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Presidents & Near-Presidents I Have Known

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Written by Lionel Rolfe
Thursday, 04 December 2008
With Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 presidential inauguration practically upon us, my thoughts have turned to the very complex subject of American presidents. Who they are and what they really mean to us. As I contemplated the subject, I had an odd revelation. It happens that I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time around presidents, vice presidents and presidential candidates. Mostly this is because I have been a journalist all my life—not particularly an important one, but still a working one. But my occupation is not the only reason I have met presidents and near presidents. I suppose it is not just coincidence that most of the Republicans were scoundrels and most of the Democrats were heroic. I suspect that partisan Republicans would say that merely demonstrates my bias, and perhaps that is so. But I don’t think it’s quite that easy to explain. I met most of the Republicans in my capacity as a professional observer of the human condition, i.e. a working journalist. I met the Democrats more through family connections. In any event, it did not quickly dawn on me that the pattern of meeting presidents and near presidents was not a typical one. What caused me to contemplate the matter was an ironic thing. I had never made a financial contribution to any political candidate before. But that changed with Barack Obama. Obviously I was not the only person who contributed to his cause. But now that he is about to be inaugurated, the fact that I had a personal financial involvement in his accession made me consider the matter in greater detail. Like so many others, I began sending in $25 at a pop for Obama because the notion of having the Republicans staying in power any longer was unacceptable, especially because the administration in power had simply stolen the office in 2000 and 2004 and then thieved so monumentally they left the country bankrupt. We’re not talking great amounts of money, either, but a significant amount for the likes of me. I think I contributed about $300 to his cause altogether. So, yeah, I would have supported any Democrat, and I seriously considered giving up on my native land if somehow a Republican “won” a third term. Only when I happened upon Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father, did I realize we had something very special here. I suppose you should know that I have not only been a political journalist, I have written books about writers. So of course the thought that such a talented politician was also an important American author especially excited me. Next time I am traveling in a foreign land, I won’t have to apologize for our president, as has been the case for a lot of the last two decades now. World round, even the taxi drivers, knew what turkeys both the Bush presidents had been. Now I could be excited and proud to be an American. As a seasoned observer of politics, it was obvious that Obama should not lose. I was not the only American to recognize the obvious superiority of this young presidential candidate. The kind of crowds he was drawing only punctuated that fact that something special was happening. Yet I feared more Republican dirty tricks, from their rigged voting machines to their outright ballot box stuffing and voter intimidation, would again win the day for them. But Obama outsmarted them. He did so by convincing the people they had the power if only they took it. If they did, not even all the Republican dirty tricks in the world would defeat them. I knew something about community organizers, and knew that Sarah Palin and the Rudy Guilani would come to rue their words in smirking about Obama’s initial profession. I learned about community organizers back in the early sixties. I was working as a reporter on the Turlock Daily Journal, and I covered the Stanislaus County beat. I was intrigued by a self-described community organizer named Benny Parrish, who would appear before the board of supervisors regularly and advocate for his welfare clients—getting them refrigerators and other such things that they needed. The man was amazing. We talked. He told me how he had learned community organizing at the feet of the great Saul Alinsky, perhaps the country’s best-known community organizer who did his groundbreaking work in Chicago. At that point there was still plenty of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty money floating around and the work Parrish was doing was paid for out of federal funds. Needless to say, this particularly galled the ranchers and farmers who controlled county government, and Brith was particularly hated by them. The truth is the War on Poverty was onto something that was absolutely true. Local government is often terribly reactionary and is nothing but a mechanism by the local ruling classes to oppress poor people. Steinbeck told the story in Grapes of Wrath. When poor people had their advocates like Benny Parrish, the yahoos resented the intrusion. But the intrusions were right and necessary. I met the man who was perhaps the most famous community organizer of all time about the same time I was watching Parrish standing up to the board of supervisors. When the regular editor had a day off, the reporters would take turns at the editor’s desk. One Saturday Cesar Chavez was camping just outside of Turlock, leading a group of grape pickers up the valley to protest at the state capitol. I met him and his dusty crew Friday at dusk, and photographed and interviewed him. Then the next morning I went in and wrote a story and slapped a picture of him on the front page. The printers who put the paper together warned me of the apocalypse that would greet my career if I put the interview and picture on the front page. But they didn’t wake up the regular editor and the boss to warn them that a lowly reporter had hijacked Saturday’s front page. The article ran and it was one of my proudest achievements, although soon thereafter I was looking for another job. I came to understand that presidential politics do matter in people’s lives. They certainly did in mine. When a Republican was in office, not only was life a lot harder financially, the culture also became meaner and stupider, more narrow, pinched and devoid of art and creativity of any kind. Even a moderate Democrat like Bill Clinton ushered in a different mood, a more creative and hopeful environment. My politics were early on formed by the people I knew and the books I read. I particularly focused on the Holocaust and The Great Depression. I studied both subjects at great length and also was intrigued by the subjects of fascism and socialism and capitalism as well. As a little kid, I remember sitting in the living room at my grandparent’s place in Los Gatos, a small town 50 miles or so south of San Francisco, listening to an old banker friend of my grandparents named Jack Boden. He was a vice president at Wells Fargo, but more importantly he was married to an Amadeo Giannini heir, and lived on a huge wooded estate in nearby Saratoga, a ruling class enclave adjacent to Los Gatos. He was a classic reactionary. He was always going on about how Franklin Roosevelt had been a class traitor and Democrats and trade union leaders were Communists. His views were completely at odds with those of my grandfather, who had been a proud and loyal reader of The Nation and the New York Times for many years. My grandfather worshipped Roosevelt. The only good thing Boden ever did was finance Steve Jobs when he was working out of a garage to build the first of the Apple computers. Later, in the early fifties, when I was perhaps 10 years old, I campaigned for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate against Eisenhower. I rode around the streets of Long Beach with a group of other young activists planting Stevenson signs and posters everywhere we could. Long Beach, the companion port city to Los Angeles harbor, was a very conservative place then and we ran into a lot of opposition, which of course added to the excitement. During that period, I got to meet and shake hands with my greatest hero, Eleanor Roosevelt. It was backstage at a concert my uncle and fiddle player, Yehudi Menuhin, gave in Long Beach. She had come back stage to say hello. I was awestruck by being able to shake her hand. I don’t think I said anything in particular, but shaking her hand was like a moment frozen in historical time for me. She was even more of a hero to me than her husband. He was always the pragmatist, the calculating politician, whereas on many issues she was his conscience. Not surprisingly, Jack Boden hated her even more than he hated her husband. I met Hubert Humphrey in 1959. At that point he was still only a senator, I think. And I didn’t exactly meet him. I mostly spied on him and hung on his every word for several hours while crouched in a stairwell. It was at the home of Jerry Baron, my godfather. I was allowed to shake Humphrey’s hand before being ushered downstairs. Humphrey had just gotten back from a celebrated trip to Russia where he met Kruschev and had famously written about an eight-hour conversation he had with the Russian Prime Minister in Life Magazine. My father had gone to the University of Minnesota with Jerry before World War II. There was a whole group of University of Minnesota alumni which whom my father and Jerry had been associated. Among their numbers were Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Orville Freeman, who would become a governor of Minnesota and Secretary of Agriculture under Kennedy and Johnson. My earliest memories of Jerry had been when we lived in Northern California. At the time, Jerry was the district attorney of Monterey County, but I knew him best as my most favorite adult in the world. I remember particularly well–I must have been not yet 10 years old—one night in Carmel when we went to visit him and he tried to dig a hole to China with me in his backyard. I think I had asked him if you dug far enough could you get to China? He said he didn’t know, but let’s try. It was a cold, foggy evening at his Carmel home and most likely he was drunk. I’m afraid my Godfather was an Irish drinker, a dedicated Catholic apostate who knew Finnegan’s Wake backwards and forwards. As the spadefuls of dark earth came out of the hole, which by then was as deep as his burly chest, Jerry was sing songing his way through some portion of the great work. I never understood Joyce so well as I did that night as he recited it and dug deeper and deeper. I’m sure we didn't’ reach China, but the hole got pretty deep, and I went to bed happy. I understood the mood of Joyce the writer from that night, if not the exact meaning of Joyce’s words. Jerry’s wife Beatty was Freeman’s first cousin and if Humphrey, who was vice president under Lyndon Johnson, had become president, a contest he almost won against Richard Nixon in 1968, Jerry would have most certainly have been on the Supreme Court. They were all that close, this group who came out of Minnesota’s Farmer Labor Party movement. To Jack Boden, all Democrats were Communists. Actually, the Farmer-Labor movement were right-wing social democrats who did battle more with the communists of the era more than even the likes of reactionaries like Boden. I am sure that Jerry would have let me join the adult conversation in the living room but neither my mother or father would. I was banished. Yet because I never was more than ten feet away from the action as I hid there in the stairwell, I was able to dote on every word of the conversation. Hours before Humphrey arrived, everyone was talking about the piece he had just written in Life Magazine about his eight-hour encounter with Kruschev. I remember that “The Hump,” as he was known, was a voluble speaker and words fell from his mouth most of the night. He talked that night for almost as long as the eight hours he had famously spent with Kruschev. The thing that stood out most strongly in my mind—Humphrey had written about how he had argued with Kruschev about God. In fact, he laughed, that part of the conversation was very brief. Humphrey had slightly exaggerated the exchange for the magazine for in truth he was not particularly religious, but even in those days, American politicians had to pretend they were religious. General Dwight Eisenhower, famously, had been an atheist before he decided to run for president. Not so many years later—it was 1965— although it seemed like another eon, I met another vice president who did become president. I met him when he was at one of the lowest points of his career. He had been vice president to Eisenhower throughout most of the fifties, but his career seemed totally dead by the time I spent time with him. He had run for governor of California and lost to Pat Brown, and then famously told the press “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But his nickname wasn’t “Tricky Dick” for nothing, and by 1968 he became president in a famous race against Hubert Humphrey, and only escaped impeachment in 1974 by resigning first. The man that I spent a few days with in 1965 struck me as one of the oddest characters I had ever met—and the most unpleasant. I had spent much of the sixties as a small town reporter, and in the process I became familiar with a lot of Republican politicians, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and such lesser known names as Ed Reinecke and Patrick McGee, who had their own brushes with presidential politics. Reinecke was a congressman when I first met him, but he later became lieutenant governor of California, and also was the first Republican politician to end up in jail because of Nixon’s Watergate scandal. He may have been little more than a fall guy, still it was his fate to become one. It was my fate to share booze and ribald jokes with him at many Republican party cocktail parties. McGee was a former Los Angeles city councilman with a great deal of charm and intelligence, a Nixon protégé of whom great things had been expected. When he lost his bid for mayor to Sam Yorty, it was all downhill for him after that. We will talk about him later because he introduced me to Reagan. In 1965, one of my exalted jobs was as city editor of the East Whittier Review, which I don’t think exists anymore. I was assigned by my boss to go to Whittier College where there was some sort of shindig, a commencement or some such thing. Bob Hope and Senator Margaret Chase Smith were the stars of the event. Nixon was invited too because he had been the college’s most famous alumni, and a vice president of the United States, even if he had a definite odor about him even then. Most of the politicians I ever met up until then all had one thing in common. They enjoyed people, and even were personally likable themselves. No matter what their politics, it seemed to me that a requisite for the job of being a politician is having a genuine affection for the human animal. You have to enjoy people, I think, to be a successful politician. But Nixon was an exception to this, and the other politician I knew who was similarly the same way was Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty. Nixon was right about one thing. The working press had it in for him. It was his own fault. He was not an easy man to like. That’s what made meeting him such a startling experience. After all the public activities and the predictable speeches, the working press was invited to join with the celebrities at a small get-together. What was surprising to me was how impressive Bob Hope was. He really didn’t need all those speechwriters to be a funny and witty guy. He just was. And Senator Smith, even though a Republican, came across as an honorable and intelligent person. There were about ten of us reporters making conversation with these two illustrious American celebrities when suddenly from the rear of the room, Nixon slouched in through a small and inconspicuous back door. He didn’t come in with an entourage. It wouldn’t have been fitting if he had. At that point he was best remembered for his disastrous and most ungracious run to become California governor. He stood there alone in the back of the room and then began yelling, “Okay guys, I’m here.” Everyone who was gathered around Hope and Smith did not want to be torn away from them, but my boss, a lady named Winnie McFarland, ordered me to go see “what the bore in the corner wanted.” She knew who it was, but he was in such odor by then it was not surprising she said it that way. I walked up to him, but he looked past me, and kept repeating, “OK guys, I’m here.” He wasn’t going to be satisfied talking to the reporter from the local rag. He wanted the guys from the New York Times and such to come over to him. Eventually, but with considerable effort, he was able to make himself the center of attention. I later talked about my experience with him with the New York Times guy and got a bit more insight He told me that anyone who ever covered Nixon came to regard him as a self-serving, charmless, pitiful, drunken, egocentric boor with no social graces, and worse, a sinister man with connections to the underworld. For him, the thing that most summed up the man was the way he and his wife Pat would come on stage and act lovely dovy, but when they walked away and thought they had gone far enough from the working press not to be seen, would throw down their joined hands, recoiling almost as if they hated each other, which apparently they did. Everything about the man smelled of in-authenticity and opportunism. Yet Nixon would go down in history for opening the door between the United States and China. I once spent a whole day in a van with Sam Yorty—Yorty in the front seat, me in the back seat. Never once did he deign to talk to me, although I had been specifically requested to join the van tour. There were only six people in the car and without going into details, the tour would not have happened had it not been for a series of articles I had written. Yorty was a kind of slimy guy who made no attempt to treat his political enemies civilly. He had begun his political life in the late thirties as a Communist sympathizer, only to move to the right and become a professional anti-Communist after a notorious and ill-fated affair with Dorothy Healey, Los Angeles’ most famous Red. Similarly, Dick Nixon started as an anti-Communist and ended up being the American president who romanced Red China’s Mao Tse Tung. He didn’t do so from any ideological desire as far as I can tell. He was always first and foremost Machiavellian. Once Bob Sherill, who had been an editor at Esquire magazine, insisted to me in an animated conversation that during the period I met Nixon, he got together with the Mafia and in particular the Teamster Union in a New York hotel room and cut the deal that ultimately made him president. The mob would put up the money and muscle for a long-term campaign to win the White House. One of Nixon’s earliest mob friends was the Cuban gangster Bebe Rebozo. One of the prizes the mob got in his administration was control of the Small Business Administration, which gave them access to legitimate businesses having a hard time which they could use as fronts. Sometimes the men who are presidents come across as hollow men. My experience suggests this was primarily true of the Republican presidents. Obviously in some sort of way Nixon was a hollow man, a putrid man, a despicable man. His Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, told the story of his drinking. Kissinger told the man from the Pentagon with the red button with which the president could start nuclear Armageddon to always come to him in an emergency and not Nixon if it was after 6 p.m. The reason was simple. After 6 p.m. Nixon got stinking drunk. If you asked him about anything he had the same response, “Nuke the bastards.” I had a brief encounter with the President who followed Nixon, his vice president. Nixon obviously made a deal with Gerald Ford. Nixon quit, thereby elevating Ford to presidency. But in return, Ford was expected to pardon Nixon so he would never have to go to jail for his crimes. Ford was an empty man, but empty in a more affable way. His emptiness was created by a strange combination of affableness and blandness. Ford would never become a Shakespearian tragedy in the way Nixon did, because, well, his emptiness was hiding a heart of darkness in the way Nixon’s did. My encounter with Ford was brief. I was a political columnist for The Los Angeles Free Press, the first of the underground newspapers. Although it was an underground newspaper, with a raunchy and subversive profile, it was incredibly well read in the seventies. Ford had come to town in Air Force One, and the Secret Service actually gave me a press pass to be among the working press who saw him taking off in it. When the moment came for him to walk past us on his way to the plane, he stopped and took a double take at me. I do not know to this day if it was because I was so unusual looking. In retrospect, with my scraggly beard and wild hair and jeans, I stood out among the straight media types who had lined up to see him off. , He stopped, looked me up and down, then said knowingly, “Hello Lionel,” as if we were old friends. I later realized he had probably read my name off my Secret Service press pass, but why had he singled me out? Just because it said, “Lionel Rolfe, Los Angeles Free Press?” I nodded, a little unnerved, and returned the greeting He did not stop and say anything to the other reporters. And then he walked onto the plane, and into his role in history, whatever that was. The emptiest of men I ever met was Ronald Reagan. I’m not sure he was complex enough to have ever been a tortured soul, like Nixon. Everyone had heard the stories of how he made decisions on important issues. His staff would present him with a single page memo summarizing the issues and choices, written in a manner designed to convince him he had made the momentous decision all by himself. He was after all an actor, although not a very good one, reading his lines. If he was motivated by anything, it wasn’t his ideology, which like all Conservative ideology is really nothing more than greed, but his basic contempt of all who are not wealthy. He had once been poor, and now he was sure he would never be poor again. It really wasn’t a complicated affair, all said and done. He was just the first of the stupid and arrogant Republican presidents we were presented with at the end of the last Millennium. Before I personally met Reagan, I had seen him in action as the California governor. I once journeyed to Sacramento with a group of Republican women, most of whom seemed to have boring husbands who owned small town hardware stores or such, and saw what was at work. They herded the women into a large room and then he burst through a door at the front of the room, saying something not memorable, but I swore all those scores of post-menopausal women squealed in unison with what probably would prove to be their last great orgasms. Before I actually met Reagan, I had heard a lot about him from people who knew him well. I used to have long talks with Lynn Nofizger, one of the most cynical men I ever met. Another who I talked to about him was his daughter Maureen, his daughter by his first wife, who unlike Nancy was an intelligent and decent human being and, of course, a left-wing Democrat. When Reagan was married to her, he too was a left-wing Democrat. But when he married Nancy, whose father was a rich Republican doctor, he became a Republican ideologue. Maureen was going through a difficult time with her family. She particularly did not like Nancy, although later in life she came to terms with Nancy. She would talk to me for hours about her father. I learned from her that the very straight, ramrod kind of guy he appeared to be he was. There was little complexity underneath, she said. He was sure of what he thought he knew. He had little intellectual curiosity. At that point in her life, she did not mean any of this kindly, and besides maybe she knew what I wanted to hear, for we had a kind of platonic romance going just then. When I knew Maureen, he was still only governor. The thought of him becoming president seemed implausible. Reagan became idolized by the right wing of the Republican Party. And before him they had idolized Barry Goldwater, the man who was slaughtered in the 1964 election by Lyndon Johnson. I heard Goldwater speaking before a small group out in Vasquez Rocks on the edge of the Mojave Desert once, and got to know his son, Barry Goldwater Jr., a congressman from the area, quite well. Neither Goldwater, in my view, was the brightest guy in the world, but I took a shine to Goldwater Jr. I was curious about his attitude toward his Jewish heritage, although his father became an Episcopalian. “Oh,” he told me, “the reason I’m a good stockbroker—for that is what he ended up doing—is my Jew blood.” Quaintly put, I thought, befitting someone from Arizona, which I imagined to be a place of hardscrabble right-wingers and that kind of comment that would directly appeal to them. The elder Goldwater was far right in his politics, but he believed in the separation of church and state, which the next hero of the Conservative movement did not. It was Reagan who introduced the perverse fundamentalist Christianity into the mix that ruled his party with such disastrous results for the next couple of decades. Jr. wasn’t always the sharpest tool in the barn. He once took off in an airplane without enough gas and had to make an unscheduled and embarrassing emergency landing near not quite to the Van Nuys Airport. He clipped some high-tension wires and ended up in the driveway of a home. Sheriff’s deputies had to pull him out of the wreckage. I got to actually meet Reagan through Pat McGee, who I mentioned earlier. We became friends when I covered his halfhearted campaign to be elected congressman. We liked to jostle politically. I particularly remember we met for an interview at the Saugus Cafe, across from the Saugus train station. He was a lowly state assemblyman at that point. He ended up telling me that if I ever got up to Sacramento, come and stay with him a few days at the Elks Lodge building across from the State Capitol where he lived. He said he would show me how politics really worked. After I was laid off as a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle, I decided to go hang out in a cabin outside of Weed, California, at the very border of the state with Oregon, right there underneath the great shadow cast by Mt. Shasta, which was technically an active volcano. On the way north, I stopped in Sacramento for a couple of weeks. McGee more than humored me. He told me that he thought I was the most talented political reporter he had ever met and he wanted me to get some insight into the business. I never quite understood why he did this. He knew I was a left-wing Democrat and he was a right-wing Republican. But I think for him politics was a game, a game made to be played in a cold-eyed manner. I stayed with him for a couple of weeks, and most days consisted of making the rounds. The rounds meant meeting with lobbyists from the automobile lobby, the oil lobby, the insurance lobby, the freeway lobby, and other such, usually at velveted steakhouses, during which bags of cash were literally passed into his hands, and then he would go and distribute the largesse among his Republican colleagues. He said he had wanted me to see for myself what politics was really about, and McGee was shameless. He was a voluble man, an intelligent man, a charming man, and a drunk. He had seduced many of the wives of the young men Reagan had appointed to various state offices. Most of these “men” were business majors from USC, whose fathers were rich insurance executives of one kind or another. Their wives were usually pretty and frustrated. McGee was old school. He had gone to Catholic schools and proudly showed off his knowledge of Latin. Unlike Jerry Baron, I do not think he was a big James Joyce fan. But like Jerry he was a great conversationalist. At one point he decided I should meet the governor. Let me paint the scene here. The governor was not happy to have to see me. The governor obviously did not like McGee. He was a puritanical man, anyway, who did not approve of Pat’s seduction of so many of the wives of his appointees. But he couldn’t say no to Pat McGee. McGee provided the mother’s milk of all politics—he provided the cash. So Reagan acted as gracious as he could when McGee strolled into his inner sanctum and plopped down into a chair and at least metaphorically put his legs on the governor’s desk. “Meet Lionel Rolfe,” McGee said to the governor, and seemed to enjoy the barely concealed disdain with which the governor awkwardly came forth and shook my hand. I’m sure I looked like a bearded revolutionary, for such I kind of was. I savored the governor’s discomfort with me almost as much as McGee seemed to. McGee apparently enjoyed making his Republican colleagues, including the governor, being forced to salute him even as he brought them their marching orders and made love to their wives. We made awkward conversation for a while and then McGee and Reagan, right in front of me, talked the minutiae of campaign cash and such. More than a decade later when Reagan became president, I was out of contact with Republicans. McGee was dead. But I could not forget the Reagan Depression in the early eighties when for the first time I saw on the streets of Los Angeles whole families from the Rust Belt who had piled up everything they had into their vehicles and headed west. Their faces were haunted by the same sort of fear etched on the faces of Oakies crossing the border into California, which I saw in photographs from the Great Depression Reagan’s major push was to destroy union jobs, which also destroyed the prosperity the country had once enjoyed when unions were still powerful, and corporations had to pay their fair share of taxes. I’m sure as president he never again was forced to meet the likes of me. I’m sure he never met anyone other than well-heeled donors to the conservative cause. My impression of the later Reagan from afar was that he was senile long before he officially got Alzheimer’s disease. He mostly talked gibberish, but his admirers, such as those post menopausal women from the high desert north of Los Angeles, were complete sycophants and couldn’t tell the difference. It didn’t matter what he said as long as he said it in that resonant voice and threw in the various code words that were required. I never met John Kennedy, but I did become obsessed with his assassination, and like the rest of the nation, I followed what happened to his two brothers avidly. I remember once going to a well-heeled club where some wealthy Democratic donors in the Livermore area of Northern California were listening to a young Teddy Kennedy. I remember coming away from that speech disappointed with him, sure he would never measure up to the legacy. But he more than grew into the job over the years. And I was close up enough to Robert Kennedy on the stage of the Greek Theater in Los Angeles to have taken a haunting photograph of him just hours before he was assassinated. Later it turned out that Robert Kennedy had run for President in part because he wanted to punish those in the government who had assassinated his brother. No doubt that is why he was killed as well. I may even have interviewed a man involved in his assassination just hours before. Like a lot of people the nickel had dropped about the assassination of John Kennedy already. As a reporter, I was in contact with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison who was investigating the assassination. One of the men he implicated was Colonel William Gale, who had been a key aide to General Douglas McArthur in the Philippines. Gale returned to California and after running for Congress from the right of incumbent Reinecke, he left town and became the Reverend William Gale, cofounder of the anti-Semitic Identity religion and then formed a militia called first the California Rangers and later Posse Comitatus. I sat in his living room as he told me about how the Kennedys had been part of the Jewish-Communist conspiracy. As he talked, he was fondling a gun with a mammoth-sized silencer. When he got angry he would brandish the gun, so much so that I got quite nervous and was glad when the interview was over. What was particularly unnerving was that he smirked and talked about Robert Kennedy, who he hinted would not survive much longer. I had a more meaningful encounter with Kennedy’s primary presidential competitor Eugene McCarthy one evening in San Francisco in 1968 as well. The senator from Minnesota was the first to challenge Lyndon Johnson and the War in Vietnam. Kennedy was killed the night he beat McCarthy in the Democratic presidential primaries. There weren't many people there. The idea was that if you donated a certain amount of money, you could go up talk with the candidate. I went up to McCarthy and told him my godfather was Jerry Baron, who four years before had run for congressman against the Republican incumbent in Monterey County, a fellow named, if I rightly remember, Burt Talcott. I told McCarthy that Jerry always used to talk about McCarthy. Jerry said he knew McCarthy pretty well. “Was that true?” I asked, with a nervous laugh. McCarthy nodded and began to tell me Jerry stories. Everyone who knew Jerry knew Jerry stories. McCarthy said he had indeed come out to Monterey County to help Jerry's campaign. He remembered one moment, he said, when they were flying in a small plane over Carmel, admiring its beauty. And McCarthy told me how he had said to Jerry, “Why would anyone want to leave this and come to Washington D.C.?” Both of them remembered the words exactly the same. Not that there was much chance of that. Jerry did not upset the incumbent. Although Carmel has a beautiful coastline that had inspired writers from Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck to Robinson Jeffers, its politics were owned by the Republicans who controlled Monterey County. It was a classic cow county, run by the ranchers and bankers and such. It was a traditional kind of place—Monterey was California's capitol under the Spanish. Yeah, it had an “artsy-fartsy” fringe, with a lot of freethinkers around like Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, still there was no way the powers that be were going to let a Democrat represent the place in the hallowed halls of Congress. Whatever poets and writers might have said about the place, it's just an old cow county run by Neanderthal politicians. I had started McCarthy off, and he would have talked about it for hours. But I turned around after about half an hour and said, “Listen, if there are some moneybags you want to talk to, please don't let me keep you from that.” He nodded, but kept on talking just to me… Intimately… Intently. His Jerry Baron memories were mesmerizing to him and to me. We talked about an hour more before some aide came up and not so gently led the senator away from me toward more probable prey. McCarthy was a legend of Minnesota politics and of American politics. He was an important and early anti-Vietnam War United States Senator who was also a pretty good poet, with a truly literary heart. At the time, the latter would seem to have doomed him from ever becoming president. America didn't dare entrust its presidency to anyone with brains and poetry in his soul then, and until the election of Barack Obama, I didn’t think they ever would. But I have lived to see the day they did. Now we stand at the beginning of his term. * My personal contact with presidential politics ended when Bill Clinton came along. I never met Obama either, but because he is a writer, it’s hard not to feel as if I knew him. Also, his attendance at Occidental College gave me a feeling of a special link to him. I have a soft spot for the small liberal arts college that Obama first attended out of high school because the librarian there went to great extents to help me when I was doing research for my book Literary L.A. Before Barack Obama, the school’s most famous alumni was the great poet Robinson Jeffers. From afar, Bill Clinton was as impressive as hell. He took office holding an amazing series of conferences at which various important subjects were discussed. What was incredible was how in each of them, he knew more than the best assembled minds he had in the room on each and every subject. Bill was obviously a brilliant guy, but I never thought of him as a poet. And at heart he was a very centrist Democrat, who combined so much Republican economics you could only sort of say he was in the real Democratic tradition exemplified by the New Deal. Also at the beginning of his presidency Los Angeles was struck by a major earthquake. Clinton handled that emergency with an incredible dispatch that impressed a great deal of the denizens of the city at the time, in stark contrast to Bush’s handling of Katrina and New Orleans. But Clinton also helped set in motion the unfair world trade and deregulation that came a cropper in the 2008 collapse, which Obama is inheriting. Who knows if Obama will truly rise to the occasion. A great part of what creates great presidents, people like Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, is timing. The times themselves tend to produce the leaders that are needed. I get the sense that Obama is destined to be just such a leader. He is a very special kind of leader, but if the times hadn’t demanded someone very special, we probably would not have seen his meteoric rise. Lionel Rolfe is the author of several books, including “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather,” “Literary L.A.” and “Fat Man on the Left,” among others.

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