“We want to give you a chance to talk to our candidate and to restate our demand that Pigasus be given Secret Service protection and be brought to the White House for his foreign policy briefing.”
Jerry Rubin at the nomination of Pigasus for president of the USA

“They nominate a president and he eats the people. We nominate a president and the people eat him.”
Pigasus nominators’ slogan

The nomination of the boar hog Pigasus for President of the United States by the Yippies had been the most “transcendentally lucid” political act of the twentieth century.

One man in the same bar as Mr. Lally, Callahan’s bar at 235 Flatbush Avenue, refused to give his name but declared emphatically: “So far neither one of these guys has said anything.”

Mr. and Mrs. John F Kennedy of Stuyvesant Town — and no relation to the Democratic candidate — said they did not watch the debate. “What show you talking about? asked Mrs. Kennedy when asked for a comment. “Oh, the television show. We were out visiting.”

Many of the first, quick samplings showed that a considerable number of voters were apparently far from making any vote decision yet.

“For tonight, I’d say Senator Kennedy was the better TV performer,” said Louis Votino, a teacher. “Would he be a better president? I don’t know. I don’t think either one was too articulate. The debate has not changed my mind at all. I’m still unconvinced.”

“The program was very upsetting,” said Virginia Lichtner. “Nixon seemed more interested in presenting a pleasant facade: everytime he spoke he seemed to end it with a little smile. He seemed to say, ‘Yes, I want more education,’ but he wouldn’t say how he was going to get it. Kennedy seemed to have a quicker mind.”

Dan Rosenbloom said: “I think Mr. Nixon did a very good juggling act. He made it sound as if the Administration was doing everything the people want. Mr. Kennedy impressed me as someone who is just trying to get across some of the things he failed to help get through the Congress. Neither impressed me too much.”

A partisan group of about 400 persons called by the Citizens for Kennedy, was gathered at the Delmonico Hotel to watch the debate. The audience of Democrats was restrained, but when some of them thought that Mr. Nixon looked uncomfortable or pressed by Senator Kennedy in the political exchange they would cheer or applaud.

Even there, however, there was a general satisfaction that the debate was showing the voters both candidates in a face-to-face challenge. Mrs. Nona Dowd called it a “wonderful program for both of them” and said that she thought they were both pretty close to each other on ideas.

Alvin Hellerstein, an attorney, watched with the same group. He said he thought that Mr. Kennedy had given an appearance of great vigor and seriousness but that Mr. Nixon had seemed to be talking down to the people.

Cheers and applause Mr. Nixon echoed* at the Federal Republican Club, where about 125 party members had gathered. General silence greeted Mr. Kennedy when he was in view on the screen.

Bernard Newman, New York County Republican leader said: “Mr. Nixon’s maturity and experience showed through clearly and unmistakenly while Mr. Kennedy seemed to want to be all things to all men on all issues.”

To Nicholas Atlas, former Assistant United States Attorney, Senator Kennedy appealed to nostalgia. “He was talking to the generation that was gone,” Mr. Atlas said. “The New Deal is behind us.”

Both candidates appeared well-informed in the opinion of Mrs. Anne J. Mathes, a lawyer. “But Kennedy was emotional and seemed scared,” she said, “while Nixon struck to the point and was logical.”

Mrs. Jesse Lehman said: “I was surprised at Mr. Nixon’s very defensive attitude. he seemed to justify his position on the basis of the fact that Mr. Kennedy agreed with him. Mr. Nixon said very little effectively. Mr. Kennedy was very forthright. I was pleasantly surprised at the way he handled himself. I thought he was outspoken, clear and to the point.”

Not everyone was satisfied with last night’s political substitute for the usual far of entertainment. One woman reached by telephone said she watched the first half of the program, and then fell sound asleep.

A rubbish collector, John Marrone, was sold on Senator Kennedy. “I like his stand on old-age pension and all that stuff,” he said. “And I don’t like Nixon. Those Republicans don’t live up to their promises.”

There was some disappointment over the absense of oratorical fireworks. Some viewers said they had not been expecting so much politeness between the two candidates. Jerome I. Levine said: “There wasn’t much said. They kept repeating over and over that ‘it’s a matter of mean.’ They were both very impressive and seemed to have firm convictions. But there were too many generalizations. It seems they were just being very nice to each other.”

“I thought that Nixon was more effective,” said Mrs. Thomas Madigan. “He wants to keep the Federal Government out of the affairs of state government. […]”

Mrs. Henry Mason liked the show and thought there should be more like it, but she offered no estimate of which of the two candidates had impressed her the most. “I wouldn’t want to commit myself,” she said.

Florence Mervis thought the debate was “very good” and that “Kennedy showed up much better than Nixon.” However, she doubted that it had added anything to her understanding of the issues.

A housewife with two children in high school thought the program and the others to follow would have a definite influence on her vote. “The personality of the men showed through,” said Mrs. Jerome Gilbert. “They could reach me where they never could have otherwise.”

Three quarters of the people at a listening house party in Montclair, NJ felt that Senator Kennedy had the better of the debate. Many thought the Vice President seeemed nervous, but there were some who thought that this was a deliberate affectations.

Most of the group at the party felt that Senator Kennedy not only introduced most of the concrete points of the program in his presentation but also accounted best in the give and take. “Kennedy looked less like Henry Aldrich,” said one of the guests, a Columbia University professor.

“I resent the fact that Nixon has lost his jowls and Kennedy seems to have picked them up,” said a housewife and member of the League of Women Voters.

“I think Nixon showed up remarkably well in the question and answer period,” said one housewife. “He looked particularly well when he was asked to comment on what he had contributed in the way of concrete program to the achievements of the Eisenhower Administration in the last eight years.”

…*Their typo, not mine. I made some minor edits all around, and shifted paragraphs into each other.

The pro-Lincoln Chicago Tribune commented:

“The Ottawa debate gave great satisfaction to our side. Mr. Lincoln, we thought, had the better of the argument, and we all came away encouraged also.”

The pro-Douglas Chicago Times also had its say. In headline style, it told its readers:

THE CAMPAIGN
Douglas Among the People!
Lincoln Breaks down.
Enthusiasms of the People!
Lincoln’s Heart Fails Him!
Lincoln’s Legs Fail Him!
Lincoln’s Tongue Fails Him!
Lincoln Fails All Over!
The People Refuse to Support Him!
The People Laugh at Him!
Douglas the Champion of the People!

That was how it was in Chicago on August 22, 1958, the day after the first debate.

At one point during the debates, Douglas told a crowd that Lincoln had been a storekeeper who sold whisky at one time. Lincoln replied:

“But the difference between Judge Douglas and myself is just this, while I was behind the bar he was in front of it.”

Iraq Stirs Old Mideast Feuds July 1, 1961

When Britain on June 19 exchanged an anachronistic treaty of protection with Kuwait for a more modern treaty of friendship, consultation and assistance, few Kuwaitis took much notice. Nothing changed in Kuwait except a few papers.

But Premier Abdul Karim Kassim of Iraq, Kuwait’s northern neighbor, took the change to signify the withdrawal of British protection and moved to take advantage of it. He announced the annexation of Kuwait.

June 25, 1972: Motive Is Big Mystery In Raid on Democrats

The Republicans quickly discharged Mr. McCord as their security man and denied emphatically that they had had any connection with the raid on the Democratic headquarters.

Mr. Mitchell described this as “another example of sheer demagoguery on the part of Mr. O’Brien.” Mr. O’Brien said that there was “a developing clear line to the White House.”

With that preposterous theory out of the way, we turn to other, more plausible motives:

More or less simultaneously with the political exchanges, the reporters about former spies began to come in. All five of the arrested men were said to have had ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.

While it was conjectured that a Cuban group might have been seeking to curry favor with the Republicans or to battle leftists, this theory, like all the others, was uncertain.

(Guns and Butter):
June 30, 1966

President Johnson said today that US air strikes on military targets in North Vietnam will continue to impose a growing burden and a high price on those who wage war against the freedom of their neighbors.

The resolute tone of Mr Johnson’s remarks, made in a speech, indicated no wavering in his decision to step up the tempo of the war to convince North Vietnam that it cannot win and should seek to netotiate a settlement.

It was the President’s first pronouncement alluding to the important escalation of the war signaled by the US bombing raids yesterday on fuel dumps close to Hanoi and Haiphong. The tenor of the President’s remarks made it plain that he was unswayed by criticism of the raids in Congress and abroad.

In a broad-ranging speech, Mr. Johnson emphasized the perils posed by developing world food shortages and his hope that nations, no matter what their ideologies, could cooperate to end poverty, ignorance and disease.

He also urged Americans to stand fast behind his policy in Vietnam.

“If you are too busy and not inclined to help, please count to 10 before you hurt,” the President asked.

The President chose for his earlier speech a site calculated to underscore the peaceful intentions of the US: The Omaha Municipal Dock on the Missouri River.

Tied up there was a barage loaded with the five millionth ton of grain to be sent to India since emergency shipments began in January. Mr Johnson gave the signal [… lots of Butter …]

Mr. Johsnon declared that he was convinced that “after decades of war and threats of war, peace is more within our reach than at any time in this century.”

This is so, he said, because “we have made up our mind to deal iwth the two most common threats to the peace of the world.” These he said, are the desire of most people to win a better way of life and the design of some to force their way of life on others.

“Now if we ignore these threats or if we attempt to meet them only by the rhetoric of visionary intentions instead of good works of determination, I am certain that tyranny and not peace will be our ultimate fate,” Mr. Johnson declared.
[…]

The President devoted a major portion of his speech to outlining the basic reasons for the US commitment in Vietnam. He presumably was trying to allay the growing discontent reflected by public opinion polls.

He cited three basic reasons for the US presence in Vietnam:

The United States is obligated to help those whose rights are threatened by force.

South Vietnam is important to the security of the rest of “free Asia” where, shielded by the courage of the South Vietnamese, other nations “are driving toward economic and social development in a new spirit of regional cooperation.”

The outcome in South Vietnam will determine whether “ambitious and aggressive nations can use guerrilla warfare to take over their weaker neighbors.”

President Johnson dealt with the last point at considerble length, reflecting the Administration view that the war waged without traditional military fronts, was a difficult one for the American people to understand.

In 1965, the President said the Communists killed or kidnapped 12,000 South Vietnamese civilians.

“If, by such methods, the agents of one nation can go out and hold and seize power where turbulent change is occurring in another nation,” he declared, “our hope for peace and order will suffer a crushing blowas over the world it will be an invitation to the would-be conquerer to keep on marching. And that is why the problem of guerrilla warfare, the problem of Vietnam, is a very critical threat to peace not just in South Vietnam, but in all of this world in whcih we live.”

The purpose of the United States, Mr. Johnson said, “is to convince North Vietnam that this kind of aggression is too costly and cannot succeed.”

He said that the tide of war had started to turn against the North Vietnamese, but added this sober warning:

“No one knows how long it will take. Only Hanoi can be the judge of that. No one can tell you how much effort it will take. No once can tell you how much sacrifice it will take. No one can tell you how costly it will be. But I can and I do here and now tell you this: The aggression they are conducting will not succeed” […]

The Communists have shown no sign of wanting to negotiate, he said, and they believe that political disgreement in Washington and confusion and doubt in the United States will give them victory. “They are wrong,” the President added.

My father, a Warsaw ghetto survivor, will vote for Ronald Reagan on Nov. 4 — casting his ballot for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in his 32 years as an American. He says he is voting against Carter.

The president’s failure, in the eyes of the Jewish-American community, overshadow his one real triumph in foreign policy, bringing Israel and Egypt to the bargaining table at Camp David. His waffling on the UN vote against Israel in March and Billy Carter’s relationship with anti-Zionist Libya have bred suspicion and resentment, solidifying the disllusionment with the Democratic Party that began with George McGovern’s candidacy in 1972.

But whatever objections Jewish voters have to Carter, they should carefully ponder the implications of the alternative: electing a man whose major supporters wish to “re-Christianize” America. Fundamentalist right-wing Christianity, both in the US and abroad, historically has incorporated or tolerated anti-Semitism. Fueled by a fear of social change and a sense of moral self-righteousness, its followers viewed Jews as outsiders, or worse.

Today’s fundamentalist New Right clings to a simplistic, paranoid perception that “radicals, perverts, liberals, leftists, and Communists” are responsible for the nation’s woes.

“We’ve got to bring some holy fear to the American system before it destroys us,” declared one preacher at an evangelical rally featuring Reagan as a keynote speaker.

Not long ago, the ideological forerunners of the New Right blamed America’s problems not on secular liberalism, but on a conspiracy of Jews. During the 1920s and 30s, men like Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin carried on the tradition of what historian Richard Hofstadter scalled “the paranoid style of American politics.” They explained away economic and political difficulties with tirades against the “International Jew”.

Anti-foreign, protectionist tendencies reached a peak in the 1920s, when the wholesale immigration of Italians and Jews coincided with a conservative backlash. One historian described the era as “probably unmatched in American history for xenophobia and paranoid suspicion.”

The national mood was set by the 1919 Red Scare (which warned of a conspiracy by German – Jewish bankers and Russian – Jewish Bolsevicks) and US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s raids on thousands of aliens and suspected Communists, anarchists, and radicals. During the postwar depression beginning in 1920, Ku Klux Klan membership grew from 5,000 to 5 million, and Ford began to repring in his widely read Michigan newspaper excerpts from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The 1930s saw a new wave of Christian conservative reaction, this time with avowedly fascist leanings. The Silver Shirts was a group that advocated the creation of an American fascist dictatorship, to be called the Christian Commonwealth. Father Coughlin, a popular radio personality, harangued about the Jewish role in the origins of coumminism and urged the creation of a “state-capitalist” system. Coughlin’s organization put its own presidential candidate on the ballot in 1936, and got 2 percent of the vote.

World War II redirected America’s concerns to a more threatening enemy than “internaional Jewry,” and so right-wing paranoia was held in check until the mid-1950s, when McCarthyism ushered in the New Right.

The relatively moderate public voice of the New Right still seeks scapegoats on whom to blame for the society’s ills. Phyllis Schlafly, the prominent anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist and long-time Reagan supporter, wrote in a 1964 pro-Goldwater tract that a “small group of secret kingmakers” within the Republican Party are “perpetuating the Red Empire in order to perpetuate the high level of federal spending and control” and are nominating only those presidential candidates who “will sidestep or suppress the key issues.”

Schlafly has addressed such overtly anti-Semitic groups as the Liberty Lobby and the Rev. Billy James Hargis’ Christian Crusade. She has also named Henry Kissinger as a member of a conspiracy to weaken America from within. (Other plotters, according to her, have been Robert McNamara, Walter Lipmann, Clark Clifford, Averell Hariman, Dean Rusk and J. William Fulbright.)

Schlafly represents a new generation of Christian right-wing ideologues who are far too adroit to make anti-Semitic statements. After all, anti-Semitism went out of style after the Holocaust, due as much to the submergence of European – Jewish idenity into mainstream culture as to Christian guilt pangs. There are occasional slips by public officials, such as the 1974 warning against the “Jewish influence” in media and government by the late Gen. George S. Brown, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But most Americans treat then with embarrassment and disdain.

American Jews must not view this fashion of intolerance with a blind eye to the past. The fundamentalist New Right, like the old, does not share the pluralistic, secular, democratic ideals that make America safe for Jews and other religions, racial and political minorities. Even if Jews are not now castigated by name, the political strategy of someone like the Rev. Jerry Falwell (“Get them saved, baptized and registered”), clearly excludes them.

The reactionary right has been looking for an “acceptable”Republican ever since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 defeat gave the party back to the relatively liberal Eastern wing. A President Reagan would not mean an American pogrom, but as Paul Weyrich of the right-wing Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress said, “We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure in this country.”

Jewish voters did not support such rightwing presidential contenders as Goldwater or George Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate in 1968. But as the case of my father shows, a conservative mood has shaken loose the liberal hold of the Jewish vote.

In this close race, that vote is being wooed as never before by beoth major parties (and by independent candidate John Anderson). Carter may be unacceptable to many. But can a Jew vote for Ronald Reagan?

Herb Fox, October 1980.

Anyway, read about him (Ullysseus Simpson Grant), he is far more interesting than Estes Kefauver ever could have been. BTW, I met Kowfever once. I was not impressed with him but then he probably was not very impressed with me either. No matter, he was strictly a one-trick Pony as far as I could tell and I did not do any work for him in any way. I do not remember him as doing anything at all at the Convention that year, just faded away into the great southern slough and was never heard from again.

I eye Aye…

April 17, 1952
President Truman indicated today that he believed he or any United States President had the theoretical power to seize newspapers and radio stations to protect the national welfare in war or great emergency.

But a White House spokesman quickly added that it was “absolutely unlikely” anything of that nature ever would have to be done.

Mr. Truman’s view, given at a news conference, startled some of the editors here for the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Controversy has boiled over the President’s seizure of the steel mills. One of the visiting editors asked the President: “If it is proper under your inherent powers to seize the steel mills, can you in your opinion seize the newspapers and the radio stations?”

Mr. Truman replied that under similar circumstances the President the President had to do whatever he believed was best for the country.

[…]
Several of the editors, many of whom attended the press conference, did not believe the President actually meant he had power to take over radio stations and newspapers.

Anthony F. Jones, president of Newspaper Editors and editor of the Syracuse (NY) Hearld-Journal, said: “What I thought the President meant was that he has the power to take over steel. It would be putting words in his mouth to say anything else.”

But Walter M. Harrison of Oklahoma City, former president of the society, said: “I think he meant he could take over the papers, radio, and everything else. If that isn’t on the edge of totalitarianism, I don’t know what is.”

April 18, 1952

The White House minimized today President Truman’s remark yesterday implying that he had the power to seize newspapers and radio stations in an emergency.

Joseph Short, White House press secretary, was asked for clarification or amplification of Mr. Truman’s answer to a question at his news conference.

“It was a purely academic and hypothetical question and there is no amplification or comment to it,” Mr. Short said.

A reporter then said that some editors, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, seemed to interpret Mr. Truman’s reply as affirmative.

“You can quote them on it,” Mr. Short retorted.

……..
April 18, 1952
The directors of the Maryland Press Association approved today a resolution calling for a “new amendment to the Constitution providing safeguard against the exercise of dictatorial power by the President of the United States.”

The action was taken, the resolution stated, because the President “has intimated publicly that he believes he has the inherent power to seize property, whether it be a public utility, an industry, or the press.

January 19, 1957
The path followed by President Truman during his Administration and now by President Eisenhower in the censorship of news “is a road that can be used toward dictatorship,” Norman E. Issacs, managing editor of the Louisville Courier – Journal and Times said here tonight.

He spoke on “America’s Iron Curtain” before 500 persons at the Rockdale Avenue Temple’s 133rd annual dinnver. Mr. Issacs said that neither Mr. Truman nor Mr. Eisenhower were “dictatorial types” but that under their Administration there had been forged “the ideal tools for the use of an unscrupulous man or group of men.”

Mr. Issacs is a former president of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association and served as national chairman of the organization’s Freedom of Information Committee.

On the Federal, state, and local levels, governmental executives are taking the people toward abondonment of free institutions and the acceptance of secret institutions, Mr. Issacs said.

….

The Socialists joined with the moderate conservative People’s Party and the communists in a coalition of anti-fascist parties in the provisional government following World War Two. The three-party coalition lasted until the communists left in 1947 (the year Arnold was born), following the 1945 election which won them only four seats, to their great disappointment. The socialists won 76 and the conservatives 85.

In the 1949 election, the voters rewarded the communists’ shift into opposition by giving them one extra seat, for a total of five. The real opposition was the new right-wing party which won 16 seats against the socialists’ 67 and the People’s Party’s 77. A “unite-the-right” coalition would have had a majority of 21, but the People’s Party chose to maintain the grand coalition. Closet socialists?

From 1947 until 1966 Austria was governed by the coalition of the Socialist and People’s parties. The People’s Party supplied all the federal chancellors (heads of government) until 1970. Following the Soviet invasion of next-door Hungary in 1956, in the 1959 Austrian election the communists fell off the radar screen, never to return to Parliament.

The coalition government broke down in October 1965 because of a budget dispute that eventually forced the resignation of Chancellor Joseph Klaus. However, his party gained an absolute majority in the national elections of March 1966, allowing Klaus to form the first People’s Party government in the Second Republic without the socialists. […]

Well, there WERE people in Austria in 1966 […] who considered Austria socialist because they considered the moderate conservative Austrian Peoples’ Party socialist. Those people were supporters of the Freedom Party that spawned Joerg Haider. In the 1966 election they got 5.4% of the vote, while the Peoples’ Party got 48.4% and the real socialists got 42.6%. (The other 3.6% got no seats, giving the Peoples’ Party an absolute majority.)

[…] the perspective of 5.4% of the population of Austria, I think one could fairly and objectively call that an extremist viewpoint.

I forgot to add “The first two leaders of the Freedom Party were respectively a former member of Chancellor Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s post-Anschluss (unity) Nazi cabinet of 1938 and an ex-SS officer.”

…
Thank you, Wilf Day. (Yes, I deleted all references to the most famous Austrian American politician, for my own purposes.)