to solve your problems. You need publicity? Exposure for your side in the English language press, and not this faux-neutral bullshit that passes as journalism? Get me a rally. I’ll bring the cameras.”

“So it will look like a Trump rally? I am not stupid, Roger.”

No, thought Stone. You’re a fanatical, anticommunist relic, and the only thing you love more than hating Castro is the sound of your own voice. “That’s why they’ve gotta look independent. You plan the rally. The week before, we do an interview on Radio Mambí. You invite Trump to the rally on-air. That way it looks spontaneous.”

Perez-Roura popped the last of the English muffin in his mouth. Stone imagined that he could see the man thinking. Weighing his options.

“It sounds… expensive,” said Perez-Roura.

And lucrative. Perez-Roura would be able to eat out on a Trump interview for months. Stone allowed a smile to creep across his face. “I know a guy.”

“¿Entonces qué? What happens after the rally?”

“Jesus, Armando! Do I need to draw you a map? You organize at the rally. You flex some goddamned muscles. Mayor Carollo is already 90% of where you want him to be. You crank up the volume, you can get him to a hundred.”

“‘Get him to a hundred?’ What you mean, ‘organize?’ Organize to what?” said Perez-Roura.

He seemed genuinely confused. Maybe Stone did need to draw him a map.

“Massive resistance, Armando. When the Feds come, you lock down this neighborhood. Lock it down. It’s the only way you’re going to get Clinton to blink, and getting Clinton to blink is the only path to victory you’ve got left. What the hell else are we even talking about?”

---

Armando Perez-Roura, speaking before Donald Trump at the Calle Ocho Rally, March 25th, 2000.


"I love my Cubans! Cause you love freedom. Very passionate, very brave. And it's experience, you know? You guys know about tyranny, you've tangled with Fidel. What you guys in this neighborhood realize is that what they're asking, it's disgraceful. The island is a jail. It's a jail. A gulag. What Clinton is doing, what he's saying he's going to do, is to send the boy to a jail, so he can be raised up in a jail. It's not freedom. It's not leadership--and Castro's laughing at him right now, believe me--it's not law. What he thinks it is, what Slick Willy thinks, is he thinks it's going to be convenient. It's politics. Pure politics, is all.

What the people are saying though, what I keep hearing, is that you're going to show him that it's going to be inconvenient.

There's a lot of tough guys in this neighborhood. Tougher than Shaky Janet Reno, that's for sure. Tougher than Billy Boy. But they think that these tough guys are going to sit around and let Janet Reno kidnap a kid so that Bill Clinton can appease Crazy Fidel! I think--I think he's underestimating Miami, for one--he doesn't know South Florida like I do--but I think he's in for a rude awakening. If he tries to tangle with Little Havana, if he tries to tangle with Miami, it'll be wild. Will. Be. Wild. Okay? I can promise you that. "

-----Donald Trump, "Calle Ocho Speech" March 25th, 2000.

---

Los Guardianes, April 2000.

"The vigil marked a turning point in Reno's approach. Beginning in the first week of April, Los Guardianes maintained a 24-hour vigil at the Gonzalez residence in numbers that ranged from a mere handful to dozens on Saturdays and Sundays. Rather than the situation deescalating, as Reno had hoped, dragging the situation out appeared to be doing the opposite, giving the anti-deportation forces time to further inflame tensions. Reno, a South Florida native, knew that it would be weeks before the heat thinned out the ranks of the watchers, and feared that if she waited that long, the situation would have spun even farther out of control.

Whether or not Reno's fear was founded in reality is ultimately unknowable. It always easy to imagine a worse outcome than the one that happened. What is knowable is that the extraction itself was a fiasco from start to finish, mitigated in few, if any, respects. What else can be said about an operation that resulted in the deaths of three protestors and yet failed in it's ultimate goal, which was to procure Elian Gonzales?

...Mayors Carollo and Penelas had forbidden both the city and county police from giving so much as an escort for the APCs used by the INS, but it is strongly suspected that sources in one or both police agencies tipped off the neighborhood to the imminent arrival of federal law enforcement. As a result, the mob that met the armored personnel carriers in Little Havana outnumbered the INS agents better than 70-1."

-----The Dangers of Faction: Election 2000 and the End of the Sixth Party System, by Douglas Brinkley, 2008.

 

[dcharles]

“All of you are going to have to get over it. I’m not–I’m not taking any questions right now. I’ve got a prepared statement here, so I will brief you all on the facts as we know them at this point in time. Yesterday evening, at approximately 11pm, in accordance with Attorney General Reno’s announcement on Friday, agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service attempted to extract the minor child, Elian Gonzalez, from the residence of his uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez. As part of the extraction team, two armored personnel carriers carrying a Border Patrol Tactical team were sent for the purposes of crowd control and personnel transport. The armored personnel carriers were in the advance position in the extraction column, followed by several conventional vehicles and two civilian vehicles, white, late model Chrysler minivans. The minivans were there for the purposes of transporting the boy, Elian Gonzales, and any members of the extended family who may have wished to come. Upon arrival at the Gonzalez residence, the extraction team encountered a group of protesters that was substantially larger than our intelligence suggested or that we anticipated. Our intelligence, which was fresh, and given to us by reliable sources, suggested a crowd of no more than one hundred persons. When the extraction team arrived, at least five hundred persons were surrounding the house and blocking our way. As the extraction team attempted to secure a path to the residence, the crowd, many of whom appeared to be intoxicated, continued to grow, and became more aggressive in their efforts to block the extraction team. The APCs and our agents were pelted with dangerous debris, including stones and glass bottles. As one of our agents attempted to exit one of the APCs, one individual, Wilfredo Flores, became very confrontational and attempted to grab the weapon of the agent in question. In an attempt to ensure the safety of both the civilians in the crowd and our agents, the agent in question was forced to fire upon Mr. Flores, which did, in fact, result in his death. At that point, seeing that the BORTAC unit was greatly outnumbered, and in an attempt to prevent further loss of life or injury, the Special Agent in charge of the operation made the decision to abort. The other two deaths were unrelated to the actions of our agents. One of the decedents, an elderly woman, died of an apparent cardiac arrest. The other decedent appears to have been trampled by the mob itself…”

—--Robert Wallis, Miami District Director of the INS, speaking at a press conference the morning of Sunday, April 9th, 2000.

---

“Bullshit. If Ricardo was trampled, how come there was tire tracks on his shirt?”

—--Adoncia Alvarez-Ortiz, widow of Ricardo Alvarez-Ortiz, April 10th, 2000.

---

“But for all the folks talking about lawlessness, talking about mob rule, you’ve gotta ask yourselves, where would this crowd have been in 1775? Which side would they have been on then? Because it’s a patriot’s duty to resist tyranny, and I don’t know how much more tyrannical you can get than sending a bunch of jackbooted thugs–and that’s what Reno’s goons are, people–into a quiet residential neighborhood to kidnap a little boy and pack him off to Castro’s Cuba! The whole operation stinks! You’ve got the Justice Department claiming that Mr. Alvarez was trampled, but every witness on the scene says that he was run over like a dog in the street.

And now–now–we’ve got the memo! We don’t know the identity of the leaker yet, but we now know, for a fact, that Juan-Miguel Gonzalez applied for a visa. A lottery visa. Which is proof positive, dear listeners, that the father is now being coerced! Of course, I don’t have to tell most of you that. Most of my listeners have the good sense to know that Castro’s–let me repeat–that CASTRO'S not on the level! But if any of you, out there in America, if any of you had any doubts in your heart—it’s time to open your eyes!”

—--Rush Limbaugh, April 12th, 2000.

---

"Russert: General Reno, suffice it to say, it’s been a tumultuous week. Last Saturday, we had the aborted raid–

Reno: Extraction operation.

Russert: –to secure Elian Gonzalez. On Monday, we had the leak of the Meissner memo. Every day since, we’ve seen huge demonstrations and widespread, if intermittent, rioting in Miami. On Friday, Doris Meissner, head of the INS, resigned, something that many on the right were calling for. The head of the Miami District Office of the INS, Robert Wallis, also resigned, and there have been calls for your resignation as well. We’ve seen attacks on federal property in the Miami area, and to top it all off, Elian Gonzalez is still in the custody of his Miami relatives. What’s the next move?

Reno: Right now, we’re doing everything we can to reunite Juan-Miguel Gonzalez, at least for the purposes of visitation, with Elian. He’s been in the country for ten days at this point, and he’s been separated from his son for almost five months now. That’s our highest priority.

Russert: Then why hasn’t there been another attempt to extract him?

Reno: We want to reunite them safely. With the unrest in the city right now, we don’t believe that would be the wisest option in terms of safety.

Russert: Well, if safety is the priority, why send in the SWAT team at all?

Reno: At the time that decision was made, we felt that we had reached an impasse with the family, and the extraction operation was the quickest and safest way to resolve it. We still believe, had news of the operation not been leaked to elements of the Exile community, that would have been the case.

Russert: And do you know the identity of the leaker? When this is coupled with the leaking of the Meissner memo, it seems like you've got a serious problem with leaks at the DO--

Reno: We’re conducting a full investigation as we speak, Tim. I can’t give details on an ongoing investigation.

Russert: --at the DOJ. You cited the civil unrest as the reason that there hasn’t been another attempt to extract Elian. There have been reports that the Miami police have turned a blind eye to some of the attacks on Federal property–is the Department of Justice, or the Federal Government more broadly, going to do anything to restore law and order to the city of Miami?

Reno: All options are on the table at the moment.

Russert: Does that include federalizing the National Guard?

Reno: Well right now, this is still a state matter. We’ve been in contact with Governor Bush, and as of yet, he hasn’t made the decision to send in the National Guard.

Russert: But President Clinton can go over his head and federalize the National Guard–

Reno: And right now, he’s given the latitude to the Governor of Florida, Governor Bush, to make that call, as to whether to deploy the Guard. I can’t speculate as to how much longer the President is going to let Governor Bush continue to have that latitude, but for now that's the situation.

Russert: Moving on to the Meissner memo. In that document, which is a summary of a conference call between INS employees, including Meissner, written by INS attorney Rebecca Sanchez-Roig, we apparently have the INS discussing the Elian situation back in December. It says here--and let me quote--'it appears that the father had made application (potentially lottery) to depart Cuba,' intimating, of course, that Juan-Miguel is now being coerced into saying that he wants to stay in Cuba. Now, I'm going to put a graphic of the memo up on screen here--you can see in the corner there that someone has handwritten on the typed memo that the document should be destroyed. Before her resignation, but after the leak of the memo, Director Meissner said that INS could find no record of a visa application from Juan-Miguel Gonzalez. Many in the Republican Party are calling this evidence of a cover up. What say you, General Reno?"

-----Tim Russert and Janet Reno, Sunday, April 16th, on Meet the Press

Robert Wallis, April 14th, 2000 immediately after resignation.

---

Roberts: ...and later, for our roundtable dicussion, EJ Dionne, Mary Matalin, and George Will, join Sam and I to discuss the entrance of talk-radio firebrand Bob Grant into the New Jersey Senate race--on the Reform Party ticket--and the ongoing unrest in Miami. But first, Miami Mayor Joe Carollo joins us live from Miami this morning.
Mayor Carollo, good to have you with us.

Carollo: Good to be here, Cokie.

Roberts: Mayor Carollo, we've received numerous disturbing reports that the Miami Police Department has been, in essence, turning a blind eye to the destruction of Federal property by predominantly Cuban-American rioters in the city of Miami.

Carollo: False. Totally false. And I have to correct you there, Cokie. It's not Cubans rioting in Miami, and I wouldn't even call it riots--

Roberts: You haven't? What do you call it?

Carollo: We've had demonstrations! And these demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, Cokie. There has been some looting, opportunistic looting, where the police have been stretched so thin attending to the demonstrations. And not in Cuban neighborhoods, either. You're seeing this looting in all the usual places. Liberty City, Little Haiti...and we wouldn't even be having these demonstrations if it wasn't for the actions of Clinton and Reno. And, listen, I'm going to tell you--at risk to myself, because there have been threats--what we've really got here, the problem in Miami, we've got an out of control federal law enforcement, killing loyal, freedom-loving citizens in our streets.

Roberts: Threats, Mayor Carollo?

Carollo: Absolutely. It's a disgrace. And down here in Miami, we've practically been abandoned by the media and by the national politicians. Everyone's talking about law and order in Miami. But it's not the people of Miami who are killing federal agents--

Roberts: Now, according to former Director Wallis and the Department of Justice--

Carollo: --BUT FEDERAL AGENTS WHO ARE KILLING US! You want to start with law and order, you start in Washington DC, with Reno and Clinton! The Gangsters-in-Chief!

Roberts: Mayor Carollo, Mayor Carollo. Please. Ah, prior to the raid last Sunday, you and Mayor Penelas--for our viewers who are unfamiliar, Penelas is Mayor of Miami-Dade County, you're the Mayor of the City of Miami--you both vowed that you would not aid federal efforts to secure Elian Gonzalez. Some are saying that decision directly led to the tragic situation and loss of life that we all witnessed. If there is another attempt, another raid, would you reconsider your stance with respect to allowing the Miami police to assist federal law enforcement?

Carollo: I'm going to have to correct you again, Cokie, because the INS never advised us that they were going to try and seize Elian.

Roberts: But you had already publicly vowed that you wouldn't allow the Miami PD to assist them in any way--

Carollo: Please. If they had valued the lives of our community, they would have reached out to my office. Even if I would not assist them, I could still take steps to make our community safe.

Roberts: You say you feel abandoned by the national politicians. But up until this past week, most of the national Republican Party has been very supportive of the position of the Cuban-American community here.

Carollo: And when things got tough--in Spanish, we have an expression: amigos de conveniencia. Friends of convenience. When it was convenient for them, when they needed our votes, they were very supportive. But now the primaries are over, and where are they? The only national politician who has stood by us, even when there wasn't a primary? Donald Trump! And he's not even a Republican!"

Cokie Roberts and Mayor Joe Carollo, Sunday, April 16th, on This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts

---

Miami was burning, the Republican Party was locked in the longest, most bitter primary battle since 1976, and a third party candidate was polling within striking distance of the major party candidates. And with all that, John Kennedy, the hottest magazine publisher in the country, was struggling to get a decent cover story for June.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

He’d had a sit down with McCain planned since just after Super Tuesday–when McCain won California, New York, and the rest of New England–and turned this thing into a real race. Way back then, they’d agreed to a date in mid-April. For reasons the RNC had no doubt come to regret, they had scheduled a month-long break in the primary calendar. Between the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin primaries on April 4th and a trio of primaries–Indiana, North Carolina, and DC–on May 2nd, no contests, conventions, or caucuses took place. During what was some of the best campaigning weather in the country, the only thing to occupy the candidates was the hot air they blew at one another and the slow avalanche of bad luck and trouble that was the Elian Gonzalez saga. It was a recipe for turning an already contentious primary into a blood feud.

For now, McCain was ahead in the delegate count by three or four whiskers. How long that would last was anyone’s guess. Of the fifteen nominating contests scheduled between May 2nd and June 6th, McCain was favored to win exactly one–the DC primary–with its fifteen delegates. The polling showed McCain as competitive in Indiana, and though Kennedy hadn’t seen any polling out of Jersey, it seemed like a state where McCain might do well. Aside from that, the month of May was the Heart of Darkness for the Straight Talk Express. States like Arkansas, Kansas, and Kentucky dominated the calendar; places where McCain’s rebuke of the Religious Right was unlikely to win him many friends among the voters, or influence among the people who told the voters how to vote. There was a chance–becoming more and more likely with each passing day–that McCain would end the primary season as the Republican candidate with the most votes but not the most delegates. Deep in the dogfight with Bush for the hearts and minds of Middle America, McCain had decided that a George cover would do him more harm than good at the moment.

“I’m going to have to put you off, John,” McCain had said to Kennedy, after he’d already ducked him for three rounds of phone tag.
Even when the guy was flip-flopping, he was a straight talker. “I’ll get square with you after June. It’s the best I can do. George is too hot right now–the goddamn Looney Tunes contingent is still up in arms about the Castro interview, for Christ’s sake, you know how many Cubans there are in New Jersey?”

Kennedy leaned forward at his desk, massaging his eyeballs, trying to keep the tension out of his voice. “You’re not putting me in a good position here. We’ve had this lined up for a month. The Castro interview was already out when you agreed to do it.”

“Well that was before Miami had turned into the goddamned state of nature, wasn’t it?” said McCain. “Things change.”

After the night of the failed raid, whole sections of Miami had descended into violence and chaos, first as demonstrations, then as riots. They were the largest civil disturbances in America since the LA Riots back in ‘92. More than one Post Office had been firebombed, and several windows had been shot out of the Federal Building on Brickell–a section of the city that was somewhat adjacent to Little Havana. “I’ve got a magazine to put out. The interview’s a regular feature. I’m supposed to get an in-depth lined up and ready to go in what, a week? Two weeks?”

“Well I’ve got a fucking nomination to secure! This is the presidency we’re talking about. Get some fucking perspective.”

That was rich. Kennedy made a noise that was somewhere between a sigh, a groan, and a growl. “Listen, give me a date. When do you want to reschedule?”

“We can always do it in August,” said McCain, a sly smile coming through his voice on the telephone line.

“So it runs after the convention? Gimme a break. The last primary’s on the 6th. That’s a Tuesday. How about that Friday?”

McCain agreed and they said their goodbyes. Once he heard the line go click on McCain’s end, he slammed the receiver down in the outburst of private, petulant rage that had been building for the entire conversation. In the process, he managed to–somehow–tweak his neck, and a spasm of pain froze him in asymmetrical lurch. It was always like this. Even in the moments when his mind had wandered from the crash, his body missed no opportunity to make him remember.

Luckily, he had a bottle half full of Oxycontin in his desk drawer.

He popped a few back and tried to figure out what he was going to do while he waited for the pain to dull.

There were three people who might end up as President in November–Gore, Bush, or McCain. (Although, if you wanted to be generous and throw Trump in the mix, Kennedy supposed that there was an outside chance that there might be four.) McCain had already backed out of his interview, and if he thought George was too controversial for the base, then that probably went double for Bush. As far as Gore went, it seemed vaguely disrespectful to ask the sitting Vice President to understudy for McCain on short notice. McCain might not even get the nomination, after all. Gore already had the nomination of his party sewn up.

Plus, Gore wasn’t even good copy.

His policy platform was so unambitious that his slogan might as well have been Gore 2000: Nothing to See Here, Folks. And while the same thing could have probably been said about Clinton, at least Clinton’s personality and proneness to scandal were engaging enough to make you forget about it. Gore was best known for having a wife who slapped warning labels on rock records. He seemed to be striving mightily to be the Democratic Party’s answer to Bob Dole; the living embodiment of the word “staid.”

There was a reason why, even in the two-way polls, that Gore’s numbers liked to hang out in the high thirties, and it wasn’t because of a huge contingent of undecideds. If a man was trying to sell magazines– and John Kennedy was trying to sell magazines–there were few ways to make it harder on himself than to slap Al Gore’s face on the cover.

That left Trump as a possible substitute, but Kennedy knew Trump and he didn’t take him or his run particularly seriously. There wasn’t much there there, and what was there, Kennedy didn’t particularly like. Everything was a pissing contest with Donald, even when no one was contesting anything. About a year ago, he’d found himself sitting next to Trump at a Knicks game–one of the many times in his life he’d inadvertently found himself in the same room as the man who Graydon Carter, now a colleague at Conde Nast, had memorably referred to as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” All night, Trump had tried to make bets with him about which one of them could pick up the most cheerleaders–despite the fact that John was married and trying to politely ignore him the whole time.

But even if John had wanted to politely ignore Trump’s run for office, Donald was going to make it difficult–just as he had at the Knicks game. These days, Trump was polling in the twenties, well on track to match Perot’s numbers from ‘92. Add to that the fact that Trump seemed to have a savant-like quality to say things that were both controversial and popular, and it made it nearly unavoidable that George was going to have to devote many thousands of words to his run.

Just not necessarily in the June issue.

The Trumps had always had a middling-to-bad reputation in New York. Fred Trump, the family patriarch, had always been a little too comfortable flouting the landlord/slumlord line to ever be Manhattan respectable, and Donald, an inveterate daddy’s boy if there ever was one, had a driving pathology to be even brasher, tougher, and more hard nosed than his father was perceived to be. In the world of upper class New York in the 80s and 90s, that added up to a guy who was always bragging at parties about head-to-heads with aging mobsters and nickel and diming people whenever he could get away with it. It was not behavior likely to endear one to the New York aristocracy–they preferred their exploitation performed from a plausibly deniable distance and converted into numerical abstractions. Stiffing plumbing contractors was too gauche for the mahogany and leather set at the Century Club, and gossiping about it was even worse. So while there was plenty of rumor and innuendo in the air, it was all light on details.

When John covered Trump, he didn’t want the coverage to be light. He didn’t want the people to have to read between the lines. He wanted the people reading the coverage to get the feeling of what it was like to be in a room with Donald Trump–the boorishness, the narcissism, the incipient megalomania, the feeling that somehow, he was on the verge of sucking all the oxygen from the space. He couldn’t do that justice in the space of a week or two.

Donald would have to wait.

The Oxys were finally starting to kick in, and the rhythm of phones ringing and keyboards clacking in the offices and cubicles outside began to coalesce into an ambient beat.

He leaned back in his chair and squeezed his stress ball back and forth.

A plan was coming together.

“Rosie!” he yelled. Rosemarie Terenzio was John’s fierce and diminutive executive assistant–more a right hand than secretary. She’d kept George going before the crash, and now he leaned on her more than ever. When his leg was acting up, sometimes literally. “McCain just bailed. See if you can get me Jesse Ventura’s phone number.”

Ventura, the former pro-wrestler-cum-Minnesota governor, was affiliated with the Reform Party, and, like McCain and Trump, had a reputation for shooting off at the mouth and attacking the entrenched “interests” who were pulling the strings of American democracy. He’d been a big booster of Trump’s all season, and Kennedy suspected that Trump would tap him for VP when the time came. An interview with him might be a way to softly check some of the same boxes as a McCain or Trump interview without shooting his wad too early.

While Kennedy waited for Rosie to work her magic, he put in a call to John Dougherty down in Phoenix. Dougherty was the reporter who’d helped him out on short notice with the Arpaio piece. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Kennedy remembered that Dougherty had broken the Keating Five story.

John McCain was one-fifth of the Keating Five.

“Straight-Talk Express, Dougherty: buy or sell?” asked Kennedy after they’d said their preliminaries.

“Oh, God.” Dougherty gave a weary laugh. “Hard sell.”

“Reasoning?”

“Because it’s bullshit, man.” Dougherty’s voice sounded like a shrug. “John freaking McCain, of all people, talking about money corrupting politics… It’s like a pawnbroker complaining about banks ripping people off.”

“Does this go back to Keating?”

“It goes back to Keating-the-guy. ‘It’ goes back before the scandal.”

“In what way?” said Kennedy.

“Alright, Keating Five scandal. Charlie Keating, investor and impresario, has been using granny’s money down at the savings and loan as his own personal marker for years–taking stakes in all kinds of risky ventures. Illegal as hell, of course. By ‘87, ‘88, the regulators are onto him, and Keating wants them to piss off. So Keating gets his five pet Senators to go down to the bank regulators and tells them to knock it off. The regulators don't like being intimidated, and the shitstorm ensues. McCain’s big cover-your-ass excuse for the whole thing was that he was just a baby senator at the time. Only been in office a few months, blah blah. The thing is, McCain had been in Washington for years before then. He’d been in the House since ‘82, and back then, he was Charlie Keating’s boy. Keating cut him in, to the tune of two, three hundred thousand on the same kind of development deal that made the savings and loan go belly-up. He had the keys to Keating’s vacation homes–”

“Gotcha,” said Kennedy. He’d heard enough to make his decision. “I’ve got an interview scheduled with McCain for the 9th of June. It’s going to be the cover, and since he might be the nominee by that point, I want this to be meatier than just an interview.” Kennedy hadn’t planned for it to be a heavy-hitter, not before McCain had put him off, but as John McCain himself had said–things change. “I want you to partner with me on it. You broke Keating Five, you’ve been covering Arizona politics for years… There’s literally no one better, maybe anywhere in the world, to work with on this. You’ll get a byline on the piece, of course, along with me.”

“Well…”

“Yeah?” said Kennedy.

“How much?”

Kennedy didn’t feel like haggling, and the Oxys were making him feel generous. “We’ll shoot for 5,000 words. We go over, we go over. Let’s say 75–no– 80 cents a word.” If staff writers at alt-weeklies in Phoenix made anything like what they made in New York, that was probably more than Dougherty made in a month. He didn’t wait for Dougherty to say yes. “If you can give me some preliminary research by the end of this week, I’ll have my EA, Rosemarie, call you and set up a time next week for us to work up an outline.”

“This week?”

“If you deal with McCain the same way you deal with Arpaio, you’ve probably already got a dossier. Just give me some good bullet points on the Arizona stuff. I’ve already got a decent handle on his campaign now, and I’ll have my people here see what they can find out about what he’s been up to in Washington. We gotta deal?”

Of course they did.

 

[dcharles]

“‘...When you’ve had the opportunity to know a state and its people the way I’ve been privileged to know the people of the Great State of Florida–from Pensacola to Key West and everything in between–well, you know how much there is to love, and you know how hard a decision like this is to make.

Today I have given the order to deploy the National Guard into the City of Miami, effective immediately.

This is not an order that I issue lightly. Two years ago, when I was campaigning to be your Governor, I promised to be a consensus builder. But I also promised to be pragmatic, and not to flinch when the tough decisions came my way. When I took the oath of office, I promised to faithfully uphold the laws of the state I love, and so help me, God, that is what I intend to do. I do not give this order as a partisan exercise or to aid one faction over another, though it will no doubt affect an issue with many partisans on both sides. Likewise, I do not not give this order to deter protest or assembly, but rather, to create the lawful, orderly atmosphere that allows all voices to be heard.

Finally, I do not give this order in defiance of federal guidance, but rather, in the absence of it. Therefore, to protect life and property, to assist the civil authorities in restoring order, and indeed, to make the streets of Florida safe for the people of Florida, I am ordering General Matthews of the Florida National Guard to mobilize and deploy what units he deems necessary and sufficient to restore order in the City of Miami and any other portions of Miami-Dade County which may be experiencing civil unrest.

Thank you. A few brief questions…Yeah, the Herald.’

‘Thank you Governor. As early as Friday morning, Mayor Penelas was publicly suggesting that the Miami-Dade Police wouldn’t be able to handle what they were anticipating over the weekend, and we’re all certainly shaken by what’s transpired. Why the delay?’

‘Well, we’ve, uh, been looking for clarity from the Federal government, and, look, you want to talk about Friday, what Penelas said on Friday? Well, this morning Joe Carollo was still saying that there were no riots, and so it’s a question of who do you…You know, when you’ve got a family, and there’s a disagreement, sometimes you’ve gotta give them some space to get on the same page. You know? It’s about respect. Giving them that space? It’s an act of love.’”

—Governor Jeb Bush, opening remarks at press conference on the evening of April 16th, 2000.


“JEB MOVES IN” –Headline, St. Petersburg Times, April 17, 2000.

“BUSH SENDS IN GUARD, STUMBLES AT PRESS CONFERENCE”--Headline, Tampa Tribune, April 17, 2000.

---

The National Guard took a heavy handed approach to looters.

---

“Though he demurred as to whether he was still in regular contact with Clinton during the Saguesera Riots, Rahm Emanuel is, if anything, a talker, and he was more revealing when asked about Clinton’s mindset at the time of the riots.

‘When you think about those days,’ he said, making broad, expressive hand gestures. ‘You have to remember where President Clinton came from. Who the hell is Bill Clinton–I mean, before he’s Bill Clinton, attorney and governor and president–before that, who the hell is he?’

The cadence of Emanuel’s voice slowed, at odds with the wiry, diminutive frame and the expansive gesturing. ‘He’s a kid from Hope, Arkansas, named Billy Blythe. And if you know anything about his background, you know that there was a lot of conflict, a lot of abuse in his childhood. He had to take a lot of shit to come by that name–Clinton.’

‘Like a lot of people who grow up in environments like that, President Clinton developed a lot of instincts–how to comfort the distraught, how to show compassion, how to mediate between warring parties–that served him well.

‘During the Kennedy thing, that played to his strengths in a way that everyone got to see. That was Maximum Bill, Consoler-in-Chief. Develops enormous goodwill. Fucking tremendous,’ he said, hands miming two fireworks exploding in the air. ‘Best numbers of his presidency, and he rode that wave for a while. The numbers stay strong through Elian, and even during the first few days of the riots, the conversation isn’t about federalizing the guard.

‘You know, sometimes guys like me, we give ourselves a little too much credit… Nobody had to teach Clinton how to fucking triangulate. The early stumbles–they’re management skills, basically. It wasn’t an ideological development. Clinton triangulates li–he naturally finds the center of an issue, is all.’

He waved the tangent away like it was an unwelcome visitor.

‘With all the fucking Elian shit, it can’t be triangulated. That’s the god-damned point. It’s a situation where you’ve got 60% who kind of, sort of think that outcome A would be pretty good. Then the other 40% passionately believe–I mean, believe right-down-to-their-nuts kind of faith–that outcome B is their only salvation. Sure, the majority has the numbers. But in a case like this, the forty percent…They’ve got the fire, and they can bring the fucking heat.

‘From the perspective of a triangulator, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can’t win by accommodating the forty percent, because you’ll never be able to go as far as they want you to go. And if you go against them, they’ll sure as shit make you lose. Hindsight, you know.’

Emanuel drifted off, leaning back in his executive chair and sighing like the defeat was personal. Officially, Emanuel had already left the White House by the time the Elian saga came to a head.

Alas, a man like Rahm never really leaves politics.

‘These are my impressions,’ he said, taking pains to make it clear that he didn’t speak for the former President. For all his bare-knuckle bravado and profane quirks, Rahm Emanuel is still an insider, and insiders know where the lines are and how to avoid crossing them.

But if these are Emanuel’s impressions of the situation, they in turn create the impression in the listener that the President had no strong feelings about the Elian affair either way. Emanuel’s account suggests that Clinton’s actions were more directed towards threading a political needle than they were toward achieving a specific outcome.

Is that why they seem so unfocused in hindsight?

True to pugilistic form, Rahm pushed back on the implication, making sure in the process that he established the kind of eye contact that would have made an executive success coach proud. ‘The President had strong feelings that the law should be enforced. At this point, the family is flouting court orders, going round and round with Justice, stonewalling. Something had to be done. But what? What the fuck do you do?

‘The concern was–I suspect– that the President wanted to avoid appearing heavy-handed. There’s a lot of sensitivities around an issue like this. The election year… Listen, I can tell you for a fact that it would have been known to Attorney General Reno, prior to any of this, that a Waco kind of stand-off was not, you know, the desired response. So she opts for a raid. Sends in the SWAT team, or the BORTRON or whatever the fuck it was called. Does it at night so there won’t be as many eyes on it. And hey, if the intelligence about the crowd had been right, the SWAT guys could have handled it.

‘But we got hustled. Out-fucking-worked. The whole time Reno’s thinking that she’s giving space for tempers to cool, all these geezers from the fucking Cold War start coming out of the wordwork. And when I say fucking Cold War geezers, I mean it. These were the kind of guys that tried to assassinate Castro in their spare time. Fucking CORU, Alpha 66, Brothers to the Rescue–that fucking neighborhood, the Gonzalezes, that whole scene–was crawling with them. They got tipped off. They were ready and we weren’t. You know how it ends.’

Emanuel got up with a shrug and moved wordlessly to a liquor cabinet. If he understood that the raid’s tragic and shabby ending didn’t illuminate the President’s mindset in the week after, he gave no indication. Emblematic of Clintonworld’s blindness on this issue? Maybe.

Perhaps instead, it was only thirst--albeit the kind that can only be slaked by lukewarm vodka and soda water.

While the eventual Barr Committee may have been focused on negligence and supposed malfeasance leading up to April 8th, it was the events of the following week that transfixed the nation. Monday and Tuesday saw the largest demonstrations in Miami history. By Wednesday evening, as the public was wrapping its head around Al Gore’s befuddling half-condemnation of the raid, the first post office had gone up in flames. Thursday kicked off a long weekend of rioting and a Friday/Saturday/Sunday of will they/won’t they between Governor Bush and President Clinton. All the while, Mayor Joe Carollo was emitting a steady patter of flagrant lies and incendiary misinformation, the Cuban Exile’s answer to Lord Haw-Haw.

Lost in the discussion about the authorship of memos and flouting subpoenas are the larger questions surrounding Clinton’s reluctance to assert himself. Emanuel responds only by way of mitigation.

‘Look, at that point, he was getting it from all sides. The far right is calling him a leftist tyrant and the center right is saying he’s incompetent. Then, the fucking Vice President all of a sudden gets vocal about something that he should have brought up ninety days ago or shut the fuck up about, and that opens the door on the Democratic side. So, are these people talking about federal overreach or what? Well then, let the state of Florida sort it out. Why does he gotta wear that jacket? If he’s going to get fucked for his troubles no matter what, it’s just self-interest.’

While few would deny that Clinton’s actions were self interested, to say that they were in his interest is another matter. Mere ‘self-interest’ wears thin as a motivator when the consequences were so dismal for all involved; it obscures more than it reveals. It needs a new descriptor, free from the pretensions to cleverness that ‘self-interest’ implies. It needs a word that captures the pettiness and venality wherein a man allows a situation to fatally deteriorate, both for fear of the criticism he might incur for making it better, and in anticipation of the criticism his foes might incur for acting in his stead.

It’s an old word: Spite.”

----All Fall Down: American Entropy at the Millennium's Edge, by Joe McGinniss, 2007.

---

“You said you knew it was over on Super Tuesday. What was it about that day? Was it the California exit poll?

Davis was shaking his head before I finished. ‘That’s what all y’all media folks think,’ he said. ‘The Republican vs. Independent thing. But that’s not it. Look, the rules can say what they want to, but the convention is going to seat who it seats. All that the California result meant to me was that the California delegates probably weren’t going to be the deciding votes, and whoever was going to win anyway would probably get the California delegates.’

‘So what was it?’

‘A combination of the map and the rules.’

‘You just said the rules didn’t matter.’

‘These rules matter,’ he said, half snorting, half chuckling, adjusting the horn rims. ‘Back then, the RNC didn’t just assign delegates based on population. They had a formula, but basically, states were awarded bonus delegates based on how Strong R they were. So if you had a Republican governor, maybe, that’s an extra five delegates. An extra few delegates for every Republican Congressman you sent to the House, every Senator, and so forth. Same thing for state legislatures. For me on Super Tuesday, it was three states. Missouri, Ohio, and Georgia. I knew then, seeing how we’d done there. I don’t even think we cracked 40% in Georgia.’

‘So why were those states significant?’ I asked, buying time to formulate the question I really wanted to ask.

‘Because those states were more typical of the profile of a strong Republican state.’

‘And you couldn’t win without states like that, because of the way the delegates were weighted.’

‘That’s right,’ said Davis. His tone of voice was only a little patronizing.

I still felt dumb. ‘But McCain’s whole strategy was Blue State—I mean, I guess they didn’t call them that back then,’ I said, getting sidetracked. ‘But his whole strategy was Blue State-Swing State. Your whole strategy. Are you saying now that it was always nonviable?’

‘Well I always knew that we were going to have to pick up some Red States. I thought we would get Indiana. Came this close,’ he said as he held up his thumb and forefinger. He shook his head and made a regretful noise. ‘And I, I still think that Jeb Bush sending in the National Guard the week before cost us. We lost by less than a half a percent there. Around three thousand votes… A lot could have changed if we’d won Indiana.’

‘When did you share your concerns with Senator McCain?’ I said.

Davis grinned. “I’m going to have to plead the Fifth on that one, Boss. At least for now.’ He pointed to the clock behind my head. ‘Time’s up.’

I turned around to see a disinterested CO opening the steel door.

‘They don’t like it when you make them wait,’ said Davis. He shuffled over to the CO and waved goodbye without looking back. Then he was gone.

I was in the car before it occurred to me that ‘plead the Fifth’ might have been more than an expression. I reviewed my notes when I got home. The Indiana primary had been on May 2nd. The right questions clicked into place.

If Indiana had been, as Davis implied, the last time he had a reasonable hope of victory, what were the ethical implications of the millions raised through the months of May, June, and July? And beyond questions of ethics, what was the motivation?
Surely, there was more to it than competitive inertia.”

----- Burned: the Rise, Fall, and Undeath of the Reform Party, by Matt Taibbi, 2017

---

Governor Jesse Ventura and candidate Donald Trump together at a press conference. Ventura was one of Trump's earliest and most enthusiastic supporters.

---

“JK: The last time I remember a Jesse Ventura story that wasn’t Trump-related was a couple months ago. There was some smoke about a back-and-forth between you and the national branch of the Reform Party. What’s your relationship to the Reform Party now?

JV: Well, I’m not about to sit up here and gossip, so if that’s what you’re after, you’re barking up the wrong tree. [laughs] It’s a fair question though. If you want to understand my relationship to the Reform Party, you’ve got to understand my own political history.

When I started out as a candidate, it was as Mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. I had a conversation with a high school teacher who suggested that I should run. He wanted me to take a chance. Well, I did. Then I had the nerve to win, and I won as an independent. Beholden to no party. It was only after I had already decided to run for Governor of Minnesota that I affiliated with the Reform Party at all.

JK: Why the Reform Party?

JV: Why the Reform Party? Because the two party system is a monopoly system, John. You know that, I know that. Everyone knows that. Well, what does a monopoly do? A monopoly protects itself above all else. How does the two party monopoly protect itself? By keeping everyone distracted with never-ending arguments over trivial bullshit and ignoring the real issues.

I’ve always been a big believer in fate. The way I see it, if fate is going to put me, a kid from Standish, Minneapolis, in a position to be a candidate, there’s no way I’m doing it as a slave of the two party system, the two party monopoly. And going way back to his work on the POW issue, I had always been a Perot sympathizer. So when fate did put me in a position to run, the Reform Party was a natural fit.

JK: Is it still a natural fit?

JV: Well, the Reform Party is a young political party at a crossroads.

I want you to take two third parties, the Bull Moose Party and the Republican Party–look it up, it started as a third party–and look at what history has to show us. With the Bull Moose Party, you’ve got a party that gets millions of votes, but it never goes beyond that. It never becomes anything other than one man’s personal political vehicle. Then you take the Republican Party. The Republican Party grows and thrives because it’s not just about any one man.

Right now, the Reform Party is learning how to carry the message of Reform into the future. If that’s going to work, everything can’t just be on one man’s shoulders.

JK: So is that the main division within the party? People who want Perot to come back vs. everyone else?

JV: The bitter enders? Yeah, I think so.

JK: Because it’s been characterized as a fight between the Perot faction and the Ventura faction–

JV: No, it hasn’t. It’s been mischaracterized as a Perot-Ventura thing by people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. And it’s almost–well, it’s frustrating, because if Ross had wanted to run this year, there was nothing preventing that, and I would have given him my consideration just like I did in ‘92 and ‘96. I doubt Donald would have even gotten in the race. Basically, there’s an element in the Reform party that wants to remain in an indefinite holding pattern for a hypothetical race that might never come. Then there’s the rest of us. We’re trying to build a party. We’re carrying the message of Reform into the new millennium.

JK: And you think Donald Trump is the man to carry that message?

JV: Damn right, I do. On one side you’ve got–no offense–two sons of political dynasties, two proud representatives of the military-industrial complex, two focus grouped, poll-tested politicians. And on the other side you’ve got Trump: self-made billionaire who speaks his mind and has a plan to cut through the BS.

There’s no competition.”

-------- John Kennedy and Jesse Ventura, George; June, 2000 issue.

 

[dcharles]

---

May 5th, 2000

Roger Stone hated being on hold. He rarely allowed it; being on hold meant that he was making time for someone who wasn’t making time for him, like some kind of schmuck.

He wasn’t a schmuck.

And worse than being on hold? Being on hold when the wrinkled old hardass on the other end of the line was doing it to ice him out. To get in his head. And it was deliberate–it was. It had to be. They had an appointment.

Concentrate on other things, he told himself. This conversation could not go poorly. It would do him no good to begin it in a snarl. Concentrate on the view.

And the view was something special. Of all Trump’s properties in New York, the high rise at Central Park South was Roger’s favorite. Situated in the center of Manhattan, it faced north, towards the park, so that men like Roger Stone could take in both sunrise and sunset while they contemplated the Upper Manhattan skyline, a swathe of living, breathing, green in the foreground. Even if there were still a few rent-controlled tenants in the building, just being here, he felt like a Master of the Universe.

And wasn’t he?

When all the campaign dust settled, he would have to talk to Trump about getting a unit here. He’d be able to afford it, after all. He heard a small clicking sound in the telephone’s earpiece. As long as this conversation doesn’t go south.

“Well! It’s about time, isn’t it?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

Finally.

Stone couldn’t get a read on whether the tone was hostile or exuberant, but it didn’t really matter. “Mr. Perot,” he said, forcing himself to smile, trying to keep it warm. People can hear a smile in your voice. “I couldn’t agree more.”

“This isn’t Trump!” said Ross Perot as if he was surprised.

He wasn’t, Roger knew. Despite the fact that this was supposed to be Perot’s direct line, two different people had vetted him before he’d heard Perot’s ridiculous banjo voice twanging through the receiver. “Mr. Trump’s going to be reaching out to you shortly. We wanted to iron a few things out first.”

“Here it comes!” said Perot.

“Well–”

“Oh, no you don’t! Now I’ll tell you what, Mr. Stone. If you think you’re gonna come up here and get on this phone with me, sideline me out of my own party, you’re about as lost as a blind Jew at a Klan convention!”

“Nobody’s trying to sideline you, nobody wants to sideline you–” At least not yet.

“Do you think I just strolled into this office from the cotton fields? That Jesse Ventura already came out and said it. Said I needed to ‘step over to the sidelines!’ His words, not mine!”

“His words. Not ours.”

“Bah-loney! Y’all and that Ventura are thick as thieves.”

“Mr. Perot, Jesse Ventura is a free agent. He can say what he wants. He’s also the highest ranking member of this party. We’re not going to turn down his endorsement. It–”

“Damn right we’re not!” came a high, raspy voice the next room over. Donald Trump, who had laid down for a nap before tonight’s fundraiser, was apparently awake.

“It would be counterproductive for what we’re trying to accomplish,” Stone said as he shot Trump a look. Not now, he mouthed to Trump.

“Well?” Perot barked.

“Well what?” asked Stone.

“Goodness gracious almighty! Am I the only one in this conversation who’s giving it an ounce of attention? You said it, man, not me! What are you trying to accomplish?”

The geniality slipped away. “We’re trying to win an election, Ross,” said Stone as if he was explaining something to someone else's loathsome child.

“Oh, is that right?” said Perot, his tone making it clear that he sensed the mockery. “He’s not just doing it so he can sell hotel rooms, get attention, and chase women?”

You say it like it’s a bad thing, Stone wanted to say. “If we’re going to win the election, we need a united, functioning party,” is what he said instead.

“And what is it you think I’m doing? You think I’m trying to burn it down? Between that Ventura, your carnival barker, and that brownshirt Pat Buchanan, I’m spending twenty-six hours a day putting the fires out!”

“Ross, who do you think made Buchanan piss off? Answer me that.”

“I don’t recall being on a first name basis with you, Stone.” The words were cold, but Perot’s tone had softened. “You did that? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Me and Pat–we are on a first name basis–we go way back, and I know about all the dead bodies he’s got buried in his crawl space. He decided it was best if the bodies stayed buried. I helped him decide.”

“We shut him down,” cracked Trump from the next room, preening in front of a bedroom vanity. “Total domination.”

Will you shut the fuck up? Roger mouthed to Trump. He was finally starting to get somewhere with Perot, and now this. Trump smirked back at him in the reflection.

“That’s no kind of way to win,” said Perot. If he’d heard Trump’s braying, he gave no indication.

Thank God for age-related hearing loss. “I did us all a favor. The man’s a virus.”

“Alright, Stone. You’ve got my attention, but what do you want? Huh? All this talk about holding hands and kum-bay-unity is one thing. Finding out where the bargaining zone is, that’s the real trick.”

On impulse, Stone decided to start where he thought he would meet the most resistance. “First thing's Choate. Choate’s gotta go.”

“If you think I’m bringing back that thieving Jack Gargan–”

“Gargan’s a clown.”

Pat Choate was the doughy, red-faced economist who had been Perot’s running mate in ‘96. Soporific even when judged against the narcoleptic standards of his profession, Choate had less charisma than a lumpy pile of wet burlap. For reasons inexplicable to Roger, he’d been the one chosen to chair the party when the Perot loyalists ousted Gargan–Ventura’s handpicked guy–a couple months back.

“Then who? One of your people?”

“No, not one of ours, but he’ll be perfect. You know him--Dick Lamm.”

“Lamb dick!” Trump cackled.

Every fucking time. Roger tried to ignore him.

“Dick Lamm? The same Dick Lamm who refused to endorse me at the convention in '96? You got some cajones, Stone."

Dick Lamm was the former governor of Colorado, and before Perot got in the race, the seeming frontrunner for the Reform Party nomination in 1996. He had never forgiven Perot for stealing his thunder, and bringing him in for party chair would go a ways toward patching some of the cracks in the party’s fragile coalition.

“Look, he knows how to raise money, he’s got connections, and he already knows how to do media--none of which Choate can do--that’s what you need in a party chair. That's the job. And you owe the guy anyway.”

“And what else?” said Perot.

“We want to take the convention out of Long Beach.”

“What’s wrong with Long Beach?”

“It’s a dump,” said Roger.

“A shithole!” echoed Trump.

“What is all that racket about!?” said Perot.

For all the good it would do, Stone shot Trump another look. “Look, the point of a convention is to get attention. To get the media there. The Dems are in LA, the Republicans are in Philadelphia. That’s what we’re competing against. What reporter in his right mind is going to try and go to Long Beach instead of Philly or Hollywood? That’s cheesesteaks and movie stars versus container ships and urban blight. It’s not a choice, it’s a punishment! I don’t want the media feeling like they’ve been punished because they had to cover our convention!”

“So where are you planning on having this fly-by-night convention?”

“Miami. It’s got sex appeal and I can get us a space.”

“Miami!?! Will they have the fires out by then? Mi-ami, my foot!”

Stone heard something that sounded like a tiny old man’s fist pounding a desk. “What’d I just say about attention?” Stone was on the verge of pleading. “The media’s going to be all over it! They’ll love it. ”

“Miami…” said Perot. It was as if Stone had just suggested that the convention be held in Malawi, and not a beloved American city. “First you go after Pat, now it’s Miami. Anything else while we’re at it? You wanna borrow a pair of BVDs while you’re fleecing me?”

Roger swallowed away a nervous laugh. “You hang onto them for now. But we are going to need your endorsement.”

“Oh, I see now. First you get the endorsement, then you sideline me.”

“Oh, no. We want you on the campaign trail. At least four or five big joint appearances.”

“So I give you everything, up to and including the shirt off my scrawny old back, and in exchange you let me get on my hind legs and make a speech or two? That about it? Well Stone, answer me this–how about I just take a pass on all of it, climb into this race, and snatch that nomination right from your teeth? Huh? How about that? You think I can’t?”

Roger had known that threat was lurking around the corner for as long as he’d known about this conversation. He’d thought long and hard about what he would say.

“Of course you can do it. Of course you can. You've already shown the country what you can do. Twice. But you don’t want to be president, Mr. Perot. You want to build a legacy. If you had wanted to be president, you wouldn’t have dropped out when you were leading the race eight years ago. If you didn’t care about the legacy, you wouldn’t have gotten in four years ago when the FEC ruled against the Reform Party and said that only you could get matching funds. Gallup just showed us a measly five points behind Bush and Gore. If you want to cement your legacy, this is your chance.”

It was all true, even if he had left out the part where the same poll put them eight points behind McCain. Save for Perot’s breathing, the line went quiet.

Trump came into Stone’s field of vision and pointed at his Rolex.

Perot let out a pointed sigh. “I’ve got conditions of my own.”

“Let’s hear them,” said Stone.

“First, I want you to keep that hippie gorilla Jesse Ventura away from me. Period. I don’t want to see his melon head and I don’t want to hear his stupid voice. I’m not endorsing him, I’m not doing events with him, I’m not posing for pictures with him, and I'm not sending him any Christmas cards. Second, if I was to give you my endorsement, that don’t mean you’ve always got it. If Trump doesn’t stay on the straight and narrow–boy, lemme tell you–I’ll jerk that endorsement away so fast it’ll make that ugly yellow rug fly off his head, and then you really will be in a pickle.”

“Done. What else?”

“You sure you don’t want to give it a little thought, make sure you can uphold your end of the bargain?” Perot sounded like a man who was expecting disappointment and looking forward to the inevitable time when he could retaliate and exact vengeance.

Still, it wasn't like Roger could walk away from the deal now. “We’re good, Mr. Perot. We mind our Ps and Qs, keep you away from Ventura.”

“Ah, well. A word to the wise, Stone. I’ve had my people look into you, and I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a big fat file on my desk and I don’t like what I see. Says here, uh, “notorious libertine and backstabber,’ is what it says right here. Those go hand in hand though, don’t they? A fellow can’t be a slave to indulgence without it degenerating into treachery before too long. But this is your last shot. You’re washed up, partner. They already run you out of the Republican Party! Mark my words, you double-cross me, you let me down, the next race you work on’s going to be Kris Kringle’s campaign for mayor of the North Pole! I hope we understand each other, because H. Ross Perot is not a man you want to have for an enemy.”

“Whatever you may have heard about my personal life, I can assure you Ro–I mean, can I call you Ross now?–”

“You may not,” said Perot.

The line was dead before Roger Stone could finish the thought. Momentarily stunned, he sputtered before he could stop himself.

“What the hell was that?” asked Trump.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking it off. “It’s fine. We’re good. He said he’s gonna do it.”

“I knew the little hillbilly would fall into line,” said Trump as they headed to the limousine and–eventually–donors who awaited them. “They all want what Trump’s got.”

At first, Stone had wondered why Perot would agree to work with him if Perot really did believe he was such a washed-up degenerate. But Roger knew the truth better than anyone. Perot was right. This was his last shot, and he was lucky to get even that.

A dread certainty came over him, that these would be neither last nor least of Ross Perot’s demands.

“Hey, make a pit stop at the Garden on the way,” Trump said to the driver before turning back to Roger. “I want to shake hands with the Policeman’s Benevolent guy. They’re picketing some cop killer.”

“Sure,” said Roger. “I’m going to hang back while you do. I need to put in a call to Rick.”

Because if Rick Davis didn’t hold up his end of the deal, Roger Stone was going to be screwed no matter what.

---

Alan Keyes smirks as Governor Bush calls John McCain "every Democrat's favorite Republican."

---

Russert: Joining us today is Karl Rove, Governor Bush’s longtime strategist and campaign manager. Karl, this is the first time we’ve had you in the studio–as opposed to talking to you from out there on the campaign trail–in quite a while. It’s good to have you back, and first of all, let me say congratulations to the campaign–

Rove: Thank you, Tim. Always good to be here.

Russert: Now, you are fresh off a streak of victories over Senator McCain, most notably a hard-fought win in Indiana on May 2nd, but also in North Carolina, along with Nebraska and West Virginia the following week. There were some calls earlier in the month, after the loss in Pennsylvania, for Governor Bush to drop out. It is safe to say the the momentum has shifted to your campaign, but a lot of analysts are wondering where it all leads–

Rove: It leads to the nomination, Tim.

Russert: [chuckles] Fair enough. But the way the math stacks up on this one–and with the wins in Nebraska and West Virginia, it looks like Governor Bush has pulled ahead in the delegate count for the first time since Super Tuesday–

Rove: I’ve got to correct that–

Russert: First–

Rove: No, no, that’s only true if you’re putting the California delegates in McCain’s column. Governor Bush won those delegates.

Russert: Well, that’s disputed for now. What is not disputed is that John McCain is the Republican who won the most votes in California. We’re certainly not going to resolve the delegate question here and now, but the credentials committee at the RNC will resolve it. So leaving it aside and looking at the calendar, most analysts are saying it looks increasingly unlikely–even if you do prevail in the upcoming contests where you are favored–that you will win a majority of the pledged delegates, though you will likely have a plurality. What is also in very little doubt at this point is that Senator McCain will have gotten more raw votes this primary season than Governor Bush.

Is Governor Bush prepared to take this fight to the convention and potentially deny the nomination to the top vote-getter this primary season?

Rove: Well John McCain has always been every Democrat’s favorite Republican–the other four guys in the Keating Five were even Democrats–so it’s no surprise that he picked up a few Democrat votes in a few Democrat states. But this is a fight for the Republican nomination, and Governor Bush has the heart and soul of the Republican Party behind him.

Russert: Karl Rove, that sounds like a “yes.” Just to be clear: if Governor Bush fails to secure the majority of the pledged delegates by June 6th, will this campaign carry the fight to Philadelphia, or will the Governor concede?

Rove: Tim, you don’t concede when you’re winning.

------ Tim Russert and Karl Rove, Meet the Press, May 14, 2000.

---

“A few days after the Guard moved in, the Miami part of the family ended up handing [Elian] over to INS, I guess it was. No cameras, no publicity. I think they handed him over at an Air Force base, and we’re all thinking that the whole thing kind of ended in anticlimax. With a whimper, you know?

We were so naïve.”

----- Anderson Cooper, quoted in Burned: The Rise, Fall, and Undeath of the Reform Party, by Matt Taibbi, 2017.

 

[dcharles]

---

“11TH CIRCUIT COURT: ELIAN STAYS”
—Miami Herald, May 30th, 2000.

“House GOP Meets to Decide Select Committee on Reno Inquiry”
—Washington Post, June 1st, 2000.

“Bob Barr, Conservative Firebrand, Tapped to Lead Select Committee”
—New York Times, June 4th, 2000.

“DOJ Set To Appeal Elian Ruling”
—USA Today, June 5th, 2000.

“And the truth is, I don’t know that we'll endorse anyone this year. The board probably won't make the final decision until later in the summer, but we conduct internal polls. Right now, the membership is pretty divided between Trump and Gore, and nobody’s got a majority.”
----James P Hoffa, Teamsters President, quoted in Labor Notes, June 5th, 2000.

“SCOTUS Agrees to Hear Elian Case, Oral Arguments Set”
—New York Times, June 9th.

---

June 9th, 2000.

This time, it would be Scotch.

When John thought about it, alcohol was a lot like apparel. Different occasions, different clothes. Different moods, different booze. Wine was for the times when he wanted to get drunk but didn’t want to seem too obvious about it. A nice dark beer suited when the situation was reversed. Vodka was for big groups and rum was for soothing sunburns after hot summer fun. But Scotch, which had always reminded John of brimstone, tasted like punishment. The good kind of punishment though, the kind he craved and deserved.

A year ago this past week, Memorial Day of 1999 was when the wheels had really started to come off the Kennedy wagon. He’d gotten the news that Hachette was dumping George and crushed his ankle while failing to pilot an ultralight. Far worse, it was the last time he slept in the same bed with Carolyn. Forty-six days later, after a series of decisions culminating in John enlisting Rosemarie to bully Carolyn into accompanying him to his cousin’s wedding, his wife was dead.

And now, staring back at him from the office computer monitor, an email from Barbara Walters, informing him that she was interviewing Carolyn’s family and the interview would air on the anniversary of the crash. She also asked him for the dozenth time if he would like to do an interview as well, this time darkly hinting that it would be good “for balance,” whatever that meant.

His wife was dead, killed going to an event that she had never wanted to attend, in an airplane he owned, that he had insisted they buy. And now it was about to be publicly rehashed by Barbara Walters, one of the world’s most industrious and relentless voyeurs.

So Scotch was the order of the day.

Or at least it would be, once he got the godforsaken McCain interview behind him. In the meantime, another Oxy would have to do. He pulled open the desk drawer and found a pill bottle with a few still rattling around in it among the empties. He was going to have to clean it out one of these evenings when he stayed late. He was starting to look like an addict.

The McCain piece had spiraled out of control as rapidly as the wildfires that were ravaging Arizona at that very moment. He had expected some tightly focused background on McCain’s ties to Charlie Keating, and maybe, some examples of McCain embellishing his war record. Instead, Dougherty and Co. presented him with a sprawling catalog of McCain’s numerous and longstanding ties to corrupt actors[1]. Billionaire fraudster Keating was the most notorious, but hardly the most nefarious. Keating had only been one of McCain’s primary benefactors in the early days of his political career. The other? The Hensley family, especially McCain’s wife, the former Cindy Hensley, and his father in law, James Hensley. While there was nothing unusual about a family helping to sponsor the political careers of one of its own, what was unusual about the Hensleys was the size of their fortune and how they came by it.

Multimillionaire beer baron James Hensley was one of the largest Anheuser-Bush distributors in the country, and ran one of the largest businesses in Arizona. Hensley was also–and John didn’t know a polite way to put it–a racketeer. In 1948, both James and his brother Eugene were convicted of a wide-ranging conspiracy to supply liquor to a number of bootleggers and gangsters operating throughout the American west. In 1952, he was again indicted, this time for tax evasion, though he managed to secure an acquittal. In 1955, Hensley’s patron racketeer and business associate, fellow liquor magnate Kemper Marley, sold him the distributorship at a steep discount. Marley and the two Hensley brothers were also partners in a New Mexico dog track named Ruidoso, which ended up being the ruin of Eugene, who was convicted of a host of track-related thefts and deceptions in 1966–including being a straw buyer for a consortium of gangsters–resulting in an (eventual) five year prison sentence. Marley, who remained a Hensley associate and a powerful figure in the Arizona scene for years, was the prime suspect in the 1976 car-bomb assassination of reporter Don Bolles, who had written a series of articles insinuating Marley’s links to organized crime. Though James managed to avoid another criminal indictment in the ensuing years, as recently as 1988, he had falsified a notarized application for a federal liquor license, concealing his earlier felony convictions and indictments.

Of course, Hensley received the license anyway. By then, Hensley’s son-in-law John McCain, fresh off a four year tenure in the US House, was well into his sophomore year in the US Senate, where he was busy pressuring federal regulators to ignore evidence of fraud by another of his patrons, the infamous Keating.

The felonies of his sponsors were bad enough, but there was also the matter of McCain’s friend and protégé, former Arizona governor Fife Symington, another convicted fraudster and extortionist. That Symington had walked on a technical appeal just last year seemed immaterial to Kennedy. The point was, over the course of decades in public life, John McCain had consistently ingratiated himself with a cast of shady characters. A racketeer and a thieving grifter were the primary sponsors of his political career. The politician whose career he sponsored was a little of both. McCain cultivated friendships and relationships with all of them, and in at least one case, was found to have acted as a fraudster’s agent in a direct effort to conceal the fraud.

Along the way, it seemed like McCain had picked up at least a few of their tricks. To the extent that there had been negative coverage of McCain nationally, it centered around stories of his temper. Kennedy found that to be euphemistic at best. It conjured up images of McCain throwing a stapler across the office after a bad call. The stories had always carried the faint whiff of bullshit, and now Kennedy knew why. It wasn’t McCain’s temper that was the issue. It was the bullying and intimidation. It was the threats. Report a story without the proper, McCain approved spin? Well, if you were Arizona media, you could expect to get a screaming, cursing call from a sitting US Senator who also happened to be a member of a powerful family of dubious and dangerous repute. Go so far as to report something negative, and you might find, as one reporter did, that John McCain had publicly cornered a family member to curse them out for not controlling what you wrote. And if you were the unfortunate fool who blew the whistle on Cindy McCain’s quest to turn her medical charity into her personal pill mill, well, you might find yourself sued for extortion and run out of the state, as Tom Gosinski had.

At the least, the allegations of intimidation diminished McCain's credibility on the Keating issue. Kennedy thought they did more. When the totality of the accumulating dirt was taken into account, it painted a picture of McCain as a man almost entirely divorced from his political image. While Kennedy was more aware than most that all public figures are, to one extent or another, creations of the media, he had rarely seen an example of someone’s private self differing so starkly from their public persona. It wasn’t as if McCain had cultivated an image of himself as a lovable dirty-trickster and simply soft-pedaled some of the rougher edges of what that entailed. Instead, McCain had gone out of his way to present himself as an honorable man, straight-talking and plain dealing, an anti-corruption crusader ready to sweep the forces of avarice from the democratic altar. Even if Kennedy had been prepared to ignore the co-captain of McCain’s crusade being one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists, or that McCain had taken millions from companies who had business before the Senate Commerce Committee, which he chaired–even if Kennedy had been willing to ignore those facts, John McCain would have still been a man almost uniquely unsuited to pretensions of reform.

That didn’t mean that the interview was going to be straightforward.

If John McCain was a wolf struggling to wear the mantle of the Templar, then John Kennedy felt himself to be an equally unlikely inquisitor into another politician’s connections to bootleggers, of all things. The legends surrounding his grandfather’s links to bootleggers were some of the most durable rumors in all of American political lore. He wasn’t sure there was any way to confront McCain on the issue without making the story about himself, or worse, seeming a hypocrite. The problem was, without the context, McCain could still portray himself as a man who’d only crossed paths with a couple shady characters over the years. Coming clean would be more than he could expect, but Kennedy at least wanted McCain to own the improbable assertion that he was the lone honorable man in a den of grifters and felons, as he would have to do if Kennedy foregrounded the source of the Hensley fortune.

A more abstract–but still pressing–problem was the reputational consequence that a too-hostile McCain interview would have on George. There had already been whispers that Kennedy’s interview of Arpaio had been too rough; Richard Blow, one of his editors, had told him as much before he published it. At the time, Kennedy thought Richard was trying to give him an easy way to cop-out. Too rough was what Joe Arpaio did to his detainees. Asking questions about it was the least anyone could do. In the end, they ran it more or less intact. The initial response had been positive, and it mostly still was. But Arpaio still had plenty of defenders and John his share of detractors. William F. Buckley managed to speak for both in his own caustic account of the situation, “The Lawman in the Pillory,” a stalwart defense of authoritarianism against the sinister mob of “illegals” flooding the dry streets of Phoenix.

Richard could say what he wanted, but rough treatment sold. On the whole, George getting sharper had been positive, but it was the kind of schtick that gave diminishing returns in the long run. There were only so many times he could set an ambush before people started to avoid his stretch of road. At the same time, if McCain managed to get the nomination, Kennedy made him the favorite to win it all, Trump or no Trump. And if he won, he would win on an anti-corruption platform that was near-Nixonian in its duplicitousness. It was one of the very purest case scenarios of the public having a right to know.

Kennedy just had to do it without looking like he was cross-examining him. Kennedy could give him the rope, but McCain would have to hang himself. He just had to figure out how.

How would Barbara Walters do it?

The ringing phone put his thoughts on pause. It was Rosemarie’s line.

“What’s up, Rosie?”

“Your uncle’s on the line,” said Rosemarie.

“My Uncle Teddy?”

“Jahwn,” drawled the Boston brogue of Ted Kennedy, deep and affable.

John realized with small annoyance that Rosemarie had transferred the call without answering him. It had been months since he’d spoken to his uncle, and Rosie must have thought it was time. The woman did have her ways. “How’s Washington?” John managed to spit out.

Why the hell was Uncle Teddy calling?

As John expected, the question about Washington prompted Ted to launch into a series of anecdotes about the Washington scene. Uncle Teddy had never been one for getting to the point, but John didn’t mind. It was easy to be genial with Ted in small doses. Nobody else had the same knack for turning scuttlebutt between a bunch of geriatric loudmouths into an entertaining yarn.

The stalling tactic also gave John some time to get his bearings. There were reasons John hadn’t spoken to Teddy in months. Or maybe it was one big reason that manifested itself in a thousand ways. He wasn’t sure, but he did know that the crash had distanced them from one another, and they’d never been that close to begin with. In hindsight, the distance was predictable. The story of John and the story of Ted had suddenly rhymed too cruelly, and when John was too long in the presence of his uncle, geniality inevitably turned into clammy unease. In the moment when John plunged into obscure depths west of Martha’s Vineyard, he’d been faced with much the same decision his uncle had when he’d taken his own plunge on the island’s opposite side thirty years before. Ted chose wrong and John chose right and it made no difference in the end. Carolyn, Lauren, and Ed were just as dead as Mary Joe. A dark understanding within John stirred, and he knew that if he had been able to save even one of them, that the sound of his uncle’s voice and the thought of his uncle’s fecklessness would not arouse such contempt in his heart. And what was that but vanity? When John considered that Teddy had made himself both present and useful in the aftermath of the plane crash–when John was too comatose to do anyone any good–he resented himself for nursing a grudge that was never his to nurse. And when it occurred to him that Ted’s words of loving kindness after the crash might have been nothing more than penance to placate the angry ghosts of 1969, he was overwhelmed, first by disgust and then by pity at the gesture’s inadequacy. There was no more forlorn a hope than penance, and few penitents less convincing. And these were only John’s conflicts, John’s feelings; no doubt Teddy had plenty of his own.

Small wonder they hadn’t been in touch, and smaller one that John decided to keep this conversation a short one. After all, he didn’t really care that Chris Dodd had placed a drunken bet on the Pacers to sweep the Lakers in the finals, and that sense of unease had taken John by the throat without warning. Dodd had always been an enthusiastic partner in Teddy’s loutishness; being reminded of it helped nothing.

“And Lautenberg’s feeling so good he’s going cross-eyed–”

“Teddy. Uncle Teddy,” he said, cutting him off. “Is this–the call, I mean–is this about–”

“You know, it’s rude to interrupt me when I’m so far gone on a tangent,” said Teddy.

John could hear the smirk in his uncle’s voice. “Is this about the Barbara Walters thing?”

“Barbara Walters? The reporter?”

“Nevermind,” said John, realizing that he was about to open a can of worms that, like most worm-filled cans, was best left sealed.

“I could tell you some stories about that one,” said Teddy.

John laughed in spite of himself. “Teddy!” he groaned.

“Fine, have it your way. But I’m not telling you the end of the story, and that was the best part.” Ted made a few murmurs of wisdom and cleared his throat, two reliable signals that he was about to get serious. “Listen, I talked to your sister a couple days ago. She said you were planning on skipping the convention.”

Caroline!

He didn’t know why he was surprised. Of course she’d ratted him out. She’d been ratting on him for 39 years. There was no reason to stop now.

“I’ll just be a distraction and you know it,” said John.

“Oh, malarkey.” Malawkey.

“I’m serious! It’s supposed to be Gore’s…you know. He’s supposed to be the star. The last thing he needs is tabloid junk following him to the convention.” And the last thing that John needed was a moment where he, Clinton, and Gore were all in the same room. Congratulations Al! Funny story–Clinton actually tried to get me to primary you. Oh, hey Bill! Didn’t see you there!

What a nightmare.

“He could use some of your shine, kiddo. His campaign’s going about as well as mine did.”

“If that’s what he wants, I’m sure he’ll make it known,” said John.

“It’s not just about Gore,” he said in the tone of a patient teacher whose student has yet to–but surely will–grasp the meaning of the exercise. “John, I couldn’t tell you what to do if I wanted to, but when you get to the age where people start referring to you as ‘The Patriarch,’ people expect things. So here I am, making the call.” His voice thickened. “I know you’ve always been your mother’s child–God rest her soul–but John, you're ours too. You’ve been gone, kid. It’s time to be a Kennedy again.”

John sighed the sigh of a man who’s just realized that he’d lost the game before it even started.

Because if there really was a Kennedy Curse, it wasn’t death. It was guilt.

---

---

“JK: So let’s get right to it, Senator. The primaries wrapped up a few days ago. You managed to put a few points on the board in New Jersey, but Bush ended the season with more delegates than you. Still, he doesn’t have a majority, and he can’t win on the first ballot. Are you taking the fight to the convention?

JM: You bet your ass we are. [laughs]

JK: Coming down the stretch, a lot of party heavyweights have thrown some pretty stiff criticism your way for sticking it out. Elizabeth Dole said that you’ve ‘made your point.’ Trent Lott said that he thought a convention fight could ‘tear the party apart.’ The rest of the Senate leadership–Paul Coverdell, Mitch McConnell–have been critical as well. And we can go on–Tom DeLay, JC Watts, Roy Blunt in the House. What’s the motivation for staying in the fight when so much of the party establishment is telling you to get back to your corner?

JM: Because we got the most votes. Isn’t that enough?

JK: It’s not enough for them.

JM: Well, some of those folks were speaking, ah, I think before the primaries had ended, and some of them are actually on the Bush campaign… [laughs] So there’s some bias there, and I think some of them are going to change their minds. What the party and the delegates in Philadelphia are going to realize is that what this campaign represents–an honest desire for reform among the American people–is being gifted to the Republican Party. Our cause has brought millions of new voters into this party. Let that sink in. We’ve got independents and Democrats who’ve never pulled the lever for a Republican in their lives who went into that voting booth and voted for John McCain. What we’ve seen from Reagan and Clinton is that you win when you broaden the coalition. That’s what I’ve done, and we will take that same coalition we’ve built this primary season and use it to beat Al Gore like a drum. We won the most votes this season, and when we make that case to the delegates in Philadelphia, they’re going to make the right decision.

JK: I think that anyone would admit that, whatever the exact number is, you’ve still got a substantial amount of support with the Republican rank and file. But you’ve barely got a half dozen Senate endorsements. Why hasn’t that rank and file support translated to elected officials and institutional figures in the party?

JM: Because they know that if I’m elected, I’m closing up the cookie jar.

JK: You’re referring to your plans to reform campaign finance.

JM: John, the American people are crying out for reform! They want us to clean up our politics, and that means getting the moneychangers out of the temple. Some of my colleagues are so used to the way things are that they can’t imagine changing. They can’t imagine how we as Republicans could be successful under a new system. But that’s not…it’s not what we’re here to do. The people want a politics of principle, not a politics of influence.

JK: There’s going to be some readers who aren’t aware, but you and Russ Feingold were co-recipients of the Profile in Courage Award for your work on campaign finance in the Senate a couple years ago. Caroline and I don’t pick the recipients, but we approve them, so I’m certainly sympathetic to the goal. But on the other hand, while I’m hearing a John McCain who’s saying that he wants to end the politics of influence, that’s the same John McCain who hired one of DC’s most powerful lobbyists to be his campaign manager. So there’s a tension there. Do you think that’s why some of your colleagues are more reticent to rally around team McCain?

JM: Well, in terms of endorsements, Governor Bush had quite a head start, so I think it’s a function of that as much as anything. But as far as Rick goes… I think you have to have some insight into how the system works to be able to reform the system. You know, there are lobbyists and there are lobbyists. [laughs] And if anyone’s asking if Rick is an honorable man, let me put it this way. In the last year, I’ve probably spent more time around him than anyone else except my wife. I’ve observed him. I know his habits, I know his heart, and I can tell you that Rick is an honorable man.

JK: ‘Honorable’ is an interesting way to put it. So, let me formulate a bit here… So, is your sense of his honor separate from who he associates with or the work he does?

JM: Well, I think that people from all walks of life–you know, with any kind of work–can behave with honor. Honor is a separate thing, but it shows up everywhere. It’s going to show up in the quality of the work you do and the way you treat people in your work. Honor is very important to me, John. Restoring honor to the White House was one of the main motivations behind this run.

JK: To make the context clear though, your campaign manager, Rick Davis, is in a partnership with Paul Manafort, who’s one of the four or five guys who invented modern lobbying. They’ve been enthusiastic lobbyists for torturers and dictators–what’s his name–ah, Abacha in Nigeria! Where’s the honor in that?

JM: Well I don’t think that’s fair. Would you criticize a lawyer for defending a client?

JK: [laughs] Now you’re going to make me take up for the defense bar!

JM: I’m wily like that.

JK: Challenge accepted. Ah, I think that what we attorneys would call ‘the distinguishing factor’ is that everyone’s entitled to a lawyer. No one’s entitled to a lobbyist.

But you said that you wanted to restore honor to the White House. One of the many Republican criticisms of Clinton, even before he was wrapped up in personal scandal, was that he was surrounded by disreputable characters. What’s your plan to avoid making the same mistakes?

JM: Transparency is one of the most important things. I’ve always emphasized that, and I’ll continue to under a McCain administration. Judgment is another. A lot of it comes down to the person’s personal sense of honor and their judgment.

JK: And where did you get that sense of honor and judgment?

JM: Well, I think the honor is part and parcel of being part of a military family. It was instilled in me from an early age. Judgment takes longer to catch up, but I certainly developed a lot of it in Hanoi. You learn who you can and can’t trust very quickly when you’re an enemy prisoner.

JK: If you developed this judgment at an early age, then how do you explain Keating?

JM: Well in that case my judgment was poor. What I would say in my defense is that I was very new to the Senate, and I showed inappropriate deference to my state’s senior Senator at the time, Dennis DeConcini.

JK: You were new to the Senate, but you weren’t new to Washington and you weren’t new to Charles Keating. He was a major campaign contributor to your first couple campaigns, and you maintained a very close relationship with him over the years. There’s nine documented trips that you either took with him or to his vacation properties before he was indicted, and your wife invested over $300,000 with him to develop a piece of real estate, sold at a handsome profit. Some people would look at that and call it an in-kind contribution.

JM: Well, the Senate Ethics Committee didn’t, and the FEC didn’t. And I returned over $100,000 of his contributions. I think over the same period, I raised a little over $600,000 total. So he was a big contributor, but never the only contributor. I actually loaned my own campaign more than I ever got from Charlie.

JK: That must be hard to do on a Navy pension.

JM: Well, my wife is financially blessed.

JK: And the source of that fortune is apparently a very colorful story. Your father-in-law was the entrepreneur. Pretty checkered history.

JM: It’s not the only fortune with some colorful stories attached to it. I know of at least one other.

JK: [laughs] Touche. You are wily.

JM: And that was a very long time ago. Mr Hensley, my father-in-law, is now one of the pillars of the Arizona business community.

JK: Well the felony conviction–it was for supplying bootleggers–was a long time ago. He’s walked on a charge or two since then, and he maintained ties with a lot of people who were wrapped up in that original conviction for decades after. And there are some very serious accusations surrounding a few of these associates. Tax fraud, wire fraud, murder. His conviction was before RICO or anything like it. But as a former prosecutor, if a set of facts like these had come across my desk, we would have been looking at him for enterprise corruption. That’s twenty-five years. I don’t bring it up to make you answer for what he did, but when you look at your early years, after the $100,000 from Keating and the $150,000 from your wife, which is derived from the Hensley fortune, you’ve got over $60,000 directly from Hensley. So the lion’s share of your initial funding comes from questionable people. Four years later, you’re being censured by the Ethics Committee for what is essentially intimidating regulators on behalf of one of those questionable people.

JM: And I’ve been very open about my failings there. I never intended to intimidate, but my actions brought me discredit. It created the appearance of impropriety. I’m not going to apologize for having friends and doing constituent service–because that’s all Charlie Keating was to me, and that’s all I was doing in my own mind–but it was unwise.

JK: You have been consistent about that. But six years after your brush with the Ethics Committee, there’s allegations of aggressive tactics used against someone who blew the whistle on your wife’s prescription fraud and embezzlement.

JM: No, no, no. Tom Gosinski–because that’s who you’re talking about–tried to extort our family. There was an investigation–

JK: That was started by an ally and then dropped. I won’t dispute that you believed that at the time, but Gosinski was working with the DEA for almost a year before he filed his wrongful termination suit. But in all of that, I think the doctor [providing Cindy McCain with fake prescriptions] lost his license, it probably ended up costing Gosinski money–he’s off the map completely–and your wife got diversion. Basically nothing. There’s the tension I was talking about again.

JM: Those were the remedies the justice system came up with. Am I supposed to ask them to put my wife in jail? Now, we’ve always been open about this. Cindy had a problem. I didn’t know about it right away, but when I did, we got her some help.

JK: I don’t know that the addiction itself is the issue. But that was in 1993/1994. A couple of years later, your protege Governor Fife Symington was convicted of his own fraud, really for actions that go back for years. All along the way, there’s allegations of petty intimidation tactics against you–screaming phone calls, contacting family members of people who’ve displeased you, things of that nature. Now you’re palling around with superlobbyists, talking about a crusade to reform politics and restore honor to the White House, and saying that the way you do it is through good judgment.
The question is, when have you displayed that kind of judgment?”

—-McCain/Kennedy interview, excerpted from “A Dubious Battler,” by John Dougherty and John Kennedy, George, August 2000 issue.

---

“Ahead of Summit, a President Talks to Scholars”
—Newsweek, June 20, 2000.

---

---

[1] I wanted to make something very clear. In real life, the person who did the best and deepest reporting on John McCain was a woman named Amy Silverman, also of the Phoenix New Times. The reason I'm laying all this on Dougherty and not Silverman in the narrative is because they are both living people, and Dougherty, having run for office, is a semi-public figure, so I don't mind putting a few minor words in his mouth here and there. Amy Silverman has never run for office (to my knowledge) and aside from her reporting, is a private person. For that reason, I don't want to put any words in her mouth, even small ones. Furthermore, Dougherty did do some very substantial reporting about McCain with Silverman, so it didn't seem like too much of a stretch. But in no way do I want to be erasing this woman's important contributions to history. Go read her stuff. Postmodern John McCain is a fantastic place to start. For the piece that her and Dougherty collaborated on, check out Haunted By Spirits.

Also, sorry about the length. Kind of got away from me there.

Anyway, go in peace or piss off in anger, no matter. I love each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart.

Enjoy chapter 10 of The Kennedy Curse.

 

[dcharles]

---

"Anderson Cooper was the first one to tell me about the rumor.

It wasn’t salacious, but it was dramatic. From a journalist’s perspective, it seemed too good to be true, one of those moments that distills and crystallizes a lifetime’s worth of context into a single point. I’m naturally skeptical of that kind of apocrypha, and experience has borne that out. Stories like that are usually bullshit. People want those moments, so they create them. They save us from having to hear the rest of the story.

And though I doubted it, I wanted it to be true too, even if my reasons were a little different. In the person of Rick Davis, I had a captive audience [all jokes at his expense intended], and if what I’d heard was right, he’d witnessed the whole thing. According to the version I heard, he’d even played a part, in his own little way.

So even if I thought I knew what the answer was going to be, I had to ask.

‘The George interview–after the interview, I should say–there’s a rumor about what went down after. Do you know the one I’m talking about?’

‘The handshake?’ said Davis. A funny little grin came across his face, like he’d just remembered the punch line of an old joke. ‘There’s some truth to it. At least half-true.’

‘You mean it’s embellished, or you mean something’s been left out?’

‘Sharp,’ he said, clicking at me as he winked. ‘Left out. It’s a best-of-John, worst-of-John kind of thing.’

‘Well now you’ve gotta tell me,’ I said. ‘Describe what went down.’

‘So John’s just got through this–,’ he started to say. ‘What kind of other reporting have you done? Have you ever been attached to a campaign?’

I shook my head.

‘White House Press?’

I laughed.

‘Stupid question. Well, ok. So normally, candidate interviews are short. They’re not like this,’ he said, gesturing at our conversation. ‘Ten, fifteen minutes, a half-hour on the long end. This thing with Kennedy was a marathon. It was like 45 minutes long.’

Remembering that Davis had been the subject of several of the George interview’s questions, I asked if he’d been in the room when it happened.

He shook his head. ‘No. I was mostly on the phone outside. But it was a long interview. You know it was a tough one. I mean, I think John handled it pretty well, but it doesn’t matter who you are, getting raked over the coals by High John the Mighty Kennedy for forty-five minutes isn’t fun. But I was outside the room, so I didn’t know how it had gone—I had even kind of heard them laughing together a few times. So when John comes out of Kennedy’s office, his face is a little red–you know, flushed–but I didn’t think anything about it. And he crosses that threshold, and kind of pivots back around on the heels of his wingtips to where he’s facing Kennedy. Real military kind of move–like, you know, uh, what’s-his-name, the German Colonel from Hogans’ Heroes–’

‘Colonel Klink?’

‘That’s the one, boss. And, uh, he takes Kennedy by the hand…gives him the most bonecrusher handshake I’ve ever seen. Kennedy winced! And you know, John was never a big guy, and Kennedy’s built like a damned NFL quarterback, and John looks up at him, right in the eye, and says ‘You’re a lot tougher than you used to be.’ And Kennedy kind of smirks at him, kind of bemused looking, and John spins right back around and marches out of the office without a backward glance.’

By and large, it was the same story I’d heard. McCain, the tough old scrapper taking his lumps and getting on with it. It was missing a crucial detail, but Rick had said that was only half of the story. ‘So what’s the other half?’

‘Like I said, it was a best-of-John, worst-of-John situation. John could always respect a tough competitor. He was good at that. It doesn’t mean he liked to lose, or that he knew when to quit, or that losing didn’t tear him up inside.’ Davis shook his head, but whatever maudlin nostalgia touched him in the moment passed quickly, and his mask of amiability returned as fast as it had slipped. ‘I’ll give him this. He kept it together long enough for the elevator doors to close.
‘And the elevators in that building–they had these beautiful etched mirrors on all three walls… We got in the elevator and he started jamming the button for the lobby floor–you know, over and over again–’ He jabbed his index finger at an imaginary button like he was tapping out Morse Code. ‘And as soon as it closes, he just let’s it rip–’HE FUCKED ME!’

A menacing voice came over the intercom: ‘Everythang alright?’ I turned to the surveillance camera in the corner and gave a thumb’s up. Rick waved apologetically. Minimum security or not, it was hard to forget I was in a prison for long.

Rick hunched forward, his eyes bright behind his glasses. ‘So then he starts kicking the mirror like you’d kick in a door!’ he hissed. ‘Glass goes everywhere.’

‘He broke it?’ I asked. This was most assuredly not in the version I’d heard, but it corroborated something about it: McCain’s mood.

‘He broke all of them,’ said Rick emphatically. ‘He was bouncing around like Linda Blair! ’ He exhaled and pushed his glasses onto his forehead so he could massage his eyes. It didn’t seem like a good memory. ‘Whew,’ he said, shaking it off. ‘John was feisty.’

‘Why is this the first time I’m hearing about it? Why didn’t it get out back then?’

‘So that’s the thing. It was maybe an hour later that it occurred to me that there might have been a security camera in the elevator–’ he glanced up at the one in the corner of the interview room. ‘--those were less common then. Just as I’m starting to scramble around trying to figure out how to get my hands on it, I get a call from the New York field office. Said a courier from George had just come by, left an envelope for us. They said it felt like there was a VHS tape in there. I tell the kid not to open it and get my happy ass down to the field office to get it. It’s one of those big yellow envelopes that’s got the metal tab. Black sharpie, right on the front, big letters: ‘First time’s free. Let’s do it again.–JK’’ He grinned.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘And it was the security tape?’ Davis nodded back at me. ‘Why’d he save your ass?’

He shrugged like I’d asked him why water was wet. ‘No idea. Maybe he thought he’d done enough already. Maybe he just thought it was a cheap shot.’

It was juicy, but he’d still left out the detail I’d wanted to confirm in the first place. ‘The way I heard it, McCain told you something, too. Before you got to the elevator.’

Big sigh from Rick.

‘Rick, the quote I’ve got is ‘Why the fuck did I let you talk me into that?’ spoken by McCain to you. Is that right?’ Of course, there was more to it than simply securing an embarrassing admission about a minute humiliation. Politics is full of humiliations large and small. Most of the time there’s no story behind them.

‘I don’t remember the exact wording,’ said Davis, his nostrils flaring. ‘But, uh, it was something like that. A few of the George people saw it.’

‘Thing is, Rick, it’s a decent question. Kennedy had been channeling the ghosts of Theodore White and HL Mencken for what, a year by then? And you talked McCain into sitting down with him for forty-five minutes?’

‘It was more complicated than that,’ he said, scratching his upper lip.

‘Well then explain it to me,’ I said. ‘Because from what you told me before, you already thought the chance of victory was tenuous. Now, you’re down in delegates, headed into a divided Republican Convention. You’re the campaign manager. What kind of sense does it make to have your candidate do a long, tough interview with a liberal magazine? So he looks tough? He’s John McCain. Everyone knows he’s tough. So he looks liberal? Where’s the percentage in that?’

Davis’ jailhouse flip-flops made a clip-clip-clapping sound on the linoleum as he fidgeted with his leg. ‘I think what I had told John–’

‘Rick, I didn’t ask you what you told John. I asked what you were thinking, and what was in it for you.’

The answer to that question taught me the difference between skepticism and cynicism.’"

—Burned: The Rise, Fall, and Undeath of the Reform Party, by Matt Taibbi, 2017.

---

June 23, 2000


“Let’s do it again?” Steve Florio repeated, standing in the doorway like he hadn’t quite believed what he’d heard. “You ball-buster.”

Kennedy motioned at Florio to keep moving, nodding at the maître d’ who was holding the door open. “If a busted elevator is the price I’ve got to pay to get another interview like that, I’ll sign the check every time,” he said, checking out the room. White table cloths and toffee colored leather seats with a classy, intimate vibe. It looked familiar, but then it looked like a lot of places. He dodged a suit-jacketed elbow in navy pinstripe slicing at a hunk of something red and bloody. Maybe more crowded than intimate. “What’s the name of this place again?” he asked Florio as they followed the waiter to a back room. “It looks heavy.”

“Patroon’s,” said Florio, patting John on the arm like they were the best of old friends. “You can get the Caesar, right? The Caesar’s good here. They’re known for it.”

“Maybe,” said John dubiously. How could a place be known for a Caesar? It was like being known for toast.

“You’re going to like these guys,” said Florio. “Jeff works right under–”

“Maybe they could put a piece of fish on top,” John mused, cutting off Florio’s spiel, pretending not to notice Florio rolling his eyes. By then, the duo they were having lunch with was in view.

Florio walked around to the far side of the table and put his hand on the shoulder of the first man. He was short and skinny, with a large, light-bulb shaped head and pencil thin neck. If not for the fluff of silver hair and the short beard that he was probably cultivating for the purpose, he could have easily been mistaken for a fourteen year old boy. “John, this is Jeff Jarvis. He works right under Steve Newhouse with the new media stuff. Brilliant guy. And this,” said Florio, moving to the next chair, “is Nick Denton, who joins us from London by way of, uh, Silicon Valley. Nick’s done all kinds of stuff–Financial Times, Wired–got into some new media entrepreneurship a few years back. We’ve been trying to come together to work with Nick for a couple of months now.”

John pulled out his chair and leaned across the table to make his handshakes.

“Careful, you two,” said Florio to Jarvis and Denton, indicating John’s hand. “The war correspondent here’s got a battle-wound.”

John tried to wave it off, but Florio was clearly disappointed. “Go ahead and tell them,” John said, giving his reluctant blessing. Florio dove into the McCain story with relish. John used the moment to get comfortable and observe his lunch dates.

Jarvis, whose voice was improbably deep for his diminutive frame, was the more effusive of the two, bobbing his head and adjusting his posture to correspond with the movements of the anecdote. Denton was more reserved. Wearing a light gray suit over a crisp white shirt, he sat a few feet back from the table, arms casually folded across his chest, his body language distant, his dark eyes engaged. His clothes were stylish enough for Silicon Valley, and with his close cropped salt-and-pepper hair, he fit the part of the tech entrepreneur well. But his face reminded John of nothing so much as that of a London cab driver, practical and brilliant, thinking ten steps ahead on a map you can’t conceive, taking into account variables you’re not even aware of, all while carrying on a conversation and navigating traffic.

“And you know who’s on the tape, right?” Florio leaned forward to deliver the coup de grace to the rapt attention of Jarvis and Denton. “You know who’s on the tape? It’s none other than St. John McCain himself, doing his best impression of Bobby Knight.”

Jarvis’ mouth was agape, his lightbulb head bobbing around like he was trying to think of something to say. The effect was comical, but John suspected that a lot of Jarvis' mannerisms would be that way, and since this was a man he was supposed to be taking seriously, he stifled his laughter and took the opportunity to pour whatever was on the table.

“Fucking hell,” said Denton appreciatively. “That’s what good journalism is supposed to do.” If the Bobby Knight reference had eluded him, he gave no indication. “You’ve got to get them a bit angry before they start telling the truth. Something a lot of American publications are slow to realize…present company rightfully excluded, of course.”

Steve Florio, ever the macher, took the opportunity to make a toast. “To Conde Nast!” he offered.

“To collaboration,” countered Denton. He was looking at John like an alcoholic looks at a bottle of bourbon in an empty room.

“To George,” said Kennedy, correcting them all. Kennedy dismissed the look–lots of people looked at John in funny ways–but did he wonder what Denton meant by ‘collaboration.’

Before he could ponder it, the waiter was at the table with an amuse bouche and a round of bitter Italian aperitivos.

In spite of himself, John found that he was mumbling something about a Caesar salad to the waiter. “I hear it’s good,” he said with a shrug. We’re known for it, echoed the waiter.

Florio’s eyes said what’d I tell ya? and he ordered a steak.

Business lunches were always like that–the best restaurants, the best food, and everyone was too busy stepping on each other, climbing that ladder, to enjoy any of it.

“And deep down,” Denton was saying, “they’re all banana republics, aren’t they? Look at this election: you’ve got McCain, the Man on the White Horse; there’s Bush, the posh, dynastically connected ne’er do well; Trump, a jumped-up estate agent; and we make it four of a kind with Gore, the party apparatchik in the proverbial gray flannel suit. The only difference is the size of the currency reserves and the nature of the coverage.”

John rolled his eyes. “The only difference?”

“But it’s true!” said Denton, eyes sparkling. “Even the Clintons…budding dynasty on the make, moving to consolidate an alternative power base before their term ends. And then there’s you of course…” A smirk appeared at the corner of his mouth. “The prince who was promised.”

John shot Florio a look. Who the hell is this guy?

Florio didn’t miss a beat. He never did. “And I told this guy six months ago,” he said, gesturing at John with an empty cordial glass, “I told him Giuliani was going nowhere fast. Didn’t want to believe me, right? Everyone wanted the drama, okay? What they didn’t realize is that Rudy’s too much drama. Drama all the time, who can keep it up?”

“What’s your take now, Steve?” asked Jarvis. John respected Florio’s ability to change the subject–from Politics to politics–without anyone realizing.

“Eh, I still think it’s Hillary’s to lose,” said Florio. “She’s too strong.”

“And there’s that banana republic, showing a bit of leg again,” said Denton. “Of course the ruler’s wife wins her election.”

“I don’t know,” said John, more sharply than he intended. He was starting to lose his patience with Denton. “When it was a two-person race, I might have agreed with you. Three person race, and I’d say you had a point. But there’s four candidates with good name recognition, and two of them eat into Hillary’s base.”

Dogged by well-substantiated allegations of persistent infidelity, Giuliani had, as Florio predicted, flamed out of the race by late May. This was followed by the succession battle, a ten day knife-fight in Nassau County between two Long Island congressmen, Peter King and Rick Lazio. King, who had always reminded Kennedy of an old junkyard dog and was a McCain man through and through, emerged victorious over the Bush-backed Rick Lazio, a young and polished sacrificial lamb who reminded Kennedy of a cell-phone salesman of middling honesty.

Though King was as moderate as any New York Republican, he was prickly and pugnacious, the kind of old-school Irish Catholic pol who could reliably be found at IRA fundraisers–and if there was a lad from the Policemen's Benevolent there too, all the better. Even if he was from the suburbs, he was the kind of big-city, factional candidate that turned a lot of Upstate voters off, and candidates like that practically invite challengers when there’s an open US Senate seat in New York.

The junkyard dog.


While it was too late for a Republican challenge to King, it wasn’t too late for billionaire businessman Tom Golisano to mount an independent bid, which is exactly what he announced he was doing on the afternoon of June 9th, a mere ten days after King had secured the Republican nomination. Though Golisano wasn’t as flamboyant as someone like Trump, he was a wild card, and the announcement coming on a Friday gave people something to talk about over the weekend. In ‘94 and ‘98, Golisano had run for governor, nabbing four percent in his first run and doubling it four years later. In both of those races, Golisano had mostly robbed from Democrats–his 217,000 votes in 1994 were more than 40,000 votes greater than the margin of Cuomo’s loss–but this time, he was clearly positioning himself as the moderate foil to King.

The final turd in the punchbowl came on the 15th, with the entrance of Al Sharpton into the race. Surprisingly reasonable and reliably sharp, he criticized Clinton from the left and on the grounds of being a reverse-carpetbagging Southern Democrat more generally. Sharpton managed almost 180,000 votes when he’d last run for Senate in ‘94, and had come within a point or so of forcing a runoff when he’d run for Mayor in ‘97, so a run now was nothing to dismiss.

John polished off the Meletti in a gulp. “The strategy for any Democrat running statewide is to run up the margins in the City and avoid getting swamped Upstate. If Sharpton cuts into her margins here and Golisano takes the Upstate moderates…she’s looking at a tough race.”

“And when might we see you turn your gimlet eyes to this race in print?” asked Denton.

“I don’t know that I’m going to be able to,” said Kennedy, pretending to regret it. “I maxed out for Hillary a few months ago. If I cover her, if I cover King–doesn’t matter which–it looks biased.” Shucks.

Kennedy caught Florio muttering something under his breath. No doubt he was cursing John’s sense of civic responsibility. No matter. Maxing out that particular donation had been one of his better ideas. It made him look like a friend without actually having to carry any water for the Clintons.

Speaking of water…. The thought made him realize the wine and liqueur were hitting him hard, empty as his stomach was.

“You should put your money where your mouth is,’ said Florio. “Hundred bucks on Clinton–any takers?” He looked around the table.

“I’m with him,” said Jarvis, pointing to Florio. “This is New York. Clinton’s gonna win.”

Jarvis and Florio both looked at Denton. “Oh, I think one would have to be quite foolish indeed to bet against a Kennedy on a matter of politics. Plus it seems quite well-reasoned.” Denton raised his cordial glass, smirking once more. “I’ll happily cast my lot with Prince John, whatever my prince should decide to do.” He raised an eyebrow, waiting for an answer.

John couldn’t tell whether Denton was being smug, being a starfucker, or just being British–or in the alternative, a smug, starfucking Brit–but there was no sense in not making the best of it. “Then me and uh, Nick here put a hundred each on King.” He raised his empty cordial glass to seal the bet, and because stomachs rarely show discretion when choosing to growl, his stomach chose that particular moment to growl a thunderous growl.

“Someone get the kid a breadstick,” Florio cracked as they clinked their glasses.

“What? I’m hungry,” Kennedy said. “Good thing I got—” the fish to go along with the Caesar. John trailed off, replaying the moment with the waiter in his head. Shit. “Guys, excuse me a sec. Don’t make any bets without me, alright?” Kennedy clapped like a coach ending a huddle, but his eyes were already looking for the door.

It was time to find his waiter.

Luckily, outside the private room where Kennedy and his cohorts were eating, Patroon’s main dining room was fairly small, and ah–there he was. Kennedy heard–whitefish on the fly for that four-top, ya heard? JFK wants whitefish!-as the waiter glided into the kitchen. It was time to sidle up to the bar and take a breather from the power-lunching.

A Bloody Mary was almost like food anyway.

No sooner had he ordered than he heard the smug voice of the starfucking Brit he’d just escaped. “Prince John,” said Denton, as pleased with himself as if he was a foxhound who’d cornered a fat vixen. “Forgive me if my curtsy isn’t what it used to be.”

John, you are the quarry.

“Don’t call me that,” Kennedy snapped.

“Quite right,” said Denton, feigning embarrassment. “Well, John Kennedy, I rather think they want us to play nice.” Kennedy wasn’t even sure what the game was. Denton motioned at the private dining room with a resigned air, as if to indicate that anything of importance was out of their hands. “And, as I understand that my particular brand of saltiness is an acquired taste, I wanted to offer you something. A way to say ‘no hard feelings,’ as it were.” Denton offered a handshake and gave Kennedy, the quickest, smoothest wink that he had ever seen.

Kennedy, who felt guilty about snapping a moment before and wanted to get a head’s up on whatever Florio was about to spring on him, took Denton’s hand, even though the handshake felt more like a hunter’s snare than a gesture of goodwill. “Don’t pay any attention to me,” said Kennedy. “I’m just hungry. You know how it is.”

“Well then, let’s see if this can’t whet your appetite,” said Denton, raising his index finger. “Blind item: a certain political strategist, of late managing the presidential campaign of an independent-minded real-estate mogul, has–thus far secretly–been the hidden hand behind a certain Baptist minister’s recent foray into the Senate election here in New York.”

“Stone?” said Kennedy. He smelled bullshit, but in a place like this, it could be coming from anyone. “Sharpton? What do you mean, ‘hidden hand?’ What the hell’s that, a donor?”

“Well that’s why it’s a ‘blind item,’ you cad.” Denton put a gentlemanly hand by Kennedy’s elbow. “Now come along, John Kennedy. We’ve much to discuss, and I believe you have a salad on the way. A Caesar, perhaps.”

“They’re known for it,” said Kennedy.

He grabbed the Bloody Mary and waded back into the melee.

---

“Supreme Court to Hear Elian Case Monday”
–New York Times, Sunday, June 25th, 2000.

“A City Prays”
–Miami Herald, Sunday, June 25th, 2000.

“The Supreme Court today heard arguments in the case of Gonzalez vs. Reno, the case that will decide the fate of little Elian Gonzalez, picked up by two Florida fishermen so many months ago. What is at stake? Well, put simply, the question is: does he stay, or does he go? The court appeared to be sharply divided on that question, with attorneys for both the government and the Gonzalez family peppered with questions from all sides of the bench. Mr. Waxman, the government’s attorney, got into an especially testy exchange with Justice Thomas, all the more notable because it represents a departure from Thomas’ usually silent demeanor…”
—Dan Rather, CBS Evening News, Monday, June 26th, 2000.

“Amidst Domestic Setbacks, Clinton Pivots to Holy Land”
—US News & World Report, June 26th, 2000.

“Barr Committee to Hold First Hearing After Summer Recess, Republican Convention”
—Washington Post, Wednesday, June 28th, 2000.

"Today we confront questions as fundamental as any which have come before the Court...We must balance the interests of the free society and the value of residing therein against the ancient instinct of parental love...There can be no question that the parental interest precedes all others. The question is, does the parental interest preempt the competing interests in this case. This court affirms that it does."
---Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority in Gonzalez vs Reno.

“Today, a deeply divided Supreme Court issued it’s final ruling on the matter of Gonzalez vs. Reno. In a 5-4 decision, with each dissenting justice dissenting seperately and Justice O’Connor writing for the majority, the Court has ruled that Elian must go. Cuban President Fidel Castro hailed the decision, while President Clinton vowed that he would ‘uphold the Court’s ruling and see to the boy’s swift return.’”
—Dan Rather, CBS Evening News, Friday, June 30th, 2000.

“I mean, vaya con Dios, am I right?”
—Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, Friday, June 30th, 2000.

“¡ADIOS!”
—New York Daily News, Saturday, July 1st, 2000.

“Miami: En Candela”
—Miami Herald, Saturday, July 1st, 2000.

“Miami, On The Brink Again”
—St. Petersburg Times, Sunday, July 2nd, 2000.