Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [97]
Milhous, in Three Acts
ACT I: Nixon’s the One
Every good Catholic blamed Lyndon Johnson for Kennedy’s death. Not that he had anything to do with the actual assassination (though there were those who believed he did). But we all knew he hated Kennedy, and Kennedy didn’t care much for him. Kennedy was forced to put Johnson on the ticket in order to get the racist Southern states to vote for him, states that were too dumb to figure out that Johnson shared none of their hatred for black people and would, in fact, ram the most important civil rights legislation since the Civil War down their throats the instant he became president.
What we couldn’t accept was that Kennedy was murdered in Johnson’s state, and if anyone should have been on their toes preventing such a tragedy it should’ve been Lyndon Baines Johnson. If there was one mental note all Catholics made after November 1963, it was that we would never, ever vacation in Dallas.
Johnson, within nine months of JFK’s death, escalated the Vietnam War by telling a lie. On August 4, 1964, he announced that earlier in the day, the North Vietnamese attacked a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. This did not happen. Johnson then presided over a slaughter of epic proportion, and any other good he might have been remembered for, like the civil rights laws or his war on poverty, was out the window.
In March 1968, Johnson gave up and declared he would not seek reelection. Even though I was only fourteen, I followed all of this and pinned my hopes on either Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy to win the Democratic nomination. What was unacceptable to me was the accession of the vice president, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, to the White House. He had loyally backed Johnson in the war, and so for me that was that, done and done, Humphrey was out.
I was up late watching The Joey Bishop Show when Joey was handed a note that made him choke. He announced that Robert F. Kennedy, who the night before had been shot after winning the California presidential primary, had just died. I screamed, and my parents, who were already in bed, came out in the living room.
“What are you doing up watching TV?” my mother asked.
“Bobby is dead!”
“No!” my mother said, clutching her chest and sitting down. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Just hang it right there on your door,” Salt said, instructing me where to place the “Nixon’s the One” poster. “There. Perfect.”
Thomas Salt was a high school senior and in charge of the Students for Nixon club, and although I was just a freshman, I had already moved up as his number two in charge of everything he didn’t want to do. We were students at St. Paul’s Seminary in Saginaw, Michigan, and we were certainly in the minority when it came to supporting the scoundrel Richard Milhous Nixon. We lived in a haven of Democrats (obviously, they were all Catholics, and Nixon was the evil one who’d been defeated by our only Catholic president). The entire seminary was blindly supporting Humphrey—but not Salt and not me, and not a few brave others. We weren’t supporting warmongers, period, regardless of what their party affiliation was.
Well, I’m not so sure about the we of that statement, as the four others were the sons of well-to-do Republicans whose fathers were either corporate attorneys or executives at Dow Chemical or one of the car companies. They probably liked Nixon because that was how they were wired. Me, I had joined in with them because I refused to support Humphrey on purely moral grounds—and while it may seem strange to use the word moral while backing Richard Nixon, the way I saw it, I just didn’t have a choice.
Oh, sorry—there was a choice. There was George Wallace running as an independent Klandidate for president (he would go on to win five Southern states). My congressman from Flint, Don Riegle, said that Nixon told him he had a “secret plan to end the war.” He promised that Vietnam would be over within six months of his election. (And it was. Six months after his second election, in 1972.)
But for now, Nixon was the “peace candidate,