A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (30 page)

Instead, he moved back to Los Angeles, bought
a home in the fashionable Trousdale Estates section of Beverly
Hills (where he was a neighbor of Leo Durocher's) and took a job
with the corporate law firm Adams, Duque & Hazeltine in
downtown Los Angeles. He also finished his autobiography, the
critically-well-received
Six Crises
, which lay the
groundwork for his comeback. In 1962, Nixon ran for Governor of
California. His opponent was the old school Irish Democrat Edmund
"Pat" Brown, the father of later Governor (and Presidential
candidate Jerry Brown).

Governor Brown was popular and had a string
of successes to hang his hat on, making Nixon's an uphill effort.
Brown had overseen some of California's greatest modernizations,
namely the implementation of Dwight Eisenhower's highway bill which
symbolized the Golden State's - particularly L.A.'s - mobility. He
also orchestrated the University of California and state university
systems. This expanded beyond Berkeley and UCLA to a string of U.C.
campuses that would include Irvine, Riverside, San Diego and many
more. The state universities - Fresno, Sacramento, San Diego, just
to name a few - made affordable education available to the masses.
A second-to-none junior college system was also created. It was a
revolution in the Democratization of education, and Nixon could not
overcome it. Brown won and Nixon, taken down from the high horse of
national stature, rejected by his home state, was embittered. He
blamed the press, taken aback that the
Los Angeles Times
had
not carried his water.

For years, the
Times
, owned by the
conservative Chandler family, had supported Nixon in his efforts to
expose Alger Hiss, fight Communism, and to thwart increasing
attacks from the Hollywood Left. But Otis Chandler made the
conscious decision to expand the paper from a parochial Republican
mouthpiece to a world-renowned paper, on par with the
New York
Times
and the
Washington Post
. He succeeded. Nixon felt
betrayed, and at his "last press conference," held at the Beverly
Hilton Hotel the night of his loss to Brown, he told the assembled
media "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."

Racism was still alive and well in 1962. In
1960, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Birmingham,
Alabama. His "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" inspired the Civil
Rights Movement. Richard Nixon, who as a Duke University law
student had argued on behalf of black rights in debates with his
Southern classmates, now failed to come to King's aid. He was
afraid of white backlash. John Kennedy did help secure King's
release. The black baseball icon Jackie Robinson, a Connecticut
Republican and longtime friend of the fellow Californian Nixon,
swung his support to JFK. Black votes in Cook County, Chicago may
well have made the difference for Nixon losing Illinois . . . and
the Presidency.

George Wallace had reached out to black voters in
Alabama, much as Louisiana's Huey and Earl Long had done in 1930s
Louisiana. Wallace lost to John Patterson in 1958 and vowed he
would never be "out-n------d again." In 1962 he ran as a strict
segregationist and won, announcing at his 1963 inaugural that his
policy was "segregation now, segregation forever."

In 1962 James Meredith became the first black man to
enter the University of Mississippi. Democrat Governor Ross
Barnett, theoretically an ally of President Kennedy by virtue of
their shared membership in the Democrat Party, instead used every
tactic at his disposal to block Meredith's enrollment. JFK was
forced to use troops to enforce Meredith's civil rights.

The "space race" was in full throttle by
1962. After the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed. Using
American technology and the brilliant minds of a handful of former
German rocket scientists, most notably Werner von Braun, by 1961
the U.S. was able to launch Naval aviator Alan Shepard into space.
The Mercury program lasted from 1961 to 1963 and was a huge
success. In 1962, John Glenn successfully circumnavigated the
Earth, then survived a harrowing return home when the heat shields
on his Friendship 7 space craft threatened to unloose itself during
re-entry, thus burning him alive.

****

The symbolic way Americans felt about Vietnam
in 1962 could be summed up by the phrase, "Trapped inside every
Vietnamese is an American just dying to get out." It was a
jingoistic view, typical of the times, and emblematic of America's
hubris
in Vietnam, where John Kennedy had increased the
number of "advisors" in country.

Many Americans had never even heard of
Vietnam in 1961-62, but it was well known by the political class
and had been a for a long time. For 1,000 years, the Vietnamese had
fought for independence; against the Chinese, the French, the
Japanese and again the French. The French had colonized it in the
18
^th
Century, and when the U.S. defeated the Japanese in
World War II, re-claimed it.

The Chinese eyed their old territory, as well. After
the Korean War, it became the central battlefield between the
forces of freedom and the forces of Communism. Ho Chi Minh, like so
many Oriental Communist revolutionaries was a French-educated
intellectual, originally wanted the country to be re-shaped using
the U.S. Constitution as a model. The U.S. said after World War II
that one of the results of the victory would be a rollback of
colonialization. Algeria would successfully split from the French.
Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago and Uganda would brake from their mother
countries. In Syria, Peru and Yemen, old regimes would be
toppled.

The U.S. now understood that its flowery sentiment
favoring de-colonization, a bulwark of the Atlantic Charter, the
agreement between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister
Winston Churchill to, in effect, "transfer" the British Empire into
the hands of the U.S., was much easier theorized than practiced.
They determined that it certainly did not apply to Vietnam. Ho
appealed to President Harry Truman for help in liberating his
country from the French, but the U.S. was too invested in France's
post-war restoration to back the dissolution of such an important
allied colony. Its fertile lands produced many lucrative natural
resources, mostly rubber in a world in which rubber production was
on the rise.

In 1954, the Communists defeated the French
at Dienbienphu. Vice President Nixon advocated the use of
"battlefield nuclear weapons" to repel the Communists, but Dwight
Eisenhower refused. The total defeat by the French shocked
everybody and forced their expulsion from the country. The
Americans began to send military advisers to support the South
Vietnamese government in its struggle against the Communists. Ike
supported the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, his
brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, the notorious Madame Ngo Dinh
Nhu.

A cultural divide, however, took shape in Vietnam in
which the government and elites, propped up by the Americans,
tended to be French-trained Catholics. Ngo Dinh Diem was a
French-educated, aristocratic Catholic in a nation of Buddhists.
Madame Nhu was more French in her mannerisms than Oriental and
became one of the most hated women in the world when she cheered
the self-immolation of Buddhist monks. Catholicism was seen as a
vestige of French colonial times, and not popular within the
citizenry. Ngo Dinh Diem was a strongman who resisted Democratic
reforms, and irritated Kennedy by using his military more to
protect his palace from constant threats of
coup d'etats
rather than fighting the Communists attacking from the north.
Kennedy hoped that the Green Berets, a special unit trained to
fight in the jungles, could win the nascent war in Vietnam without
escalating forces, but the government was teetering. A "domino
theory" was posed, a carryover from the Truman years, based on the
idea that if one nation (Vietnam) went Communist, then it would
cause a series of countries (Laos, Cambodia . . . ) to do the same.
By 1962, it was an increasingly American operation, with U.S.
advisors in country increasing from 700 to 12,000 in 1962.

****

In 1961, young operatic Robert Goulet was the
sensation of Broadway in
Camelot
. The play, and the times,
would become the embodiment of the Kennedy era, its mythology
expounded upon by Jacqueline Kennedy herself after JFK's death when
she used the phrase "Camelot" in an interview with journalist
Theodore White.

The "blacklist," which described the period
from the late 1940s throughout the 1950s in which known Communists
were not allowed to write screenplays - or were forced to do so
under assumed names - came to its official end in 1960.
Producer/star Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick hired
Dalton Trumbo to pen
Spartacus
. Some have called
Spartacus
the first "political" film. This might be a
stretch. Certainly,
The Sweet Smell of Success
(1957)
starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, was a referendum meant to
disgrace the "witch-hunting" Red-baiter Walter Winchell. The former
New York columnist moved to Hollywood, where in 1962 he re-invented
himself as a gossip monger. His protégé was Los Angeles Angels
rookie pitcher Bo Belinsky. Winchell arranged for Belinsky to date
"every broad that matters," all of whom Winchell knew. Then
Winchell would write about it, making for column fodder that turned
Bo into a celebrity.

Spartacus
, which used most of the USC
football team (including assistant coach Marv Goux) as gladiators,
told the story of a slave uprising against the Roman Empire,
disguised by Trumbo as an illustration of American repression. It
was a profound switch from such religious epics as
The Ten
Commandments
,
Ben-Hur
and
Moses
that marked the
previous years.

A key scene involved a black gladiator,
played by the former UCLA football star Woody Strode, who
sacrifices himself so that Douglas's
Spartacus
can live.

In 1961, Jimmy Cagney starred in an old
school studio film called
One, Two, Three
that featured
Cagney as Coca-Cola's man in West Berlin. The film poked
good-natured fun at the Communists in East Berlin, using a love
affair between a radical (Horst Buchholz) and the Southern belle
daughter of Coke's main honcho as a metaphor for how young
Communists are really just yearning to become Americans.

The early 1960s were the last vestiges of the
old studio system. In 1962, Darryl F. Zanuck produced
The
Longest Day
. Its cast of superstars was led by the ultimate
symbol of American superiority, John Wayne. The film was a
flag-waving
paean
to U.S. glory, telling the story of the
successful D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. But other films of 1962
went in a different direction.

David Lean's
Lawrence of Arabia
was a
panoramic epic, its rich colors and sound making full use of the
new panavision film that marked movies of the era. It was the tale
of T.E. Lawrence, a low-level British Army officer who led the
"Arab revolt" that helped Great Britain defeat Germany's ally, the
Turkish Ottoman Empire, in World War I. The film was remarkably
prescient and worth watching today as a lesson in "what went wrong"
in the Middle East. It certainly was not uncritical of the British
Empire.

In 1962, Frank Sinatra produced and starred
in
The Manchurian Candidate
, which was oddly either
anti-Communist or anti-American, depending which way one views it.
Sinatra insisted it was not anti-Communist, but its story -
Communist "brainwashing" of an American soldier, thus turning him
into an assassin of the U.S. Presidential candidate in order to
install a Communist front man in the White House - is hard to be
seen as anything other than anti-Communist. On the other hand, it
featured a drunken McCarthyite character and Angela Lansbury
apparently as a staunch conservative who orchestrates the Communist
plot (?).

The film was screenwritten by the talented
Rod Serling. Serling also produced
The Twi-Light Zone
, which
by 1962 was in its fourth season. The
Zone
was a
groundbreaking television series with strong social messages,
usually liberal in nature as befitting Serling's tendencies (found
within his work in
The Manchurian Candidate
and 1963s
Seven Days in May
).
The Twi-Light Zone
also was an
entrée for every hot young actor and actress of the late 1950s and
early 1960s, including the likes of Robert Redford, Lee Marvin,
Burgess Meredith, Carol Burnett and many others.

Also in 1962, screen icon Marilyn Monroe
died, possibly from an overdose of sleeping pills. There is
evidence that the Kennedy's may have been involved, but it has
never been proven. Marilyn had an affair with Jack and perhaps a
brief flung with Robert Kennedy prior to her August, 1962 passing.
Her ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio, always insisted the Kennedy's had her
killed to avoid embarrassment.

Music of the era was embodied by the swank
sounds of the Rat Pack; Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
The bossa nova orchestrations of these talents marked the time and
place, a unique combination of Manhattan glamour and Las Vegas
glitz. Youthful America tuned into new musical stylings. On the
East Coast, the "Philadelphia sound" was male in nature, featuring
harmonic convergences on street corners where would-be lotharios
tried to woo passing girls with talent and bravado.

In Detroit, black voices were heard. Old style jazz
was fused with rock 'n' roll in a style called Motown. It was
picked up on by white groups like The Righteous Brothers. In the
South, Elvis Presley was "The King," having brought country twang
and black stylings to rock music. On the West Coast, the Beach Boys
and Jan and Dean were influencing millions of people into pursuing
the "California dream" of surfing, girls and cars. Ray Charles,
Connie Francis, and The Four Seasons were all at the height of
their popularity in 1962. Shelley Fabares's "Johnny Angel" was
constantly heard on the radio. Chubby Checker hit it big with "The
Twist," and a toy called the hula-hoop sold big on the strength of
this concept.