Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [97]
In June of 1988, the Washington Post ran a news account of Ali, out of nowhere, talking to one of its reporters on the phone. He appeared to have a hard grasp of politics, current states’ rights issues, and federal judgeships being contested. Noses of reporters who had known Ali for a long time began to twitch, particularly that of Dave Kindred, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal. How could this be? Ali had had the political insight of an infant. Kindred investigated. What or who was behind the new Ali, the wily Washington lobbyist who seemed to have the ear of everyone from Strom Thurmond (their only common ground was Dr. Mendenica) to Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter? Specter’s wife even baked Ali a double-chocolate–mousse pie. For a while, Ali was known only as a brilliant phone presence to the senators—that is, until he began to show up on Capitol Hill.
When he materialized, the senators, confronted by the empty shell of Ali, sought running room, guarding their flanks with comments like, “Well, he’s just quiet,” or “sometimes he doesn’t take his medicine.” One of Sam Nunn’s aides, noting Ali’s listlessness and Hirschfeld’s rat terrier presence of aggressive quizzing, wondered: “Is Ali being carted around like a puppet?” Senator John Warner’s press secretary, Peter Loomis, said: “Hirschfeld did all the talking. Ali was yawning. He could barely focus his eyes.” Ali and Hirschfeld had spent the entire summer on Capitol Hill. What were they after, or more likely, what was Hirschfeld after? Ali had had a suit seeking $50 million in damages from a “wrongful conviction in the 1967 draft evasion case.” It was defeated, and now Hatch and others, like W. C. Fields with the Bible, were looking for loopholes to remedy it. Some of the senators even suspected that Hirschfeld, who reportedly could do a flawless impression of Ali, had impersonated Ali in their prior telephone conversations. When confronted with these suspicions, Ali vascillated on the alleged fraud. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout politics,” he said. Then, on the Capitol steps in front of the press, he later denied the allegation and said he had trust in Hirschfeld. “I have no bosses,” he said. “I’m the boss.” Hirschfeld also denied the allegations. From the day he joined the Black Muslims, that has to be one of the big self-delusions of all time. Through Ali, Hirschfeld had sought the damages and to make himself an indispensable broker to the Republican Party.
Thomas Smith, a Detroit lawyer involved in the auto factory deal, cut to the center of Ali, saying: “Ali baffles me. I don’t know how I feel. He’s gullible and easily led by Hirschfeld. At the same time, I perceived Ali laughing at everybody. He’s so aloof. He doesn’t care enough about people. Ali seems to be in a world by himself, and he looks out of it at you once in a while.” Wilfred Sheed, in his long ago book on Ali, had him pegged right, too. “He wants to tell everything, and he wants to hide everything. There is evidence to support every Ali theory. This is confusion of Ali’s creation. He insisted that today’s truth is better than yesterday’s…. He likes