SUDDENLY, ALONG CAME LYNDON!

By Edwin Cooney

Friday, November 22nd, 1963 was, of course, the day Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson became President Johnson. However, Wednesday, January 20th, 1965, known nationally as Inauguration Day, was the day the big 6 foot 3 inch, 210 pound Texan became everyone's master.  In LBJ's mind, it may well have been Lyndon Baines Johnson's Liberation or Freedom Day. His lifelong ambition to be elected President of the United States was a reality. He was master of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, of House Speaker John McCormack, and Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, the latter his frequent after five p.m. drinking companion. He was clearly boss of numerous former Kennedy associates including Robert McNamara, JFK's "brilliant" Secretary of Defense, and, of course, Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He had even gotten more votes in the State of New York than had Robert F. Kennedy, someone he truly and deeply despised! He was bigger physically, politically and rank-wise than most. Everyone, even social and fiscal activists, had to check first with LBJ to assure the legitimacy of their interests and even their handling of them.

His political experience was born in the 1930s when he was an assistant to Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg. By 1935, he'd been appointed chairman of the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration. In the spring of 1937, he was in Congress due to a special election he narrowly won. In 1948, he won the Democratic Senatorial Primary over Governor Coke Stevenson by just 87 votes out of a total vote of 9,888,000 Texans. Henceforth, he would be known as “Landslide Lyndon!”

His judgment of people and situations was such that he instinctively knew who he should befriend or show deference, and who he could afford to bully and thus control. He kept records of birthdays, anniversaries, instances of favor and instances of defiance. LBJ often quoted his father Sam Johnson, a state legislator, who told his eldest son: If you can't walk into a room and immediately tell who is for you and who is against you, you're in the wrong business.

As I listened to him beginning on Wednesday, November 27th, 1963, I heard more of a demanding than a  commanding voice, far from JFK's New England/Harvard eloquence. In the coming months, there were stories of how LBJ begged and wheedled Chief Justice Earl Warren into heading up the commission assigned to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. As for his treatment of Robert Kennedy, understandable as that might be in view of their mutual dislike, it nevertheless seemed cruel and unpresidential at the time.

As the 1964 presidential campaign unfolded, as a partisan Republican, Barry Goldwater, seemed to me to be determinedly principled while Lyndon Johnson seemed purely opportunistic. Only with time and events did I begin to learn what it might have been like to grow up and become a truly progressive politician in the South. How Lyndon Johnson pulled it off is an amazing story.

He began by systematically befriending southern leaders such as House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Richard B. Russell of Georgia, John McClelland of Arkansas, Robert Kerr of Oklahoma and J. William Fulbright, also of Arkansas. LBJ often referred to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "my second daddy!" (Interestingly and, I believe, significantly, I've neither heard nor read of any special relationship LBJ developed with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.)

LBJ was essentially a New Dealer who was devoted to using government's resources to alleviate poverty, misery, disease and ignorance, not only from the United States but from the world community as well. A number of historians these days have come to believe that one of  President Johnson's goals in Vietnam was to demonstrate to everyone that New Deal-style democracy was the ultimate and permanent answer to world Communism and despotism.

Over time, I began to understand and even sympathize with LBJ's goals although his methods were ultimately ineffective insofar as world New Dealism was concerned.

Many were shocked by Johnson's transformation from a typical Southern segregationist who would vote for poll taxes and oppose anti-lynching bills into a civil rights leader. By 1965, he had shepherded three civil rights acts through Congress breaking the House Rules Committee's stranglehold on civil rights issues, a deed President Kennedy had been unable to accomplish. He accomplished this by campaigning to have a majority of House members sign a discharge petition which, if passed, would take the bill out of the jurisdiction of the House Rules Committee. Congressman Howard Smith, the Rules Committee chairman, began to give way as House members began to steadily sign the discharge petition. Subsequently, Smith, a lifelong segregationist from Virginia, was forced to allow his committee to consider the Civil Rights bill which was passed by the House of Representatives on January 30th, 1964. This movement on LBJ's part began on the nights of November 26th and 27th,1963, LBJ's fifth and sixth days as president. When advised to move slowly on civil rights legislation, LBJ is said to have responded: What the hell is the presidency for!

What's below is Lyndon Johnson's explanation of what compelled him to become a civil rights president. He had obviously waited for the right time and set of circumstances to pull it off. I only wish I could transmit the sound of his voice as he stood before Congress and told this story on Monday night, March 15th, 1965.

"My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas in a small Mexican American school. Few of my students could speak much English and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to school without breakfast, hungry! And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, ‘cause I saw it in their eyes! I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew hoping it would help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow, you can never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the face of a hopeful young child! I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and people like them all over the country. But now I do have that chance. And I'll let you in on a little secret. I intend to use it!” 

I believe he meant every word. Absent in his presentation of that story was his traditional whining and pleading tone.

As Johnson spoke those words, I was still in that place of spiteful ignorance incapable of a capacity for genuine discernment. I was not only ready, but even anxious to believe that LBJ surely had something to do with President Kennedy's assassination. Only gradually was I even capable to grasp what Lyndon Baines Johnson was really and truly all about!

Where are you as you evaluate people, their motives, and the events they oversee? Hopefully, you're ahead of where I once was!

Lyndon Baines Johnson these days rates in my top ten presidents, just below Theodore Roosevelt and just above Woodrow Wilson.

When I think of LBJ these days, there is lots to inspire and admire. There's even much to love! The fly in the LBJ ointment is that too often there was little to like!

Still, with all that can legitimately be criticized, especially the Vietnam War, America is better off than it otherwise would be if he hadn't been our president!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

 

ROGER MARIS — HE LOVED THE GAME — HE HATED THE FAME!

By Edwin Cooney

Yes, indeed, the cost of fame is sometimes higher than the actual achievement, effort or money. Sometimes the price is your very individual dignity. On Wednesday, September 20th, 1961 (exactly 60 years ago today), Roger Eugene Maris of Hibbing, Minnesota and Fargo, North Dakota  hit home run  Number 59 and barely missed Number 60, thus falling short of Babe Ruth's season home run record from 1927. Back in July of 1961, Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, a personal friend and former ghostwriter for the Babe, ruled that both Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle would have to hit 60 or 61 home runs in 154 games in order to be recognized as the new single season home run king of Major League Baseball. That was the last time the number of games would be an aspect of official record keeping. (The most stark example of this is that 13 years later when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run thus breaking the Babe's career record, baseball rightfully ignored the fact that Henry Aaron had 12,364 career at bats while the Babe had only 8,399 at bats for a difference of 3,965 to "Hammering Henry’s" advantage. (Most modern baseball record holders have a “games played” advantage over their predecessors!)

Nineteen sixty-one was a fresh new year throughout America. We had a new young President, Jack Kennedy, and his lovely wife Jackie. Despite crises in Cuba and Berlin, despite the evil and godless Khrushchev, things were getting freer and perhaps a bit easier in America. Winston Churchill was still alive and in Parliament in Britain, Elvis was out of the army singing and making movies, The Beatles were performing in Germany  and the Yankees were still pennant contenders even though they'd just lost the 1960 World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Unlike George Herman (Babe) Ruth, Roger Maris was not naturally lovable! Roger was shy and often moody. He hated to talk about himself or his achievements. Maris came from a somewhat dysfunctional Minnesota and North Dakota family. An outstanding high school athlete, he considered playing football for coach Bud Wilkinson's University of Oklahoma Sooners but decided after visiting the college that he could earn much needed money almost immediately in professional baseball. Initially turned down by the Chicago Cubs, Maris’ next stop with his dad Rudy, Sr., was Cleveland and there they hit pay dirt!

Roger was about 6 feet tall and weighed around 200 pounds. He possessed a strong right throwing arm akin to those of Rocky Colavito (a Cleveland Indians teammate) and Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Even more, Roger Maris possessed a quick left-handed bat. His swing was short and quick and he had power to all fields, although much of it, as a left-handed hitter, was to right field — which was vitally important at Yankee Stadium with the low four foot wall being only 296 feet from home plate! 

Roger was a pretty typical Midwestern boy. Like The Babe, his family roots were in the Roman Catholic Church and the Democratic Party. The family's name was originally spelled "MARAS" until Roger substituted the second A with the letter I because he was sensitive to the altogether too typical and deliberate mispronunciation of his last name by fellow players, unfriendly fans, and members of the press. He was tall and muscular, with short blonde hair and hazel eyes. (Some said he looked facially a little like Elvis Presley minus the sideburns.) Although he had typical baseball ambitions to win a World Series, Roger would have been content to never go to New York City in search of big time fame. However, on Friday, December 11th, 1959, the Kansas City Athletics, to whom he'd been traded by the Cleveland Indians in June of 1958, sent him to the New York Yankees. To Maris, the differences between the two teams were as stark as the definition of success. Most important, in K.C. a player could develop on his own. In New York, players were not only pressured but too often followed by detectives to ensure their behavior and Yankee worthiness. In Kansas City, the press was benign while in New York, it was anything but! The truth was that Maris was content in Kansas City. The team, after all, was improving and he was a vital part of that improvement. His home was in Raytown, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. There he resided with his wife Patricia Ann (Carvel) Maris, two-year-old Susan, and one-year-old Roger, Jr. However, New York was where much of baseball's money and World Series success was, so, with misgivings, Roger joined the Yankees.

Roger Maris would spend seven seasons in New York from 1960 through 1966. In the first two seasons, he hit exactly 100 home runs, 39 in 1960 and 61 in 1961.

In 1960, Maris got a mere taste of big time fame when he hit 39 homers, second to Mickey Mantle's league-leading 40, and batted .285 with 112 RBIs. Roger Maris is one of only a few players to hit a home run in his first World Series at bat.

Maris's 61 homers, .269 batting average and 142 RBIs, important and significant as they ultimately were insofar as his earning power was concerned, constituted the shallowest part of his season. The unfortunate substance of his season was his discomfort with the press and their discomfort with him. He'd patiently answer questions about how he hit or the conditions under which he failed or succeeded, but he hated personal questions such as those having to do with his marriage. One reporter wondered if Roger "played"" while on the road. When Maris responded that "I'm a married man," the reporter is said to have responded to Maris saying: "I am too, but I'm not a radical about it!” Maris found questions like that presumptive and offensive. During the season, Roger and Mickey got a room with teammate Bob Cerv who had been a star with Maris in Kansas City in 1958. Near the end of the season, the pressure was such that Maris was losing handfuls of his hair. At the close of the season Maris was, for the second time in two seasons, the American League's Most Valuable Player. In addition to his 61 homers, he carried the Yankees through the 1961 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. There would be a meeting with President Kennedy. He also received the diamond-studded Hickok Belt as Outstanding Professional Athlete of the year 1961. The following February, Maris signed a contract for $72,000 and, along with Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, starred in a forgettable movie called "Safe At Home!” However, at about that time, all the glory suddenly stopped.

Reporters grew tired of Maris and he grew tired and even less cooperative with them. Old-timers such as Rogers Hornsby, the great National League batting star and Ruth contemporary, called Maris a “bush leaguer” and wrote stories about his rudeness toward fans and, even worse, toward children. (A young boy was reported to have asked Maris for his "John Hancock” on a baseball and Maris wrote that name. Reporters who witnessed that incident failed to report that Maris got the ball back and signed his full name to it.)

Maris had respectable years in 1962 and 1963 and, again, in 1964, but in 1965 he hurt his hand and was almost nonproductive for the rest of that year. Even worse, Yankee doctor Sidney Gaynor reported to Yankee General Manager Ralph Houk that he could find nothing wrong with Maris's hand. So, for the first time in his athletic life, he was suspected, to his resentment of "jaking." Additionally, as Mickey Mantle's career began to end and Yankee officials and fans began celebrating "The Mick", Maris's reputation began to plummet into press and fan contempt. Finally, on December 7th, 1966, the Yankees sent Roger Maris to the Saint Louis Cardinals for a journeyman third baseman, Charley Smith.

Roger Maris's temperament and background were ultimately unsuited to New York as was the stardom his achievements during the first two years earned him. Years later, contemporaries generally agreed that one of the reasons Roger Maris couldn't entirely enjoy his success was due to the fact that his older brother Rudolph, who'd been the superior athlete of the two brothers, had suffered a polio attack in 1951 that ended all likelihood of athletic success. Roger would often insist that his older brother was the superior athlete and family and friends agreed that Roger could never be really comfortable with his success.

During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, due to the efforts of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, Roger Maris, New York fans, and even the press would make peace. In 1978 and in 1984, Roger Maris would return to Yankee Stadium to the cheers of fans to be recognized and, in 1984, to have his Yankee Number 9 retired. Still, fame, at its warmest and most profitable, was beyond Maris's capacity to enjoy. Hence, even those who loved him best (me included) are forced to admit that he spurned his fame up until April 13th, 1978 when he and Mickey Mantle raised the Yankees World Championship flag at Yankee Stadium.  

On Saturday, December 14th, 1985 at age 51 Roger Maris died in Houston, Texas of lymphoma cancer also known as Hodgkins Disease.

The date of his death was the same as teammate Elston Howard who died on Sunday, December 14th, 1980. Yankee teammates Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Johnny Blanchard, Bill Skowron, and Bobby Richardson braved the below zero temperatures of Fargo, North Dakota, where Maris was raised, to pay tribute and to bury him. Later that month, services were held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, attended by George Steinbrenner and former President Richard M. Nixon who was especially attentive to Roger Maris's grandson who was in attendance.

Roger Maris didn't exactly ignore fame as he certainly derived much, although not all of the pecuniary benefits available, but the heart of fame is fickle and even jealous and Maris certainly failed to properly nurture it as fame inevitably demands.

His career statistics will, and perhaps shouldn't, be enough to put him into baseball's Hall of Fame. However, if you ask me, it's hard to identify Roger Maris's achievement of hitting 61 home runs in 1961 as being less famous than most achievements that are glorified in baseball's Valhalla!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY   

A LONG WEEKEND 50 YEARS AGO!

By Edwin Cooney

Edith Rachel Gassman, my best friend ever, was a quiet dignified lady. However, she was especially quiet that Friday, September 10th morning when she picked me up to take me back to Attica for the weekend. The first thing she told me upon entering my college room that morning was that a prison riot had occurred the day before and that a group of prisoners in defiance of warden Vincent Mancusi had control of Cell Block D. She told me further that two of our neighbors, Frank and Joe, were hostages of the rebellious prisoners. We hardly knew either Frank or Joe despite the fact that they lived on both sides of us — Frank lived just to our right and Joe lived to our left about three houses down the block. Edith grew even quieter when my reaction didn't match her sense of invasion and disquiet. She and her late husband had lived in Attica since the 1940s where they raised daughter Sharon and son Michael. Mr. Gassman had died in 1961 and Edith had become a house parent at the New York State School for the Blind in nearby Batavia, New York. That's where we met in the fall of 1963 and a year later she invited me to join her family as sort of a son. That was the core of our relationship from 1964 until her death in 2010. Thus, Attica didn't quite mean the same to me as it did to Edith. She also told me that a guard who had been injured on the day of the takeover and who eventually died, Billy Quinn, had been one of her Cub Scouts back in the 40s or 50s, although they were never really close personally.

Upon arriving in Attica that Friday, there was a certain expectancy of trouble that was about to visit either the town (the population of which was approximately 2,500 citizens) or the prisoners. The prison population was 2,243 uneducated, young and angry Blacks and Puerto Ricans. According to Heather Ann Thompson's book "Blood In The Water," 40% were under 30, 77% came from cities, 80% had not graduated from high school, 63% were Black or Puerto Rican, and two thirds had been incarcerated before although that didn't mean that they were all hardened criminals. Many, as Ms. Thompson points out, had been transferred from more heavily populated prisons downstate due to their angry temperament and the overcrowded populations of downstate prisons. In other words, rather than building larger prisons downstate, the population problem was kicked upstate by the Department of Corrections as, no doubt, ordered by the governor.

Most people I knew, family included, heartily wished that the prison with its population of "criminals and perverts" lived elsewhere. As for me, I didn't care so much that they were in Attica. I was simply sorry that they had screwed up and hoped they would realize the error of their ways, and simply get through their sentences and get back home where they could be happy citizens once again. (I was still young and naive enough that living happily ever after was what could and should be everyone's fate!)

As the weekend passed, Atticans saw prominent newspaper men such as Tom Wicker from the New York Times, famous lawyers like William Kunstler, and Herman Schwartz, Assemblymen named James Emery and John Done, as well as a Congressman named Herman Bedillo enter their lives and ultimately judge community mores. They didn't much like it!

Throughout Saturday and into Sunday, I listened intensively to local radio and television. Saturday night, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther party flew in from San Francisco to offer his party's support to the rebels, but it turned out to have no substance. Neither Elijah Muhammad nor Lewis Farrakhan were willing to assist the prisoners in a substantial way. Meanwhile, lawyers William Kunstler and Herman Schwartz were doing all they could on behalf of the prisoners. Everyone, me included, was praying and hoping for the freedom of the correction officers who were hostages.

Whether Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller would or should make a personal appearance was both an open and debatable question. One of the most vivid moments of the weekend for me was when Michael Smith, Sr, father to correction officer Michael Smith, a hostage, said: “I don't care whether Rockefeller comes here or not, because I wouldn't walk across the street to even look at him, but he has an obligation to end this situation." That generally summed up most everyone's feelings. What was the cause of the riot was a matter which would have to be faced, but the ultimate feeling was to get it over with.

So, at 9:46 a.m. on the morning of Monday, September 13th, 1971, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller did exactly that. Consequently, ten hostages lost their lives, not because prisoners cut their throats and castrated one of the men (as the governor for some time believed), but because the supposed "sharp shooters" weren't such sharp shooters. (Happily, both Frank and Joe survived the crisis.) Author Heather Ann Thompson's book "Blood In The Water: The Attica Uprising in 1971 and its Legacy" tells the story and outlines its consequences in great detail.

A day or two after the re-occupancy of the prison, I heard Lawyer William Kunstler tell an audience: Nelson Rockefeller is a downright murderer! Now, when I call him a murderer, I am libeling him — and I dare him to sue me!

At the close of that historic weekend fifty years ago, I believed that "Rocky" had made the right, although agonizing, decision to re-occupy the prison. Yet, in the wake of Mr. Kunstler's public libel of the governor and no response from Mr. Rockefeller, I had to take Kunstler's charge seriously. I still continued to like and even admire Nelson Rockefeller through his Vice Presidency and up to his subsequent and morally untidy death on Friday night, January 26th, 1979.

Time and events have changed my perspective. Back in 1971, my mind and heart were very impressionable. I was still very much an establishment Republican. After all, that was my environment and, subsequently, my mind set.

I wonder if I'm less innocent than I was back in 1971 or if I'm merely differently innocent today?

I'll leave it up to you to decide!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY