Historical Figures Series: The Presidential Campaigns Of George Wallace, Part 3: The 1972 Primary Campaign And The Attempt on Wallace Life

 

Lurleen Wallace had passed away from cancer in May of 1968. George had spent much of his presidential campaign in the space of mourning her. Not long after the campaign ended, he would resume both his public life in Alabama and begin to court the woman who would eventually become his third wife Cornelia Snively, who would not be 25 when they got married in January of 1971.

By that time, Wallace was running for Governor of Alabama for the second time. The campaign against incumbent Albert Brewer is considered by many, including Jimmy Carter, the most racist campaign in modern southern political history. During the primary Brewer received the most votes but not a majority and as is the case in Alabama state law, it went to a run-off. Wallace, who had already proven himself to be a nasty campaigner, was even more so in this campaign.

Brewer had unveiled a progressive platform and had worked to build an alliance between blacks and the white working class. Wallace turned on this using slogans such as: “Do you want the black bloc electing your governor?” and an ad showing a white girl surrounding by black boys with the slogan: “Wake up Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama. He personally maligned both Brewer and his family. His tactics were effective: he narrowly won the Democratic nomination and won the general election in the landslide.

Brewer had used Wallace’s ambitions against him, saying that ‘Alabama needed a full-time governor.” Wallace had promised not to run for President, but the day after the election flew to Wisconsin on a campaign trip. The sole purpose of his run for governor was to maintain his Presidential prospects.

After the 1970 midterms, Nixon’s prospects for reelection looked grim, and while events in 1971 would improve them nationally – his recognition of China, taking the country off the Gold standard, the start of détente with the Soviets –  he still faced a quagmire in Vietnam, and a sharp recession -  and the fact that he had to negotiate with a heavily Democratic Congress not inclined to like him. Considering how narrow his victory had been two years earlier, Nixon knew his chances of reelection were remote if the Democrats could unite around a strong candidate, something that the party had no shortage of. And he was well aware of the threat a strong candidate could be.

Nixon was convinced early on that his greatest threat would be Ted Kennedy, even after the events at Chappaquiddick two years earlier. This thought remains high in his thinking well after Kennedy ruled himself out early in 1971. By that point George McGovern, who had taken up the banner of Robert Kennedy’s campaign, at the Democratic Convention in 1968 had declared his candidacy. But no one was taking him seriously. The favorite of the establishment was Edmund Muskie, a moderate Senator from the once reliably Republican state of Maine, and Humphrey’s running mate in 1968. He had proven himself an able campaigner during that stretch, and in August of 1971 lead Nixon in preferential polls.

A dozen candidates would declared for the nomination, including the groundbreaking run of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American of either gender to run for the White House. Eugene McCarthy also made a run that ended up going nowhere. Eventually the campaign would come down to six men, McGovern, Muskie, Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, Hubert Humphrey, John Lindsay, the Republican Mayor of New York who had switched parties to run for President and George Wallace.

The primary rules would change the campaign strategies for everybody but few would feel the benefits more than McGovern and Wallace. It is worth noting that, with the exception of Muskie, no candidate planned to campaign in all twenty-two primaries. Indeed Muskie has chosen to run such a campaign because he believed it would prove his national appeal. This idea would break down very quickly.

McGovern would plan what amounted to a targeted strategy of certain states over others. Wallace’s would benefit from two critical factors: first the existence of crossover primaries, which would allow Republicans to vote in Democratic primaries. It also helped that the state of Florida, which had basically been a non-factor in Presidential primaries to that point, elected to have its primary surpass New Hampshire to be the first in the nation. It ended up being second, but that would be good enough to help Wallace’s prospects.

Prior to his campaign Wallace had announced that he was no longer in favor of segregation and his campaign slogan for 1972 was somewhat more moderate: ‘Send them a message.” Underlying this was the fact that his previous campaigns had sent the nation a message and it was one that they were all aware of.

Wallace knew even with the new primary system, gaining the Democratic nomination would be a longshot at best. His best hope was to have enough delegates when the primaries were over so that if there was a brokered convention (a very real possibility) he could negotiate getting the nomination on perhaps the second or third ballot. Few thought this possible, and there is every indication that if this failed, Wallace was planning to run as a third party candidate yet again. Nixon was more concerned by this prospect than him getting the nomination: Wallace’s third party campaign had hurt his ‘Southern Strategy’ and nearly cost him the White House. There was no reason for anyone to suspect it would not do so again.

Wallace’s campaign would also get a boost from an outside factor in January of 1972. In Richmond Federal Judge Robert Merhige had ruled a decision that had to do with the busing of African-American students from predominantly African-American public schools to predominantly white schools until the percentage was proven correct. This decision would be overturned by June, but its message would resonate throughout the Democratic campaign.

Most contenders would follow a middle ground, even McGovern favored an amendment before the Senate that favored moderating the issue. Only Lindsay favored it with no restrictions at all. By contrast, this position perhaps more than anything else would electrify Wallace’s primary campaign.

After Muskie stumbled in New Hampshire, given life to the McGovern campaign the nation’s attention turned to Florida. Both Wallace and Lindsay had determined that this would be the state where they launched their campaigns to national prominence. During much of the leadup, everyone believe that Wallace would probably win but no one thought that he would get more than twenty percent of the vote. The most prominent figures thought that he would barely be able to make an edge between Humphrey and Muskie.

All of them were proven wrong on March 14^th. Wallace swept the state with more than 41% of the vote taking 75 of the 81 available delegates. Lindsay, who finished with less than eight percent of the vote, was dead in the water. Humphrey, hoping to start off strong, finished a distant second with less than nineteen percent of the vote, Muskie’s at 9% was officially sinking, and other candidates like Jackson and Chisholm were running on empty. McGovern had campaigned solely to serve as spoiler and take votes away from Lindsay. He finished with seven percent of the vote and was dismissed. No one seemed to notice at the time.

Though Muskie would try to hold on for a few more weeks, by April he was essentially finished as a candidate. The race dropped to three men: McGovern, Humphrey and Wallace. Wallace’s organization was strong on the ground but not when it came to organizing at the delegate level. In many states where he had strong showings, his failure to file for delegate slates would keep hurting him. In Wisconsin, where he managed to upset Humphrey for second place, he got no delegates. In Pennsylvania, he would finish a surprise second to Hubert Humphrey but would only end up two of the 137 delegates in play. (McGovern who finished third got 37 and Muskie who was effective out of the race, got 29.) On May 16^th Wallace was leading all candidates in the total number of votes with more than 3.3 million. By contrast, McGovern had only gotten 2.1 million and was in third trailing Humphrey who’d managed 2.6 million. But because McGovern’s campaign had been better organized, his campaign had already amassed 560 delegates to that point while Wallace only had 324.

Still it was clear that Wallace had national appeal, he had narrowly lost to Humphrey in Indiana while winning big in Tennessee and North Carolina. And May 16 loomed like a huge day for him: the Maryland and Michigan primaries were that day. He had nearly upset Lyndon Johnson there in 1964 and Michigan was a crossover primary where more than 300,000 had voted for him four years earlier.

On May 15^th Wallace was staging a rally in Laurel, Maryland. Not long after he finished it, he took off his jacket and started to shake hands with the crowds. What he did not know was that a man named Arthur Bremer was in that crowd. The previous November, Bremer had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. A court appointed psychiatrist had declared him mentally ill, but stable enough to continue to live in the community. That January he went to a gun shop in Milwaukee and purchased a snub-nose.

In March, he wrote in a diary that he planned to assassination either Richard Nixon or George Wallace when he campaigned in the Wisconsin primary. He attended two Wallace rallies during that period, then traveled to Ottawa where Nixon was visiting. After realizing that the security was too tight to get to Nixon, he wrote that it was his fate to kill Wallace, though it should be noted he never seemed as enthusiastic for as for Nixon. “I won’t even rate a TV interruption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks,” he wrote. Despite his lack of enthusiasm, he went to Michigan and visited the campaign headquarters in Silver Lake. The Kalamazoo police would receive an anonymous call telling them of a suspicious character sitting in a car near the National Guard Armory. He would be questioned but released. He had a clear opportunity to shoot his target but children were nearby and he did not wish to wound him.

Bremer had been at a previous rally in Wheaton which had turned rowdy. When Wallace refused to shake hands with the crowd, Bremer aborted his plan.

After he finished speaking, against the advice of his Secret Service agents, Wallace began to shake his hands. Bremer pushed his way forward and opening fire, hitting Wallace four times. One bullet would lodge in Wallace’s spinal cord, the others him in abdomen in chest. Three others were unintentionally wounded. Bremer would be tried and convicted in August of 1972. He would be sentenced to 53 years in prison.

Wallace would be in surgery for five hours and had to receive several units of blood to survive. He would be visited by his political rivals Humphrey McGovern, Kennedy and even Shirley Chisholm, who despite the opposition of her constituents in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, believed it was the only humane thing to do. It remains to be known if sympathy was a factor, but the next day Wallace triumphed in both Maryland and Michigan, receiving a remarkable 800,000 votes in the latter state. Despite that, his near assassination effectively ended his campaign.

It is hard to know how Wallace’s campaign could have progressed even had he not been shot. Most of the states that remained were not the kind that contained ‘Wallace voters’ and it was only in New Mexico that he would receive any delegates any all. That said, it is likely much of the South would have been loyal to him had he gone to convention, certainly the five states that he had managed to carry in 1968 – Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Georgia – and perhaps he could have managed to get states like Kentucky and Missouri on his side. Combined with the 324 delegates he’d already won; he could very well have gone to the convention with anywhere between 450 and 500 delegates – more than enough to negotiate if a brokered convention had indeed happened. Considering the anti-McGovern feeling that would pervade the DNC well beyond his actual nomination, one could see him being at the very least a power-broker and perhaps being able to win a spot on the ticket if that had been the case. McGovern had made it clear he would strike no deals with Wallace; Humphrey had not been far vaguer.

And its worth noting that McGovern’s prospective path to victory had included Wallace as a factor. He had been depending that Wallace, when he was inevitably turned away, would run as a third party candidate and therefore draw votes away from Nixon in the South. Nixon was certain who could beat McGovern in a two-man race, but he knew given Wallace’s strength in the south – and just as importantly, the Northeast -   he could very well lose states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Humphrey had taken four years earlier, and struggle in New Jersey, Illinois and Ohio. When Wallace was shot on May 15^th, the Nixon campaign was certain they would win a landslide against any candidate. McGovern was still focused on winning the Democratic nomination so it did not enter into his thinking. There would be far too many factors that worked against McGovern’s eventual landslide defeat that November, but any remote chance he had of winning was demolished with Wallace’s shooting in Laurel.

Wallace would live but would end up being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But initially his supporters were not convinced that his political life was over. The night he was undergoing his surgery, Jules Witcover remember the vigil held by members of Wallace’s entourage: “alternating between the yet unidentified ‘they’ who had gotten their leader, and almost gleefully anticipating the political future.” When word came down Wallace would live, Witcover heard one supporter say to another: “Now we got us a candidate!”

Indeed, not long after Wallace’s speech at the DNC that July, many were certain that not only Wallace would rise again but that in four years the political landscape would be such that the presidency would be a certainty. Indeed, the political tides would undergo an earthquake in the next two years, enough to make many on both sides think this was inevitable.

In the final entry, I will cover the lead up to the 1976 election, the preparation for the Wallace campaign, the actual run and how it a very indirect way affected the futures of both political parties for that election and perhaps beyond in ways not even he could have imagined.

Great Movies I Found While Looking For Porn: Love & Other Drugs

 

In a way I think 2010 marked a severe downturn in the number of films that were hyped for award contention where sex scenes and nudity were critical to the movie. The most famous example of it was Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan,  a film that was billed in a way for the notorious lesbian hook-up between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis that is the culmination of a rivalry-flirtation that has been going on to that point. Like much of the film, the hallucinatory quality is such that the viewer ends up questioning its reality. Blue Valentine was actually released in an R-rated and an unrated version because of a very frank sex scene that takes place between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams’ characters in a motel room halfway through the picture.  This was done no doubt more because of the nudity then anything else; the scene in question is one of such desperation that there’s very little erotic about it. On the comic side of this was The Kids are All Right, which had some truly hysterical sex scenes between Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo that honestly seemed to come as much as a shock to their characters as the audience when they happened.

All three of these movies received multiple Oscar nominations and Black Swan and The Kids Are All Right were nominated for Best Picture. The common link between the three movies is that were all basically independently made moves, which by this point had become one of the major sources for films with frank sexual scenes at their center. (Quite a few of the movies on this list are going to be from that circuit.) Love and Other Drugs which was the other major film in 2010 that had scenes of that heightened sexuality was an outlier in 2010 in that the sexuality and nudity were not only part of the film but indeed part of the hype. Much of the advertising featured leads Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway basically naked: a similar pose would be seen on the posters for the film and in the movie trailers. There was early talk of both actors getting Oscar nominations for their work; indeed both received Golden Globe nominations for their performances that year. (Hathaway lost to Annette Bening for The Kids are All Right while Gyllenhaal lost to Paul Giamatti for Barney’s Version an interesting comedy that never even entered Academy Award voters’ minds.) But since the Oscars has never been willing to take comedy seriously, neither was nominated and Hathaway is remembered that year, unfortunately, for the disastrous Oscars ceremony that February. (I’m pretty sure this is where the hatred of Hathaway as a person began.)

Now to be clear when I rented the film  well after this, I was watching for the nudity but I had no idea was a superbly funny and dare I say, heartfelt romantic comedy I was  going to get.       If I had known at the time the filmmakers were the team of Marshall Herskowitz and Edward Zwick, not only would I have been less surprised but I would have hurt the movie didn’t get recognition.

Edward Zwick clearly has a place among the most undervalued directors in history. He has directly some of the most critically acclaimed films of all time, including Glory, Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond. Some of these films have received Oscar nominations and even Oscars, but Zwick has never been nominated for any of them. He and his collaborator Marshall Herskowitz have a far better reputation when it comes to television as over a period of fifteen years they created some of the most unforgettable series in history. There most famous creations were the groundbreaking Thirtysomething and the iconic cult hit My So-Called Life. I actually wrote very favorably about their last (to date) network series Once and Again, one of the most undervalued TV series at the start of the Golden Age. If there is a theme in the work of Zwick and Herskowitz, it is their tendency to look very frankly inside the bedrooms of their characters and make the audience look too. Thirtysomething featured the first scene on television with two gay men in bed; My So-Called Life dealt with all version of sexuality, both for teenagers and their parents and Once and Again continued that format.  Relativity another short lived series took this to a far greater extent, actually trying to air a scene in which a character proposed to another at the moment of orgasm. (ABC cut it.)

Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise considering that Zwick’s first feature film was the original About Last Night… a film known as one of the best movies made by the so-called Brat Pack, featuring some erotic scenes that truly must have contorted the censors of the MPAA at the time. (I may cover it myself at some point.) However when Zwick made Love and Other Drugs, it might very well have come as a shock that this was the next project from the man whose previous film was the World War II drama Defiance.

Love and Other Drugs makes it very clear the kind of character Jamie is in its opening montage where he is an electronics store selling every kind of video equipment almost exclusive to female patrons. Naturally, he is caught having sex with his boss’ girlfriend and as he runs out the door, one of his customers gives him his phone number on the way out. Jamie’s brother Josh, who’s cashed in on the tech bubble essentially tells him that if sex was a marketable skill, “you’d be richer than me.”

The movie is set in 1990s Pittsburg. Jamie is the technically the bad apple of his family. His father is a successful doctor, so is his Jamie’s sister and Josh had just become a millionaire. Jamie has always had the potential to be a doctor but as we learn later on, he couldn’t get through college because of a severe case of ADD. (“Ritalin at eight,” he mentions at one point.) More out of a sense of wandering than anything else, he ends up become a pharmaceutical rep, under the tutelage of Bruce Winston (the always delightful Oliver Platt) who thinks that Jamie “and his swinging dick” get him to Chicago, the promised land where Bruce family lives.

Jamie is more than willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, and that includes sleeping with the nurses with the doctors where he has to make his biggest sales. (I think this film may be the first time I truly realized who Judy Greer was and what she could do even small roles.) This also includes cheerfully taking all the Prozac out of the sales department, replacing them with Zoloft, and dumping them into the garbage. (In one of the subtler gags in the film, there is a homeless man who notices them the first time and apparently helps himself to them. By the time of our last encounter with him, he asks for them and tells Jamie that he is a job interview coming up the next day to prepare for.)

In the midst of trying to convince that doctor (played by Hank Azaria) to commit, Jamie impersonates a doctor. It is there he meets Maggie Murdock (Hathaway) a 26 year old who is suffering from Parkinson’s. In the midst of this conversation, Maggie takes off her shirt. This might be considered a meet-cute except when Jamie is unloading his samples into his trunk and Maggie clocks him with her purse. It is a measure of the kind of man Jamie is that he can’t remember the name of the woman he just ogled and when asks her for, she snickers: “Strong eye contact. Implied intimacy. You’ll make your quota” before disappearing.

A committed Jamie has absolutely no problem flirting with the nurse he’s been sleeping with to get Maggie’s number and calling her. Maggie, who clearly has little time for his bullshit, endures a minute of his sweet talk before saying: “This is a sales call. You want to close right?” Similarly when they meet at the coffee shop she works at, she cuts through all of the preamble he usually goes through by just saying “Let’s go…This isn’t about making a connection for you. This isn’t even about sex for you. This is about the sheer boredom of being you.” Jamie is only momentarily flummoxed before he says: “Does that mean I don’t have to leave a tip?”

The sex scenes that follow are not merely erotic, they are also very funny, mainly because Maggie spends much of the movie as the aggressor in them, something that clearly flummoxed Jamie. (In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, she shows up at his apartment, takes off her coat to reveal she is naked…utterly shocking Jamie’s younger brother, who is sharing the apartment with him.) It’s pretty clear that Jamie has spent his life being chased by women; he is unprepared to deal with the fact that the shoe is on the other foot. His younger brother keeps needling him for this fact throughout the movie with wonderful insults at his behavior: “Were you molested by a Care Bear?” he says when Jamie tries to say something sentimental. (I know this was the first time I saw Josh Gad do anything and he steals every scene he’s in.)

Of course much of Maggie’s resistance is because of her condition. She has a disease that will probably kill her well before she turns 35 and she seems willing to accept this. Her independence is someone who has just decided to live her own life no matter what. When Jamie finally persuades her that he wants to have a serious relationship, her reaction is simple: “When you end it, I get to hate you” as well as giving very specific conditions as to their relationship. As they walk off she finishes their conversation by saying: “Why am I mad at you already?” And of course they do come to odds over her condition. After a medical convention in which Maggie meets a lot of Parkinson’s sufferers who have accepted their condition, there is a montage where Jamie goes along with this and then the inevitable point where he starts dragging Maggie to every doctor possible. Maggie has accepted her fate but Jamie hasn’t. Their eventual break-up (this is a romantic comedy) happens because of this divide.

In a way, Love and Other Drugs is about a deeper subject than its love story: the movie is a pretty clear indictment of our healthcare system, which was much under debate during the films making. Jamie achieves his greatest success as a rep when he hears from Maggie about how Pfizer is making a new drug called Viagra. This comes at a time when they are having a conversation about performance anxiety (which leads to so many entendres it becomes first hysterical, then sexual) but made clear by Maggie is just how much more important a drug that fixes impotence is to the public than one that cures depression. When asks about her insurance for her drugs, Maggie produces a roll of bills to pay for her medication instead and we later see her leading a group of elderly citizens on a bus to Canada where they get cheaper drugs and reminds him to have cash when they do so. (The climax of the film takes place when Jamie manages to catch up with her on one such trip.) And the scenes with the homeless man taking the anti-depressants isn’t a coincidence; the movie makes it very clear he’d never be able get the medication he needs any other way.

Gyllenhaal and Hathaway have a great chemistry, which honestly shouldn’t surprise anyone. In Brokeback Mountain Hathaway played the woman who would become Gyllenhaal’s wife and their characters have a sex scene in the back seat of Hathaway’s car within a few hours of their first date. (One critic called Hathaway’s tearing off her bra ‘the most overt sexual act in the entire film.) The two of them are clearly comfortable around each other throughout the movie and the chemistry crackles between them in every scene there in together. What I find interesting about their work in this movie is that, in an odd way, this was sort of an aberration film for both of them.

Both Gyllenhaal and Hathaway were child actors. Gyllenhaal’s breakthrough role was the polarizing independent film Donnie Darko and he spent much of his early career working more in those films, frequently playing younger lovers of older women (Lovely and Amazing, The Good Girl, Proof) Many of the characters he has played in more mainstream films have rarely been the romantic lead (Zodiac, End of Watch, Prisoners and by far his greatest performance in Nightcrawler) Gyllenhaal has been in more than his share of mainstream films, most recently as Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home) but he has never played as easily a likable a character as Jamie in any film since Love and Other Drugs.

Hathaway, by contrast, worked in more conventional films: her break through role was in The Princess Diaries  and she was most famous, prior to her Academy Award for Les Miserables for her role in The Devil Wears Prada. Many of her movies essentially were potential franchises (Get Smart, an underrated action film parody) and mediocre romantic comedies (Becoming Jane, Bride Wars and Valentine’s Day). But Hathaway has always had a certain love for independent films: along with her work in Brokeback Mountain, she had earned a Best Actress nomination for her work in the superb independent film Rachel Get Married.) There has since been an interesting mix between big budget movies and independent films ever since: Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises and reuniting with Nolan in Interstellar and a superb performance in the criminally undervalued comedy Colossal. Her work in the last few years has become more and more intriguing, particularly as she has ventured into the Peak TV world in Modern Love and WeCrashed.  Like many actresses as they get older, I suspect she will venture more into television in the years to come, much in the same way that Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have.

It probably won’t shock you that Love and Other Drugs has a happy ending; this is, after all, still a romantic comedy. But where this film moves above the traditional rom-coms is that the ending reunion is braced with reality. Jamie tells Maggie that she needs somebody. Maggie denies it twice, but the second time Jamie responds: “Everybody does.” Maggie starts crying and says simply: “I’m going to need you more.” What Jamie ends up saying is beyond the traditional declaration of love we get in even less-conventional romantic comedies. Before one of their iconic dance numbers, Fred once told Ginger: “There may be sad times ahead…” before saying: “Let’s face the music and dance.” There may be no dancing involved but Jamie essentially tells Maggie that should enjoy the latter before the former. Isn’t that what all love stories are?

 

 

I Have A Theory As To Why The Emmys Keep Nominating Succession - And It Doesn't Make Them Or HBO Look Good

 

I mentioned in my last piece on criticism in passing that when Succession debuted in the summer of 2018, Newsday’s original review was not favorable only giving it two stars out of four.

This was not a minority opinion at the time. The original reviews for Succession were generally middling at best – I remember reading an Entertainment Weekly review labeling it under the same brush as the fifth season of Arrested Development, and it’s opinion of both series was not favorable. I don’t remember the exact grade, but I think it was a C- at best.  The only review that gave it a higher opinion at the time was that of The New Yorker when the first season was over. Most critics did not think this belonged in the same pantheon of great TV as the recently completed The Americans and the much anticipated new season of Better Call Saul.

When awards groups began meeting that December Succession was essentially an afterthought. Kieran Culkin was nominated for Best Supporting Actor by the Golden Globes, but while that circuit had a history of recognizing recent sensation, Succession was not on their Best Drama list. The major contenders were the groundbreaking Pose and the undervalued Homecoming. More nominations were given to the Netflix thriller Bodyguard than Succession got. Culkin ended up losing to Ben Whishaw for his role in A Very English Scandal.

Similarly, the Critics Choice Award which had a similar recognizes series like this even at that point, barely gave the show the time of day that December. Their major focuses of that year’s new crop of series were Killing Eve, Pose and Homecoming. Again Succession was an afterthought, with only a single nomination this time for Matthew McFayden. He would lose that year to Noah Emmerich. (Both awards show gave their Best Drama prize – deservedly – to the final season of The Americans.)

There was a certain amount of surprise when Succession got nominated for Best Drama in the summer of 2019. I may be projecting, but I don’t think anyone was particularly happy about it at the time. To be fair, I have little doubt that then most people considered an afterthought to the Emmy domination that the final season of Game Of Thrones was going to have that fall. (The fact that even the most devoted fans and critics considering the final season and the series finale a spectacular disappointment did not disparage the Emmy voter from giving the show over thirty nominations.)  I remember being extremely disappointed that Homecoming, a series that had dominated the Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards was completely shutout and Succession was nominated for Best Drama in its place. However, I was just as unhappy with the nomination of Bodyguard at the time, and in both cases for the same reason.

Wit Game of Thrones completely dominating the Emmy categories in its final season, almost no other series had much of a chance of doing well in the acting nominations by default. But for a series that would basically dominate the acting nominations its next two seasons, it might shock some that it received a total of zero in every major category. Part of this was because of Game of Thrones domination of the Supporting categories where Succession has done exceptionally well subsequently.  But it does say a lot that the Emmys were fine nominating Michael Kelly, from the already controversial House of Cards final season as well as Chris Sullivan from This is Us (though to be clear I have no complaints about that) ahead of either Culkin or McFayden who had been nominated for awards that year. As for Best Actor, I’ll admit it was a strong field including Bob Odenkirk, Sterling K. Brown and Milo Ventimiglia from This is Us, Jason Bateman and the eventual winner Billy Porter as well as Kit Harington. Richard Madden who’d won the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Bodyguard couldn’t even get a nomination, so in retrospect, maybe it’s not a shock that neither Brian Cox or Jeremy Strong was invited.

All told Succession received five Emmy nominations its first season and won two: for Main Title Theme Music and the season finale. Jesse Armstrong genuinely seemed shocked that he won the latter prize, but so did Jason Bateman when he took Best Director. Ozark had a better night Succession with Julia Garner taking the first of what would be three consecutive Emmys for Supporting Actress in a Drama and more people were focused on Billy Porter and Jodie Comer’s wins and the triumphs of Fleabag. I don’t think anyone, certainly not me, thought that Succession was going to be around at next year’s Emmys. 

Now I’ve written in my most recent article that HBO has the swagger that allows even lesser dramas and comedies to get nominated over superior series on networks or services. And to be clear, I had little doubt that with Game of Thrones vacating the seat of prestige drama, there would no doubt be other HBO dramas to fill the void. But if I had been asked to guess which would be the one the following year,  despite it’s nomination for Best Drama this year, I would have given it slim odds of repeating. And honestly, it would not have just been based on pure prejudice towards the series but rather the history of how the Emmys worked when it comes to nominations and awards.

It has been the bane of television fans existences that while every other awards show on the planet seems willing to let a new field of nominees come in every year or at least a few new visitors, the Emmys seems to be an exclusive club year after year after year. Regardless of how good subsequent seasons are, once you’re in, you seem to be in for the duration of the series run no matter how much the quality of the show declines over time. Game of Thrones was by far the most obvious example, but I could just as easily use ER and Law and Order in the 90s, The West Wing in the 2000s and The Handmaid’s Tale right now. The fact that by this point in Peak TV history certain shows would take gap years or even longer hiatuses had done little to change this over time and I had no reason to suspect there would be any change to this going into the 2019-2020 season. I was fairly certain that when The Crown returned for Season 3, it would dominate the Emmy nominations (it did) and that when Stranger Things returned for Season 3, Ozark which I considered a filler series, would drop down to take its place. (I did not think that both shows would be nominated.). I was also certain that two HBO series that had taken gap years before premiering new seasons that were to air that fall were going to be the dominant dramas – and I would have been in good faith doing so.

By the time the Emmys had aired, I was convinced the second season of Big Little Lies would be one of the bigger nominees for Best Drama and the acting categories. I realized that many had found the second season a disappointment, but I had not and I thought the series domination of the Best Limited Series category in 2017 would be enough for it to carry the day. (As you shall see, I was not entirely off in thinking that way.)

 Similarly Westworld was coming back for a third season that spring. To be clear by this point I found the series completely incomprehensible and could not understand why so many people loved it. But again, I was aware of the Emmy history of recognizing previous nominated shows and actors. And in both 2017 and 2018, Westworld had been one of the most nominated dramas among the Emmys, receiving thirty eight nominations and multiple nominations for almost every actor in the cast. In 2018, Thandie Newton had taken home the Best Supporting Actress prize for Best Drama. There was little reason to doubt that regardless of my personal feelings, Westworld would be similarly dominant.

And it’s not like that there would be other prestige dramas airing in between those two. During the fall of 2019, the most talking about show on television was Damon Lindelof’s reimaging of Watchmen, one of the great triumphs of television. In the winter of 2019, the only question that awards pundits had was whether it would be nominated as a drama or a limited series. I had basically disregarded Euphoria at the end of 2019, but considering how much popular love their was at the time for the show, people might well have thought it could have been a major contender.

The awards shows of 2020 might have done something to promote the possibility of Succession as a contender for awards in the fall, but if it was possible it didn’t seem obvious in the winter of 2019. Succession had been nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Drama. So had Big Little Lies. The fact that Succession took the prize and Best Actor for Brian Cox might have created a tremor but it wasn’t necessarily a foreshadowing of anything: the Golden Globes had never, to take the most obvious example, ever given Game of Thrones the Best Drama prize in its entire eight year run. Similarly, it had gotten three nominations at that year’s Critics Choice awards. Watchmen (which was nominated in the Original Series category as well) had gotten four and would end up winning as many awards as Succession did that January (Best Actress for Regina King and Best Supporting Actress for Jean Smart) The fact that the show had won Best Drama again was indictive that critics like it but that did not mean future success. In 2015, Mr. Robot had taken the Best Drama prizes from both organizations and ended up losing the grand prize to Game of Thrones that year. At that point in time, both awards show had as much a history of following as they did leading: (in 2018, both had given their Best Drama prizes to The Handmaid’s Tale  after it’s triumph at the Emmys. And there was still no sign that Succession had a grass roots movement overall: when the SAG award gave their nominees for Best Drama Ensemble, they would recognize Game of Thrones and Big Little Lies, but not Succession. (The Crown won that year.)

So why in the summer of 2020, did the Emmys go so hog wild over Succession and basically shunt its previous champions, Big Little Lies and Westworld, to what amounted to the Supporting categories? You might argue that the second and third seasons, respectively, of those two shows had been of a poorer quality and the second season was so brilliant that had to prevail. If you truly believe that I wonder if you’re the kind of person who still believes in the Tooth Fairy. There had been far better shows during that period – the fourth season of This is Us which was almost entirely ignored by the Emmys and Euphoria was a bigger ratings hit than Succession but it was basically ignored as well. And yes Succession had been nominated the previous year, which had given it an in but there have been series that have received a nomination for Best Drama one year and fall out of contention the next – Mr. Robot had done so in 2016, and despite its quality remaining essentially at the same level, it never did again.

So why was Succession nominated? I have a theory, and its not a pretty one. I have, to be sure, no evidence of it besides conjecture, speculation and the history of the Emmys in general.

I have been loathe to play the race card when it comes to the Emmys, but that does not mean I am not aware of its horrible track record when it comes to minorities. It has only begun to improve quite a bit in the last decade, mostly through the victories of people like Sterling Brown, Porter, Regina King, and yes even Viola Davis’s work on How to Get Away With Murder.

I also know that while HBO has a great record when it comes to great TV, it’s track record when it comes to having nominated dramas that have minorities cast members is, if anything, worse than the Emmys.  The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood may have led the revolution, but The Wire was basically ignored by the Emmys in comparison to those series as well as Six Feet Under.  The pattern started early; Oz the show that started the revolution got practically no nominations from the Emmys at all.

After the big three left True Blood, which for all its flaws had a heavily minority cast, received just one Emmy nomination. Tremé, a David Simon series set in New Orleans, never got anywhere with the Emmys. Game of Thrones became dominant almost from the start. (Boardwalk Empire also did well but it had a fairly strong minority cast – though none of them, including Michael K. Williams or Jeffrey Wright ever received a nomination for their work there.)

I don’t have to tell you that HBO had a similar history of monochrome talent among its most nominated comedies: from Sex and The City to Entourage to Girls, there was a scarcity of white people on either coast. Silicon Valley was slightly better in that regard, but it usually paled in terms of recognition by awards shows to Veep. (They have gotten better in that regard as I’ll get to below.) Limited series is a harder nut to parse and a fairly recent category in the Emmys so I won’t consider them.

Now I’m not saying that Succession received its Emmy nomination for Best Drama because of the nominated dramas in HBO’s lineup, it’s cast was by far the most monochrome. I can not prove it, and even if I suspect based on the nominated series records, correlation does not equal causation. And I fully admit the theory only holds up if you only consider the nominees for Best Drama that year. Westworld may not have been nominated for Best Drama, but Thandie Newton and Jeffrey Wright did receive acting nominations. No matter what I think of the series she’s in, Zendaya did win Best Actress for Euphoria that same year. 

 This argument falls apart further when you consider the nominated series and actors in the other Emmy categories that year. Insecure, Issa Rae’s landmark comedy show, had its best year in regard to nominations, with Rae and Yvonne Orji getting nominated.  And Watchmen was nominated in the Best Limited Series category and was absolutely dominant, winning eleven Emmys including another trophy for King and Best Supporting Actor for Yahya Abdul-Mateen.

And its not like in the last couple of years HBO’s track record with minority dramas and comedies haven’t improved dramatically: the following year Lovecraft Country would be HBO’s most nominated series and I May Destroy You would prove a triumph for Michaela Coel, who became the first African-American woman to win for Best Writing for a Limited Series.  Admittedly, it is troubling that the Emmys choice to ignore the former entirely for awards and give the lion’s share of the acting wins to Mare of Easttown rather than nominees from I May Destroy You. That is indictive of the larger problem the Emmys still have when it comes to recognizing minority actors and writers. It's also not lost on me that Insecure was basically shut out of the Emmys in its final season last year while Barry dominated the Best Comedy categories.

To be clear, I am not saying that the fact the majority of nominated dramas and comedies from HBO are nominated by the Emmys because of its problematic history with recognizing minorities. That was a problem well before HBO began producing great television and it is a problem that has been indicative of much of Peak TV to this day. So much of television has focused on the white male antihero above all else that Emmy recognition of these series is perhaps inevitable. And I can’t do more than hypothesize that Succession’s track record with the Emmys is just a symptom of a poor history rather than simply recognizing a series on its own merits. Hell, Mad Men won Best Drama four years in a row and it had a similar scarcity of African-American actors.  But when the Emmys recognize a series that has such a predominantly white cast as it did last year, over the final season of This is Us, when it fills its Supporting Actor category with Succession nominees and excludes such more than qualified contenders as Giancarlo Esposito and Michael Mando from Better Call Saul as well as previous years where it has ignored nominees from series such as The Good Fight, when it nominates a cast which basically encapsulates the rich and powerful billionaire white people over series over say countless very good shows that have minority casts whose only crime is to not be on HBO (I’m thinking in particular of Starz’s Power series), well…there is a message here and it reflects on how the Emmys will always go to HBO by default and an underlying tone beneath.

And again, I have no proof of this and I loathe the idea of being the kind of critic who is ‘just asking questions,’ something I had any other person for doing. I imagine I will take a beating by just about every single group imaginable who loves Succession and thinks that it deserves all the awards it gets. Perhaps all of this is mere pettiness and dissatisfaction against a network I truly feel has dominated the awards circuit for far too long with series whose appeal I can not comprehend. I honestly don’t know. But as Succession enters what will be its final awards circuit, part of me does truly feel the question must be raised.

 

Resume Crash Positions: Yellowjackets Returns for a Crazy Second Season

 

Last Sunday, arguably the most anticipated drama returned to the network where it has become one of the most talked about and critically acclaimed series in years.  This genre-defying drama had dominated the awards scenes for much of the previous year, had defied easy analysis and kept fans speculating with every episode based on the idea of ‘wtf?” This series has one of the greatest casts in decades, an exceptional writing staff and some of the most radical twists in television, including a season finale that changed the game. It dominated awards shows for years, winning big at the Critics Choice Awards and the HCA TV awards. And when it return, it earned the biggest ratings its network had seen in over a decade. I speak, of course, of Showtime’s Yellowjackets.

Yes, I realize that almost everything I said in that previous article could just have easily been applied to Succession (had you not, you know, known how much I loathe that particular series) but the thing is, the descriptions apply pretty much across the board for both. Indeed, last Sunday night was a big night for peak TV as both the second season premiere of Yellowjackets and the final season of Succession did indeed earn the biggest rating in their respective histories: more than two million people were watching either. But I have to tell it was never a close question as to which series I care about more, and which has already proven itself by far to be the far more fascinating series. Judging by the ratings numbers and all those awards nominations I saw over the past year, I’m not alone in that respect. Along with series like The Gilded Age and Cruel Summer, Yellowjackets demonstrates by far that Peak TV is alive in the 2020s.

There’s a lot I could talk about in what will amount to a rave review of this series. I could argue that this is perhaps the most genre-defying series in TV since Lost ended more than a decade ago, and I wouldn’t be far off: all of the aspect that made that series great – drama, surrealism, bizarre comedy, multiple timelines, endless speculation after every episode – are in full force, complete with a healthy dose of horror, a genre that has been sadly neglected throughout peak TV. I could tell you about the extraordinary performances from the entire cast, including four of Hollywood’s greatest actresses doing superb work as well as a remarkable group of young actresses who are at their level already. I could tell you that this series has by far some of the most disturbing imagery that probably not since the much beloved Hannibal left the screens has ever been seen on television and because it’s on cable TV, it can go even further. (The final scene of last night’s episodes is by far the most shocking scene I can remember on television in memory: it’s hard to believe any wedding in Westeros even topping it.) There’s so much to unpack that it deserves multiple reviews – and I’m more than willing to right them; this is a glorious series deserving all the plaudits. But this review will focus on an aspect I don’t know if it has been fully explored today by columnists about a certain level beneath the surfaces of the characters that reflect both the brilliants of the writers led by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and the four female leads we’ve been following since the start.

As long as I’ve been reading reviews about Succession, there’ve been a certain circle who argue the real reason the Roy children are the way they are is because of the trauma their father has inflicted on them. Fine, if you think that justifies the way they are and why you watch the series, I’ll let you have it. I don’t think anyone would even doubt the idea that all of the women in Yellowjackets are dealing with the aftereffects of childhood trauma: it was all but spelled out in the commercials for the first season. What I have found fascinating is how while all four adult female leads (and the ones we’ve met so far this season) are all suffering aftereffects of their trauma in different ways, they are all essentially suffering versions of it the same way. All of them made the decision (talked about by Shauna and Tamala in the pilot) they would never talk about what happened to them beyond the broadest of strokes, and that clearly has meant not only with the press but with therapists, friends or even family. They’ve all essentially decided to bury it as deep as they can and pretend it didn’t happen. This would be a horrible approach for any sufferers of trauma, much less the kind that clearly involves a paranormal element to it. What I don’t think any of the characters are aware of is that while a quarter of a century has gone by, all of them are still essentially in the same case of arrested development that they were in before the crash.

This is clearest in the case of Shauna (Melanie Lynskey deserves every award ends up getting in the future). In the Pilot, we learned that she had received early acceptance to Brown before the crash and has since lived as a housewife in what is clearly a failed marriage and an unhappy motherhood. At the beginning of the series, a reporter asked her why she was living like this. We spent much of the first season assuming it was out of mourning for the death of her best friend Jackie, but the season finale revealed the deeper truth. Shauna has blamed herself for Jackie freezing to death after a fight in one of the final flashbacks of Season 1. The ghost of Jackie has been following her ever since (as we saw in very creepy flashbacks of Season 2, quite literally) and in essence she has decided to live Jackie’s life for her. She married Jeff, Jackie’s boyfriend, who Shauna had been sleeping with (and was pregnant with his child during the crash) and has essentially married him less out of love but more because she thinks that Jackie would have done. Whether or not Jeff knows this has been an open question; based on what we know of their sex life during the first season, it hasn’t been good for a while. We still don’t know the fate of Shauna’s child, but its likely that Kelsey is essentially a replacement child in that sense, and considering how horrible their relationship is, Kelsey no doubts suspects it. I’m also relatively sure that’s the real reason she began her affair with Adam early in Season 1. It had nothing to do with Jeff’s supposed affair (which as we learned was all in Shauna’s head); more likely it’s because the only time Shauna thought sex was exciting was when she was betraying her best friend and she wanted to get that feeling back.

Taim (Tawny Cypress) is the character who has the most obvious paranormal aspect to her personality; we know she has been seeing visions all her life, that she had moments where she sleepwalked and turned feral. But she clearly spent the entirety of the ordeal denying it and has done so through all her adult life. (I would guess that is at least one of the reasons Van, her girlfriend in the past, is not married to her in the present; Van knew this part of her and she would never been able to lie about it as easily as she had to Simone.) Taim is determined to achieve the goal she had before the crash: get into elected office.  That is the reason she hired the reporter to interrogate her friends at the start of Season 1; at the end of the day she refuses to trust anyone but herself. Because of that determination she spent all of Season 1 in basic denial of the horrors that were unfolding around her family which came to the point where she isolated herself from that even as she won elected office. Taim is still doing everything in her power to pretend that nothing supernatural is wrong with her. She may not have that option much longer.

In a very weird way (which is fitting considering the character) Misty may be the most well-adjusted of the four survivors. She has a stable job as a caretaker, she is trying to do good as a ‘citizen detective’ and she may be the most committed of the four of them to protecting everyone. And just as when she was in high school, nobody wants anything to do with her. Christina Ricci came across as well, the creepy characters she always plays and while that is incredibly justifiable given the lion’s share of her actions, I now find them also incredibly sad. Misty is essentially the same person she was before and during the crash, a pathetic nerd who just wanted to be loved and hang out with the cool kids. And nobody knows what she does, no matter how much she helps her friends, then or now, they will always hate her. They may very well have more reason to in the present than the past, but the fact that they never listen to her, no matter how grounded her advice, shows they will never take her seriously. I almost think she is much the John Locke of Yellowjackets devoting all of her actions to everybody’s best interests and never being appreciated for it. But where as Locke’s interests were based on some form of ‘destiny’ Misty’s interests are genuinely devoted to helping her friends. The very ability she has to be a public nuisance have helped her realize that Nat was kidnapped and that Shauna will need help from the police. Her friends need her help desperately – but they still won’t take her phone calls!

If Misty is Yellowjackets Locke, Nat is clearly the show’s Sawyer: forever angry, self-destructive at every turn, willing to burn any bridge she can to get what she wants, suffering from trauma well before she got on the plane. Juliette Lewis’ work in this series has arguably been some of the best in her more than thirty year career, playing a soul so wounded she thinks herself beyond fixing. Natalie has been in and out of rehab so many times that no one bothers to count any more and when she leaves in the pilot, she says she has ‘a purpose’…that does not include staying sober. The fact she is determined to find out who is blackmailing them is as close as she can get to one; what is clear is that she’s always needed an enemy to function, as much as in the present and the past. In what was the most shocking moment of the season finale, Nat was sticking a shotgun in her mouth before cultists broke in and kidnapped her.

It was revealed eventually that the leader of the cult was Lottie, played by Simone Kessell as an adult, the clearly psychic teenager who has been just as tormented by what happened as everyone else. In the opening to the second season, we saw that she had spent the immediate aftermath of the crash in a kind of mania, undergoing shock therapy until she has emerged the leader of a ‘self-help group.”  Nat is no happier to see Lottie at the start of last week’s season premiere then she is to see, well, anybody. When Lottie points out Nat was going to kill herself, Nat expresses no gratitude and it is only then we realize just how deeply wounded she is by life. She has now focused her rage on ‘bringing down Lottie’ who she clearly holds responsible for everything that has happened in the last quarter of a century but just as Sawyer’s quest for vengeance brought him nothing but grief for decades and no satisfaction when she achieved it, we know there is nothing good coming at the end of it. Nat is so badly broken that she will not accept help no matter who offers it.

It’s worth noting that Lotte, so far, seems in a similar state of arrested development: just as we see at the beginning of Season 2,  she is trying to achieve the same state of bliss that she was at when she had a figure of authority over the survivors and is clearly just as disturbed by the vision that plagued her then and she is now.

The key criteria of this series so far has been, as brilliant as all four leads are, it is rare for even two of them to be in the same scene together. It would never occur to Tam to just ask for her friends silence before her run for office; they are so deeply scarred by what happened in the wilderness that the trauma has driven them even further from each other and that not even the darkest necessity will drive them back towards each other.  The writers say that they have a strategy for how Yellowjackets will play out (it will encompass five seasons and they’ve already been renewed for a third) and while I don’t want to speculate on it, I think at least part of it will have to be accepting the damage that all of this has done to them and trying to find a way to heal with each other.  One can not help but be reminded of one of the most iconic phrases from Lost: “if we don’t live together, we’re going to die alone.” It’s pretty clear that, even if they are married and have families, all of the leads are fine with the idea of the latter because many of them don’t want to live, they’re barely surviving.

Not that I’m waiting for Yellowjackets to end any time soon. As I’ve mentioned already, the performances from all of the female leads in both the present and their younger versions are incredible. The series continues to dazzle with its impressive casting. Lauren Ambrose has yet to appear as the adult version of Van; is there a better suited actress for a series about death and mysticism than the star of Six Feet Under and Servant? Elijah Wood has already graced the stage as an equally creepy citizen-detective whose help Misty needs but who has suspicions about Adam’s death. This is an Ice Storm reunion twenty-five years in the making. And Jason Ritter, Lynskey’s husband is due to make an appearance later this season; one can wonder if the writers will even have his character in the same room with his wife when it happens.

I realize that those who have heard so many mentions of Lost will be  shaking their heads thinking: “another mythology show.” Yes, but unlike Lost in this one the secrets are already known to the characters but not the audience. Of course which characters know which secrets remain to be seen, and just as in the former series, the withholding of information will no doubt be deadly to certain characters at times. And at the end of the day it’s not the crash and aftermath that matters as much as where the characters are now: I have no idea how Yellowjackets will end; I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be a point where anyone screams: “We have to go ba—ack!” (Though honestly part of me would love to hear Christina Ricci shout it.)

A series like Yellowjackets is, just like Lost was at its best, the reason we watch TV in the fair place. And there’s another reason to do so. By the end of 2023, Showtime as we know it now will not exist in the same form, and there are already hints that it will begin to shift away from the original programming such as Homeland and Masters of Sex that made it legendary and more into spinoffs of franchises like Billions and Dexter. (Believe I’ll have a lot to say about that when the time comes.) Yellowjackets may very well be the last true Showtime original series. If that’s the case like the crash that starts the series, it’s going to leave one hell of an impact.

My score: 5 stars.

Why Gerald Ford's Decision to Pardon Nixon Was The Right Decision Then - And Now

 

 

I have mentioned numerous times in several of my columns how galled I am when columnists on the internet make specious remarks about how certain historical decisions from deep in the past were the wrong ones because they did not take into account society today. I find it just as annoying when the media – as well as a few historians – make that same argument on national television. Such was the case following Donald Trump becoming the first President to be indicted on criminal charges on Thursday.

More than a few historians were called to comment on previous Presidents whose behavior had been above the law. (The questioning was selective then as I’ll make clear below.) Invariably the talk came back to Richard Nixon receiving a full pardon for Watergate by Gerald Ford  has essentially laid the groundwork for the behavior of Trump’s behavior in the White House. Some said that Nixon not being punished encouraged Trump to behave the way he did, some argue that it laid the groundwork for future abuses of power ever since.

The irony of history is not lost on me, though clearly it is lost on the media. When Ford initially pardoned Nixon, the backlash was immediate and it was one of the contributing factors that would eventually cause him to lost to Jimmy Carter when he ran for election to the Presidency in his own right two years later. About a decade after the fact, the public reversed course said that it was the right decision for a nation that needed to heal over two years of Watergate and move forward. Now, in the wake of Trump’s presidency, the tide has shifted again.

Leaving aside the fact that no person, not even the President can see beyond the immediate effects of their actions, I fundamentally think all of this is a fundamentally wasted discussion. Because like all those I loathe, it ignores the realities of the past for the future and the present. In order to justify a decision that really does need to, I’m going to discuss in some detail the factors around Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon, why it was absolutely the right decision for the country, and why regardless of what the media thinks, it would not have made a different for the abuses of the executive branch that followed for the next half century.

First, let’s start with the obvious: Presidents had been bending, if not outright breaking the powers of the executive branch pretty much since the founding of the Republic. Andrew Jackson was considered pretty close to a tyrant by the Senate because of how he chose to the run the country, Lincoln’s disregard for so many aspects of checks and balances are ignored because he was in the midst of a Civil War (and the fact that his assassination more or less made him a saint) Woodrow Wilson was responsible for similar conditions during America’s involvement during World War I (including the imprisonment of over 5,000 German Americans for the duration) and FDR was as hated by as many as those who loved him for the New Deal. Even his role as Commander-in-Chief included one of the most notorious abuses of power as hundreds of thousands of Japanese were held in internment camps with their properties being seized without any renumerations.  Kennedy had no problem allowing his brother to wiretap many in the civil rights movement and LBJ carried on with the practice. Yes J. Edgar Hoover probably would have done it anyway, but neither President had a real problem with it. Both Oliver Stone’s Nixon and the recent Gaslit have the President’s Men frequently agreeing that the Kennedys and Johnson’s crimes were as bad, if not worse, than Nixon’s. This is hypocritical, to be sure, but there is a grain of truth in it: there was a history of abuse of power well before Nixon took office.

Now I am not for one moment excusing anything Richard Nixon ever did; he was a monster beyond reproach and his abuses were utterly blatant beyond the imagining of civilized people. All that said, you can’t forget that both Houses of Congress were heavily Democratic through the entirety of Nixon’s term and that the Democrats had hated Richard Nixon for a quarter of a century.  They say just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and in the case of Richard Nixon both were correct.  Nixon had his defenders among the Republican base, well into ‘the Final Days’ and there are still people who, to this day, believe that Nixon was framed for his crimes.  Could he have survived everything that happened, no matter how horrible, if there had been more Republicans in Congress?

Another thing: when Nixon won reelection with 49 of 50 states in 1972, the RNC was woefully underfunded compared to the CRP, something many Republicans were very bitter about when this landslide failed to put the GOP take over either house of Congress  that year. Nixon won every state but Massachusetts, but his party gained just 13 seats in the House and lost two seats in the Senate.  The conservatives in the party had never been thrilled with Nixon and Nixon had been talking in private about forming a completely new party made up of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. (He had plans to be the last President to ever be a Republican.) So as much we want to believe that this was about an abuse of power so blatant it crossed a party lines, it’s worth noting neither party had much love for Richard Nixon before and even then.

I mention this because Nixon knew this very well and was hoping defend himself with the threat of Spiro Agnew in the White House. Then Agnew got involved with a corruption scandal of his own and had to resign. Nixon’s choice of Gerald Ford was done in part as counteraction to this: Ford, while considered a nice guy, was also considered a lightweight intellectually (LBJ had once said: “He couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time; another famous comment was that when he was with Michigan, he had played football without a helmet.) Nixon was more than willing to go down with the ship: all his actions, including the Saturday Night Massacre, prove this. By the final months, even his own cabinet was beginning to think he had lost touch with the reality on the ground and it wasn’t until Goldwater gave him the famous diagnosis that there weren’t enough Republican votes against conviction that he resigned.

Ford’s decision to issue a blanket pardon was meant with immense hostility and overshadowed the rest of the term. It was as much a political decision as anything else: Congress had ground to a halt the last several months because of Watergate and it was unlikely that it would until the issue was resolved. Furthermore, Ford and the GOP was hoping that with ‘the Nixon issue’ out of the way, they might have a chance to make some gains in the mid-term elections which were at the time less than three months away. (As we all know that strategy backfired spectacularly.)

So yes, there were political factors involved – Gerald Fold was a politician after all. He also did believe very strongly that he had end the national nightmare that had plagued the country for almost two years. But say for the sake of argument, he had decided not to do so. It would have meant going against both his own political interests and the national mood, but that’s not what the historians preaching today care about now. Let’s say he decided to not pardon Nixon. What would have happened next?

Start with the obvious: who would have tried him? Yes, Congress had set out four counts of impeachment but those were only for the Senate to try him while he was President. Nixon had resigned. There was no precedent for trying a former president for any criminal offenses. Who would have had jurisdiction?

The Senate technically would have had it, but I’m relatively certain that nobody in Congress would have wanted to go forward with it after he resigned. The whole purpose of impeachment was to get Nixon out of office. He was now gone. The whole argument for trying Donald Trump after January 6^th was to prevent from running for President again. Nixon was already in his final term, and not even he would have considered trying to break the rules in this regard.

The Justice Department would have had jurisdiction  to investigate him and make recommendations to the court. That would have worked for the conspiracy charges, but what about the bombing of Cambodia which was the fourth count of the indictment? This was a can of worms no one would have wanted open, not the least Henry Kissinger who was still part of the Administration and certainly not Gerald Ford. It would have been bad enough to have the President in the dock at the Senate; would anyone have wanted him standing trial at the Hague? The nation had just gotten out of Vietnam, the last thing anyone wanted to do was revisit another foreign policy travesty.

Then there are the tapes. One of the reasons Nixon’s resignation was that he would never have to make his private recordings public. (For good reason, we’ve heard a lot of what’s on them.) Nixon would have availed himself of every pre-trial motion imaginable to make sure those tapes never got admitted to evidence. The proceedings would have no doubt dragged on at least six to seven months before we ever got inside a courtroom.

Then there’s the problem of witnesses. Most of the ones they’d have to call would have testified before Congress already and many of them were already in prison because they’d refused too. I have little doubt Nixon would have been more than willing to use the concept of executive privilege as a way to keep every single witness the prosecution could call from testifying – another several weeks, if not months of delay – and how many of them would be willing to testify against Nixon in exchange for lesser sentences? I can imagine how thrilled so many of the public would be that men like Haldeman, Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman walking free to talk against their boss in court for crimes they’d help commit.

And this gets to the final point: How in the 1970s could you find a jury that could be purely impartial? No one in America for the past twenty years could claim to be utterly neutral about Richard Nixon. He’d gotten more than 60 percent of the popular vote two years earlier, and his approval ratings might have been between thirty and thirty-five percent by 1974, but that’s still 3 out of ten.  Everyone says now that it was a mistake for Nixon to have been pardoned. Does anyone honestly think that a trial that might very well end in an acquittal would have been any better for the country? The one thing everyone seemed to take away from Watergate was that it was an example of ‘the system working’. Would they have had the same thought if all of this national nightmare had kept going on and the end was Richard Nixon walking outside the courtroom a free man? It’s not like controversial trials have ever changed people’s opinions of the defendants; O.J. got acquitted, remember.

And for those pundits who think that a trial for Nixon would have scared off future Presidents from abusing executive power; remember that Gerald Ford’s chief of staff when he became President was a man named Richard Cheney. The same Richard Cheney who was becoming enamored of the grand unit of limiting all power to the executive branch with no checks or balance. The same theory that had been giving the blessing of legal scholars such as Antonin Scalia and future Attorney General Bob Barr. (By the way, those people who think Donald Trump would have learned a lesson from Nixon going to prison….they have been covering Trump all this time, right?)

The 1970s had already been a horrific decade when Ford took office in 1974, and they were going to get even rougher after he did: inflation and stagflation, oil embargoes, the battle over the ERA, the rise of the conservative movement, crisis in Russia and the Middle East. What good would it have done America had in addition to all they had to deal with the continuing distraction of the trial of a former President that they just wanted to put in the rear view mirror when there was nothing to be gained and everything to be lost?

Gerald Ford made the kind of bold decision that we hope our Presidents are capable of: the decision to put country over party in the name of the national interest regardless of the political or personal cost to themselves. It was the right call in 1974 and it is the right call half a century.  Future Presidents may merely have learned how to bend the rules without suffering anywhere near the consequences Nixon did. But you can’t blame that on Ford either, nor the fact that so many people took the wrong lessons away from Watergate.  Donald Trump made his own bed. You can’t blame Ford for that, no matter how much you want too.

 

Lost Rewatch on VHS: Exodus, Part 2

 

VHS Notes: As the show took place near the beginning of the summer film season, trailers for movies that could well have been potential blockbusters were showing throughout the season finale. Episode III  of Star Wars had been airing trailers for weeks, but after the first two prequels it was more a sense of dread that anticipation. (Oh how twenty years has changed the opinions of some.) Far more important was the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins arguably the most significant comic book movie that would debut so far this century – and one of the all-time best. Also significant were Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Russell Crowe’s undervalued Cinderella Man and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, more famous for the celebrity marriage that resulted than its actual quality.

We also got some previews for upcoming attractions for the 2005-2006 season. None of the series announced would be successful, but that did not make them uninteresting or even poor. Glen Morgan’s reboot of The Night Stalker, the Geena Davis vehicle Commander In Chief, and the sci-fi Invasion all had moments of brilliance. I was a huge fan of the last one, and Davis and the show itself would receive early award notice before it ran out of steam. The most significant trailer was for a new summer reality show called Dancing with the Stars.

On to the end.

With any season finale there is always both a lot to unpack and a lot of speculation, some of which will be important, some of which only seems important at the time. I remember in the first book of Nikki Stafford’s Finding Lost she attempted a lot of speculation the fact that Claire was the only regular who did not get a flashback of her own in the entire two-part finale and was only seen boarding the plane. Nikki tried to read significance in to this when it was simply a matter of her flashback being cut for the sake of the episode length. (You can find it on the DVD, where she’s having a conversation with the captain.) But it speaks to how much the entire world was trying to find meaning in every single action that happened on the series even now – and perhaps as to why so many fans became frustrated the longer the show went on and we kept getting more questions for every answer we got.

Nikki also speaks that the most significant conversation in the episode is the one between Jack and Locke as the approach the hatch and Locke makes it very clear of the differences between them, and why he thinks they are on the island. Before I get to my own reaction, it’s commonly forgotten that less than half an hour earlier Sun asks Shannon a variation of the same question. She puts it in darker terms – “Do you think we’re being punished? For the secrets we kept? For the lies we told?” – but she comes to basically the same conclusion when Shannon asks her why – “Fate.”  Claire basically gives a variation on the same answer Jack gives Locke when he tells him  about destiny – that there’s no such thing as fate. This is ironic because of how Claire may very well have ended up on the island, how she saw things before she was taken, and in a sense because of what she and Jack have in common.

Much will later be written about the irony of Jack’s response to Locke saying he doesn’t believe in destiny and that’s certainly true in hindsight. Looking at it during this rewatch, however,  I honestly think the viewer would be expected to take Jack’s side based on how Locke acts throughout the entire episode.  First after Arzt explodes (and what does it say about the way things are that no one except Hurley even pauses before moving on) and Locke insists on getting the dynamite anyway.  Then they divide the dynamite and as they move through the Dark Territory Hurley asks Locke what he thinks is in the hatch and Locke just says “Hope.” (Hurley’s answer, for the record, is closer to reality than anyone else speculation.) Then the monster finally shows its face (or you know, fumes) and everybody runs away and Locke takes off his pack and strides towards it.  The last time he saw it, he saw something ‘beautiful’ but that’s clearly not what he sees this time.  He starts to run away but then it grabs him (I love the clanking of the chain just as the smoke takes the form of one) and when Jack grabs he yells at Jack to let him go and for Kate not to throw the dynamite. Then Jack demands to know what the hell he thought he was doing  - and Locke begins his speech, starting with the fact that ‘he was being tested’. It’s not just the way he talks about destiny that Jack would find off-putting but when he refers to Boone as ‘the sacrifice the island demanded’, I’m pretty sure this is where Jack decides that Locke is beyond insane.  After everything that happened involving Boone’s death and Locke’s entire attitude afterwards, a remark like this would convince anyone that John was not dealing with a full deck – and if that didn’t, the fact that Hurley starts running towards them screaming not to do this and Locke lights the fuse of the dynamite anyway – would finish the job. I’m not surprised Jack tells Kate they’re going to have a Locke problem; by this point this is by far the most logical conclusion to draw. I think Darlton chose to make Locke’s flashback the last one of the episode to remind us where he was before the plane crash and why he just might be on the right side of this; if it had come earlier we very well might have lost sympathy for him completely right here. Locke will be accused of fanatical behavior in later seasons; it’s worth noting the writers pretty much spelled it out in the season finale.

We might have figured it out ourselves were we not having to deal with so much else: the writers spend the episode splitting our attention between the jungle, the camp and the raft. The jungle scenes are by far the most important when it comes to learning new things about the island: most notably the Black Rock. (It’s interesting that much of the initial speculation about what the ship was carrying and how it got into the middle of the jungle will eventually be proven to be basically accurate.) But we barely have time to process this (and of course Arzt blowing up) before we finally get our first real glimpse of the monster before it attacks. We’re still trying to figure out how a wisp of smoke can do what it does before it takes it form and starts attacking Locke. It will be awhile before we see it again and by that time, another set of characters will see a new aspect of it.

Now there’s another crisis unfolding: Rousseau has abducted Claire’s son and Charlie and Sayid start running after it. Charlie’s behavior begins a critical change in the middle of this episode: first when he demands a gun from Sayid, and then blames Sayid for not giving him a gun when in fact he left Claire behind to get him, giving Rousseau her opportunity. I’m kind of impressed Sayid didn’t go any further than that: Charlie had it coming.

The pursuit of Rousseau gives several demonstrations as to why Sayid might well have been a better leader than Jack. From the moment Rousseau disappears, he calmly assessed where she’s going and why she’s going there.  He knows better than to overstress someone who is not a civilian in the pursuit, can tell when there’s a trap being set, and when Charlie is injured, takes a far calmer approach to treating Charlie’s wound than Jack would under similar circumstances.  When he and Charlie finally track down Rousseau, his approach towards getting Aaron back is still calmer and he doesn’t insult or demean Danielle for what she has done, where as Charlie is hostile and far more offensive.

Jack’s behavior in the jungle is pretty much keeping in with who he has been to this point: he argues with Kate about keeping the dynamite and after she earns the right to keep, carries it anyway. When Kate confronts him on it, Jack is dismissive of her complaint. That said his remark: “Everyone wants me to be leader until I make a decision they don’t like” is something we’re kind of amazed its taken him this long to admit. Jack may not be suited for leadership and he may not be making the best decisions but its hard to blame him when everybody keeps undercutting him at every turn. This wasn’t a job he wanted in the first place and it has to be frustrating that no one seems to willing to accept his decision in a role no one was itching to take.

As for the raft, it is interesting watching many of the dynamics in connection not only with what we see in the flashbacks but in what we remember from the island. Jin and Michael seem to have begun to work past the horrors of the early days towards forming a real friendship. Walt finally seems to have accepted Michael as his father as well as understanding the reasons why they were separating. That said, Michael clearly is not capable of letting go. After Sawyer goes out of his way to risk his life to get the rudder back, Michael thanks him for saving them – and the minute he sees the gun, turns cold. The conversation between the two of them also doesn’t look good on Michael either. Sawyer confesses that his father shot himself when he was eight, and rather than offering sympathy he turns on Sawyer and says the only reason he came on this raft was because he wanted to die. Sawyer does not confirm that directly – but it almost happens anyway.

Because just as they speak the radar picks up a signal. There is fierce debate between everybody about what to do regarding the flare – and while Michael will later blame Sawyer, it’s Walt’s plea that makes him fire the gun. The last minutes of the scene are among the best moments in the history of the entire series. The occupants of the raft begin to cheer and celebrate, first as the signal gets closer, then as a boat appears on the horizon. The man on the boat seems kind and friendly and we all feel that rescue is imminent – until the bearded man says: “Thing is, we’re gonna have to take the boy.”

The viewer immediately draws the connection with Rousseau’s remark that ‘the Others said they were coming for the boy.” Unfortunately no one except Sawyer immediately sees the threat. Michael becomes protective – but by then it’s too late. Almost too quickly for the eye to see Sawyer gets shot and falls in the water, Jin dives in after him, Michael is assaulted, Walt is grabbed and an explosive is thrown onto the boat. The final minute where Walt screams “Dad!” as the boat disappears into the horizon while Michael screams frantically and tearfully: “WALT!” are the most powerful in the show’s history. No matter how poorly the story of Walt and Michael will be handled in the second season, one can not deny the power of it the images here.

I may have mentioned that I only saw the first season in reruns the first time I watched the show, so there was less than a week between my viewing of the season finale and the premiere of Season 2.  So I was not aware of how angry some critics and fans would be that after spending the better part of half a season trying to get the hatch open, the first season ended with Jack and Locke peering down into an endless chute rather than seeing what was inside. One critic actually expressed that this behavior was a manifestation of everything that would be wrong with the series going forward.  The fact that the writers never planned to show us what was in the hatch in the season finale, or that they more or less spent the entire second season in the hatch did not matter; the seeds of doubt had been planted in some people’s heads, and in the minds of many never went away. Perhaps if I had watched the show from the beginning, I might well have felt the same.

That said, I sincerely doubt it. As anyone who loves television – and has a place in their heart for shows like Lost  - the speculation is always half the fun, sometimes even more than the answers. Based on how I actually watched the rest of the series going forward, my guess is I would have spent the summer like so many other fans: every few days my thoughts would be wondering “What the hell’s down in the hatch?” My attention would have no doubt turned to other concerns: “Will everyone on the raft get back ok? What are the Others going to do with Walt? Will Charlie end up back on drugs?” I probably would have cared about the human relationships, most obviously with whether Jin would ever get back to Sun. I might even have begun to wonder whether the show’s basic cast would remain intact the whole series, because a show set on a desert island isn’t easily going to add new regulars. (That speculation would quickly prove to be the most unfounded.)

The one thing that is clear now – and then – was the season finale, like the entire first season of the show – was a work of art that had rarely been seen before. (I’d say it has rarely been seen since but in the last two decades we’ve seen a lot of brilliant shows that started out with seasons that were, if anything, as extraordinary as this or more so.) Perhaps that’s why the next couple of seasons dropped in the estimation of some critics and fans. It’s not that they were not as brilliant as the first one; it’s because by that point in history, it had been rare for series to start out brilliantly and then have sophomore slumps. (Desperate Housewives would be a prime example of it the next year; Twin Peaks had been a critical example of this, and a lot of people feel the same way about shows like Glee and Homeland.) 

Perhaps the real reason that many were unhappy was because the truth is rarely as fascinating as the speculation. And in a way, Lost would actually deal with this directly in the character of Locke in Season 2. Were the writers trying to mirror the problems fans had with the next season in the journey of Locke? It’s a point to consider as we head inside the hatch.