Some of you might be aware of Boogie Man, the biopic documentary on the Lord of the Vampires, Lee Atwater. Some of you might not. Some might not even be old or informed enough to know who Lee Atwater is. Or was.
I'd like to think otherwise, but just in case, a summary:
Lee Atwater rose to prominence in the 70's and 80's, beginning with campaigns for Republicans such as that noted crusader for racial justice, Strom Thurmond. Showing an aptitude for moral decrepitude, he made an indelible mark on the elections of 1980. In particular, he made popular with Republicans "push-polling", sliming South Carolina Democratic congressional candidate Tom Turnipseed with blatant race baiting (claiming that he was - gasp - a member of the NAACP! Dum-dum-duuuuum!) and anvil-heavy hints that Turnipseed was literally crazy.
Race-baiting was a specialty of Atwater. Famously, he said of Ronald Reagan's new Southern Strategy (in the 1980 elections), "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'— that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites."
In 1988, as campaign manager for candidate George H.W. Bush, Atwater went on to his "finest" moment: the destruction of Michael Dukakis as the Democratic presidential candidate with a 17 point lead. Or, as Atwater put it, "We're gonna strip the bark off that little cocksucker." Observers of modern Republican campaigns will be familiar with the tone of what happened next: no provable direct statements by the official campaign, but somehow, accusations of mental illness made it to the press. They also falsely claimed that his wife had burned the flag. And of course, there was the Willie Horton ad, which - again - was not put out by the Bush campaign. Officially. Wink, wink.
For his efforts, Atwater was crowned chairman of the RNC, where he continued to put his penchant for sleaze to work. In the meantime, Atwater spawned a brood of sleaze-mongering homonculi, including the human potato, Karl Rove.
In 1990, Atwater was stricken with a brain tumor, and died in May of 1991. In his final year of life, Atwater converted to Catholicism and tried to make amends for his lifetime of destroying other people's lives with a few apology letters.
All of this has been well-documented, and the movie Boogie Man does a fair job of showing Atwater as he was. The reason I repeat this little biography and bring up the movie is that it reminded me of another movie, Citizen Cohn.
Roy Cohn was, while not a exactly contemporary of Atwater (he did serve as an informal adviser to Nixon and Regan), at least a kindred spirit. He was not a pleasant man. After being instrumental in the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, he became a crony of Joseph McCarthy. Working on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Cohn was particularly nasty in his zealous persecution of suspected Communists, and was one of the prime movers during the Red Scare. During the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, he was a frothing-at-the-mouth attack dog for McCarthy, vile and self-possessed to the point where he threatened to "wreck the Army". Almost definitely gay himself, Cohn was particularly keen to accuse others of homosexuality, showing no shame in his hypocritical sliming of anyone who crossed him, or even crossed his path. So vile was Cohn's behavior that he once attempted to force a pen into the hand of a comatose and dying man in order to forge his way into becoming a beneficiary of the dying man's fortune.
Roy Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984 and died of complications from it in August of 1986. Without the slightest hint of remorse or sense of decency (or even irony), Cohn insisted until his last breath that he was suffering from liver cancer.
Citizen Cohn, unlike Boogie Man, is a dramatization, and thus prone to "artistic license". It does, however capture the spirit (or lack thereof) of the man.
So, why these two? Why write this? Because one of the common themes in these two cases, as well as other, similar low points, is that there was no countervailing force against these people until it was too late and the damage was done. Cohn was not discredited until his last few months and Atwater only saw the light months before seeing The Light. The media were too afraid of Cohn and McCarthy, and too lazy with Atwater to stop them, and their opponents fared no better. In Atwater's case, the Democrats seemed to be blindsided by his stunning depravity and were unable to mount any effective defense. Atwater clobbered the Democratic opponents of his candidates over and over because - at that time - no one thought the American public would possibly believe his ridiculous, unfounded, and vicious attacks.
This pattern was repeated with disastrous results during the elections of 2000 and 2004, and the run-up to the defeat and occupation of Iraq. Only now, in the last 18 months, has the country, the media, and the politicians seemed to have woken from this nightmare.
It is important to stay awake. I know that this "awakening" has been in the works longer than that; this site, the 50-State Strategy, and a newly vertebrate-d media are good first steps.
But as the above examples show, we can be fooled, and then fooled again. And one day the conditions will be right, the country will be dozing, and the proper circumstances will align in order to allow the next generation of rabid soldiers of hate to rear their ugly, slightly balding heads.
And we must be there.