In the fall of my fifth grade
I was sent to school on an urgent assignment from my father. I
was to correct the teacher's misinterpretation of history and
explain to her that Franklin Roosevelt, and not George Washington,
was the father of our country.
"Washington was just another
aristocrat who rose to power on the backs of dead soldiers and
working people. He could afford to throw dollars across the
Potomac and chop down his family's fruit trees because they
had more money and more trees. But working people don't. We
have to squeeze our dollars and hang on because the world is
filled with people who want to cheat us out of it."
My teacher looked at me with
wonder but I wasn't rebuked, because she taught in a union town.
My attitudes were spawned at Local 23 of the Oil, Chemical and
Atomic Workers. My father, Albert Dolph Strother, was a smoldering,
230-pound, six-foot-two-inch, khaki-clad, Lucky Strike-smoking,
hard-muscled malcontent who sometimes lashed out in his sleep
at intruders trying to take away something he had earned through
sweat. I shadowboxed behind him, learning to call strikebreakers
"scabs" with the corners of my mouth turned down and occasionally
spitting in the grass. I carried candy Lucky Strikes in my shirt
pocket. What my father hated, I hated. What he believed, I embraced
as universal truth.
According to our code, to
budge off of a truth in the face of an argument or to compromise
merely showed lack of character. To forgive one's enemies was
for the pale-faced preachers in my mother's church who pleaded
for larger collections in the Sunday sermons my father occasionally
attended as the price of peace at home. We listened vigilantly
to those tear-stained sermons, especially closely when the union
was on strike, to make sure the preacher didn't ask God for
anything that would give aid and comfort to a scab or a union-busting
company. Strikes made collection plates awfully light in Port
Arthur, and preachers were known to ask for heavenly intervention
when they couldn't make the payment on the church's new Ford.
The city of my birth needed
Jesus to help cushion its workers against its climate of violence
and its fear of unemployment. Port Arthur was an acid-smelling,
soot-covered union town of people who earned their living at
one of the local oil refineries or chemical plants. The city
was a festering sore that infected the Gulf, the marshes, and
the bayous. Even the air smelled of something singed and sour.
Bosses, Republicans, and professional people moved to Beaumont,
eighteen miles away. When Pete Seeger sang about "ticky-tacky"
little houses that "all look the same," he could have been talking
about the houses and society of Port Arthur. All of our fathers
made, within a few cents, the same salary. Women didn't work.
Democrats always received 95 percent of the vote.
My father was a brooding man
who would enter blue periods and sit for hours under a cottonwood
tree staring at things in the bottom of an empty coffee cup
like a reader of tea leaves. I would sit close by and carve
wooden sticks for fishing corks and repair broken fishing reels.
Occasionally I would feel his presence as his big fingers reached
out and tightened a screw I had forgotten or tied a knot in
a line about to unravel. Once in a great while he would pat
me on the head or ruffle my hair. Men like my father didn't
hug. It just wasn't part of the code. These little acts of love
and kindness were done without comment. Silence was part of
our communication. It seemed more important to listen to the
dry rattle of the cottonwood leaves than to pollute the quiet
with meaningless words. But for some reason, when we were in
the Gulf of Mexico out of sight of land in our tiny, fourteen-foot
pea shell of a boat, he would share his secrets of life, both
of us looking at the horizon while gulls threw themselves out
of the sky to prey on the shrimp jumping across the surface
to escape schools of speckled trout beneath them. I remember
the smell of the fish breaking salt water and the thousands
of frantic shrimp doing tailstands on the mirror surface.
"Not much difference in those
shrimp and working people," my father said. "If they go down
the fish eat them, if they jump out of the water they get eaten
by the gulls." I just nodded. Occasionally as we sat watching
our hand-carved popping corks bob on the water, he would say,
"Raymond, go to school and get an education. We need some lawyers
who can help working people."
In the depths of the Damned
Republican Depression, before I was born, my father was infrequently
employed as a deckhand on a Texas Oil Company tanker taking
heating oil to New York. For some reason the company always
fired all of the deckhands once they were in port and hired
new ones. My father's theory was they didn't want men together
long enough to organize. After being released my father would
hop freight cars back south. As the unemployed deckhands and
assorted displaced rail riders watched America slide by their
boxcar, they sang Jimmy Rodgers hobo songs and talked about
a new order where working people had job security and the bosses
would be put in their place -- wherever that was. They rolled
their own cigarettes and talked freely about the experiment
in Russia and how maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.
"We'd all be Communists now
if it weren't for Franklin Roosevelt," my father once told me.
"We were about ready to pick up guns when he came along. Damned
Herbert Hoover almost destroyed this country."
My teachers, though, again
seemed to have a warped sense of history. They talked about
a world depression and global economic factors. One of them
actually had the gall to say Hoover wasn't responsible for the
Depression. She didn't even know that his first name was "Damned."
Her lack of understanding of a basic truth about Damned Hoover
shook my confidence in the infallibility of teachers. I had
already learned that preachers could not be trusted.
I had never talked to my parents
about college. My father may have harbored dreams I could go,
but I knew they couldn't afford to send me. My mother didn't
seem to care. I didn't want to hurt their feelings, so I didn't
discuss my ambitions with them. My father was sure that because
of the union he could get me on at Gulf Oil, and that was my
heritage.
The day after receiving the
letter I packed some jeans, my only suit, and some shirts in
a duffle bag and found my father sitting in a metal lawn chair
under that huge cottonwood tree in the backyard, drinking coffee
from a chipped cup. The grass in front of his chair had been
worn to dirt like the carpet at the bottom step in an old public
building. I explained that I was going to college and that I
would hitchhike there so I could start early training for the
cross-country season. He looked at me with almost no expression.
"I'm glad. I always wanted you to got to college. But being
on strike and all, I don't know how we can pay."
"I have a track scholarship."
"So where are you going?"
"Northwestern Louisiana State."
"Where's that?"
"Natchitoches, Louisiana."
"I know where that is. I once
worked for a logging company that cut around Natchitoches. What
are you going to study?"
"Journalism. I'm going to
be a writer."
"Not a labor lawyer?'
"No."
"Well, maybe you can tell
the union side. Nobody ever does that. You got any money?
"Yes, sir. I've been saving
this summer."
He reached into his thin brown
wallet that was shaped like the contours of his hip and turned
out a leather flap that covered what he called his strike fund.
He unfolded a $100 bill and handed it to me. It smelled like
a damp newspaper. It was the last money he ever gave me.
He took a swallow of coffee
and looked off into the blue, over the tops of the scrub trees,
where he could see the gulls endlessly circling over Sabine
Lake. He always looked south as though pain ended where the
earth met the water's edge. Often I tried to look at the same
spot to see if I could see the same things he did. I could not.
At least not yet.
My father died on his seventy-fifth
birthday, December 29, 1982. Cancer had invaded his bones and
his brain. He didn't know me when I stood next to his bed. He
was reaching up and tightening imaginary bolts with an imaginary
wrench, perhaps fixing the car of some boss, or a machine in
the refinery. The latter part of his life had not been pleasant.
He was forced to retire by company rules, and no union leader
came to his rescue. At night he would watch television, the
window to a world he did not understand that disappointed him
terribly.
His youngest son had been
killed flying helicopters in a war he opposed. His eldest son
was a tool of politicians and associated with the same business
people and bosses he had spent all of his life fighting. After
the funeral I walked into the backyard of the old house to the
worn spot under the cottonwood tree. On a still afternoon the
worm-eaten, sun-parched winter leaves rattled together into
a moan of mourning and reproach. I stood under the old rotting
tree and wept.
Upon graduating from the
LSU School of Journalism, Raymond Strother worked for the Louisiana
Press Association and the Associated Press before hiring on
with ad man/political consultant Gus Weill in 1967. Early on
in his career, Strother became intimately familiar with the
"colorful" side of Louisiana politics, best evidenced in a visit
with St. Landry Parish Sheriff Daly Joseph "Cat" Doucet in a
brothel in which the sheriff had what Strother calls a "proprietary
interest." Eventually, Strother would leave Louisiana politics,
when "principles and ethics long buried began to fight to the
surface." But not before he would work for one of the most colorful
politicians this state has known -- Gov. Jimmie Davis.
I didn't know what to expect
when I signed on to the Jimmie Davis campaign for governor in
1971 but I was told by the money people that it would be necessary
for me to stay on the road most of the time, so I bought a new
suit, some wash-and-wear suits, a new manual portable typewriter,
and a bottle of Johnny Walker scotch to tuck in my suitcase.
At that time large areas of Louisiana were still dry, and my
religious candidate didn't drink. At least I was so informed.
(Later I found that wasn't true. In fact, little the public
knew about the old politician was true.)
Our campaign team was a strange
group. Because the real Jimmie Davis band had disbanded decades
before, the old campaigner assembled a group of players and
a singer and simply gave them the old band's name. Music has
always been the center of his campaign, so it would be the center
this time too -- the flame that attracted the moths to the edge
of our stage.
The final group in a Davis
campaign was a gospel group, so he hired the famous Speer family
from Nashville. They came complete with a deluxe touring bus
and a beauty queen who kept the band circling the bus like wolves
waiting to spring through any open window. But this religious
Nazarene family immediately made the bus off limits and put
a padlock on its door to protect the little darling as she slept
in her secure bunk.
While the Speer family bus
was ultramodern, with the amenities of a hotel, the Davis bus
was a tired old retread selected only because of the minimal
cost. The driver was a religious man who abandoned us one night
in some remote village because when he was hired the governor
had told him he would be paid "five" per month, which he interpreted
as thousands and found in his first paycheck that Davis had
meant hundreds. A compromise was reached, and he returned. Later
I found vagueness was a Davis technique to set up bargaining
that was advantageous to him. He usually covered his mouth with
his hand when he spoke and mumbled in incomplete sentences,
so one was never sure exactly what he had said. Often he would
reprimand us by claiming he had not given specific orders we
thought he had. Along with mumbling, he used code words in all
conversations, so that one was never completely sure what he
meant.
A typical Jimmie Davis command
would be, "Find that man who did that thing yesterday and tell
him to go to the place we went yesterday and to bring his things."
That might have meant something
as simple as, "Find the mechanic who fixed the bus yesterday
and tell him we will leave the bus at the service station on
Main Street and he should bring his tools."
But there was never a straight
statement. Davis had apparently broken so many laws and committed
so many near-crimes as governor that he had become not just
careful, but paranoid. One of his chief lieutenants, George
Dupuis, told me that when the gamblers came to the governor's
office to make their payoffs, he would turn and look at the
window at Capitol Lake and talk about the beautiful weather
until the door closed behind them. Then George would pick up
the bags and drive the cash to a north Louisiana bank owned
by Davis and his friends. Davis could then say with conviction,
"With the Lord as my witness, I can honestly say I have never
touched a dollar of gambling money."
So our campaign began its
slow trek to yesterday with two buses with captive women in
them, a young man trying to invent political consulting as he
went, and an assorted group of shiny-suited pickers and singers,
hangers-on, campaign groupies, Jesus freaks, music fans, petty
thieves, white-collar criminals, arthritic, gray-haired political
hacks, and a living legend who was in reality a master of deception.
We were full-tilt boogie, determined to re-create 1944.
Davis had decided that his
press secretary/political consultant/speechwriter/television
ad producer (me) should manage the events in each of the small
towns. So on the morning of the first day we moved into Jonesboro,
where he had started his other two campaigns. I positioned the
stage in a large flat area to allow room for crowds, but close
enough to the courthouse to tap into an electric power socket.
Davis, still living in the 1940s, told me confidently his voters
would "come out of the pine trees by the thousands."
To alert these redneck masses,
a convict and a Cajun boy known only as Muscles drove through
the countryside playing Davis music out of the huge speakers
affixed to the top of the vehicle, interspersed with information
about our appearance the next day. At night the two reported
to Davis about how many people waved and promised to attend.
They lied.
By show time, a few dozen
people stood in the shade of some distant oak and pine trees,
fanning themselves with newspapers and Davis handbills. They
were a motley group of country people interspersed with a few
public officials in wet white shirts and wilted ties.
But we opened. Doc Guidry
played "Under the Double Eagle." Eddy Raven sang "Mama Tried,"
the Speer family sang something about Jesus, and Anna Davis
of Chuck Wagon fame did a beautiful rendition of "Help Me Make
It Through the Night." Then Jimmie jumped onto the stage to
speak. Though Davis knew hundreds of country songs by heart,
he could not remember the speech he had given most of his life.
He read it haltingly from large note cards.
 |
The speech lasted about twelve
minutes, loaded with platitudes and cliches, not a single word
of which related to any concern a voter might have -- or even
to the second half of the twentieth century. When Davis finished
speaking he would pick up his guitar, an instrument he had never
learned to play, and hang it around his neck as a prelude to singing
a couple of his standards. He held his crowd pleaser, "You Are
My Sunshine," until one of our shills in the audience would scream,
"Play 'Sunshine,' Jimmie." The audience would genuinely go wild
and demand encores, which he never gave. "Always leave 'em wanting
a little more," he told me. "Besides, they're getting this for
free."
One day Davis asked me into
the bus. "You tell me you can get me in the newspapers. They
don't cover my speeches."
"Well, governor, you don't
say anything. You don't talk about any issues or say what you
will do if you get elected. We give the same speech at every
stop. If we had some new material, we might make news."
"Then we'll add something
to the speech. What do you think is important now?"
"Drugs, governor. Parents
are concerned about their kids and drugs."
"Well, then, we will put something
in my speech about drugs. You work it up."
I spent the next two days
in a library and talking to law enforcement agencies until I
came up with a program to educate children about drugs and to
increase the penalties for selling. I gave it to Davis, who
told me he would study it and make some cards, meaning that
he would add some new 4 x 5 index cars to his old speech. I
notified the few reporters still on speaking terms with me about
our new position and stood in back of the crowd when Davis began
his old speech.
Abruptly, he stopped at the
point where he was to inject the new drug material. The pause
seemed to go on forever. He wasn't used to deviating from his
set piece and was trying to process the added sentences. People
in the audience began to cough.
Finally he looked up and literally
screamed in to the mike, "DOPE!"
He paused and screamed again.
"DOPE!"
He looked around the crowd,
which was obviously mystified. "Dope!" he continued. "Some people
are for it -- some people are against it. Myself, I don't know.
Ask your mommas and daddies."
Then he went directly back
to his old speech, full of outdated expressions from his agrarian
past like, "I've been to the mill and had my corn ground." I'm
not sure exactly what that means, but it perhaps is a metaphor
of experience. The press laughed, and I went to the car and
guzzled four beers. At dinner that night Davis came over to
my table.
"How do you think that went?"
"Brilliant, governor. You
were just brilliant. I guess if the press doesn't cover that
speech, it just proves they're against us."
He nodded in satisfaction.
He never again asked for new material.
In the early 1980s, Strother
made the move to Washington, fueled by his successful working
relationship with U.S. Sen. Russell Long. Before long, his groundbreaking
techniques and winning record drew a national client base --
and the attention of a Southern governor who wanted to one day
be president.
I'm sorry I ever met Bill
Clinton. He was a dreamkiller who ended our relationship by
damaging my business and adding my body to those he climbed
over to reach the White House.
