His name is Henry the K., but we leftwing children of the revolutions of the 1960’s always just referred to him as “Satan.”
People who truly know me know that I came out of the Vietnam War protest era, although I actually worked for Richard Nixon’s aptly named CREEP at age 15 in 1972, at my mother’s behest, for which I will always forgive her.
However, in 1968, I went door to door with my Cold War Liberal father campaigning for “Clean Gene” Eugene McCarthy, a forgotten Democratic politician who ran on a strict antiwar banner in the fateful Democratic primaries of 1968. I was only ten hears old.
The well known riots at the Democratic Convention came later that year. I remember those also. Mayor Daley turned his police loose on protesters and many relatively peaceful protesters were badly beaten by police. A nearby park in Chicago was taken over by protesters and named “People’s Park.” Inside the convention, an equal amount of chaos ensued, with the party coalescing around establishment candidate Hubert Humphrey, who did not run on an antiwar ticket. I remember Humphrey well too. He seemed a decent enough man at the time.
The Chicago Seven were later placed on trial for conspiracy after the demonstrations. They included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and a number of others, mostly Jewish. They were represented famously by Jewish radical attorney William Kunstler, who has always been one of my favorite people. Although my father was against the Vietnam War, he really hated those hippies. He used to inveigh against “Ay-bie Hoffman.”
By 1974, I’d added long hair, rock music, LSD and marijuana to my high school studies. I hung out with hippies, potheads and acidheads. I remember once David A H, a bisexual hippie senior who nevertheless always left me alone. He used to take windowpane LSD by putting it right on his eyeball.
Nixon was one of our villains. You have to understand that in that era, if you identified with the hippie movement, still going gangbusters in 1975, Nixon was probably automatically your enemy. Hating him was almost a cultural requirement. He represented, all in one man, of everything we were against. The perfect human voodoo doll.
One day David said matter of factly, “Nixon always looks like he hasn’t shit in a month.” A good one-liner!
I always felt that that was one of the best summaries of Tricky Dicky I’d ever heard.
K. was Nixon’s right-hand man. Although he was not an attractive man, ponderous, overweight, nerdy, homely and bespectacled, he had an odd reputation as a playboy, often seen escorting various actresses in public. I remember one morning at the breakfast table my father was looking at the latest pic of him with some comely model draped on his arm.
“Boy,” my father remarked. “This administration’s really got problems if Kissinger’s their playboy.” A good zinger!
The more I read about this man, the more convinced I am that he is something approaching pure evil. He has to be a psychopath of some sort. He’s one cold-blooded bastard at least. He look in his face and you see a man with heart of ice. There are probably few people as hated among my anti-Vietnam War cohort as this man. I’m getting very impatient waiting for him to kick off so I can dance on his grave. He’s stuck around far too long already.
Just hurry up and die already, Henry!
