One Hand Jerking (4 page)

While covering the anti-Vietnam-war movement, I ended up co-founding the Yippies (Youth International Party) with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. After what was officially described as “a police riot” at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, I became an unindicted co-conspirator. I testified at the trial after ingesting 300 micrograms of acid. This was during my psychedelic macho stage. I even tripped when I was a guest on the
Tonight
show, and also while riding the subway during rush hour.

I had been supporting myself by writing film criticism for
Cavalier
magazine, and with college speaking engagements.
Cavalier
declined to publish a particular column—my review of
M*A*S*H
as though it were a Busby Berkeley musical called
Gook Killers of 1970
—ostensibly on the grounds of bad taste, but I learned that three wholesalers had told the publisher they were pressured by the FBI and would refuse to distribute
Cavalier
if my column appeared in it.

And my name was on a list of 65 “radical” campus speakers, compiled by the House Internal Security Committee. Their blacklist was published in the
New York Times
and picked up by newspapers across the country. My college bookings suddenly stopped. Just a coincidence.

When I got married in 1964, John Francis Putnam had an idea for a poster that would be our housewarming gift. He designed the word FUCK in red-white-and-blue lettering emblazoned with stars and stripes. Now he needed a second word, a noun that would serve as an appropriate object of that verb. He suggested AMERICA, but that didn't seem right to me. It certainly wasn't an accurate representation of my feelings. I was well aware that I probably couldn't publish
The Realist
in any other country. Besides, FUCK AMERICA lacked a sense of irony.

This was at the time that a severe anti-Communist hysteria was burgeoning throughout the nation. The attorney general of Arizona rejected the Communist Party's request for a place on the ballot because state law “prohibits official representation” for Communists and, in addition, “The subversive nature of your organization is even more clearly designated by the fact that you do not even include your Zip code.” Alvin Dark, manager of the Giants, announced that “Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist.” And singer Pat Boone declared at the Greater New York Anti-Communism Rally in Madison Square Garden, “I would rather see my four daughters shot before my eyes than have them grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see those kids blown into Heaven than taught into Hell by the Communists.”

I suggested COMMUNISM as the second word, since the usual correlation between conservatism and prudishness would provide the incongruity that was missing. Putnam designed the word COMMUNISM in red lettering emblazoned with hammers and sickles, then presented me with a patriotic poster which proudly proclaimed, FUCK COMMUNISM!—suitable for framing. I wanted to share this sentiment with
Realist
readers, but our photo engraver refused to make a plate, explaining, “We got strict orders from Washington not to do stuff like this.” I approached another engraver, who said no because he had been visited by the FBI after making a plate of a woman with pubic hair. I finally found an engraver who agreed to do it. I published a miniature black-and-white version of the poster in
The Realist
and offered full-size color copies by mail. And if the Post Office interfered, I would have to accuse them of being soft on Communism.

At a midwestern college, one graduating student held up a FUCK COMMUNISM! poster as his class was posing for the yearbook photo. Campus officials
found out and insisted that the word FUCK be air-brushed out. But then the poster would read COMMUNISM! So that was air-brushed out too, and the yearbook ended up publishing a class photo that showed this particular student holding up a blank poster. Very dada.

And then there was Robert Scheer. He had been researching a booklet,
How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam
, to be published by the Fund for the Republic. He was frustrated because he wanted to witness first-hand what was happening in Southeast Asia, but they wouldn't send him. Since
The Realist
had already sold a couple of thousand FUCK COMMUNISM! posters at a dollar each, I was able to give him a check for $1900, the price of a round-trip airline ticket. He traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia, then wrote his seminal report.

Four months after the assassination of John Kennedy, William Manchester was authorized by the family to write a book,
The Death of a President
. Jackie Kennedy submitted to ten hours of intimacy with his tape recorder. Two years later, she insisted on cutting material that was too personal for publication. Bobby Kennedy sent a telegram to Evan Thomas, editor-in-chief at Harper & Row, suggesting that the book “should neither be published nor serialized.” Thomas wrote to Kennedy advisers, asking for help in revising the manuscript, which he felt was “gratuitously and tastelessly insulting” to Lyndon Johnson.

Bennett Cerf of Random House read an unedited manuscript and said it contained “unbelievable things that happened after the assassination.” Jackie filed a lawsuit, and in 1967 the case was settled out of court. Harper & Row made the requested deletions. So did
Look
magazine, which had purchased serialization rights for $665,000. I tried unsuccessfully to obtain a copy of the original manuscript, so I was forced to write “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” myself, imitating Manchester's style.

It began with a true news item. During the Democratic primaries, LBJ attacked his opponent on the grounds that his father, Joseph Kennedy, was a Nazi sympathizer when he was U.S. ambassador to England, from 1938-1940. Then I segued into stories—such as JFK's affair with Marilyn Monroe and LBJ's incredibly crude behavior—that media folks knew about, but not the general public. Next came made-up anecdotes that reeked of verisimilitude, all leading up to a few paragraphs that plunged
The Realist
into the depths of its notoriety:

“During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, Jackie inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. . . .

“Of course, President Johnson is often given to inappropriate response—witness the puzzled timing of his smiles when he speaks of grave matters—but we must also assume that Mrs. Kennedy had been traumatized that day and her perception was likely to have been colored by the tragedy. This state of shock must have underlain an incident on Air Force One which this writer conceives to be delirium, but which Mrs. Kennedy insists she actually saw.

“‘I'm telling you this for the historical record,' she said, ‘so that people a hundred years from now will know what I had to go through. . . . That man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he'd learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realized—there is only one way to say this—he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president.'

“[Handwritten marginal notes:
1. Check with [Warren Commission head] Rankin—did secret autosy show semen in throat wound? 2. Is this simply necrophilia, or was LBJ trying to change entry wound from grassy knoll into exit wound from Book Depository by enlarging it?
]”

My printer refused to print that issue of
The Realist
, and I spent a couple of months trying to find a new printer. I never labeled an article as satire, in order not to deprive readers of the pleasure of discerning for themselves whether something was the truth or a satirical extension of the truth. The most significant thing about “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” was its widespread acceptance as truth—if only for a fleeting moment—by intelligent, literate people, from an ACLU official to a PeabodyAward-winning journalist to members of the intelligence community.

Daniel Ellsberg said, “Maybe it was because I
wanted
to believe it so badly.”

My favorite response came from Merriman Smith, the UPI correspondent who always ended White House press conferences with the traditional “Thank you, Mr. President.” He wrote that I had published “filth attributed to someone of national stature supposedly describing something Johnson allegedly did. The incident, of course, never took place. . . .”

That issue reached a circulation of 100,000, with an estimated pass-on readership of a few million. In 1974, however, I ran out of money and had to suspend publication of
The Realist
, only to reincarnate it in 1985 as a newsletter. “The taboos may have changed,” I wrote, “but irreverence is still our only sacred cow.”

When I originally started publishing, I was truly a lone voice, but now irreverence has become an industry.
The Realist
served its purpose, though—to communicate without compromise—and today other voices, in print, on cable TV and especially on the Internet, are following in that same tradition.

The last words in my final issue, published in 2001, came from Kurt Vonnegut: “Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you.” My own swan-song editorial concluded: “And so this little publication comes to an end, neither with a bang nor with a wimper. Just a deep sigh of satisfaction.
The Realist
has been a way of life for me, but, of course, old editors never die, they just run out of space.”

In the late 1950s, I read an article in
Esquire
by Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of
Punch
, the British humor magazine. “The area of life in which ridicule is permissible is steadily shrinking,” he wrote, “and a dangerous tendency is becoming manifest to take ourselves with undue seriousness. The enemy of humor is fear and this, alas, is an age of fear. As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limit that human ingenuity, courage and understanding can take it. . . . By its nature, humor is anarchistic, and it may well be that those who seek to supress or limit laughter are more dangerous than all the subversive conspiracies which the FBI ever has or ever will uncover. Laughter, in fact, is the most effective of all subversive conspiracies, and it operates on
our
side.”

The article was called “America Needs a
Punch
,” and I took the implications of that title as my personal marching orders. After I launched
The Realist
in 1958, it developed a reputation as a haven for material which could be published nowhere else.

Our first cartoon, unsolicited, by Drury Marsh, was a reaction to the National Association of Broadcasters amending its TV code to ban the use of actors in “white-coat commercials.” The revised ruling read: “Dramatized advertising involving statements or purported statements by physicians, dentists or nurses must be presented by accredited members of such professions.” The cartoon showed a man dressed like a doctor doing a cigarette commercial, then changing to his civilian clothes in a dressing room, going back to his office, getting dressed like a doctor again, and finally telling a patient, “You're going to have to give up smoking.”

Another unsolicited cartoon arrived from syndicated editorial cartoonist Frank Interlandi. It showed a man walking along, spotting a poster of a mushroom cloud with the question, “If a BOMB Falls, What Would You Do?” He continues walking—thinking, thinking—and finally says out loud to himself, “I'd shit!” Interlandi told me that he simply could not conceive of a more appropriate reaction, and he had refused to compromise.