Call me a fool, but when Ross Perot announced his first run for the presidency of the U.S.A. in 1992, I looked all over Reno, where I was living at the time, in search of a core group which would devote time and energy to getting him on the ballot in Nevada. The man pressed my buttons with every word he uttered in those early days, as he did with
at least 20,000,000 other Americans equally disillusioned with the American political system.
My
first political awareness had stemmed from a summer after high
school when I worked at the State Department in Washington, D.C., in
a WWII leftover barracks leaning against a White House fence. Every morning, then President Harry S. Truman vigorously strode by our open windows on his daily constitutional with a coterie of drop-dead gorgeous, macho, Secret Service bodyguards puffing along behind him, barely able to keep up with his Missouri mule-trot.
"Good morning, folks!" he would call cheerfully to our heads hanging out of the windows for a better look at "the boss" (a term he himself applied only to his wife, Bess). Some of us he knew by name because he often stopped to make inquiries into our personal lives in a warm and friendly manner, always with a kind smile and occasionally with a pat of his hand.
"Hey,
Miss Leola," he said one day, "did you have that granddaughter yet?" My friend Leola beamed back a "Yes, Mister President, a little girl named Jane!" The next day when he walked by and saw Leola at her window, he gestured to a Secret Service man who ran across the grass with a pink-beribboned box which he passed
to my friend. Leola was overwhelmed, but Truman waved aside her gratitude, saying, "Make sure she grows up to be a Democrat!" and rushed on his way. In the box was a baby's rattle, with a note that it had belonged to his daughter, Margaret, many years before. I am sure that rattle is still in the family, and they are probably Democrats, as well.
I stayed on at college in Washington as a scholarship student during the Eisenhower years. One of my fraternity brothers went to work for Richard Nixon who was Ike's vice-president. He became a rabid political animal. His personality changed.
I was especially sensitive to this because we had
worked together at the Post Office that Christmas, moving out of the frat house ($10 per month, with breakfast) and into a small, cheap room ($1 per week, no meals) nearer the main Post Office where we endured long shifts for just enough money to make the labor worthwhile for students like us.
The basement room had only one bed, a moldy double mattress standing on bricks to keep it above a damp, uncarpeted, concrete floor. The landlord did not question two young men sleeping in the same bed. Apart from his establishment's being no more than a flop house, homosex would never have crossed his mind in those more pristine days. We were both very masculine men, and both had a reputation as "swordsmen" on campus, meaning we got plenty of pussy. I was class president, and he was a basketball star. Nobody (our other fraternity brothers) ever questioned this arrangement.
The American capital gets humid and hot as hell in August and as cold as the North Pole, in December. That year was no exception. Freezing! He and I worked the same shift and slept the same hours. We wore longjohns to bed, it was so cold.
Longjohns weren't enough. I remember that first night. We were exhausted from sorting and pigeon-holing mail by hand (the world before computers) and filling and dragging heavy bags of the stuff out to the docks for pickup by the hearty postmen. We had shivered through a lukewarm shower separately, and it was not until I saw him stepping into his longjohns before leaping into bed that I saw him naked for the very first time since we had met at our first fraternity rush party three months before. The fucking guy was magnificent! Being a strawberry-blonde myself, I was not generally attracted to fellow redheads, but all of a sudden his glowing, tight, rust-colored curls made him look like a cherub to me. I was already in bed. I had to turn away so he couldn't see my hard.
He wasn't in bed more than a minute, his teeth chattering with cold as much as mine chattered with desperate anticipation of having to try and get some sleep next to a beauty like that, when he rolled toward me and threw an arm and a leg across me.
"My brother was in WWII," he said. "In combat, down in the foxholes, he used to wrap up with his buddy when they were crouched in snow up to their ass. He says it's OK for guys to do that in situations like this. We gotta warm up, Ben, or we'll never get to sleep."
I gulped.
Our bodies heated up fast. He was all over me, it seemed, enfolding me in his arms and legs, nestling his nose in my throat, his hair shampooed and sweet-smelling in my nostrils.
I couldn't help it. I came. Not quietly, with any attempt at restraint. Sexually excited beyond my capacity for sham, I clung to him like a vise with my throbbing dick pressed against his belly, pumping cum into my longjohns till the gobs of semen soaked through.
He didn't say a word, but I felt his hands moving. He was unbuttoning his longjohns to the crotch, and then mine. His dick slid around in my juices. He held me tighter until I thought I would break, and then he
came, with a sigh and a snort, burying his face on my shoulder to stifle his cries.
When it was over, we fell asleep that way and woke up in the morning hard when the alarm clock went off. The room was freezing. He shut off the alarm and moved against me again, rubbing warmth into my body as I likewise caressed his. His bubble butt drove me crazy. My stroking it seemed to make him hotter.
To my surprise, he turned his back to me and wet my cock with his spit and guided me inside him. I fucked him in a frenzy. He jacked off, and we both came.
Afterward, we got up and wiped off with a towel. Our bodies were a sticky mess from the night before and from the session now, but we had to rush into our clothes and get to work.
We worked side by side at the Post Office for two weeks, making love every night with our vast store of youthful passion. We did everything to each other, but never talked about it. Still, it seemed during that time that we were very much in love.
We continued our affair in secret through the winter and into the spring. Things were fine, but he went to work for Nixon part-time before the summer and
seemed too busy for much sex. He gradually became a different man. His political work became his whole life and, in emulation of Nixon, he decided to aim for law school. All our fraternity brothers noticed sharp changes in his personality. He became aloof and secretive. Our affair came to an end.
Not until the world learned of the dark side of President Nixon a couple of decades later was I able to look back and recognize some of his troubling characteristics as they had been reflected in my fraternity brother, who had gone on, I learned, to an exalted political position during Nixon's presidential term. What happened to him after Watergate, I never knew and no longer cared
By the time of Nixon's resignation in 1974, I had become a world-weary journalist in the foreign field and had long since lost my youthful exuberance for the political realm --- and for my fraternal friend.
Not until Perot popped up in 1992 did the political sap stir again in my veins. I threw myself into his Northern Nevada campaign as Media Manager, writing press releases and making local radioa and TV appearances on talk shows in his behalf. I thought I knew him like a book, but its pages dropped out when he announced his withdrawal before the election and left us hanging in the limbo. His return to the fray a few weeks later made no difference to me at all. I had already thrown out my membership card in what was to become the Reform Party.
The Reform Party! Aha! Still alive and kicking --- mostly kicking --- today, and who stands at its helm, official recipient of the millions of dollars in federal funds earned by Perot in his second run in 1996? Pat Buchanan, at whose TV image I used to figuratively spit when he co-hosted "Crossfire" on CNN! Enough said. Please read the below.
Ben Boxer
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Article From The Advocate 9/19/00
Headline:
Buchanan kick-starts his campaign at antigay Bob Jones University
Text:
Pat Buchanan attempted Monday to restart his presidential bid at fundamentalist Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. Known for its far-right religious views, Bob Jones University is also notorious because of its anti-Catholic rhetoric and an interracial dating ban--which was in effect until this year--as well as for prohibiting openly gay alumni from visiting campus. Buchanan wasted no time falling in step. Decrying what he called the moral decay coming out of Hollywood, he said: "Instead of breaking up Microsoft, why don't we break up Disney?" He also listed society's growing acceptance of gay men and lesbians as a key element in the nation's decline. University president Bob Jones III told the crowd that Buchanan "cares more for truth than for his own image."
