A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (67 page)

For years, the Yankees looked like the
British Empire crushing poor Boston, whose identity more closely
resembled the Irish Republican Army during their darkest hour. But
beginning in 2001, the Yankees somehow managed to lose in the
post-season every year, occasionally defying all odds and
imagination in so doing. No matter how much money they paid in
salaries, and no matter how stacked their All-Star line-up was,
they somehow lost to Arizona (2001), Anaheim (2002), Florida
(2003), Boston (2004), Anaheim (2005), Detroit (2006) and Cleveland
(2007).

All mojo, all previous assumptions, all of
history in fact was turned on its head in 2004. With Alex Rodriguez
now on board, the Yankees led the Boston Red Sox three games to
none with a late lead in game four of the '04 Championship Series.
In what simply must be the most impossible comeback ever staged,
Boston rallied in that game and in that series to win, four games
to three. From there, the Red Sox defeated St. Louis in four
straight for their first World Series title since Babe Ruth was
their ace pitcher in 1918. Having rid themselves of the "Curse of
the Bambino," the Bosox won again in 2007, ascending to a place of
power in the game of baseball seemingly as implacable as one-time
Yankee hegemony.

Carthage is destroyed

"Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without
firing a shot."

• British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
  

On November 22, 1963, President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. In August of 1964, after
the Gulf of Tonkin incident, his successor, President Lyndon B.
Johnson, thrust America into the Vietnam War.

The United States fought in Southeast Asia
until January, 1973. Approximately 58,000 Americans lost their
lives; some 1 million people died in the war overall. The Vietnam
conflict was concluded when President Richard M. Nixon, Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger, and the North Vietnamese reached an
agreement hammered out over a period of years at the Paris peace
talks.

The agreement was an artful triangulation on
Kissinger's part, pitting Soviet, Red Chinese and North Vietnamese
Communist interests against each other, thus maximizing American
global gains; all exacerbated by a heavy U.S. bombing campaign
meant to put pressure on her enemies. At the time, it appeared that
a division between North and South Vietnam would be created, not
unlike the DMZ separating North Korea from South Korea since
1953.

In 1975, the Communists broke the agreement
and invaded the south, overrunning Saigon and causing a max exodus
of panic. Between 1975 and 1979, Communism indeed spread in
realization of the long-held "domino theory" throughout Southeast
Asia; to Laos and Cambodia. 1.5 million human beings were murdered
by the Communists, most infamously by Cambodian revolutionary Pol
Pot. In 1979, American diplomats were taken hostage in Iran, which
was overrun by Islamic fundamentalists. Between 1977 and 1980, the
term of American President Jimmy Carter, Communism spread
throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It appeared that the
battle for the Third World had been won by Communism; that the
"long twi-light struggle," to use Kennedy's 1961 words, between the
forces of freedom and the tyranny, had been lost by America.

Over the next 27 years, those losses would
be reversed. Just as in most of American history, the concept that
this happened simply by accident, or because Americans are smarter
or more diligent than other humans, defies common sense. Rather, it
would appear the only valid theory is that the hand of God favored
us.

Lyndon Johnson was the Democrat torchbearer
of 1964. His opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Arizona)
represented the nascent conservative values of the West. Richard
Nixon had tried to harness its power but McCarthyism, combined with
"tombstone votes" in Texas and fraudulent votes in Illinois, had
prevented him from riding the whirlwind. This was just one part of
the three-act Shakespearean drama that was Nixon's long, strange,
twisted struggle with the Kennedy family.

Johnson won in a landslide and in 1965 the
Democrat Party appeared to be all-powerful. They controlled the
White House with veto-proof majorities in the House and the Senate.
Democrats won at every level; they controlled state houses,
governorhips, and the Supreme Court. LBJ certainly appeared poised
to create a "permanent majority" when America's Hitler-conquering
forces would wipe out Communism in Vietnam.

When his civil rights bills were passed, LBJ
had the most "perfect" majority imaginable. He and his party not
only controlled the "black vote," they also controlled the
segregated Jim Crow South. But Johnson was a wily politico who
sensed that trouble lay ahead.

"We've just handed the South to the
Republican Party for 40 years," he told aide Bill Moyers at the
civil rights signing.

Towards the end of the long, hot summer of
1965, a routine traffic stop by a white Los Angeles police officer
of a black motorist in the Watts section of south-central L.A.
sparked furious riots. The reaction to the riots was a demand for
law 'n' order by the white conservative base. Its champion: the
former movie actor Ronald Reagan.

In 1966, Reagan ran a Right-wing campaign
against incumbent Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, the man who had
beaten Richard Nixon in 1962. Reagan won in a landslide. This
immediately vaulted Reagan into the national spotlight, and his
successful eight years in Sacramento served to strengthen his
national position all the more.

Reagan was a reactionary
because he had much to react against. Primarily this meant the
disturbances on California college campuses in the 1960s. The
University of California-Berkeley - the school and the city -
allowed itself to become the
de
facto
staging grounds of American
Communism, openly providing "aid and comfort" to Hanoi.

An enormous divide split the country.
Hollywood took a Leftward turn, with actress Jane Fonda traveling
to Hanoi to pose for photo-ops, while the motion picture industry
increasingly made anti-American movies. The conservative movement,
which had in the 1950s consisted of little more than a few
intellectuals sitting around William Buckley's mother's Connecticut
house for readings of Hayek, Kirk and Rand, had been charged up and
Westernized by Goldwater; infuriated by the anti-war Left; and
given life by Reagan. Its base was Orange County, California, the
suburbs just south of Los Angeles.

Reagan bided his time,
however. The initial benefactor of the Right's new life was Nixon.
In 1968 he ran for President. Johnson announced he would not run
for re-election. Robert Kennedy would run. In April, civil rights
leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. In June,
Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in the
mid-Wilshire District of Los Angeles. Ironically, he had spent the
day at the Malibu home of his friend, John Schlessinger, who
directed
The Manchurian
Candidate
, which depicted the
assassination of a Presidential candidate!

Had RFK run against Nixon
in 1968, he may well have won. Nixon "benefited" from the death of
another Kennedy, but the three-act drama was not over. Nixon also
benefited from the total depravity of the new Left, which
manifested itself in anti-war protests, hippies, excessive drug
use, long hair, dirty people, sexual lasciviousness, and various
other forms of unimpressiveness. The anti-war Left was placed in
full view of the television cameras during the Chicago riots at the
1968 Democrat National Convention. The protestors chanted, "The
whole world is watching" while the Chicago police rounded them up,
thinking that the world would favor them. The world was aghast not
at the police, but at
them
. The essence of what they
wanted; ending the war - replacing the government with peace
activists - was the opposite of what they in actuality
got.

One positive thing seemed to come out of the
era, however: great music from The Who, The Doors, The Beatles, The
Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Credence Clearwater Revival, The
Beach Boys, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield,
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and many others..

Nixon inherited the Vietnam War, which by
1969 had lost the support of the American public. Lacking the kind
of backing that might have led to ultimate victory if implemented
several years earlier, he decided to make the most of it, using
"carrot and stick" diplomacy.

In 1972, Nixon re-opened diplomatic
relations with Red China. It was a bold move that he alone could
accomplish at that time. Had a liberal Democrat tried it, he would
have been excoriated. Nixon's anti-Communist credentials buffered
him from conservative criticism. Combined with the impending end of
the Vietnam War, Nixon consolidated the support of both the Right
and moderate Democrats, winning re-election in 1972 by the largest
margin in American history. He took all 50 states and 62 percent of
the popular vote.

In 1973 and 1974, however, revelations of
White House burglars breaking into Democrat National Headquarters
at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. led to Nixon's
resignation.

Deprived of political and public support by
Watergate, facing a Democrat majority in Congress, Nixon's plan of
triangulation unraveled. John and Robert Kennedy's younger brother,
Teddy, was the key player in the third act of the Nixon-Kennedy
drama. The agreement with the Communists had been that if they were
break it, the U.S. would resume support of the South Vietnamese
government; if not a return of the troops who departed in 1973, at
least money, arms, materiel.

At this point, Kennedy made
the decisive move, that point of departure that ultimately made
conservatism the winning ideology of the 20
^th
Century, if not of 2,000 years of Christian history, thus
marginalizing the Democrats, then and now. By 1974, the fact that
some 100 million human beings had been or were in the process of
being murdered in the century was no longer hidden. Mao Tse-Tung's
Cultural revolution, said to have claimed 55 million lives, was in
its eighth year; its evils exposed.

Somehow, the Left, almost
as if mesmerized by evil forces, did not see that with which was
placed before thine eyes. Stanford University, for instance, had
become radicalized, and its marching band actually did a
tribute to Chairman Mao
during the precise time in which he was murdering the maximum
number of his citizens.

The Venona Project was not
yet revealed; the Soviet and KGB archives that would be opened in
the 1990s, revealing Alger Hiss's guilt and the full extent of the
Communist holocaust, were not yet available to the public; but
Kennedy and his party
did know
the political ideology this country was fighting
had already killed substantially more people in its gulags and
re-education camps than had died in the Nazi Holocaust. Despite
this full knowledge, Kennedy and his party made the conscious (and
unconscionable) decision not to oppose them; but instead to do all
they could to oppose America's efforts at stopping them.

Teddy Kennedy did not kill the 1.5 million
people who died as a result between 1975 and 1979. To say so would
be moral relativism. The Communists killed them and they must
shoulder the guilt, but had Kennedy and his party stood against
them at this critical moment in history they would not have
died.

From the short-term political analysis, it
appeared in the mid-1970s that Ted Kennedy had "avenged" Richard
Nixon on behalf of his two slain brothers. This brings forth one of
the great "what if?" scenarios of all time. Had JFK not stolen the
1960 election from Nixon, several things may very well not have
happened. First, Nikita Kruschev would probably not have been as
adventurous; the Berlin Wall may not have gone up, and missiles may
well have never been placed in Cuba.

Furthermore, Nixon probably would have
allowed air cover to be used at the Bay of Pigs, which means the
invasion probably would have succeeded, which means Fidel Castro
would have been ousted, and Cuba would have been freed! Had this
happened, there never would have been a Communist government to
welcome the Soviets' delivery of nuclear missiles on Cuban
soil.

Given these developments, the Communists may
well have not given the go-ahead to Hanoi as they continued to amp
up the Vietnam War, which could have been averted. Another
possibility, which given Nixon's hard-line position - not adopted -
at Dienbienphu in 1954, is that Nixon may have successfully won the
war as early as 1964-65 by cutting it off at the head.

Had Vietnam not been
fought, or had it been won in the mid-1960s by the Nixon
Administration, this creates a host of further "what ifs?" that go
in many directions. First, had the Cuban Missile Crisis been
averted and the war either not fought or was won by America, there
may never have been the need or the political will on both sides to
implement the arms control treaties that Nixon put into place with
Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev.

It goes beyond this. With Nixon in the White
House in 1963 instead of John F. Kennedy, JFK would not have been
assassinated. Most likely, Robert Kennedy would not have been
running for President when he was assassinated in 1968. Teddy
Kennedy would not have been the leader of the Democrat Party, in
place to destroy the carefully-laid peace agreement of
Nixon-Kissinger.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these
"what ifs?" concerns Ronald Reagan. Had Nixon been seen as the
"winner" of conservatism's ageless struggle with Communism, there
may have never been a Reagan Revolution. Or, Reagan might have been
the natural successor to Nixon. Or, John and Robert Kennedy may
have won, or lost, Presidential elections in 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976
. . . all with consequences too complicated to effectively
explore?