John Wayne Grandpa

This bubbled to the surface of my mind when I was thinking of people who support Donald Trump, and why. It’s not really about my grandpa at all.

He looked a bit like John Wayne. Not so much that you’d mistake him on the street or anything, but if you met him and I pointed this out, you’d likely say, “Yeah… around the nose and eyes, maybe a little.”

I was thinkin’ about him today. My grandfather, not John Wayne. He was a WWII vet, a working man, and a big believer in patriotism and a fierce opposer of communism, much like a great many other men of his generation. And he was a BIG fan of John Wayne, of course… and of Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon was President at the time, and my grandpa was just as happy as anything about this; he did not care for Hubert Humphrey, and Nixon had chased all the commies out of Hollywood back in the fifties, and this was as good a credential as you could ask for, far as Grandpa was concerned. He WAS a little disconcerted when Nixon went to China, but “Well, he must have had a good reason,” said Grandpa, and that was that.

Richard M. Nixon could do no wrong in my grandfather’s eyes. And me? Well, I was a child at the time, and paid little attention to the news, and the President was something like a third lieutenant God as far as I knew, and I was happy to take Grandpa’s word for it.

And then Watergate broke the news.

And my grandfather did not care for this. And I learned this when they came to visit, and my grandma brought me a new GI Joe, and my grandpa gave me five dollars, and then explained how this whole Watergate thing was a big crock of crap. At length.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this – Grandpa had never made political speeches before, that I had noticed – but, well, he must have had a good reason, right? And I listened, and when he was done, I ran off to play with GI Joe.

Thing about Watergate? It ran ON for a few years. And a year is a very long time to a child. And I began to hear more about this thing called Watergate. And I began to pay attention. I watched the news sometimes before the evening TV shows came on. Learned a lot about what was happening in Vietnam, back when you used to see some pretty gruesome things on the news. And while I still didn’t understand what this Watergate thing was, it seemed that maybe the President… or maybe some guys who worked for him… had done something… bad. Maybe broke the law. And there was a lot of talk about “secret tapes.”

But I was a child, and all this was happening way off between Oz and Narnia and New York City, and other faraway places. It did not concern me.

But the thing was? It really started to dominate the news, particularly after Nixon had fired this one “attorney general” guy from his job, a goofy looking man in a bow tie. It was something different almost every DAY.

And a year is a very long time to a child.

And we saw my grandparents at Christmas, and Grandpa was PISSED. And I remember hearing him rant to my immediate ancestors about the goodness of Nixon and how this was all just a big screwjob, and quite a bit else, at some volume. Plainly, he felt strongly about this issue, as Grandma had to keep reminding him about Indoor Voice.

A year went by. I paid attention. Still didn’t quite understand what had happened, but apparently a LOT of Nixon’s friends had broken the law, and there was some question as to whether he knew about it, or wasn’t involved, or had TOLD them to break the law…

… and I saw my grandfather three times that year, and he was angrier every time. Thanksgiving was a struggle to keep to topics away from politics, and that Christmas was what we today would call a hot mess. My grandfather’s anger at the media and the hippies and the commies and the Democrats would NOT be denied, and YOU PEOPLE JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND! HE CHASED THE DAMN COMMIES OUT OF HOLLYWOOD!

I was a child. A bright child, I like to think, but I didn’t understand why hippies were bad, because they were all about love and peace and really cool music, and I really had no idea what the media was, and apparently commies and Democrats were two different flavors of “villain,” as far as I could figure. And I didn’t dare ask. In that age, in that family, when a man raised his voice, overvocal children tended to catch a clip around the ear, so I stayed the hell out and kept my mouth shut.

But my grandfather wasn’t normally given to fits of temper. At least, not before Watergate. But these days, ANYTHING about politics would set him off.

And this continued on a rising note until Nixon finally resigned.

I watched it on TV, and he gave his speech, climbed on a helicopter, and flew off to Narnia or San Clemente or somewhere, not to be seen again anytime soon.

And the next time I saw my grandfather after that, he was still angry. And he cornered me at one point and howled at me about how GODDAMMIT, THEY NEVER PROVED ANYTHING! AND EVEN IF HE DID ANYTHING WRONG, HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING THEY ALL DIDN’T DO! THEY’RE ALL GUILTY! NIXON JUST GOT CAUGHT IS ALL, GODDAMMIT!!!

I was, I believe, ten at the time.

And I stood there with weak knees and heart soaked in terror and eyes as big as eggs and nodded wordlessly, head bobbing up and down. *Yes sir, no doubt about it, you are righter than right, sir! Yes sir! Please don’t hit me, sir!
*

And Grandma screamed at him for screaming at me, and then he got mad at himself, and apologized, and walked off. Later he gave me a ten dollar bill.

And I began reading the hell up on Watergate, because plainly this shit was important in ways I had not known, to get my grandfather all lathered up like THAT.
And it was years before I finally understood what it had all been about, and why it was called Watergate in the first place, and who G. Gordon Liddy and John Dean and H.R. Haldeman were, and about the Secret Tapes and the missing 18 minutes, and why Sam Donaldson talked about Nixon and “The Divine Right Of Presidents.” (“If the president does it… that means it is not illegal.”)

But it took me longer to understand why my grandfather went off like that, and STAYED like that for several years. Why had he been angry at ME? Why wasn’t he mad at Nixon, who’d betrayed the country? Or at the evil media, who’d done the screwjob, with the help of the hippies and the commies and the Democrats?

I was grown before I figured it out. He wasn’t mad at me. He’d put his faith in Nixon, and Nixon had let us down, all of us, sure. But worse than that? My grandfather had been wrong. He’d backed the wrong horse. He’d trusted and defended a crook. And he’d been WRONG. And that meant that everyone he hated, all the hippies and the commies and the Democrats… had been RIGHT. While he had been WRONG.

And he didn’t handle that very well. Plainly, if Nixon was guilty, then so had every other president in history. Nixon just got caught, that’s all. They’re all equally evil. They HAVE to be. Both sides are JUST AS WRONG!

I remember my grandfather. He looked a bit like John Wayne, who was a cowboy actor, and a staunch conservative, and whose name, when spoken by a European, is a warning you’re about to get a faceful of European attitude.

John Wayne voted for Nixon in 1960. So did my grandfather.

I wish I had more happy memories of my grandfather.

Because I think many of today’s kids will not have happy memories of their own, before all this Trump crap is said and done.

Is there a debate in there? Because while it talks about politics, this is a debate/discussion forum and that looks more like an MPSIMS recollection.

[ /Moderating ]

Hm. Point taken. Moderators, feel free to move it to an appropriate location if you feel that this is appropriate.

My grandpa was an immigrant who looked nothing like John Wayne. And he was a staunch Democrat who never yelled at me.

My grandpa was a life-long teamster who loved FDR and used to buy me magic kits.

ETA: and he looked a little like Phil Silvers.

I think it will be the overall issue of climate change rather than any individual politician that will do most damage to that intergenerational bond. A lot of kids are going to end up very disillusioned that their apparently loving grandparents could be selfish, ignorant and stubborn enough to refuse to take this problem seriously.

But as you noted, nobody likes being wrong, and it takes a lot of conscious practice to be able to handle being wrong without simply doubling down on the wrongness.

This. A lot of kids are going to realize that their parents and grandparents actively opposed steps to protect the kids’ futures.

John Wayne made Green Berets, the military worshiping Viet Nam war propaganda. Made with the generous assistance of the US Dept of Defense, Lockheed, General Dynamics. The movie Sulu would just as soon forget ever happened, much less he had anything to do with it. Loaded with all manner of Asian stereotypes presumed by the ignorant to be Vietnamese. Chinese, Burmese, Filipino(?!), Japanese, we couldn’t tell, we didn’t know. About the same time that Bob Hope made a very good living telling bath/job/haircut jokes.

OK. True Grit, some forgiveness there. Not enough.

(Wow…welcome back,Master! Articulate as ever, and always a great read. Why’d ya disappear for so long? )

But…
Your parallel between Nixon and Trump isn’t quite accurate.
As comedian Bill Maher put it: "Nixon said ‘I’m not a crook’. Trump says ‘I might be a crook, but so what?’ "

Nixon knew he was in trouble, and admitted it by resigning, because the evidence was clear cut to everybody. Picking a lock and breaking into an office is obviously illegal, even to somebody who doesn’t follow politics.
Trump’s crimes are not so obvious.
Yes, seriously,— I said “not so obvious”.

We sophisticated Dopers might think it’s obvious. But to a disinterested voter, the whole Ukrainian thing just does not look as bad as you think it is.
Imagine a minimum-wage worker at Walmart; For him, a burglary is something he knows about–it’s a part of his life and something he can relate to.He sometimes talks with his friends about having their car or house broken into. So Watergate was a bad thing.
But a delay in transferring billions of dollars to a foreign place with a weird name? That’s way beyond anything this Walmart guy has ever discussed over a beer with his buddies. It’s so for out of his experience that he just cant relate to the issue, and can’t get interested in it. And besides, that other guy Hunter Biden was doing the same thing wasn’t he? Geez…who gets paid millions of bucks from a foreign place with a weird name?Hell, Biden didn’t even clock in or out…just worked one shift and somehow took all that money.
So what’s the big deal with Trump?

Even if Trump does somehow get thrown out of office, our imaginary guy at Walmart isn’t going to feel like your grandpa. He wont be upset that he backed the wrong horse, that he’d trusted a crook, and now had to admit that he was WRONG.

It’s not so obvious.
Unfortunately.

Assuming someone is ignorant or oblivious to goings-on because they have a shitty job in the Land Of Shitty Jobs doesn’t strike me as very sophisticated.

I was being sarcastic…After all, we Dopers love to declare how smart we are. :slight_smile:
But my point is that masses of good, hard-working folk just don’t care about this impeachment stuff.It’s too complicated, and totally divorced from their lives.

And it’s going to backfire for the Dems. They won’t win any new voters.
But they sure make themselves feel good.

So you just don’t believe in the rule of law?

My grandfather was what John Wayne pretended to be, a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail. And, 10 of his 11 children were Democrats. In the family tradition I was a serious 7 year old Dem. My friends and I threw rocks at any car with a Wilke card in the window. FDR was God so Wilke must have been the devil.

Personally, I am educating my great grandchildren by loudly informing them that Trump is a MORON. They are tolerant and might even be interested if Trump had anything to do with dinosaurs.

Ehh.

Grandpa was more all about how the Republicans are doin’ the RIGHT THING, and all these hippies and Democrats were destroyin’ AMERICA!

Sophisticated? No. But it was his belief system. Guys like FDR had done all right – we’d been at war, after all – but for a REAL AMERICA, you needed guys like Eisenhower and, by ghod, NIXON, because he’d chased the commies out of Hollywood! Not these wishy washy Democrats, who seemed to think that empty headed hippies were people, TOO! Not people like LBJ, who wanted to give money to people who didn’t wanna WORK!

Grandpa had a belief system. Near as I can tell, a LOT of Americans vote according to their belief system. I know a woman who voted for Trump because she was worried that a Democrat would deny her Freedom Of Speech rights, because political correctness. I know another man who voted Trump because a Republican would NEVER take away our GUNS! And I can name a third person who felt that the Republican party had the blessing of God Almighty, as opposed to those Democrats, who seemed to favor gay folks and trans folks and those horrible abortionists.

This is all crap, of course. But it ain’t crap if you believe it. And while I used to think we picked political parties the way we picked our football teams to root for – who’s biggest, meanest, and kicking the most butt – I begin to wonder if it ain’t more of a religion.

Because the year was 1973, and my grandfather was acting like a man whose religion was flaking out on him. And he did not like it.

I think he’s saying that there are a LOT of people who don’t understand the first thing about the rule of law. A lot more than you’d think.

These people understand that a Strong Man Authority will keep them safe. That’s all.

MPSIMS here we go.

My sons’ Grandaddy (my dad) voted Nixon in 1972 and regrets it immensely. He said he’d never vote for a Republican again. Now our kids get to hear him (and my mom) rail against Trump. It was especially entertaining last summer, when one of Mom’s two liberal siblings and his wife were also visiting. If 10% of people like my parents (Southern, Evangelical, working class, White) turned on Trump, he’d be gone in 2020. I don’t see that happening, which shows how atypical our kids’ paternal grandparents are (their maternal grandparents are upper middle class, college educated secular Jews and vote as you’d expect).

My Dad was a Ranger in the South Pacific for three years after Pearl.(I was such a late baby that my older brother and sisters were graduating from high school and middle school when my mom slipped on the stairs and went into labor three months early.) He never talked about it, except for funny bits about pilots and the world’s grumpiest First Sergaent. (“It’s really boring,” said this Top, allegedly, one day. “Somebody go salute the lieuie and see what happens.”) He used to sit at the bottom of my aunt’s garden with her husband----a fierce Italian-American with a voice like grindstones gritting together, the face of a bulldog, an addiction to tiny French poodles, and a history in the Korean War himself.

Dad used to talk about the 442nd Infantry Regiment as an example of the purest patriotism he had ever seen, unless it was the 332nd Fighter Group, which would reduce him to red eyes with mysterious wet tracks down his face. He’d haul out a seemingly-tablecloth-sized lace-edged hankie (with lace tatted by Mom’s mother) honk loudly into it, and then insist on reading, “We Band of Brothers,” to me. “It’s real smoky in here,” he’d grumble, waving a hand at clear air.

“Dad, if it’s smoky in here, it’s because the house is on fire. You haven’t smoked in five years.”

That would get me a gimlet eye, a glare, and more Shakespeare.

He once had a drinking problem, and spoke of quitting as the best thing he’d ever done. Neither he nor Mom were good with emotions. When I moved out, I took with me my love of foods nobody else in the family would touch, and my family consisted of mutants who would eat pickles by the handful and decide if this or that wild berry was edible by gulping down a handful.

On my first visit back home, I went to the cupboard to see if there was anything I could stand to eat, and found it full of all the weird shit only I would touch.

Dad substituted Shakespeare, the poetry of the King James Bible, and 17th, 18th, and 19th century romantic poetry for the emotional catharsis provided by drinking till sloppy, then quoting Churchill, Parker, and other wits. When sober,
Shakespeare was his therapist. We went over every line, every syllable, every nuance. He hated most modern poetry with the exception of Robert Frost. It had to be beautiful, it had to rhyme, and it had to make him snuffle and get red-faced.

He and Mom had a marriage that got rocky toward the end, which was after 56 years together. Mom once confided after his death that while she loved us kids and all, but if she had had the choice she would have never married. There were twelve pregnancies, at the minimum, and four living kids. There were at least two boys born between me and my closest sister; decades later, Mom still could not talk about them. There was a mystery aunt I never knew about till I was in my thirties; she was born “different.” When I called a newfound cousin and explained who I was in an effort to understand the family tree more, the cousin exclaimed—before saying hello, “We’re not Jewish! We’re not Jewish!” The family name certainly seemed to hint otherwise.

He used to flail around so badly in his sleep that he and Mom stopped using one bed. He used to get up in the middle of night and drive for hours. I have no idea what happened on those rides, but one evening two giant cops came to the house and took him away.

Days later I started into the dining room, only to be drawn up short by the sight of Dad at the dining room table, fedora on the table, dressed in his best suit and overcoat, with his face in his hands.

Mom pulled me back. “Be extra nice to your dad today,” she whispered. “He’s having a bad day.”

Dad let others give him words because—I think----he was one of those people who swallowed his emotions. I think he used poetry and other things as an excuse to hint at his real emotions. It was other people who gave him the ability to talk about war. He used to quote a Japanese pilot sitting on the deck of* Hiryu*, who looked up and saw the impossible fighters from the Yorktown, poised for a second. They dipped wings and dived. “They looked like pearls falling from a broken string.”

The only hints he gave of his politics were the way he always rooted for the underdog while we watched Sixty Minutes, and an incident with my older brother at the breakfast table. There had been an awful rape a few days earlier, and my brother sneered at it. “Well, what did she expect, with that skirt?”

My dad stood up so suddenly that the table jolted, then slammed both hands on the table. Juice and coffee slopped over. He was older then, balding, middle section softening, a handful of inches shorter than my brother. “Is she says no, it’s rape!” I can see that making sense to my dad, because he thought in terms of underdogs and bullies. My brother was the sort of guy who collected guns and wished out loud that somebody would break into his house so he could use one of those weapons. He specified the race of the burglar with a certain word.

 We never talked about politics,  but he hated bullies,  and he didn't understand how you could hate somebody without meeting them.  "Look at us,"  he'd say,  as us four kids and he and Mom argued about pizza toppings.  Despite the age difference,  I had the same teachers, priests, food, neighborhood, books,  culture,  and religion as my older siblings.  We couldn't share a small pizza.  

Alzheimer’s finally took away his nightmares, then his memories, then his life. I don’t know if his politics can be extrapolated to these times, because his philosophy amounted to, “No bullies.”

Well said.