Myth

Despite thousands of contested ballots in Florida’s Palm Beach County, a lot of people are calling on Al Gore to act like a mensch and concede the election to George W. Bush–as they contend Richard M. Nixon did in 1960 when he lost to John F. Kennedy amid rumors of fraud. Even the veteran New York Times reporter R.W. Apple on Thursday quoted from Nixon’s memoirs to this effect.

It’s certainly true that Nixon claimed he spurned advice from President Eisenhower to dispute the election results in order to spare the country a constitutional crisis. (He was saving that for 1973.) And, indeed, Nixon’s version of events now borders on accepted fact. But it’s a myth and a false precedent.

Here’s what really happened: In 1960, Nixon lost to Kennedy by 113,000 ballots of 68 million cast–0.2% of the overall tally. In several states the vote was excruciatingly close. Allegations surfaced that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s machine and Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson’s cronies in Texas fixed those states’ ballots, stealing their combined 51 electoral votes from Nixon and tipping the election. (The final electoral count was 303-219.)

The fraud rumors sent Nixon’s people into conniptions. Republican officials pressed hard for a recount bid, though Eisenhower was not leading the charge. Early on, the president did endorse the idea, but he soon changed his mind, provoking bitterness among Nixon’s aides. According to Nixon’s friend, Ralph de Toledano, a conservative journalist, Nixon knew Ike’s position yet claimed anyway that he, not the president, was the one advocating restraint. “This was the first time I ever caught Nixon in a lie,” Toledano recalled.

More to the point, while Nixon publicly pooh-poohed a challenge, his allies aggressively pursued one. Much of this history has, incredibly, been forgotten as biographers such as Stephen E. Ambrose have propounded Nixon’s line. But a glance at the 1960 newspapers shows that GOP leaders tried to undo the results. They knew it was a longshot, but the effort continued right up until the electoral college certified Kennedy’s win on Dec. 19.

GOP leaders had reason to conduct even a doomed campaign. Even if they ultimately lost, they reasoned, they could still taint Kennedy’s victory. They could claim he had no mandate, galvanize their rank and file and build a winning issue for upcoming elections.

So on Nov. 11, three days after the election, Thruston B. Morton, a Kentucky senator and the Republican Party’s national chairman, launched bids for recounts or investigations in not just Illinois and Texas but also Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. A few days later, Robert H. Finch and Leonard W. Hall, two Nixon intimates, sent agents to conduct what they called “field checks” in eight of those 11 battlegrounds.

In New Jersey, local Republicans obtained court orders for recounts; Texans brought suit in federal court. Illinois witnessed the most vigorous crusade. Nixon aide Peter Flanigan encouraged the creation of a Chicago-area Nixon Recount Committee. As late as Nov. 23, Republican National Committee general counsel H. Meade Alcorn Jr. was still predicting Nixon would take Illinois. On Dec. 2, Morton dramatically flew into Chicago while a Cook County recount was underway.

All the while, leading Republicans, as well as Nixon himself, claimed that the vice president had nothing to do with the efforts. But the involvement of such close aides as Finch and Hall makes such an assertion implausible. More likely, Nixon was shrewd enough not to muddy himself directly in the grimy business because, as he later wrote, getting involved would mean “charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.”

In the end, these efforts came to naught. In some cases (New Jersey, Illinois), the GOP obtained recounts but they didn’t change the final vote. In other cases (Texas), judges rejected the GOP’s bids for recounts. As it turned out (as several academic studies have concluded), some fraud existed, but not enough to alter the outcome.

Still, because of the ruckus that the Republicans kicked up, they succeeded in tainting Kennedy’s triumph. Nixon proved canny enough to wage his battles while escaping opprobrium. Nixon may have been a loser, but he was nobody’s fool.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial campaign does nothing else, it ought to excise the mythology of liberal Hollywood from our popular consciousness once and for all.

The notion that Hollywood marches in ideological lock step — left foot always forward — has long been useful to publicity-seeking congressmen, right-wing culture warriors and moralists-on-the-make from the Legion of Decency to the Traditional Values Coalition. In fact, there was a time, not so very long ago, when the mere mention of Jane Fonda’s name was so remunerative to conservative fund-raisers’ direct mail campaigns that they should have put her on retainer.

Like so much in politics, it all works very nicely — until you consider the record:

Schwarzenegger is traversing a well-marked path from entertainment celebrity to elective office, and all who have preceded him have been Republicans, foremost among them Ronald Reagan. Age and Constitution permitting, he probably could have been elected to a third presidential term. There’s former U.S. Sen. George Murphy and the late Rep. Sonny Bono, who came to politics through song and dance. Clint Eastwood was probably America’s most famous small-town mayor.

The last time a certified Hollywood liberal had a real shot at elective office it was 1950, when one-time actress Helen Gahagan Douglas — whose husband was actor Melvyn Douglas — ran as the Democratic candidate for one of California’s U.S. Senate seats. She, of course, was defeated in a bruising campaign by a young Orange County congressman named Richard M. Nixon.

The 1960s generally are regarded as the time when liberalism spread Kudzu-like throughout the film and television industries, choking out every other mode of thought and expression and producing a spate of culturally subversive and anti-Vietnam War films. Like a majority of Americans, most people who worked in Hollywood in those years came to oppose the war, and it’s safe to say that a fair number inhaled along the way. Yet it was also an era in which so-called mainstream stars like John Wayne and Bob Hope maintained considerable influence.

And, when all was said and done, the guys with the real power — the ones in suits who run the studios — recruited as their industry’s new international spokesman President Lyndon B. Johnson’s former chief of staff, Jack Valenti. And so he remains today, Hollywood’s sonorous paladin of unshakable centrism.

David Freeman, novelist and screenwriter, is also a shrewd chronicler of his company town.

He points out that the real Hollywood — as opposed to the imagined one — always has encompassed both ends of the ideological spectrum. “Jimmy Stewart, a deeply conservative and sincere Republican, and Gregory Peck, a very liberal and committed Democrat, were the opposing poles of their era,” he said. “Louis B. Mayer thought of himself as a Republican plutocrat. Big money usually is conservative; this is not news. Over the last generation, it’s certainly true that liberals have been noisier, but there always have been plenty of conservatives, though an ingrained sense of good manners made them quieter about it.

“There are vocal people on the left — Barbra Streisand, for example — but on the other side there are people like Tom Selleck, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and Arnold, who have made their positions known. In fact, now that conservatism is fashionable, Republicans everywhere, including Hollywood, have become louder. There’s been a change in the country, and Hollywood always reflects changes in the country. It doesn’t lead change; it reflects it.”

Thus, said Freeman, since Sept. 11, most Hollywood Democrats — like most Americans — have adopted a more traditionally conservative approach to issues of physical security.

Take, for example, his friend and former Yale Drama School classmate Roger L. Simon, a mystery novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and filmmaker whose best-selling Moses Wine mysteries involve a protagonist who came to private detection as a pot-smoking Berkeley radical. Nowadays, Simon — whose latest novel is “Director’s Cut” — also maintains a popular blog that generally supports Schwarzenegger, whom he describes as “a straight down the line, middle-of-the-road Republican.”

“When I came here 30 years ago,” Simon said, “I was known as a radical. I was considered too left wing for creating a hero out of Moses Wine.

“Now, I consider myself nothing. Since 9/11, my politics are completely based on individual issues. I was definitely in favor of war on Iraq.”

Even when he began writing films, Simon recalled, Hollywood’s “liberalism was never universal. When I wanted to pitch stories with leftish themes, I never went to the so-called baby moguls, who made such a big deal out of being former SDSers. They were afraid of those stories, but other — ostensibly more conservative — people in the industry wanted to appear open. Hollywood is a business. You can have any opinion you want, if your movies are making money.”

There is no better evidence of that — and no stronger refutation of the liberal Hollywood myth — than the movie industry’s most decisive intervention ever into California politics.

In 1934, the muckraking novelist, socialist tract writer and dietary crank Upton Sinclair stunned the state by winning the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. His platform called for adopting a modest universal old-age pension and seizing idle factories and farmlands so that they could be handed over to cooperatives of the unemployed. Sinclair was favored to win the general election, and that prospect rattled the California establishment to its marrow.

Among those most alarmed were the mostly Republican, mostly Jewish founding fathers of the film industry. They had a particular reason to loathe Sinclair, who, as a relatively well-paid but unsuccessful screenwriter and producer, had turned on the industry. The year before he won the nomination, Sinclair had published a book, “Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox,” based on a series of interviews he had conducted with the recently deposed Fox Studios founder. The book, as historian Kevin Starr points out, was “an anti-Semitic document in which Jewish villains were everywhere. Ostensibly an expose of Hollywood and Wall Street, the Fox memoir had a strong secondary theme as well: Hollywood as the Cosa Nostra of American Jewry.”

Hollywood responded as it never had before — or since. Louis B. Mayer collected a day’s pay from every one of his employees making more than $100 a week for Sinclair’s Republican opponent. Irving Thalberg, Metro’s production chief, produced dozens of phony newsreels, subsequently distributed free to theaters up and down the state, in which seedy, suspicious looking immigrants with vaguely Russian accents endorsed the Sinclair program: “Vell, his system worked vell in Russia. Vy can’t it vork here?”

Sinclair lost and returned to his tracts and novels, though he never worked in Hollywood again. Paradoxically, he later would win the Pulitzer Prize for “Dragon’s Teeth,” one of 10 novels he wrote about the adventures of an anti-Nazi secret agent, Lanny Budd.

Somehow, like the Schwarzenegger campaign, it all suggests that Hollywood lives not by ideas left or right but by Joseph P. Kennedy’s famous dictum: “Sooner or later, everybody does business with everybody.”

Ken Jennings wants you to know he didn’t name his trivia game “Kennections.”

“It’s really an unpleasant name,” the “Jeopardy!” champion turned host says of the quizzes now published weekly by Mental Floss. “We have to lead with that. It was suggested by an editor at Parade Magazine, but it doesn’t look good or sound good.”

But Jennings loves the quizzes themselves, which are now collected (kellected?) in “The Complete Kennections.” The Simon & Schuster release, on shelves July 29, follows earlier Jennings books that included more writing. Those include: “Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs,” “Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks,” “Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids” and “100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife.”

Jennings recently spoke about his books, AI and why trivia matters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was writing books always a goal?

I was an English major in college. I wanted to write and to teach, but writing didn’t seem like a practical choice. I was also doing a double major in computer science, and in 2000 it was absurdly easy to get a job at a friend’s startup, even if you were a terrible programmer, which I was.

Writing about geography and myths and fabled places of the afterlife all seem to make sense coming from the brain of a “Jeopardy!” champion.

It’s easy to imagine the same kid in an elementary school library, reading about these things in the World Book encyclopedia during a rainy recess. That’s my origin story. I was just a sponge for weird information. That’s my origin story right there.

I thought of “Jeopardy!” as a fun, crazy summer and did not think it would be my life, so I tried making each book less about “Jeopardy!” and trivia than the one before it.

Is the information in your books trivial, or do you think it’s important to get readers to understand geography and the way our culture passes down myths and tales?

I’m a believer that trivia is not just a bar pastime, or even a way for little Lisa Simpsons to get told they’re smart into adulthood. I always felt trivia was kind of a universal social good, a way to enjoy cultural literacy.

I feel I’m part of the last generation that had to justify having nerdy interests. It was kind of shameful and made you the punchline of jokes in movie comedies and stand-up. Today, it seems self-evident to everyone younger than us that, well, of course you would just be obsessive about lunchboxes or about “Battlestar Galactica” or fossils. That’s totally normalized, and it’s actually good.

But I’ve also been mourning the loss of generalists, people who knew a little bit about everything, which is what “Jeopardy!” celebrates, but it’s not fashionable. We live in a siloed society of specialists. And I really think we’d be better off if everybody knew a little bit about everything.

I do think it’s good to know trivia is not something that makes you better than other people. It doesn’t exist to show off or even to make you feel smarter about yourself. Ideally, it should bring people together and make the world more interesting and make you a more sparkling conversationalist.

“Jeopardy!” and your books strive to make learning facts fun. Is there a lesson there for educators?

I think that’s the beauty of trivia. I wrote a series of books for kids with amazing facts because I liked that kind of book when I was a kid. And you can see it in a classroom, when you see kids’ eyes light up about information and about serious subjects and about knowledge when it’s presented in a fun way, especially with narrative.

Narrative is the secret sauce. It just makes kids think the world is an amazing adventure and you just have to be curious and dig into it. But that gets beaten out of us, and then a lot of us at some point just specialize in one thing. You need to remind people that learning is not a chore. If it’s not fun, you’re doing it wrong. And trivia is very good at that.

Every good “Jeopardy!” clue tells a story in some way, saying, here’s why you should want to know this or here’s what this might have to do with life and the reason why this is not random minutia, which I think is a lot of people’s stereotype of trivia nerds. A trivia question can help you connect it to other things. Trivia is just an art of connections.

That’s certainly true in your “Kennections” book.

I grew up doing crosswords, riddles and rebuses. I’ve always liked trivia that rewards not just the recall of the right fact but has a little more mental clockwork involved so you have to solve some puzzles. You have to analyze the clue and figure out why it exists and what it’s asking or what it’s not asking, what was included, what was omitted. There’s a lot of analysis that can kind of lead you to the right answer by deduction, even if you don’t know the right fact off the top of your head. One half of your brain is just trying to recall these five facts, but you’ve got this other half that’s trying to figure it out and step back and take the big picture. And it might be something outside the box.

The art of it is finding five things that fit in the category but that can have double meanings: Commodore is both a computer and a member of a Lionel Richie combo.

You write that “Kennections” consumes your life — you go into a bagel store and wonder if you can build five questions out of the flavors. Is the problem that in your day-to-day life, you’re constantly seeing things and thinking things this way? Or is the problem that you can’t say this out loud because you’ll make your family crazy?

That’s something I learned early — that being this trivia-loving kid has the potential to be annoying. But my kids know what they’re getting from me at this point. And they both have the gene themselves. One is obsessed with Major League Baseball, and one is obsessed with the history of Disney theme parks, and they have encyclopedic knowledge every bit as awe-inspiring and freakish as I had as a kid. And I’m proud of that.

Do you worry about living in a culture that’s so polarized that facts aren’t even universally received and where AI takes over people’s need to be curious, allowing students to take shortcuts in learning?

I think an oligarch class is going to deliver us a combination of both, where the AI will not only create reliance on it but give us bad, counterfactual information about important issues. And it’s really something I take seriously. It’s really something we need to be pushing back on now.

You don’t want to trust an AI summary of a subject or AI’s take on an issue without understanding who controls that algorithm and why they want you to hear that information.