Vice President on a commercial airliner?
Did I see the Vice President on a commercial airliner in this film? Even in the early 1960s, there was Air Force 2, the vice president's plane
shareAlthough highly unlikey to happen it can. President Nixon flew on a commercial flight in the seventies. Under these circumstances the flight is called Executive One but for whatever reason Nixon's flight kept its scheduled call-sign. Enjoyed the film.
shareWhen Nixon took that commercial flight from Washington to California it was all for window dressing and the press. Air Force One flew empty right behind it in the event he had to return to Washington quickly.
shareWas there an official Air Force Two in the early 60s? The VP could use government planes but I don't know whether he had a specific plane of his own then. Anyway, besides having him traveling on a commercial flight what I thought was even more astonishing was that he had no security or even an aide with him, which is NOT fathomable. What did he do in NY, take a cab from the airport?
By the way, Sen. Cooley didn't get off a bus -- it was a trolley car, which were still used in Washington until 1965. He took it to demonstrate how frugal he was. A lot of congressmen travel in similar low-class style, though most of the public doesn't realize that (a lot of them certainly do everything they can to make sure they go in luxury!). A&C is one of the few film records of the old DC trolley system.
Right on about Nixon, wpgbfw.
One thing to remember is that until Nixon, the office of vice president was basically a sinecure. The vice-president did nothing other than preside over the senate. It was Nixon who turned it into an important office.
Nixon didn't turn the vice presidency into an important office -- Eisenhower did. The VP has no assigned duties other than what the president allows (aside from presiding over the Senate). Ike was smart enough to realize that by the middle of the 20th century it was no longer possible to shunt a VP off onto unimportant matters or keep him out of the loop. This became even more evident after his heart attack in 1955, during which period, it must be said, Nixon acted modestly and responsibly.
An irony is how Nixon, after he became president, reversed course and marginalized Spiro Agnew as much as possible. Partly this was due to his growing megalomania, but much of it reflected the fact that Nixon realized he had made a huge mistake by putting someone so ignorant, inept and unqualified into the #2 spot, apart from Agnew's being a public thief and congenital liar to boot, though Nixon didn't know this then. Given Nixon's involvement in Watergate, we're actually lucky Agnew was forced out ten months earlier due to his criminal activities; it would have been an unmitigated disaster to have such a bigoted, undereducated ignoramous running this country, his moral turpitude aside. (G.H.W. Bush similarly sidelined poor Dan Quayle during his tenure; Quayle wasn't qualified to be vice president but he was an honest and decent guy and the US would have coped with a Quayle presidency if it had come to that. If only this Bush had sidelined Cheney!)
There had been a few important VPs before -- as far back as, say, Martin Van Buren, who was a major force under Andrew Jackson -- but you're correct, until the 50s the job rarely carried much power. Or a private plane.
Lol a bit late with this reply but didn't Johnson on the day of Kennedy's assassination flew in to Dallas on Air Force Two?
shareThe President and VP always fly separately, precisely in case of an accident. When JFK arrived in Dallas LBJ was already there to meet him, even though they had all just left Ft. Worth about 15 minutes earlier! Johnson flew in with Gov. John Connally, so they would be there to "greet" Kennedy. But whether Johnson's plane was officially called "Air Force Two" at that time is uncertain. I think the VP's plane didn't get that designation until later on, when the office actually got its own plane. I don't believe that was as early as 1963, but I could well be mistaken.
(Also greeting JFK, but for real, was the Mayor of Dallas, Earl Cabell, who was elected to Congress the next year by unseating a rabid right-wing Republican named Bruce Alger. Alger had been part of the mob that attacked Lyndon and Lady Bird in a Dallas hotel lobby in 1960, spitting on and pushing them, and was seen by many as an extremist and embarrassment. In the wake of Kennedy's murder, most Dallas residents realized they needed to tone down the city's reputation for violence, and ousted Alger, who ran behind Barry Goldwater in the '64 election. Most Republican leaders then thought that threatening, calling names at, and spitting on a Senator and possible Vice President went beyond the pale. Times have changed.)
Are you implying that Republicans today would endorse that behavior?
"H.I., you're young, you got your health... What do you want with a job?"
No, I'm not implying. I'm stating precisely that, outright. Not all Republicans, of course, but when Tea Partiers held rallies against Obama's health care bill several months ago many of them carried signs not only painting Obama as either Hitler or Stalin, but some held racist signs and one man actually did spit on at least one black congressman entering the Capitol; another congressman was called a *beep* all caught on tape. (Some TP'ers deny this but the audio and visual records are clear.) And not one of the Republican members of Congress who addressed this or other rallies denounced such tactics and name-calling -- most copped out by saying they "hadn't heard it". Maybe not, but does that mean you shouldn't denounce such things? You can only call such behavior out of place if you actually heard or saw it? Eventually a few GOP House leaders made perfunctory statements that they don't go along with some of this, but still left it vague and hypothetical, not having the courage or integrity to forthrightly denounce the people who perpetrate that kind of crap, or even the behavior itself.
Look what happened to Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, a "moderate" Republican, who at a town hall meeting in 2009 was attacked by other Republicans present when he denied the far right's lies that Obama was either a Muslim or foreign-born. He was heckled by his own party members, an incident that presaged his surprise defeat by the unqualified Christine O'Donnell in the 2010 Senate primary, which enabled the Democrats to keep a seat they would almost certainly have lost to Castle. (John McCain was famously booed during the 2008 campaign when he made a similar defense of Obama's religion and background at a campaign rally.) Such incidents have been widespread for the past year and a half, at rallies, on websites, TV interviews, you name it. Few other Republican members of Congress have even been willing to flatly state that Obama was born in the US: most say they "have no reason to believe he wasn't" and fatuous garbage like that. (Not even Glenn Beck agrees with this stuff.) No guts, no integrity, just shameful playing to the base, anything to win...and it certainly helped them this November.
And yes, this is a big contrast to American politics 40 or 50 years ago. There was certainly gut-fighting, there were false accusations and the like, but most politicians got along and respected one another and refused to indulge in or abet blatantly violent or name-calling behavior. In the 1960 election, Nixon repeatedly denounced anti-Catholicism against Kennedy and renounced the support offered him (Nixon) by the KKK. Goldwater declined to make political capital out of the arrest of Johnson's closest aide on a morals charge (homosexual solicitation) in the midst of the 1964 campaign. Hubert Humphrey refused to make an issue of the meddling by some Nixon supporters to sabotage the Paris peace talks during the 1968 campaign because there was no evidence Nixon was involved. People had some sense of morality, of limitations even in politics. And people of different parties actually worked together and found common cause on much legislation: there was a great deal of inter-party cooperation, and division within parties on many issues...unlike today, where cooperation and compromise are virtually non-existent. Both Democratic and Republican presidents from FDR through Daddy Bush worked in reasonable harmony (obviously with many exceptions) with the opposition; Eisenhower even famously said he got much more help from Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn than during the two years his own party was running Congress. JFK and LBJ had good working relationships with Republicans in Congress and often got GOP votes on many issues; and even Nixon and Ford had fairly good relationships with congressional Democrats.
Nothing even remotely like that is present in American politics today, and unfortunately it's because both parties -- but particularly the Republicans -- have lost their ideologically broad mix and have migrated to the extremes. And the Republican extreme is beset by many people who scream violence and hatred. The defeated GOP Senate nominee in Nevada, Sharron Angle, called for "second amendment solutions" if the vote didn't go the Republicans' way. The imbecile Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota has called for "revolution in blood" (she claims this is what Jefferson preached) to remove the government. And a Republican House candidate in Texas last month publicly called for the violent overthrow of the Obama administration, including if necessary the murder of the President, and not one Republican denounced him. Here on IMDb I ran into a Tea Partier who expressed the hope that Obama would be assassinated, to save the country from socialism -- though like most TP'ers, he hasn't a clue as to what actual socialism is.
When JFK was assassinated, it hit everyone hard, and Republicans of all political stripes -- in the days when the GOP was a broad-based party with liberals and moderates as well as conservatives -- were as strong in their genuine mourning as anyone else. (Barry Goldwater, a close friend of Kennedy, was devastated.) I guarantee that if Obama were murdered, while of course the leadership of the GOP would profess sympathy, and others would at least remain silent or make pious statements of supposed mourning, a lot of their base would be overjoyed and make little secret of it...and GOP leaders would denounce little if any such behavior, out of pure political calculation -- and fear. That too would be a long way from 1963.
Sorry for a long reply, but my great fear about this country is that its politics are being pushed by the extremes, and that few "leaders" have the guts to really stand up and say "Enough!" But it's people on the GOP side who call for violence, and sometimes act that out. Not all Republicans, not even most...yet those supposedly responsible ones mostly skulk away like cowards from denouncing uncivil (or worse) behavior from their supporters, rather than standing foresquare for honorable, constructive and respectful disagreement. Democrats certainly have their faults and share some blame for the partisanship and divisions that afflict our nation today. But it's not Democrats who preach violent overthrow of the government or the murder of presidents, nor their leadership who fails to denounce such things.
Politics were certainly different. One wouldn't see a president running for reelection today using anything as negative and deceitful as the infamous "Daisy" commercial. Only a Democrat of the 1960's could get away with suggesting that his opponent would bring on a nuclear war.
Politics were very different then, but I'm amazed you think that they're not as negative as the "Daisy Girl" commercial...which was only two years after this movie came out. Today, vastly worse stuff is aired at every level of politics, from local through national. The truly vicious, factually unfair and slanderous kinds of campaigning we see so often today were largely the brainchild of the late Lee Atwater, the legendary take-no-prisoners Republican strategist of the 1980s who by his own admission would say and do anything against a rival candidate in order to win. So bad (if effective) was he that as he was dying of a brain tumor in 1991 he actually made calls to many of the politicians he had worked against, asking them to forgive him.
The so-called "Daisy Girl" ad in 1964 (which ran only once) actually never mentioned Barry Goldwater or the Republicans at all, not even Goldwater's frighteningly offhand advocacy of giving Army brigade commanders the option to use "tactical" nuclear weapons. Outwardly, the ad was merely making Johnson's point that we needed a sure hand on the nuclear "button". Obviously, it was indirectly targeted at Goldwater, whose own loose talk about nuclear weapons and opposition to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and other such restraining measures had been loud and long. Because Barry is today remembered in a kind of nostalgic haze of fondness after his later, more mellow years, most people forget just how dangerous and unyielding Goldwater's talk about nuclear weapons was held to be by most people in the 60s. No one accused him of wanting a nuclear war but there were great fears that his reckless kind of talk and actions could indeed bring one on.
But though you clearly intended it as a partisan swipe at Democrats, in fact, you're right: only a Democrat could get away with that kind of suggestion in the 1960s -- for the simple reason that it was only a few prominent Republicans like Goldwater who called for a larger nuclear arsenal with fewer controls, and for using such weapons with many fewer restraints than existed. (Goldwater, for example, had vociferously advocated using nuclear weapons in Cuba during the missile crisis, and later in Vietnam.)
Anyway, however "negative" that commercial may have been, it's almost genteel compared to the libelous garbage that candidates of both parties spew these days...even against members of their own party.
Don't you think you're overlooking some of the extremism on the Democratic side, especially during the recent Bush presidency? People on the left got pretty outrageous, too. They also portrayed Bush as Hitler, with Swastikas, etc. I'm an Independent myself, but I do think it is disingenuous to blame all of this on the Republicans. The Democratic party has also been strongly influenced by extremists- those on the Left. I agree with you that this has all gone too far, and I sure wish both sides would tone it down, and act a little more gentlemanly. But this goes for both sides. I think you have whitewashed the sins of the Democrats a little. But your point is well taken, and it would behoove both parties to chill out a little bit. Oh, I meant this as a reply to your posting of Nov. 16, not this post. It was in reply to your lengthy analysis of party politics, with your view that the Republicans were the more guilty of the two parties.
shareWell, I think I did say that the Democrats were guilty of negative politics as well (as I believe I made even more explicit in the post you replied to). You're absolutely correct that there are extremists on the left who aren't exactly fair-minded or temperate and make some outrageous and dishonest statements or do blatantly stupid and offensive things like comparing Bush to Hitler.
That said, my main points were two: first, how the mainstream politicians of each party deal with the extremists on their own side, and second, how those extremists affect the politicians' own actions. And this is where the Republicans are far worse than Democrats. What Democratic politician ever compared Bush to Hitler, or didn't refute people on the left who used extremist language? In fact, several years ago one of the most left-wing Democratic officeholders, Rep. Maxine Walters of California, was denounced by other Dems when she made some intemperate remarks against Bush (I don't recall the substance of them, they had to do with Iraq, but nothing as bad as calling Bush a Nazi or something truly lunatic). Dems joined in denouncing MoveOn.org when it called General Petraeus "General Betray-us". No Democrat to my knowledge has ever attended a rally where supporters used the most extreme kind of talk against the Republicans that the Dem failed to refute it, and certainly never endorsed such language. And without any question, no Democrat ever countenaced any notion that Bush or Cheney or any other Republican should be assassinated, or called for resort to "second amendment measures" if an election didn't go their way. While many Democrats questioned, and still do, the legitimacy of Bush's election (as do I), that's an issue of a proper vote count and biased Supreme Court, not one of Bush's own illegitimacy or ineligibility to hold the office.
By contrast, as I pointed out, many GOP officeholders have addressed rallies in which hundreds of audience members have carried signs comparing Obama to Hitler, and not one has denounced that sort of thing -- except when cornered by the media, and even then in a hurried, brush-off, generic way. Republican candidates have called for violence to "correct" an election that didn't go their way, and virtually every single Republican Representative refused to even acknowledge that Obama was an American citizen: when asked, most ran away from the question (and sometimes from the questioner) by saying the formulaic "I've never seen any evidence that he isn't," as phony and dishonest a statement as has ever been made by supposedly responsible people. It was a Republican congressman, Joe Wilson of SC, who called out "You lie!" at the President of the United States during his State of the Union address, then tried to deny he'd done it (like any coward), until public pressure grew so high that he had to offer a grudging apology, and even then the GOP leadership refused to rebuke him or even say anything more than that he should say sorry and forget it. (And Wilson was rewarded for his disrespect with a flood of donations from Republican activists amd support from many people like Sarah Palin.) What do you think the Republicans would have said had a Democrat yelled that at Bush or Reagan? They would have raised hell and probably tried to remove the guy from office. But in fact no Democrat has ever shown such public disrespect to a President. And with Obama, of course, the racial aspect comes into play as it could never have with other presidents, and again, not a single Republican has denounced racist signs or language at Tea Party rallies and the like, and they've even gone so far as to deny that such things even happen, the audio and visual evidence notwithstanding. Even between Republicans, it's bad. Christine O'Donnell, the unbalanced loony who won the GOP Senate nod in Delaware (and thereby cost the Republicans an otherwise almost certain victory) insinuated that her primary opponent, Rep. Mike Castle, was a homosexual, with an on-line ad saying something like "I've never seen any evidence that Mike Castle is gay. All I'm saying is...". Etc., etc., etc.
Sorry for another long reply -- and this thread is way off topic, much to my chagrin -- but the evidence plainly shows that while both parties have their extremists, the GOP routinely surrenders to or indulges theirs, and goes along with them, to a vastly greater extent than even the most rabidly partisan and left-wing Democrat. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Republican Party consists almost exclusively of conservatives of varying degrees. The once large bloc of genuine Republican moderates and liberals is nearly non-existent, and control of the party is firmly in the hands of its most conservative members. This means that not only do Republicans have to play up to and mollify the most right-wing elements of their party in order to survive politically, many such far-rightists are now officeholders themselves. The Democrats have lost much of their old conservative wing (which was never as conservative as the Republicans'), which is as a big loss for them as is the loss of moderates and liberals for the GOP, but they're still a broader-based party ideologically and in their elected representatives than the Republicans. The fact that there are many actual moderate and conservative Democrats who routinely oppose the Dem majority in the House, for example, compared to the Republicans' mindless uniformity on virtually every major issue, is further testament to the fact that the Republicans are far more narrowly based and thoroughly beholden to their far-right wing (and hence do nothing to upset them) than are the Democrats to their left...which in any case is less numerous, less extreme, less influential, and absolutely less enamored of violence, than are their counterparts on the right.
While Hobnob has said many things which are not true, I do not feel like rehashing them here. I would merely point out one incident, the famous spelling bee attended by VP Dan Quayle.
For decades Quayle has been a laughingstock because he seemed to correct a student who spelled "potato" correctly. However, the teacher had misspelled the word on a placard, and Mr Quayle responded as he did in order not to humiliate the teacher.
He took all the ridicule on himself, rather than have those children see their teacher as an ignorant boob. And he has never since corrected the record. Quayle was always a man of class AND intelligence, though he had such an innocent face that his political opponents could call him an idiot and the public thought that maybe he was.
It was character assassination -- common now but still fairly rare in those days. If I had to pinpoint the time when civility went by the wayside, it was during the Reagan administration and probably during the hearing for Judge Bork.
Today the Left is at least as adamant in enforcing ideological purity on their side as the Republicans. In 2004, Howard Dean famously said that he represented the Democrat wing of the Democratic Party. And it was shortly after that when the Democrats decided to purge Senator Lieberman from the party, just a few years after he was their vice-presidential candidate.
Actually, nothing I said above is "not true". Inconvenient facts for you, perhaps, but not untrue. Every single statement I made was accurate.
As to your point about Dan Quayle: I don't at all recall that the teacher had a misspelled placard anywhere, or that Quayle was holding it and didn't want to embarrass the teacher. When the kid spelled "potato" correctly Dan specifically told him he'd forgotten the final "e", and the child dutifully appended what he clearly knew to be a mistake. If Quayle was indeed trying to spare the teacher's feelings, which I know no evidence of, he would have done better not to have told the kid to add the erroneous e -- thereby not only making himself look foolish but, far more seriously, making the child look bad and hurting efforts to teach proper spelling -- but rather to have congratulated the kid and then, off-camera, told the teacher he had caught the mistake and pointed it out. Better to have embarrassed one teacher, privately, than himself, the innocent kid and the entire school system publicly by propagating such a stupid mistake. (Not to mention that, if your version is true, the teacher ended up embarrassed anyway, as her mistake would -- and did -- come out.) But I do not believe that the event unfolded as you describe: it was Quayle's mistake, pure and simple. However, even if your version is correct, Quayle handled it in the worst way possible.
All that said, the stuff Quayle endured may have been harsh and at times unfair, but unfortunately that's the sort of routine criticism politicians endure. However, there's a big difference between attacking a pol for his beliefs or qualifications or policies or misstatements (which is mostly what Quayle endured), and going over the line by calling him a Communist or Nazi or liar or fraud, as many Tea Partiers and their GOP allies have done to Obama. Republican office holders generally don't go to that extreme but do little to renounce it, and the few who do often pay the price (to cite Mike Castle in Delaware again, whose downward slide began when he rebuked Tea Party types at a town hall meeting in 2009 who called Obama a socialist and claimed he wasn't born in this country; John McCain was famously booed at a campaing stop in 2008 when he similarly rebuked a stupid woman who made similar attacks). Recently, the Treasurer of the Orange County (CA) Republican Party sent out an email substituting Michelle Obama's face on a gorilla and has refused to resign for this blatant racism, even though even the county's GOP chair has demanded she quit. Nor is this an isolated incident. The present Governor of Maine has said he would tell the President of the United States to "Go to hell" if he ever came to his state. What Democrat -- what other governor anywhere -- has ever said so outrageous a thing?
Incidentally, I agree with your take about Robert Bork. I thought at the time, and still do, that the campaign that was launched against him was outrageous and unfair. I don't believe Bork should have been on the court but allowing a Supreme Court hearing to degenrate into a p.r. fight was disgusting. Of course, the Republicans had done a similar (if tamer) thing to Abe Fortas in 1968, when Johnson nominated him to be Chief Justice, and scuttled his nomination. And since Bork the GOP has been just as pernicious against Democratic presidents' nominees as anyone was toward Bork. Orrin Hatch denounces Democrats who threaten to filibuster a Republican president's nominees but then goes ahead and does precisely that to Democratic presidents' nominees. If the GOP was really so pure of heart they'd act more responsibly. These days, whole blocs of Republicans routinely vote against any Democratic nominee, just as many Dems routinely vote against any Republican nominee. This never happened up into the 70s and even early 80s, when members of both parties mostly voted to confirm appointments (not just court, but cabinet, agency heads, etc.) unless there was a truly major issue. These days, mindless partisanship reigns far too much of the time. And this isn't helped by a fanatic like Michelle Bachmann, in 2006, calling House Democrats "un-American", or the likes of Donald Trump currying favor with the GOP's mainstream by resurrecting the birther issue yet again. (Yes, I know, The Donald claims credit for Obama's getting the state of Hawaii to break its rules and issue the so-called long-form birth certificate, but the point is that Trump could only make this an issue because a majority of GOP voters insisted Obama wasn't born in this country -- 63% before the long form was released.)
Unfortunately, politics today makes the partisan skirmishes of fifty years ago seem like the proverbial clambake. Back then, the parties were broad-based and members not only worked together honestly but socialized with one another off-hours (as is shown in Advise & Consent). Today, with parties, particularly the Republicans, appealing to an ever-narrowing base, extremism and lies are becoming routine partisan tools -- monkey wrenches thrown into the machinery of government. And it's the American people who are paying the price.
I will simply say that I disagree entirely with your characterization of Republicans as the party of lies and extremism. And I will point out that Gallup polls conducted annually for more than 20 years show that about 37-42% of Americans describe themselves as conservatives, but only about 17-22% call themselves Democrats (Google it). So how can it be that Republicans, representing about twice as many Americans, and thus appealing directly to the most voters in our center-right country -- how can it be that they are the extremists and not the Democrats, who represent the left-wing fringe? It is the Democrats with the narrow base, not the Republicans.
I think you have this wrong, and a great many other things wrong. But we do agree that Advise and Consent is an excellent movie which presumably captures a particular moment in time.
Well, I don't want to get much further into this, but you misstate what I said. I did not characterize the Republican Party as a party of lies and extremism. I said many in the party are right-wing extremists -- not mere conservatives, but the rightist fringe I cited -- and that many of its members do in fact lie, or worse.
You also distort the poll figures you cite. By your own statement, 37-42% of Americans describe themselves as conservatives -- not "Republicans"; yet you go on to state that twice as many people call themselves Republicans as Democrats -- which is not what the numbers you yourself cite say. "Conservative" and "Republican" are not synonymous (though a majority of conservatives would be Republicans, or at least normally vote R).
In any case, party i.d. fluctuates constantly, but most polls over the past several years show Dem identification around 32-38%, and Republican i.d. around 20-25%. Some polls show higher or lower figures but broadly speaking that has been the usual result. Your 17-22% Dem figure is way out of the norm for any poll I've ever seen, and if correct is an aberration. It's far closer to the usual Republican numbers, in fact. A plurality of Americans, regardless of ideological leanings, don't identify with either party nowadays.
Anyway, we're obviously never going to agree on anything, even on a basis for any meaningful discussion, so it's best to leave it here, especially as we're way off base from the thread topic. I'll simply cite the late great Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who famously and accurately said, "You're entitled to your own opinions; you're not entitled to your own facts." I'm sure you'd say the same thing to me, which is why I don't think we can have a good discussion, only an argument, which I'm not much in the mood for.
But yes, we can at least agree on the merits of this excellent film. See, there can be a basis for some agreement and discourse, can there not?
Our disagreements aside, my best to you.
Yes, a VP on a commercial airliner is beyond the pale now. Though members of the Cabinet have been on commerical flights to save money.
Whatever aircraft the VP is aboard is always, "Air Force Two." VP Nixon visited the St. Lawrence Seaway prior to the formal opening by Pres. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II. It was "a big deal" in our community when "Air Force Two" landed at Massena, NY. And when the president is aboard the helicopter - always crewed by Marines, it is "Marine One."