George McGovern, Pete Hamill & Other Old Poops

Thirty summers ago, I was living halfway between Trenton and Princeton in New Jersey, dreading the start of my final year of high school. The family had moved from Huntington in June, where my father had bought a car wash in Hamilton, a blue-collar enclave where the occasional KKK poster could be seen pasted on telephone polls around town. Two weeks after we'd settled in on Pine Knoll Dr., he died of a heart attack, and my four older brothers and I were left to operate the business while trying to sell it off. It was a crummy break.

One of my diversions was driving a few miles away to pick up The New York Times each morning and read about the latest strategic blunders that doomed George McGovern's campaign against Richard Nixon. Not surprisingly, as a 17-year-old pot-smoking longhair, I was staunchly in favor of the charisma-challenged South Dakotan, even though I knew he didn't have a prayer that fall, hoping that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's enterprising reporting on Watergate would somehow resonate with voters. But, of course, it was too early.

Lawrence High was a virtual prison compared to the open-campus, anything-goes school I'd attended in Huntington. Just for openers, phys. ed. was a daily requirement, given as much importance as English or biology: What's more, compared to my previous school, where gym was held just twice a week, and you could choose archery, bocce or tennis instead of a more traditional regimen, at Lawrence uniforms were required and the obese coach was a complete idiot who'd scream at kids who couldn't climb a rope in 15 seconds. Talk about torture.

Not that the culture shock in other classes wasn't as acute. My American history teacher, for example, was a redneck who proudly compared himself to Archie Bunker and claimed McGovern was a communist. My fellow students were just as dumb: In an October mock election, the tally was 28-2 for Nixon, a result that was, and still is, considering the era, simply shocking. Since the voting was by hand, I suspect there was some brown-nosing going on, just as I was hooted down one day upon proposing that marijuana be legalized.

I shrugged at the irony that one of the boobirds was the senior class' biggest dope dealer: Lost in my own teenage world of the Stones, Bowie, Rimbaud, Kerouac, Joyce and Dickens, I sucked it up and counted the days until my release. On weekends, I'd drive to Princeton and browse in the bookshops and record stores, picking up Dylan bootlegs and paperbacks for a quarter, and generally kept to myself.

There were a few highlights during that bleak year. I saw Randy Newman, David Bromberg and Jerry Jeff Walker in concerts on the Princeton campus; in February the car wash was sold; the Watergate hearings were televised; and on weekends friends from Long Island would often visit and it was like old times. When I was accepted at Johns Hopkins University in April of '73 it was one of the happiest days of my life, signaling my escape from a really lousy public school.

I was reminded of all this upon reading McGovern's July 29 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, in which he whined about the new reality of having to arrive at airports earlier than just a year ago. Everyone, aside from ACLU eggheads and forever-adolescent professors, I suppose, has complaints about the chaotic security checkpoints that chew up time and patience. As I've written before, the lack of profiling (a form of political correctness that's not only dumb but dangerous) is counterproductive. It doesn't make sense to waste five minutes frisking and prodding children and the elderly while young males of Arab descent are waved onto the plane. Nevertheless, it's a small sacrifice to make in the interest of safety.

But McGovern, now 80 and very cranky, is incensed. Echoing Bill Clinton's preposterous and self-serving comments that he'd join Israel's military if the country is threatened by Saddam Hussein, McGovern writes: "I'll probably yield to the computer age eventually despite my strong instincts against it. But deep inside I'll never yield to the airport terrorism that President Bush has imposed on us as his answer to Osama bin Laden. I'm willing to shoot bin Laden. I'd even volunteer to fly a bomber against him if we had any idea of what country he is in. But I'm not willing to let fear of Osama bin Laden weaken our civil rights and convert our airports into police-state nightmares."

I found it satisfying that an Aug. 11 Boston Globe editorial took the exact opposite position of McGovern's. Those who haven't relegated McGovern to the dustbin of political footnotes will remember, of course, that Massachusetts was the only state the former senator won in his campaign against Nixon. The Globe says: "Amid all the talk about the best way to honor the first anniversary of Sept. 11, the worst way would be to retreat from deadlines Congress set for improving airport security... [I]t would be a mistake and an insult to the memory of the nearly 3,000 who died a year ago to let airlines' exaggerated concerns about disgruntled travelers trump safety."

Some Americans argue, with fairly convincing evidence, that citizens over the age of 75 shouldn't be allowed to drive automobiles unless they submit to annual tests from the DMV. Similarly, I think a strong case can be made that newspaper editors not allow former elected officials, once-esteemed novelists and playwrights or historians to embarrass themselves in print once they reach a certain age. Does anyone take the gibberish of people like Gerry Ford, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Arthur Miller, Jimmy Carter and Bob Dole, to name just a few "senior statesmen," seriously? It's bad enough that Congress is burdened by the likes of Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd and Fritz Hollings, whose incoherence just mucks up an already abysmal legislative body.

George McGovern has led a distinguished life of public service and I don't regret my youthful endorsement of his liberalism. I don't agree with nearly anything he's said or written in the decades since his landslide loss to Nixon, but he was an icon of the times, a man who bravely spoke out against the Vietnam War, bucked the corrupt Democratic party personified by Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and was a decorated World War II pilot.

But making the asinine statement that airport security, such as it is, is shredding civil rights makes McGovern seem like Al Sharpton, Cynthia McKinney or Jesse Jackson. He's better than that, and it's sad to see the man's brain deteriorate in a public forum.

Hamill's Hyperbole

Every Sunday, looking through the newspaper clips piled on my floor, I see a stack of candidates for "Moron of the Week." Some are like Harold Stassen, perennials who can't resist a contest: I'm thinking of Paul Krugman, Thomas Oliphant, Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan, Bill O'Reilly, Richard Cohen, Anna Quindlen and Al Gore. Oops, scratch the last entrant; he's not a regular columnist, only occasionally taking advantage of the "For Rent" sign on The New York Times' op-ed page.

Pete Hamill, if you're under 20, grew up in an Irish Brooklyn neighborhood playing stickball, worshipping Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, and entered the newspaper trade as a hard-drinking reporter, understandably seeking to escape the drudgery of manual labor. He subsequently swore off the sauce, wrote books, campaigned for liberal political candidates, dated Jackie Onassis and for a short time last decade caused an exciting stir as editor of the New York Post.

Hamill now writes a sporadic column for the Daily News, which is hit or miss. But last week the tabloid ran a piece by the hard-boiled celebrity journalist that, if Columbia Journalism School was a reputable institution, would be framed for its sheer imbecility. Under the headline "Execs make mob look legit," Hamill followed the pack and laced into CEOs who've either been convicted, accused or suspected of corporate fraud and let the purple prose fly.

Not content to repeat venomous?some deserved?attacks on people like Kenneth Lay, John Rigas, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow and Martha Stewart, Hamill added this absurd comment: "A few brave souls in Congress and the media are demanding facts about the President's dealings with Harken Energy in 1989 (exposed last week in the Daily News) and Vice President Cheney's operations at CEO of the Halliburton Corp. in 1998."

Not surprisingly, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, up to his eyeballs in ethical lapses, didn't make Hamill's list of villains.

I'd say Hamill's the one who's "brave," for exposing himself to ridicule by bestowing medals of honor on members of Congress?some of whom are just as crooked as the "Axis of Sleaze" he describes?and dumb reporters who've lazily attached themselves to the Harken "story." Here's a question: If Bush's "dealings" with Harken were so nefarious, how is it that the mainstream media didn't pummel him with these charges during the 2000 presidential campaign?

The exhaustive five-part series that major newspapers ran two years ago about Bush's past set a new record for vetting a presidential contender. If the same standard was applied to Bill Clinton in the '92 campaign, he'd most likely be forgotten by now, an Arkansas hotshot who played by Dogpatch rules. Maybe reporters were all still in a trance after kissing John McCain's ring, but more probable is that the issue wasn't considered newsworthy without the context of Enron, Global Crossing and Adelphia.

As for Cheney, The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer was correct in his analysis of Aug. 9. He wrote: "Three years ago, the CEO of Amazon was Time's Person of the Year. Bill Gates was God. Venture capitalists and dot-com entrepreneurs were American heroes. That was when the market was up.

"Today the market is down, and CEOs are bums. So the cry has gone up, 'Hey, wasn't Dick Cheney a CEO?'... Cheney did not sell his stock because he had inside knowledge that the stock market?and his company's shares?were headed south.

"He was forced to sell his stock when he was chosen by George Bush to be his running mate. He wasn't dumping. He didn't want to sell. In fact, the big brouhaha at the time was Cheney's wanting to retain some of his stock options. He sold purely to avoid conflicts of interest. Not from any foreknowledge. Certainly not from any guilty knowledge...

"It may turn out that there is damning evidence that we have not yet seen. But until someone produces it?say, that Halliburton's cost overrun revenues were knowingly and crookedly inflated?we are left with the following syllogism: It is open season on CEOs; Cheney was once a CEO; therefore, it is open season on Cheney."

But all that's a rinky-dink aside compared to what comes next in Hamill's piece. He writes: "When Carlo Gambino was CEO of the Brooklyn-based corporation that still bears his name, he couldn't have imagined the larcenous possibilities of legitimacy... As the head of a corporate secret society (there is no other kind), Don Carlo wouldn't have been forced by market pressures to allow his district salesmen to peddle heroin. He wouldn't have had to approve the occasional bullet in the back of the skull, to keep order in the branch offices...

"Gambino, in fact, would have been a perfect candidate to join the Axis of Sleaze, even if it meant lowering his moral standards to be in their company (the old mob guys, for example, had a fundamental sense of honor, which the sleazebags don't possess)."

Can I raise my hand, teacher? Fine by me if creeps like Skilling and Fastow spend years in the pokey?their greed was Boesky-like, and exceeded even that of the flim-flam dotcom titans who'd be in similar fixes today if their companies weren't already bankrupt?but maybe I've missed the reports that these executives routinely killed people who crossed them. Hamill apparently believes that the "occasional bullet in the back of the skull" displayed more "honor" than cooking the books.

Hey, I'm a fan of films like The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, Bugsy and Road to Perdition, but that's cinematic genius based on horrible reality. Hamill's lost in a weird world, one in which selling smack to blacks and Hispanics in impoverished neighborhoods, not to mention frequently murdering competitors, is more moral than the financial misdeeds of Big Business executives. It takes a jerk like Hamill to actually make a robber like Andrew Fastow look good.

Quiet at Yankee Stadium

Even though the Red Sox are flirting with blowing their entire season?there's a reason the phrase "Pedro, Lowe and pray for snow" is an instant classic in New England these days?I immensely enjoyed two visits to Yankee Stadium this past week. On Aug. 6, my two boys and I, accompanied by my brother and his sons Quinn and Rhys, sat in excellent main field seats at the Stadium, just beyond third base, and heartily enjoyed Mike Mussina blowing yet another game, this time to the lowly Kansas City Royals. I should qualify that Q&R, who live in London and were here on a visit, are rabid Yanks fans, but why quibble with details?

The highlight of the 6-2 contest came in the fifth inning when Alfonso Soriano scorched a line drive directly to my older brother, who got the first hand on the ball before it inevitably bounced a section ahead of us where a small riot ensued to claim the souvenir. The boys were thrilled, although Gary wasn't; a week later he still has a sprained index finger, an injury that would probably land a $6.5 million utility infielder on the disabled list for three weeks.

Then last Saturday, Junior and I joined my friend John and his son Jack for a 4:05 contest against the A's, and again the visiting team walloped the Yanks, this time by a tally of 8-0. The night before, of course, Oakland had prevailed in the 16th inning to win a 3-2 marathon, and probably as a result the Bombers were listless.

After all, when you're making peanuts, playing an afternoon game a mere 13 hours later is heavy lifting. Not that the A's showed any sign of fatigue: It took only a few innings for their team to pound David Wells, while his counterpart Cory Lidle shut down the Yanks, yielding a bunch of meaningless singles. The sold-out crowd was lethargic as well, which was refreshing. Junior was in full Sox regalia, and didn't even draw one cry of "1918" or "Red Sox suck!" I can't remember the last time that happened.

Between innings, while the boys were glued to the trivia questions on the scoreboard, John and I talked politics, both local and national. My buddy's a fellow conservative?a rarity among my limited social circle?and we agreed that Mike Bloomberg's gotten a bit big for his britches. As if the unreasonable tax on cigarettes last month wasn't bad enough for small businesses in a recession-flooded city?and, still, I've yet to hear one liberal complain that this tax is regressive, affecting low-income New Yorkers disproportionately?now Mayor Mike wants to ban smoking from all restaurants and bars.

The restaurant plank was inevitable, and probably won't be resisted, but including stand-alone saloons in this "worker safety" measure is one more slap at the business owner struggling to get by. It's Bloomberg's claim that bartenders working an eight-hour shift are so bombarded by secondhand smoke that it's as if they'd puffed half a pack themselves. He doesn't say that if these employees, many of whom smoke themselves, are so worried about the fumes that they might consider another line of work; it's not as if they didn't understand the atmosphere of a bar.

You tell me: What percentage of customers will bars lose because they can't drink and smoke at the same time? Even if it's only 15 percent, although I'll bet more, that's a huge bite out of a small profit-margin livelihood. Next on the docket, I'm sure, will be a $2 tax on a six-pack of beer, which might drive a number of bodegas into bankruptcy. Even though I'm against almost all taxes, there's no denying the city's in a bind, but why is Bloomberg (with the applause of Democrats; among legislators this isn't a partisan issue) going after workers and consumers with the most to lose? I choke on these words, but what about a "sin" tax on bottled water, exotic produce and triple-cream Brie?

On Aug. 12, the Times weighed in with a typically sanctimonious editorial, applauding the man the paper pilloried during his campaign against Democrat Mark Green. An editorial concluded: "Once the new ban is in effect, those extremely expensive cigarettes may burn a hole in some pockets and pocketbooks while their owners look for a place to use them. Expect smokers to congregate just outside the establishments that once allowed them to light up in more social, convivial surroundings.

"Mr. Bloomberg can anticipate challenges to the new ban, including the argument that it will hurt business. His staff rejects that notion, with one exception. Restaurants and bars will do just fine, but the tobacco companies, they say, will feel the heat."

In any case, as Miguel Tejada swatted a homer off Wells, John and I spoke about the midterm elections and agreed that no trend, despite the giddy happy-hour chatter of Democrats, will emerge until well after Labor Day. As it is, the GOP lucked out with Robert Torricelli's ham-handed apology for his ethical lapses to the voters in New Jersey, and that state could wind up in the Republican column. You won't read this in the Times, of course, but Missouri's Jean Carnahan and Minnesota's Paul Wellstone are faring worse in the polls than their campaigns let on, and unless Democratic Floridians wise up and nominate Bill McBride, Jeb Bush will clobber the inept Janet Reno.

On the other hand, Tom Daschle's made it his personal mission to reelect Tim Johnson, his colleague from South Dakota, and that burst of ego (which one hopes will distract his attention from other senate races) will probably pay off. It doesn't help that White House-recruited candidate Rep. John Thune isn't running a convincing campaign. At least he hasn't imploded like Bill Simon Jr., the Republican challenger to the vastly unpopular California governor Gray Davis: Why Simon's legal troubles weren't vetted by the ideological conservatives who rejected Dick Riordan?who could've defeated Davis?is just another example of the right wing preferring purity over practicality.

Mind you, Simon himself wasn't found guilty of any crime in the verdict handed down in Los Angeles last week?the loser was an investment firm started by Simon, his father and brother, and didn't implicate the candidate?but the guilt-by-association in today's political environment has made the novice candidate even more of an underdog than before.

Given the circumstances, President Bush has been forced essentially to withdraw from the California gubernatorial race and give up hope of making 2004 inroads on the nation's most populous state.

August 12

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