Campaign ’75
It was on a hot afternoon in August when Dick, who is the proprietor of Dick’s Dutch Mill Cafe and Lunch Room in Lake Manawa, Iowa, saw the strangest thing. He was drawing a draft for the fat man when he saw it.
“What the hell was that?”
“What?” asked the Okie.
“This trailer.”
“What trailer?”
“Just passed down the road. Had a crazy sign. Something about ‘The Road to the White House. Fred Harris for President.’ ” Dick shook his head, “Who the hell’s Fred Harris?”
“Dunno,” said the Okie.
“He used to be a senator from Oklahoma,” explained a stranger, “and chairman of the Democratic party.”
“I’m from Oklahoma,” said the Okie. “Came up with my folks during the dust bowl. My daddy died in ’39. He had us move up here instead of California ’cause he said it was good farm land. Anyway, when he died we sold the farm. Been truckin’ ever since. This Harris any different from the others?”
“Well,” said the stranger, “he says he’s against big business.”
“That’s good,” said Dick. “I’m a small business.”
The fat man, who’d been hunched over his beer, looked up and saw his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “They all stink,” he growled. “From the dogcatcher down here to the president in the White House, they’re a bunch of crooks. The whole thing stinks. Here I am, knocking my butt off to make $12-13,000 a year . . . and my kid’s sitting on his ass, doin’ nothin’, and he makes almost as much as me. Food stamps. Welfare. They’re crooks just like the politicians.”
“I think it’s changing, though,” said the Okie. “The newspapers are gettin’ after the politicians. Maybe they’ll bring us some change.”
“I’m all for a change,” said Dick, who was not particularly pleased with the serious drift of the conversation, “bring back Nixon.” Everyone laughed. The Okie ordered another beer.
“Maybe Harold Hughes should be president,” said the Okie, who explained to the stranger that Hughes had been a senator from Iowa who quit politics when he found religion. “He was a truck driver just like me, and a drunk too, and he rose above it.”
“Harold Hughes,” said the fat man. “Fred Harris. The last man worth walking into a voting booth for was Franklin Roosevelt.”
***
The village of Vail, Colorado, is a sort of Disney World for the power elite. Little more than ten years ago it was a sheep meadow in the middle of the Rockies. Now it is cluttered with ersatz Bavarian architecture, cutesy little shops, young people who seem excessively healthy and older people who strain to appear informal in their expensive sports clothes. President Gerald Ford skis there in the winter and plays golf there in the summer. His host is a businessman named Richard Bass, who is very big in strip mining. His friends and golfing buddies are also successful businessmen – or advisors like Alan Greenspan, who used to be successful businessmen. The president moves easily through Vail, communing with his peers. He is probably the first president of the United States ever to wear a leisure suit.
Every afternoon, the president goes to the golf course, trailed by two cars full of Secret Service men and one car full of reporters. While the reporters are herded into a small press area near the practice putting green, the president goes over to the driving range for a lesson from local pro Bob Wolf. First the president works on his short irons, then his woods. He swings very slowly, calmly, and the ball sails away, veering neither to the left nor right. Sometimes he will duff a wood shot but that is usually when he lifts his head up.
One afternoon he came over to chat with the reporters and was asked how he felt about the appeals court ruling against his two-dollar-per-barrel tax on foreign oil.
“We are analyzing, of course, the decision by the circuit court of appeals,” the president said, leaning on his putter. “And I will not know until later this afternoon what the Department of Justice and what my White House counsel will recommend. But sometime this afternoon, I can give you a decision.”
Then he went over to the first tee in his golf cart and hit his first shot about 200 yards down the fairway. Up ahead, Secret Service men checked the tees, rattled the flags in the holes and inspected the ball washers to make sure they weren’t booby-trapped. Up ahead, suntanned executives and their suntanned wives sat on the back porches of their imitation Swiss chalets overlooking the golf course, drinking gin and tonics and waiting to applaud politely when the president passed by.
Campaign ’75, Page 1 of 6