One Way to Become President
Jun 26th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Any of you non-whippersnappers remember the crackerjack Alabama-born journalist William Bradford Huie? Last night a flashback documentary on Jack Kennedy’s murder in Dallas unexpectedly took me back to a visit I paid Huie in his little Alabama birthplace, Hartselle. He picked me up at the nearest commercial airport in Huntsville, already famous/infamous for two reasons: an electrocution-happy prison, especially towards its black inmates, and the early U.S. space program, with its uncrowned king Wernher von Braun, who there in Dixie continued a virtually seamless career with a foundation laid back in his native Germany where he had successfully realized Adolf Hitler’s dream of rockets that did their best to obliterate two primary World War II metropolitan targets, London and Antwerp.
As an exceptionally gifted writer of both non-fiction and fiction, Bill published twenty-one books in both categories by the time he died in 1986, which had sold more than 28,000,000 copies, with several of them also filmed. One of his less known non-fiction books brought us together that night in Alabama around 1965, The Hiroshima Pilot – about Claude Eatherly, the United States Air Force pilot of the airplane that had scouted out the weather just before the pilot of the Enola Gay dropped its introductory atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
American peace activists had turned Eatherly into an almost iconic hero of the anti-nuclear movement, importantly abetted by an exchange of correspondence brought out (at first in German only) between the militantly anti-nuclear German-born philosopher Günther Anders in Vienna and Claude Eatherly in his native Texas, where he wound up in and out of several psychiatric facilities. Anders launched his project with the transparently preconceived thesis that Eatherly symbolized the mass guilt complex that fairly overwhelmed innumerable right-minded Americans after that one bomb exterminated about 140,000 Japanese in the comparative twinkling of an eye on August 6, 1945, the vast majority of them civilians, followed three days later by another 74,000 in Nagasaki. Bill Huie, as he explained to me during my visit to him and his wife Ruth that night in Hartselle, had not in fact set out to debunk the portrait of Eatherly depicted by his and Günther Anders’ book (published under a title that began in English with Off Limits followed by the German equivalent of for the Conscience). To his own surprise, Bill’s conscientious research – exhaustive, as always – disclosed the extent of Eatherly’s clever unwitting manipulation by anti-nuclear forces for their own express purposes. In short: Bill discovered quite a different Eatherly from the one that first book had depicted. For a while after I made that discovery, I toyed with the idea of putting together a documentary play about that entire, psychologically multi-layered complex.
The word “colorful” – to use a locution picked up from that late great Texan Miz Molly Ivins - hardly covered Bill Huie. Politically, the record he left classifies him predominantly as a conservative, but definitely a thoroughly democratic one. The ever more murderous racism of his beloved Dixie horrified him ever more and more, and he pulled no punches in the several books he wrote about it, with Three Lives for Mississippi perhaps the best known. His last letter to me in Berlin before he picked me up at the Huntsville airport asked off-handedly about my experience with a double-barreled shotgun – one of which I discovered within easy reach on the floor between our front seats in Bill’s car. Almost casually he told me that the local Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross on the front lawn of his Hartselle house, which from then on he never left, either by day or night, without a double-barreled shotgun in hand, for the benefit of any Klansman watching.
Getting back to Jack Kennedy and the fine American art of President-Making, a.k.a. Presidency-Buying, I hope that biographical sketch of Bill Huie suffices to establish his reputation for factual reliability. We spent my only evening in Hartselle talking primarily Eatherly-oriented shop, lubricated by what he called “the little jug o’ bourbon” I’d brought along as an ice-breaking gift. Bill’s own Memory Lane included at least one Hollywood stint as a screen-writer. That led to the early screen diva Gloria Swanson, who in turn led to Jack Kennedy’s rapacious rags-to-riches Irish immigrant father Joe, who had founded the Kennedy Dynasty – and very considerable fortune. “Only thing old Joe Kennedy and I had in common”, according to Bill: they’d both had affairs with Swanson during the phase of her life fictionally immortalized in the film Sunset Boulevard. With that fact established, Bill continued, with a scowl but without a perceptible beat: “But a gentleman doesn’t talk about things like that.”
I quickly sized Bill up as what an Edinburgh friend of mine would call “a complicated piece of work”.
From this point on I record what I heard from Bill Huie that Alabama night. During a Florida vacation, Bill’s presence had come to the attention of old Joe Kennedy, the most prominent local resident, who sent word to Bill that he had something he’d like to discuss with him. When Bill turned up, only the briefest obligatory conventionalities preceded his host’s getting down to brass tacks:
“Huie, I want to make Jack President” – already at a date well before JFK’s election, or even his nomination, let alone his campaign.
That Florida meeting came during one of Bill’s sporadic periods of Hollywood unemployment, and Joe Kennedy made him an offer he decided not to refuse: Kennedy engaged Bill – under conditions of hermetic secrecy – to travel extensively across the United States and at each stop press into the hand of a carefully pre-selected powerful local Democratic Party honcho one thousand American dollars – naturally in cold hard cash, which could tell no embarrassing tales.
That account from the highly reliable reporter William Bradford Huie - who had no reason whatever to invent it - has resonated in my mind ever since then, especially at four-year intervals, reinforced and substantiated by the historical American record. Looking back, even the Democratic Party’s compatively liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt - so liberal that many more conservative fellow Democrats apoplectically denounced him as “that communist in the White House” - came from an old, old, pseudo-aristocratic New York state family with firm roots extending all the way back to the original Dutch settlers, divided by FDR’s time into the more or less equally rich Hyde Park Roosevelts, who included him, and the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, who had given the country its first President Roosevelt, colloquially known as Teddy.
One may reasonably assume that the conveniently handsome Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan would have never wound up in the White House without the puissant support and promotion of such media monarchs as the Philadelphia Annenbergs. (A favorite Hollywood anecdote from that campaign period had some case-hardened Hollywood casting director exclaiming: “Reagan as President? No, no – Reagan as best friend!”) When President Reagan spent a California vacation from Washington, where and how did he tend to spend it? As a houseguest of Walter Annenberg, at his extensive spread in luxurious Palm Springs, keeping things all neat and tidy. The ugly but definitely applicable word “puppet” comes to mind. By a funny coincidence, Walter Annenberg – despite no experience whatever in professional diplomacy, least of all in such top-level diplomacy – became Ambassador of the United States of America to the Court of St. James in London.
And in the interest of my own health, physical as well as mental, I have no intention of even touching here upon the transplanted Texas oil-rich Bush clan – at least not for the moment….
