A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (68 page)

What
did
occur as a result of Ted
Kennedy's actions, in concert with the Right's reaction to the
American Left - anti-war protests, the gay liberation movement, the
sexual revolution, the drug culture, treachery and lack of
patriotism -
was
the success of Reagan, of
conservatism, and of the Republican Revolution that followed.
Richard Nixon rehabilitated his image in concert with Reagan's
carrying on policies he started. Ted Kennedy became the despised
face of the Left. That was
his
penalty.

The Vietnam War coincided
with very bad economic times. Labor strikes and general malaise led
to the near-downfall of New York City. In 1968-69, Mayor John
Lindsey campaigned for and won re-election on the strength of his
association with the Super Bowl champion Jets and the World Series
champion Mets. But New York continued a long slide in which crime,
the Mafia, the unions, racial and social strife tore the very
fabric of the Big Apple. The 1950s swank of Madison Avenue, of
Frank Sinatra, of Fun City, which was the New York of 1962, was
gone by 1969, seemingly never to return. In 1977, the
Summer of Sam
when a
deranged killer stalked the streets, New York was seen as corrupt,
depicted by movies like
Serpico
; its streets dirty, its
people unlikable; or a source of laughter as seen through the
film
Saturday Night
Fever
. A '70s laugh track.

New York's
panache
as
the
great city of the
world was replaced by Los Angeles, the "in place" to be in the
1960s and 1970s. Nixon himself said of 1968 in general, and his
home state in particular, that "this is the place" he would rather
be; astride human history in 1968. L.A. was viewed as the place
where they had gotten it right in race relations, and its defense
industry was booming. Hollywood had a golden era in the 1960s and
1970s:
Dr. Strangelove
,
In the Heat of the
Night
,
Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
,
Patton
,
M*A*S*H
,
The French Connection
,
The Godfather
,
The Godfather
II
,
Three Days of
the Condor
,
Chinatown
,
Marathon Man
,
Rocky
,
Network
,
The Deer Hunter
and
Apocalypse Now
.

Just as Los Angeles was taking its place on
the world stage, buoyed by its great sports teams, the prestige of
USC and UCLA, of Hollywood and its defense industry, San Francisco
- the mirror of New York - was suffering a similar fate. Its image
was also captured on film, by the Clint Eastwood movies that spoke
for the conservatives, increasingly at odds with activist judges
and liberal lawmakers who invested their emotions on behalf of
criminals instead of decent, law-abiding taxpayers.

The social dynamic of the
1970s directly correlated with the social one. L.A. was symbolized
by its great Dodgers, Trojans and Lakers teams, playing on the
national stage in gleaming stadiums. San Francisco had taken a back
seat to gritty Oakland, its teams playing to sparse crowds with no
stakes in stadiums that smelled of urine. There was no glamour,
no
panache
in The
City. Its politics took a Leftward turn for the worse, its
businesses brought to a standstill by dockworkers, labor strikes,
and Mob-controlled parking lot vendors. In 1981, the gay lifestyle,
given such free reign, began to spread the AIDS virus.

In 1961 the United States launched the
Mercury space program. In 1962, John Glenn circled the globe. The
"space race" with the Soviet Union, one of the most dramatic
symbols of the Cold War, was on in earnest. The U.S.S.R. got off to
a fast start and consistently led the U.S., but American
technological superiority prevailed.

Amazingly, America's great space
accomplishments occurred simultaneously with the ravages of Vietnam
and great social angst at home. Nevertheless, in 1969 Apollo 11
fulfilled President Kennedy's admonition that we "land a man on the
Moon, and return him safely to Earth."

The first man was Neil Armstrong, who like
many of the astronauts had an advanced degree from the University
of Southern California (because NASA built a "bubble" on campus for
the pilots to train in).

"One small step for man, one giant leap for
Mankind," said Armstrong.

America's landing a man on the Moon, an
achievement repeated a couple of years later, not only meant that
the U.S. had defeated the Soviet Union, but it reflected this
nation's exceptionalism. Since the founding of the country, America
had consistently achieved things that were unthinkable anywhere
else on Earth; the building of things, the completion of projects
on this soil years - decades - before any other country did
anything similar.

The Trans-continental railroad; the Los
Angeles Aqueduct; the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden
Gate Bridge, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge; the Tennessee
Valley Authority, Hoover Dam; the Manhattan Project, jet
propulsion, the breaking of the "sound barrier," missile
technology; medical advancements, elimination of childhood
diseases, maladies that be-deviled man for all times; movies,
automobiles, highways, scientific breakthroughs; accomplishments
previously considered unthinkable, futuristic and fantastic; were
routinely made into American reality!

In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia
defeated Republican Gerald Ford of Michigan for the Presidency. At
that moment, the Left may well have felt that they were indeed the
"winners" of American history; that the victory achieved by Lyndon
Johnson and their party 12 years earlier, its Great Society ruined
by Vietnam, had been given second life.

Carter was a direct result of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964-65; considered moderate, yet friendly to blacks
and palatable to whites. He represented a Southern base that
political pundits knew would be the battleground for the future of
America. The nation had "won" the civil right battle and extricated
itself from Vietnam, using Watergate shame to incorrectly blame
Nixon.

During his four years in
office, however, America experienced what Carter himself called a
"malaise." It was an era of bad hair, bad music, bad clothing
styles, bad drugs, and bad morals. All the negatives of the 1960s
with none of the political passion. America had lost her way.
Nobody used the term "Cold War" anyway, preferring
detante
, which Reagan
said was the relationship a farmer has with his turkey prior to
Thanksgiving. Under Carter, we were the turkey.

Carter and his party mis-read American
public opinion, thinking that Vietnam had worn us out, sapped us of
our jingoism. His appeasement of the Soviets while they engaged in
adventurism in Africa, Latin America, Asia and increasingly, the
Middle East, enraged the Right. Our economy was tepid; gas lines,
high interest rates, home ownership and the "American Dream" a bad
nightmare instead.

In 1980, Reagan opposed Carter and won in a
landslide. Between 1981 and 1989, the American economy boomed under
Reagan. The stock market and real estate exploded. Reagan restored
patriotism and built up the national defense, particularly through
the funding of the Strategic Defense Initiative. It bankrupted the
Soviet Union.

Reagan's Vice President, George H.W. Bush,
was elected President in 1988. On his watch, the Berlin Wall fell
in 1989, and on Christmas Day of 1991, the Soviet Union had
collapsed. The United States had won the Cold War. Had the U.S.
achieved this political victory by virtue of winning a war in which
40 million people had died, but the result was the same as it was
in the early 1990s, historians would have judged it to be worth the
cost, just as they judged winning World War II worth that cost.

"Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without
firing a shot!" declared his partner, the conservative British
"Iron Lady," Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In 1991, Bush launched the
Persian Gulf War, pushing Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and
establishing America as the dominant force in the Middle East.
Combined with American ally Israel's having won Arab wars in 1967
and 1973, and the Soviets loss of Afghanistan in the 1980s, there
was a sense that President Bush's "New World Order" was now the
dominant global ethic, with America holding a special place of
power over and above all previous conceptions. Author Francis
Fukuyama's
The End of History and the Last
Man
(1992) outlined this world. He was 16
years off the mark. There were more wars to fight, at home and
abroad.

When the San Francisco 49ers won the Super
Bowl in January of 1982, it had an enormous effect on The City. Its
long-held "superiority complex" was long gone by then. There was
simply no use trying to pretend. The town, its people, its
politics, all it stood for, was seemingly low rent. It was not New
York, and New York was in the doldrums. Los Angelenos could care
less whether San Franciscans made fun of them. San Francisco was
irrelevant. L.A. simply went forth and produced excellence. In all
ways that people measure greatness, Southern California dominated
Northern California.

While sports victories really have no direct
connection with society, somehow they seem to spur people, to give
them confidence and even hope. For years, the 1962 Giants had been
a source of The City's nostalgia, of a better time not just on the
field but in life. The collapse of the team mirrored the collapse
of The City.

Suddenly, in 1981 the 49ers went out and
beat the hated Los Angeles Rams (who seemed to have been sapped of
their "precious bodily fluids" once they moved to Anaheim) twice.
Led by a former Stanford coach (Bill Walsh), an ex-Notre Dame
quarterback (Joe Montana) and a rookie safety from Southern Cal
(Ronnie Lott), the 49ers captured the Super Bowl from the
Cincinnati Bengals. In 1984 they proved it was no fluke; their 18-1
Super Bowl champs of that year are one of the greatest teams ever
assembled. By January of 1995 they had won five Super Bowls and
totally reversed the long inferiority complex of San Francisco.
This time, they had something real and actual to feel superior
about. The Rams were on their way to St. Louis.

Perhaps it was coincidence, but the 49ers'
rise coincided with the Bay Area's rise. First, the Silicon Valley,
stretching from San Francisco to San Jose, became the hub of
America's economic and technological engines, its tentacles
spreading into every area of global life.

Then, in 1992, two Jewish Democrat women
from San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein (a moderate) and Barbara Boxer
(an unabashed liberal), were elected to the Senate from the Golden
State in the "Year of the Woman" election. This reversed years in
which political power and influence, embodied by a conservative
boys network characterized by the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald
Reagan, had dominated California - and Western - politics.

The 1992 elections were a strange reversal
also of the Reagan-Bush era; 12 years of Republican domination.
Bill Clinton's victory was a result of odd twists of fortune not
unlike the "what ifs?" that embody the Nixon-Kennedy relationship.
In some ways, the election of the opposing party mirrored England's
shift to Labor over the Conservative Winston Churchill after
winning World War II.

When the U.S. ousted Saddam from Kuwait,
resulting in wild celebrations and parades when the victorious
troops returned home in 1991, George H.W. Bush had a 91 percent
approval rating. His re-election seem assured. What happened, in
part, was that Bush and the GOP became victims of their own
success.

When the United States won the Cold War it
produced an immediate "peace dividend," which manifested itself in
the form of greatly reduced defense spending. The result of this
were mass layoffs in the defense industry, located principally on
the 405 corridor of Los Angeles between Westchester and Long Beach;
i.e., Howard Hughes's L.A.

This snowballed into a mild recession.
Clinton and his campaign advisor, James Carville, somehow managed
to paint this as "the worst economy since the Great Depression."
Bush still would have won in 1992, except that a Texas billionaire,
Ross Perot, ran as an independent, siphoning off the Republican
votes otherwise ticketed for the incumbent President. Clinton won
with well under 50 percent of the vote, and was re-elected in 1996,
again with less than 50 percent when Perot threw his hat in the
ring a second time.

The job losses in Los Angeles hit during the
worst decade in the region's history. In 1991, L.A.P.D officers
were videotaped hitting a black motorist, which sparked riots in
1992. A stray gang bullet hit a USC football player. Orange County
declared bankruptcy. Los Angeles experienced its worst sports
decade. The only championship won by a Southern California team was
UCLA's 1995 NCAA basketball title, which was quickly dissipated by
coach Jim Harrick's firing over an expense report. USC's football
team fell on hard times. The Dodgers were mediocre. The Angels blew
the 1995 pennant in a September meltdown.

The Silicon Valley and San Francisco, on the
other hand, experienced boom times. The beneficiary was President
Clinton, who inherited a world in which "peace broke out all over"
in wake of the Cold War's end. When the Republicans swept the 1994
mid-terms, they kept his "feet to the fire," pushing through
Republican policies that spurred an economic recovery. The
"Information Superhighway" created the Internet and its enormous
investments. All those smart tech-savvy defense workers, laid off
by Cold War victory, landed on their feet in the new dot-com
era.