Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [133]
—Associated Press, April 15, 2004
TERRY: I’m all done with it. I won’t be the First Lady this time. I just can’t. If you do this, I’m staying secluded down here in Baja.
JESSE: You say you won’t, but I know if push came to shove, you’d be right there. Besides, the problem is that when I come to visit, they’ll destroy the place with all the helicopters. I won’t be able to sneak down!
TERRY: I notice you don’t even question whether or not you’ll win.
JESSE: Once you become a legitimate candidate, you get Secret Service protection. And I don’t go into anything to lose.
TERRY: Let me put it this way, I have no intention of being part of it, at all. I think I’d actually be more helpful to you if I wasn’t involved.
JESSE: But you’ve softened on another point. You did admit that being vice president wouldn’t be so bad, then we could live where the Gores did by the big telescope.
TERRY: Plus, then I’d get a chance to ride with the Washington, D.C. mounted park police.
JESSE: If we could just find somebody to be top dog. . . . Well, that would ease things up for me; as vice president I could be the official guy at funerals. You can’t screw that up too bad.
Taking the personal and family end out of the mix, seriously, honey, can I make a difference? That will be the ultimate question that I’ll ask myself. Am I just barking up a tree, or do I truly believe that my country needs me?
It’s like there’s a war being waged inside myself. It’s also a war of my fighting to be content with simple things again. That’s a dilemma. Also, do I retire in my mid-fifties? I’m done? Well, my dad did it. He reached the minimum retirement age for the city of Minneapolis, took it, and never looked back. In hindsight, I think he was smart to do that. He could have stayed on and worked another ten years and gotten more money. But he retired at fifty-five—and died at eighty-three.
TERRY: That’s the other thing I think about—what if we only have twenty years left, do we really want to take four, or even maybe eight, of those years and make ourselves insane?
JESSE: You’d be open-minded enough to give me my shot. That’s all I can ask for. The other battle I have is with the warrior part of me—the part that says: where would I have been today, and what opportunities would I have gotten, had it not been for the forefathers? You can’t go through life waiting for the other guy to do it.
TERRY: That’s what’s wrong with the country right now.
JESSE: So my meeting with Vince is being arranged. I want one hour, just him and me alone in a room.
Vince McMahon, Jr., and I go way back. I’d joined his World Wrestling Federation (WWF) back in 1985. Through many ups and downs between us over the years, I’ve always liked Vince. He’s been called wrestling’s P. T. Barnum, a simply amazing showman and entrepreneur. When I was governor, he brought SummerSlam to the Target Center, and had me be the guest referee. Later, when I was teaching at Harvard, he inducted me into the Wrestling Hall of Fame. Today Vince is chairman of the board of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
He’s also very involved with politics. His interest began around the time I became governor of Minnesota. In July 2000, he founded WWE’s Smackdown Your Vote!, a nonpartisan approach to getting young people involved in the process and registered to vote. WWE began collaborating with many other nonprofits like Rock the Vote, the Youth Vote Coalition, and the League of Women Voters. In 2003, Vince’s group joined forces with Russell Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, in an effort to get “Two Million More by 2004.” They had a big impact.
Vince told me, after I won governor, “If you ever go for president, I’ll back you 100 percent, with everything I’ve got.” Now we’ll see if he wants to play the game.
The scene: Vince McMahon’s