Dec. 21, 1970

No words needed...

The other victim in Dallas

I've always been fascinated by Texas political history.

One of the most fascinating of the Lone Star State's colorful characters is John Connally, an LBJ protege who was governor of Texas when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

You no doubt know that Connally, riding in the jump seat of the 1961 Lincoln limo, was also hit that day.

His story -- understandably so -- tends to get lost amid the death of a president.

But Connally's tale is a good one, worthy of study on its own.

Here is a fascinating interview with Connally and his wife Nellie conducted by Larry King in 1992.

For those of you interested in this type of thing, don't miss "The Lone Star," James Reston Jr.'s excellent biography of Connally.

As an aside, Connally later became a Republican. President Richard Nixon wanted Connally to be his successor for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. But, of course, Watergate happened, Connally became entangled in scandal and most doubted that the Republican base would have accepted the former Democrat anyhow.

Give Connally a look. His is a Texas-sized tale.

I used to be a Republican...

...until my party was hijacked by neo-fascists, many of whom are continuing to embarrass our great state on a daily basis in Music City.

I still like Ike. He couldn't get nominated today.

I also think, in many ways, Nixon's the One. He couldn't get nominated, either.

TR? Lincoln? Forget it.

Jack Kennedy couldn't get the Democratic nomination today. He cut taxes and was a Cold Warrior.

U.S. Rep. John Duncan? He's got guts. Made the right decision against the wars and the Patriot Act. I like him. A lot.

Many of these new folks bow to the feet of Ronald Reagan, yet must have never studied what the Gipper actually believed. It was a nice mix of idealism and pragmatism. Do any of them even know the source of Reagan's phrase "rendezvous with destiny"? I doubt it.

The days of Everett Dirksen and Mike Mansfield arguing in the Senate and then going out for a drink after 5 are long gone. We're a worse nation for it.

I became a Republican because I thought they believed in getting government out of our lives, not intruding into them.

These days, I am a painter passing through, a wayfaring pilgrim, a person without a party.

You can have what my friend Dean Harned calls this "curious mix of fundamentalist Cromwellian orthodoxy and Christianized Shariah Law," if you want it. I think it's by and large a disgrace.

'In the squalor of life and war, what a magnificent act!'

I am thinking today of another April, of Appomattox, 1865.

You know the story. Gen. Robert Edward Lee, refusing to lead his Army of Northern Virginia into either slaughter or guerrilla war, called for a meeting to surrender to U.S. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Somebody found a building owned by Wilmer McLean (who has quite a story himself) at Appomattox Court House, Va.

Lee dressed in a crisp new uniform; Grant, taken aback by the request for the meeting and dressed only for battle, sported a private's coat splattered with mud.

They talked awhile. Grant reminded Lee they'd met during the Mexican War. Grant later wrote he enjoyed the conversation so much he almost forgot the reason for the meeting.

(Grant's memoirs, by the by, are the best of the genre.)

Richard Nixon used to tell a story about Winston Churchill's fascination with this April moment at Appomattox.

In his book "Leaders," Nixon said that during a stag dinner in Washington, Churchill declared Lee was "one of the greatest men in American history and one of the greatest generals of all time."

Nixon writes:

"He (Churchill) said that one of the war's greatest moments came at the end, at Appomattox. Lee pointed out to (Grant) that his officers owned their horses as personal property and asked that they be allowed to keep them.

"Grant said, 'Have all of them take their horses, the enlisted men and the officers as well; they will need them to plow their fields.'

"Churchill's eyes glistened as he looked around the spellbound group and said, 'In the squalor of life and war, what a magnificent act!'"

21st century blues

I'm tired.

Don't know if it's some sort of malaise, the wonderful effect of puke-green pollen, or just deadlines and commitments.

But, I'm tired.

Did a little work this morning then came home and slept for four hours. Sinuses drained. It rained.

The highlight of the day was Jenn bringing home two totes bought at a yard sale, filled with old newspapers and magazines, about Elvis and JFK and Mickey Mantle and Richard Nixon. Down at the bottom of one was a surprisingly clean vinyl copy of Elvis's last studio album, "Moody Blue." Alas, the vinyl was blue. I'll find the black vinyl version one day.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. One box also contained something I've never seen: The Rolling Stone issue from just after Elvis's death.

I heard today that the Elvis statue is being removed from what used to be the Las Vegas Hilton. Hearing such news on the heels of seeing the trailer for the new Tim Burton "Dark Shadows" farce made me want to crawl into a hole and hibernate.

I was born too late and I know it and sometimes it just plain sucks.

St. Patrick's Day at The Waynesville Inn

Waynesville, N.C. -- Happy St. Patrick's Day from The Waynesville Inn.

This charming valley, tucked into the mountains, is showing signs of spring, cute and quaint, growing green just in time for St. Paddy's Day.

Yes, I've had some green beer. Yes, I've also had some Guinness.

We are celebrating my birthday here at the Inn, which sports a spa, a golf course, a tavern and a three-star restaurant.

In the 1920s, the dairy farm that occupied the current property was sold to Jim Long, according to hotel literature. Donald Ross designed the golf course and the rest is history. It opened as Waynesville Country Club in 1926. Famous guests include Chi-Chi Rodriguez, Arnold Palmer, Billy Graham and President Richard Milhous Nixon.

We went downtown today. I ducked into that endangered species otherwise known as an independent bookstore, Blue Ridge Books. Bought a New York Times. Jenn bought me Stephen King's JFK novel, "11/22/63." She shopped at a store that has a moving sale. I bought a festive hat and a new pair of rose-colored glasses.

We came back to the country club and enjoyed some brews and a burger at The Tap Room. I had bought a Romeo y Julieta downtown and smoked it on the deck after lunch while finishing off my Guinness. We have reservations at the Cork and Cleaver at 6.

Sing a chorus of "Danny Boy," eat, drink and be merry today.

Life is good.

Super Tuesday!

Today is Super Tuesday!

If you're eligible, please get out and vote. And, as they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often.

In honor of today's festivities, here is the greatest political commercial in American history, Nixon Now!, '72.

And here's Jake's take on the Republican race.

Rick Santorum is an extreme lunatic. No way around it. The guy's positions stem from the Stone Age, he isn't ready for prime time, he's as much a Washington insider as Newt Gingrich AND he suffered the greatest Republican senatoral electoral defeat in history in his 2006 bid for re-election, which he lost by 18 points. If Santorum wins the nomination, Mr. Obama's re-election victory will be larger than LBJ's '64 slaughter of Barry Goldwater.

Newt Gingrich is yesterday's news. The guy is smart, I like some of his ideas, I'd love to see him debate Obama, but he's got more baggage than Phyllis Diller. He would come into a general election with at least a 50 percent unfavorability rating. Newt's star shown brightly in 1994. Now it's time for him to set up his colony on the moon.

Ron Paul is great on most domestic issues, but terrible on foreign policy. Mr. Paul would've let the Nazis take over Europe and declare it not in America's interest to intervene. The reality of the situation is we live in a global economy. That's reality. I admire his respect for the Constitution and his no-nonsense straight talk. But I think a vote for Paul is tilting at windmills. Cue "The Impossible Dream."

OK, so Mitt Romney's a flip-flopper. Who isn't? I sure as hell don't think the same way I did when I was 18 and I want a president with the same flexibility. It shows a keen mind. The art of politics, after all, is compromise. Even Nixon, the ol' Communist hunter, made his greatest marks by reaching out to China and Russia. Reading "The Real Romney" sealed the deal for me. Like him or not, Mitt can win independent voters. He can win some of those 10 swing states on which elections hinge. He's super smart and has a proven track record on the most important issue of the day -- economic recovery. And if you think moderate is a bad word, please look up its definition.

Whatever your politics, go vote. Participate in the process. The privilege to do so was won with a lot of spilled blood.

Nixon Now!

There will be an answer, let it be...

I sit here tonight, John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" flickering from the television set, cooling myself in front of a box fan, wondering about endings.

I don't handle them well. But, that shouldn't be a shock, if you've ever pulled up a chair to listen to my ramblings. Maybe that's why this final Ford flick -- not a good one, really -- is holding my attention. The Cheyenne are trying to make their way home to Wyoming. Back to what they were promised. But, and we know this song all too well, their way of life is gone with the wind.

Movies are good when you're depressed. You can lose yourself in them. Laugh. Cry. Be marveled. Space out. Whatever you need.

I'm one of those rare people who actually likes to see movies in the theater alone. Keeps me focused. Unless, of course, your companion is a beautiful woman. Then you just pick any old thing. Save "Citizen Kane" for a solo flight.

So much of my world is changing, in rapid, seismic shifts, the way these things seem to go. I thought about Elvis yesterday, dead 32 years, watched him belt out "Unchained Melody" when he was so sick, singing from his soul, right until the end. My friend Dean says, "I don't know what's worse -- the fact that he's been dead 32 years or the fact that we're about that age."

But, what do you do? I guess you get up on your horse, pull your hat over your head, and ride off into the sunset. Thanks for the memories. Happy trails. Until we meet again.

April is supposed to be the cruelest month. But I can make a case for August.

Summer goes. Nixon resigns. Elvis dies. Good-bye "Heartland Series." And now Robinella.

Tonight, I'll watch Pappy Ford's elegy to the Cheyenne people in front of the fan while sipping on orange juice, all the while saying so long to a blissful part of my life.

There will be an answer, let it be...

Mr. Nixon

Believe it or not, he feels like an old friend.

Richard Nixon died 15 years ago today. I was standing in the door frame at pal Dean Harned's childhood home when his parents told us the news. I remember Dean came over to my house and we watched the TV coverage until the wee hours of the morning.

Sounds strange, I guess, for someone born four years after his presidency to feel such an attachment, if that's the right word, to our 37th -- and most enigmatic -- president. Well, let me back up and tell you the story.

A hundred years ago, 8th-grade teacher Dave Lewis showed us a video from the show "Our World" that Linda Ellerbee hosted with a man whose name I can't remember. This particular episode highlighted the early 1970s. Up popped a segment on Watergate introduced by the playing of the "Mission:Impossible" theme.

Something clicked.

I wrote a report on Watergate for Lewis at the end of the year. All this coincided with the 20th anniversary of the infamous June 1972 break-in that would ultimately bring down Nixon's administration. I remember I stayed home to watch the CBS retrospective instead of camping out at a friend's house down the street.

I was a weird kid.

But, this led to my developing a lifelong love of history. Stephen Ambrose's excellent three-volume biography of the man from Yorba Linda was the final determining factor in my decision to major in history at UT. I read it the summer before my freshman year and knew I didn't want to study anything else.

I have read no telling how many Nixon books over the years; I have spent more time with him than several family members. I begged my parents to take me to Nixon's library in his hometown during a vacation swing through California. They did.

Throughout all of this I have never been bored.

Elliot Richardson, the attorney general that Nixon fired, once said that Nixon would be so easy to fix, but that if you took away his flaws, you also take away the very drive that caused him to seek the presidency. That's Shakespeareian in its ironic complexity.

One reason why I like Nixon is because he is so obviously ordinary. He could reach such beautiful mountaintops only to sink into dark and disturbing valleys, often at virtually the same time. Whereas Kennedy seemed flawless (and, yes, that was a myth), Nixon seemed like one of us.

If you didn't see it in the theater, rent Ron Howard's excellent film "Frost/Nixon." A scene at the end, in which Nixon and Frost talk about cocktail parties, reveals the essence of the man, a truth that writers and Nixon observers have sought and failed to adequately verbalize for years.

"You know those parties of yours, the ones I read about in the newspapers. Do you actually enjoy those?" Nixon asks Frost.

"Of course," is the reply.

"You have no idea how fortunate that makes you, liking people. Being liked. Having that facility. That lightness, that charm. I don't have it. I never did."

All this from a man who in 1972 won what was then the biggest electoral landslide in presidential history.

Yes, Mr. Nixon is an enigma. And, for better or worse, he feels like an old friend.

Borne back into the past

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."

Sometimes it is an escape.

I love history. Hell, I should love it, since I majored in it during college and spend a good portion of my working life writing about it.

But it's more than a vocation. It's very much an avocation. It's a passion.

A few weeks ago, while checking out at a store, I noticed the clerk had been reading David McCullough's biography on John Adams. So, we struck up a conversation. And I realized, while talking about our nation's founders, that part of the appeal lies in the fact that so many of these great characters from history are exactly that -- characters.

No novelist, not even Shakespeare, could dream up the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. Horatio Alger has nothing on Harry Truman's ascent to the White House. Even Dickens couldn't come up with as colorful a character as Teddy Roosevelt.

The American Civil War? My goodness, what to say about that? And we haven't even mentioned European or Asian history yet.

For me, though, I think history is also an escape. To what I'm not exactly sure. I think it gives me an illusion that things were better once, more romantic, more noble. I sometimes get depressed because I look at our current era and its great challenges and fail to see the hero on the horizon who's going to help us fix the mess.

And so, like Fitzgerald's boat against the current, I escape back to the past, back to something I've never known, back to a time of great ideas, back to the interesting, flawed men and women who shaped the American experience.

I like what I find there. But, does it make me crazy if I tell you that sometimes I don't want to return to the present?

I long to see you...

Heard a song getting ready for work this morning that took me to the beginning of my long love affair with American folk/roots music.

Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you/Away you rolling river...

I was back in music class at Brickey Elementary School, that beautiful old brick building that no longer stands. I can still see me sitting there on the bleachers, wearing an alligator shirt and singing to my little heart's content, full of naive wonder about the world.

Away, I'm bound away/Across the wide Missouri...

Wikipedia says that "Shenandoah" originated in the early 19th century as a river chantey. The song spread up and down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and eventually became a haunting installment in the American songbook.

The meaning is disputed. Obviously a tale about a wanderer's love for an Indian girl, arguments have arisen over whether Shenandoah is an Indian chief or the famous Virginia river. Apparently the doubt was enough to keep the song from becoming a Virginia state song a few years ago.



The version I heard this morning was from an old late 60s/early 70s Glen Campbell album. His cover is full of lush strings and a choir; it is a wistful treatment that fits the moment. One can almost feel the longing.

Away, I know I'll go/Across the wide Missouri...

The song has made its way into our popular culture. Bob Dylan recorded the song on one of his albums. Richard Nixon, who apparently loved the song, left instructions for it to be played at his funeral. Filmmaker Oliver Stone used the song to close his 1995 biopic on the 37th president.

Good stuff.

Sad song of the week: Found a new sad song that I'm climbing the walls over.



A few weeks ago, I read News Sentinel columnist Wayne Bledsoe's interview with The Everybodyfields, the Alt-Country Johnson City duo Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews. I missed the group's appearance at the World Grotto because of illness, but their new album "Nothing is Okay" is a sight, er sound, to behold.

I'll write an elaborate review later, but you simply have to stop what you're doing and find a copy of this song "Savior." This may replace George Jones's "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and RobinElla's "Teardrops" as my favorite sad song. Here, listen:

Love's not a savior/when you're messed up/when you're messed up, forever

You feel you're drowning in red hearts/Wrapped in red ribbons/And blue skies

Then somebody pulls the plug/It all goes down the drain/Don't we all change?

God, that should be illegal.

Anyway, I think I've found a new favorite. I'm going to catch these folks next time they are anywhere near East Tennessee.

Beautiful, simply, wonderfully, heartbreakingly beautiful.