THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (26 page)

In the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, Richard Nixon had
pointed out that some 800,000 people (going on a billion-plus)
lived under Communism and only 550,000 under freedom, with a huge
Third World considered the great prize in between. Latin America
threatened to go Communist, with the
Argentinean-turned-Cuban-revolutionary Che Guevara leading a series
of rearguard terrorist actions against all forms of capitalism and
Democracy in the region. The Communists were on the march in Africa
and in Asia. They controlled Eastern Europe behind what Winston
Churchill called an Iron Curtain. The U.S.S.R. was making deals
with France and India. They established legitimate political
parties in Italy, Greece and other liberal European countries. The
Soviets continued to use what Vladimir Lenin called “useful idiots”
to push their cause in the American and Western media.

1964 was a seminal year in this regard, although it
had started earlier. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, an
increasing number of films sympathetic to Communism appeared,
usually depicting “peasants” or “farmers” who, only after
“collectivizing,” could save their land. Films like
Song of
Russia
and
Mission to Moscow
made no attempt to disguise
their pro-Communist messages. Even such actors as Gregory Peck, one
of the most respected stars of all time, lent themselves, wittingly
or unwittingly, to the “cause.” Peck once allowed himself to be
filmed in a cartoonishly bad scene with a beautiful woman and a
bearded old man, all fighting the Nazis. In between firing shots,
they spout off the most hackneyed possible Communist phraseology;
as if in fighting desperately for one’s life in freezing
conditions, such things would cross their minds!

Ayn Rand, a fiercely anti-Communist woman who had
escaped Stalin’s Russia, landing in Hollywood in the 1930s, led a
vanguard conservative movement pointing out its hold on the film
industry. Her
magnum opus
novel,
Atlas Shrugged
(reportedly under film development with Angelina Jolie), depicted a
futuristic alternative world; one that seemingly would have existed
had World War II not been fought. The United States, now a second
rate power never recovered from the Great Depression, can be saved
only by a handful of “men of the mind,” conservative excellencies
representing the “thin red line” between anarchy and freedom.
Conservative and Christian icon Whittaker Chambers, however, found
it elitist, stating that each page screamed, “”to the gas chambers”
for all but the most gifted amongst us. Ronald Reagan, William F.
Buckley and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan all considered
it a seminal influence on their political ideologies.

It took years, but after the U.S. won the Cold War
and the archives were opened, it was confirmed that many of the
Hollywood filmmaker’s accused of Communism
were
Communists.
However, in the 1950s McCarthyism became a dirty word. In truth, it
was not Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations,
often wild and misleading but not always, that got him in trouble.
Despite revisionism, McCarthy had little if any interest in
Hollywood, which is why movies depicting the era use fictional
characters with “McCarthyite characteristics” instead of the real
thing. McCarthy only became unpopular when he seemingly went crazy;
crazy enough to go after former World War II military chief of
staff and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, and even
Republican President
Dwight D. Eisenhower!
These are two
icons of world history, men whose visage sits astride the annals of
man more proudly than perhaps any with the exception of the living
Christ. On top of that, Marshall – even though he kept his politics
private – was almost assuredly a conservative Republican, albeit an
international pragmatist.

After the election of Kennedy in 1960 and the
Democrat sweeps of 1964, the Left was feeling confident and ready
for revenge. Aside from McCarthyism, they had been humiliated by
Nixon when he backed Whittaker Chambers and proved that Alger Hiss,
a leading Roosevelt aide, had been a Soviet spy.

In 1957,
Sweet Smell of Success
starred Burt
Lancaster as a thinly disguised Walter Winchell, a redbaiting radio
and newspaper personality who had attacked numerous Communists (and
some who probably were not). His staccato voice was the narration
for the TV show
The Untouchables
, starring Robert Stack. In
the film, the Winchell character is thoroughly disgraced: a liar
and for good measure an incestuous sibling!

The old religious fare –
The Ten
Commandments
,
Ben-Hur
– was replaced by social angst,
revolution, and “blame America” movies. In 1960, “blacklisted”
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – after writing under a pseudonym for
several years - was allowed to write
Spartacus
for Kirk
Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick. The story of a slave
rebellion against the Roman Empire was a veneer for a social
re-ordering against America.

In 1962, John Frankenheimer’s
The Manchurian
Candidate
depicted a bumbling, alcoholic McCarthyite Senator
(James Gregory). Producer Frank Sinatra (at that time in the
process of becoming a Republican for two reasons: the Kennedy’s
snubbed him, and he suspected them in the murder of Marilyn Monroe)
always insisted it was an
anti
-Communist film. The fact that
a presumably Republican society woman (Angela Lansbury) turns out
to be a Soviet spy who has an incestuous relationship with her son
(Laurence Harvey) while turning him into a robotic assassin of a
Presidential candidate creates murky questions as to who is evil;
the Communists for orchestrating such a plot, or the Republican
society woman for carrying it out?

That same year,
Advise & Consent
offered
a similarly convoluted message. The Chambers-Hiss affair is
fictionalized with Henry Fonda (the Hiss character) discrediting
Burgess Meredith (the Chambers character). Later it turns out Fonda
did attend Communist meetings, which are said to have been
relatively harmless. The film does not benefit from the Venona
archives 30 years’ hence, which showed Hiss was a paid spy.

In 1963, Frankenheimer returned with
Seven Days
in May
, based on the true story of Republican industrialists
who plotted a military overthrow of FDR in 1934. The film did not
show that it was a presumably Republican Marine, Smedley Butler,
who foils the plot. In the film, the Marine is now an “ACLU type”
played by Kirk Douglas, who thwarts the overthrow plotted by Burt
Lancaster, playing a character similar to Right-wing Air Force
Commanding General “bombs away with” Curt LeMay, JFK’s “rival”
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1964, several movies put forth the message that
nuclear weapons were bad, and that American aggression or mistakes
would be our undoing because of them.
Fail-Safe
told the
story of a mistake that launches a strike against the Soviet Union.
Dr. Strangelove
was Kubrick’s darkly comic turn, which does
the same thing. In both movies, the poor Soviets are the victims at
no fault of their own.

Other films had a social edge to them.
Cool Hand
Luke
was a sympathetic view of prisoners in a brutal “chain
gang” system.
To Sir With Love
was banned in Alabama because
it showed a black teacher (Sidney Poitier) in charge of white
working class English students.
In the Heat of the Night
featured Poitier as a sophisticated big city detective who comes
down to Mississippi and shows the “dumb crackers” some real police
work.
The Graduate
rejected middle class values; parents
were alcoholics, liars, cheats and sexual libertines.
Easy
Rider
glorified drug use, at least until a white Southern
“redneck” kills a peaceful, dope-smoking hippie for no good reason.
Midnight Cowboy
explored the seamy world of hustling with
homosexual themes on the dirty streets of New York City.

While conservatives can find much to fault in all of
these and many other films of this and later eras, nobody can deny
one essential fact: they were great movies, artistically and
financially. To the extent that one could quantify such a thing,
great filmmaking had changed hands from such conservatives as Frank
Capra, John Ford and Darryl Zanuck to liberals like Stanley
Kubrick, Dalton Trumbo and John Frankenheimer.

1964 was also a seminal year in music, an art form
that like Hollywood leaned to the Left. Early rockers like Elvis
Presley, The Righteous Brothers and The Beach Boys ranged from
conservative to apolitical. The “British rock invasion” began to
change that. The Beatles introduced new hair and clothing styles
that resulted in the “long-haired hippie” look. Controversial front
man John Lennon declared that the group was “more popular than
Jesus Christ.”
Time
magazine’s April 8, 1966 cover asked the
question, “Is God Dead?” Roman Polanski’s
Rosemary’s Baby
did not ask that question, it declared it to be a fact while
depicting the birth of the anti-Christ in a New York luxury
apartment building.

The Rolling Stones became the symbol of hedonism,
their “Sympathy for the Devil” raising the question of Satan
worship. Jim Morrison of The Doors seemed to take that a step
further, exploring dark themes of life after death that rejected
Christianity with such works as “When the Music’s Over,” which
included the lyrics “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection . .
. send my credentials to the House of Detention.”

Only The Who, a group of kids from middle class
British backgrounds, maintained the slightest vestige of
traditional values. Their rock opera “Tommy,” while no revival
meeting, did explore guitarist Peter Townshend’s quest for the
meaning of Christ (parabled by the miraculous “deaf, dumb and blind
boy” from “Pinball Wizard”) in his hard-to-understand young
life.

In the late 1950s, the Beats were San Francisco
poets who endorsed counter-culturalism. Their seminal work was Jack
Kerouac’s
On the Road
. The Beats’ voice became Allen
Ginsberg, who transported the movement from the West Coast to New
York. He was said to have “homosexualized” it by “forcing himself”
on several otherwise-straight members of the Beat generation,
Kerouac allegedly among them. According to rumor, novelist Gore
Vidal did the same thing to other young men. The theory behind this
was that, through the use of alcohol and psychedelic drugs, they
were able to convince reluctant men to try this activity; that it
was merely a “lifestyle choice,” an “alternative” that was neither
worse and maybe even better than traditional male-female sex.

Further rumors spread that Mick Jagger of the
Rolling Stones, although straight, engaged in such activity out of
hedonistic, drug-inspired boredom. To the extent that Ginsberg and
Vidal inspired such a thing, the “gay liberation movement” took
shape in the 1960s. In 1969, a riot/protest at Stonewall, a gay bar
in New York, made headlines. The movement attempted to make
homosexuality mainstream, but AIDS took a terrible toll on gay
people. Drug use via dirty needles also spread AIDS. Other sexually
transmitted diseases increased tremendously, partly as a result of
rampant homosexuality, but also because of “free love” among
straights.

The American Civil Liberties Union became a powerful
legal force in the 1950s, ostensibly strengthened by liberal
reaction to McCarthyism. The goal of the ACLU, which has evolved
over the years, was to fight traditional precepts thought to be
restrictive, paternal, and stifling. Criminal rights, racial and
gender victimization; all aspects of individual liberty have been
its staple, with much attendant controversy since, like most good
things, it can and has been badly overdone. The concept of class
action lawsuits and an overly litigious society are its legacy,
again with some legitimate success, and with many unfortunate
results. Among the unfortunate results have been the ability of
special interest groups, especially of minority races, to extract
huge monetary awards and, more often than not, “payoffs” (often
orchestrated by such “race peddlers” as Jesse Jackson and Al
Sharpton) from legitimate corporations. Enormous jury settlements
orchestrated by the ACLU have driven the cost of goods and services
provided by corporations, but its most egregious influence has been
on the health care industry. Doctors and hospitals have been forced
to “value add” huge costs to medical care in order to off-set the
terrible threats, awards and pay-offs extracted by these legal
off-shoots.

Then there is the issue of drug use. The “high
priest” of psychedelic narcotics was Dr. Timothy Leary, a highly
publicized Harvard professor who encouraged young people to “drop
acid.” Acid was LSD, allegedly invented or manipulated by the CIA
as a Cold War tactic to get defectors, spies and turncoats to talk.
It was “perfected” by a Berkeley chemist named Owsley Stanley. A
“good trip” reportedly made people “commune with God.” Bad trips
were most Satanic in nature. It had devastating consequences on
millions of people, its affects felt today in an on-going drug
epidemic. Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, pills (uppers and
downers) all entered the culture full bore.

“Tune in, turn on and drop out,” Leary advised his
disciples, who did just that by the hundreds of thousands, with
terrible ramifications. Perhaps hardest hit were black people. By
1965, they had made enormous strides in social and economic
progress. The average black family was still a relatively cohesive
unit in the mid-1960s. Their collision course with the “hippie
movement” and the drug culture was a devastating blow to them. Many
middle class white children, destroyed by drugs, were able to
return to the support system of families. They could afford
rehabilitation, generally absorbing loved ones back into the home,
thus effectuating recovery. Many blacks did not have this advantage
and, once hooked, found themselves living on the streets with no
place to go. When they “dropped out,” they never came back.