From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling

Eric Rozenman

Description

From “I Like Ike” to razor-wire and National Guard troops ringing the U.S. Capitol, from Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” to Brotha Lynch Hung’s “Meat Cleaver,” the United States has changed. Seven decades of material abundance and unprecedented technological advances have entwined with pronounced social and cultural fragmentation. What — and who — can explain this peculiar transformation of the land of the free and home of the brave? In From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling: Co-Starring Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Bill Clinton, the Supremes, and Barack Obama, Eric Rozenman takes readers on an often wry, but always substantive, journey through the past 65 years of American culture. The author provides first-hand accounts of key players and events. Presidents, prime ministers, dictators, rock stars, movie stars, survivors, protesters, and a Miss America all have their say. An FBI investigation of the author makes clear that those in charge didn’t know the half of it. Bob Hope and Shirley Temple Black, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel are among those who paint the era’s impressionistic portrait, by turns entertaining and tragic. Through a fast-moving series of vignettes, From Elvis to Trump highlights a nation and a time that concludes – brakes screeching before a STOP sign that was there all along – in unparalleled change and challenge.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Popular Culture
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 23 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680537383
• Langue: English

Extrait

From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling: Co-Starring Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Bill Clinton, The Supremes, and Barack Obama!
Eric Rozenman
Academica Press
Washington∼London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rozenman, Eric (author)
Title: From elvis to trump, eyewitness to the unraveling : co-starring richard nixon, andy warhol, bill clinton, the supremes, and barack obama | Rozenman, Eric
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2021. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021950641 | ISBN 9781680537369 (hardcover) | 9781680537376 (paperback) | 9781680537383 (e-book)
Copyright 2021 Eric Rozenman
Paperback edition 2023
For Melinda, a Woman of Valor
Contents Preface: Hidden in Plain Sight Sixty-five Peculiar Years Chapter One: Forward Slash Cheers for Trump. What Was that About? Chapter Two: First Backslash Cheers for Obama. Who Was That About? Chapter Three: It All Started with Vietnam Wallace, Nixon; One Grenade, One Molotov Cocktail Richard Nixon, from Scorn to Pity Chapter Four: Back in the Real World, So to Speak Apology, Request, and Death on Campus Chapter Five: Protest Marches, Adjective and Verb “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” Au Revoir, Phil Ochs May Day: Workers of the World, March! “Let My People Go!” Chapter Six: Celebrity Journalism. Stop the Presses! Andy Warhol, Elvis Clinton and More Golfing for Dollars: A Most Unlikely Sixsome “Here She Comes, Miss America!” “He’ll be Back!” Three Men in a Picture Don’t Have “60 Minutes” to Explain Yourself Elvis Jefferson Clinton in Florida Chapter Seven: The First President Bush You Call This Politics? Chapter Eight: We’re Off to See the Dictator! For the Moment, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore W., Hillary and a Specter Chapter Nine: Conflicted on the Mediterranean Speaking of Tear Gas, Welcome to Gaza City Chapter Ten: Yitzhak Rabin, A Quandary A Tragedy in Israel Chapter Eleven: Opera Bouffe with Your F.B.I The Man Who Knew Too Little but Heard Plenty The Inconvenient Natan Sharansky Chapter Twelve: Democracy Dies in Darkness, Dogma and Used Needles One Day at The Washington Post I Left My Heart in San Francisco. But Nothing More Chapter Thirteen: Birth of the Beat Only Rock ‘n Roll, but We Liked It “Those Louie Louie Boys, the Kingsmen!” Live and On Stage, The Rolling Stones! The Fab Four, The Beatles! “The Supremes, Never the Same Show Twice” The Grateful Dead: Free, No Bargain I Introduce The Supremes! Warming Up for Woodstock, Overheating in Georgia “From Hawthorne, California — The Beach Boys!” Chapter Fourteen: Europa, Europa, Good-bye Only Two Places Epilogue: Mood Change Seize the Day. But Which One? Index
Preface: Hidden in Plain Sight
Sixty-five Peculiar Years
From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling; Co-Starring Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Bill Clinton, The Supremes and Barack Obama! blends bits of memoir, celebrity vignettes and shards of U.S. history from 1956 to 2020 to achieve something unique: An often wry, quirky but substantive answer to the questions how did we get here and where are we going.
From Elvis to Trump is an eyewitness’s meditation on the past 65 years, from the incandescent arrival and impact of Elvis Presley and rock n’roll on American and international culture through the disruptive—or better, accelerant—election of Donald Trump as the 45 th president of the United States and its continuing ripple effects.
By a series of sometimes Zelig-like coincidences (some Chasidic rabbis maintain there are no coincidences) the author, as newspaper reporter, congressional press secretary, lobbyist of sorts and newspaper and magazine editor found himself eyewitness to the famous and the influential, and sometimes the infamously influential. In addition to the main title characters, other players appearing in this pageant of the second half of the 20 th century and first two decades of the 21 st include: Gov. George Wallace, CBS-TV’s Mike Wallace, President George H. W. Bush, Bob Hope, Miss America Jacqueline Mayer, The Beatles, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, The Rolling Stones, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The 1967 March on the Pentagon, the Woodstock dress rehearsal known as the 1969 Atlanta International Pop Festival; the first Palestinian intifada in 1988 (a Molotov cocktail in every alley); and Donald Trump’s bizarre rally outside the U.S. Capitol in 2015 are among events witnessed and endured. Comic relief pitchers include F.B.I. agents investigating the author, an alphabetically challenged U.S. Army sergeant and a No-Doz fueled tow-truck driver. Foreboding arrives with Wiesel’s renewed fears of Jew-hatred in unstable societies and America’s self-inflicted instability.
Among those left on the cutting room floor, not for lack of intrinsic interest but rather because not every digression furthers discourse, were Ohio’s four-term Gov. James A. Rhodes (R); Stripper Blaze Starr (“Burlesque Comes to Campus!”); Speaker of the House Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. (D), (“That’s some outfit your wife’s wearing …”); Hustler magazine’s Larry Flynt; Sen. John Glenn—fighter pilot, first American in orbit and beloved (by many, but not all) politician—and Neil Armstrong, aeronautical engineer, professor and first man on the moon. Glenn, Armstrong, Orville and Wilbur Wright and the author, all native Ohioans, one allergic to heights.
The cavalcade of decades and players arrives not so much at a destination but unexpectedly at three related questions. They were perhaps unavoidable after summer 2020’s often destructive protests against not only anti-black racism but also against the underlying founding declaration of the American nation itself. Unavoidable also after the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol in rejection of the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president and against constitutional procedure itself. Question One: With political-cultural divisions hardening into intolerance, with homicide rates having surged in cities across the country, and the Capitol itself enclosed for months by razor wire and troops, can digitally dominated, attention deficit Americans maintain, and pass on, freedom? Two: Can they underwrite the opportunity others elsewhere might have to hold or obtain liberty? And three: If not, then the citizens of what other nation might?
And now, said the dog Mr. Peabody to his boy, Sherman, let’s climb into the Wayback Machine and travel to the time when …
Chapter One: Forward Slash
Cheers for Trump. What Was that About?
It was Sept. 8, 2015. Thousands of people had gathered on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol for a noon rally. Featured among numerous speakers were a hero of the war in Iraq, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Donald J. Trump, a real estate tycoon and reality television star—or perhaps the other way around—from New York City. The latter two were among the many Republican Party presidential hopefuls for 2016. All the speakers condemned the nuclear weapons deal the Obama administration had arranged with Iran, excoriating it as, at best, temporary restrictions on Tehran but not long-term disarmament.
President Obama, outmaneuvering Republican-led opposition, presented the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Russia, China, Germany, France and the United Kingdom also participated in the talks) as ordinary legislation. It would need a simple majority for ratification. Those opposed insisted it amounted to an international treaty, which would have required a most unlikely two-thirds Senate approval. Instead, the president’s supporters neatly flipped the script and made it subject to a resolution of disapproval. At the time of the rally, such a resolution loomed. But Democrats already had enough members committed to blocking it.
I then worked as Washington director of CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, a news media watchdog. As such I was a minor representative to a series of meetings organized by pro-Israel groups seeking some way to block the Iran deal. They took place in a conference room with glass walls and a lofty view of the U.S. Capitol. But even on sunny days, we saw only long and generally discouraging odds. That was due in no small measure to President Obama’s determination to get the JCPOA through and complementary squishiness of the 10 Jewish members of the Senate, Democrats all and none daring to oppose, more than in symbolic gestures, their party’s leader.
CAMERA’s D.C. office was in the Hall of the States building, a virtual lobbyists’ central, two blocks from the Capitol. For security reasons—advocates of fair coverage of Israel occasionally being threatened from the far right, far left and by Islamic supremacists (three mutations of the same virus)—CAMERA did not appear in the building directory. The nameplate on the office door gave no hint as to our presence; U.S. mail went to a post office box. Sure, exercise your First Amendment rights. But watch your back.
Curious to hear the speakers, my colleague Sean Durns and I walked the short distance to the rally. We especially wanted to hear Cruz, whom veteran Harvard University Law School Prof. Alan Dershowitz had called one of his brightest students. Cruz was a leading critic of the Iran deal. Of another one-time student, Dershowitz recalled that Barack Obama also had taken his course.
Trump, like Cruz, was a draw. Not as a serious politician, of course, but a favorite of New York City’s tabloids. He was the serial husband of beautiful wives, best-selling ghost-written author and TV celebrity whose signature line, on his show “The Apprentice,” was “You’re fired!” A number of retired generals and corporate executives who joined the Trump administration early on apparently had not watched much television.
Cruz, a first-term senator and former Texas solicitor-general, and Trump were among 16 Republicans seeking the GOP’s