From The Vault Of Art Shay: Richard Nixon At 100

By Art Shay in News on Jan 23, 2013 7:00PM

1960: Dick and Pat Nixon fared well in South Dakota, addressing farmers and other malcontents who believed his accusations—picked up from the McCarthy slush pail—that there were too many Commies around ready to hand us over to the Kremlin.

Nixon found friends, if not solace, amongst the Dakota farmers (their grandkids currently reaping the polluting profits of oil-fracking!)

Dick and Pat Nixon in 1968, working Chicago\'s financial district for votes at the expense of poor Hubert H. Humphrey, who might have won if he had deigned to go into Grant Park and ask the Hippies how he could help them that last night of the Convention, instead of sneaking up the Penthouse elevator to watch his TV reruns of the evening and trying to make sense of the commentariat.

Not trusting Nixon\'s reputation as a poorly shaven debate confrere, Kennedy checks to see if his wallet is still safe in his pocket.

It was at interviews like this one before the 1960 Chicago debate that Nixon read the media\'s interest in him as hostile. The one time JFK spoke to me, I like to tell the more socially conscious of my offspring, he asked me one down to earth question which I answered just as four Secret Service myrmidons took\r\nhim away: \"Where can a feller take a whizz around here?\"

A button-dispensing Republican contingent from Rockford, Ill. appeared, as did some chaste cheerleaders shaking ass for their favorite Dick.

At an Arkansas-Texas football game in 1969, Nixon stands out like an easly findable Walso amidst a covey of well-hatted Texas millionaires from a plain seat in the 8th row. \r\n

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art Looks back at Richard M. Nixon, who would have been 100 this year.)

The fault, dear Brutus, says Cassius, is not in our stars, but in that we are the underlings. Quaker or not, our 37th President , Richard M."I'm not a crook." Nixon, whose corpse has just turned 100, was a master of blaming others, the heavens, fate , bad luck- anyone but himself for being a world class mendacious fuck- up and opening the Presidential gates to such other lightweights as Mitt Romney, John McClain (the air hero who-while boasting of the inadequacy of his Vietnamese jail cell, couldn't remember the number of houses he and his wife owned), and Sarah Palin, McCain's unavailing stopgap low IQ fashion-mom.

Like all potential Time Inc. writing hotshots I worked on outing the scandalous behaviors of the sanctimonious elected: the names and addresses of their girl (or boy) friends; how they came by easy money; how to reach their families if they died doing the Nelson Rockefeller routine-slipping out of the sexual saddle the family sorta knew about; head striking the Capitol tarmac or worse, bouncing on the front page of The Washington Post—then as now a heck for leather snitch.( I used to write Sunday features for their Think Section in the sexy Sixties.).

The only thing I added to the Nixon refuse pile: Confirmation of the fact that when they lived in a small university town with their two kids, they were in a babysitter club and left town owing six couples in their group five or six evenings of baby-sitting. Not really Capitol crimes, but enough to bring up the poem one often hears covering the Nixons. A colonial poem: I like thee not Oh Dr. Fell and why that's so I cannot tell, but this I know and know full well, I like thee not Oh Dr. Fell."

Not exactly a smoking gun, but an aspirating Molotov cocktail.

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.