Month: March 2016

Somehow the Cruz campaign is going to have to get along without me. My blood pressure is at dangerous levels, and I’m monitoring it closely.  I have a doctor’s appointment to check on this, and Babbie and I will go to Prompt Care  or the emergency room if necessary.  We’ll try to control it until then by modifying my diet to include more carbs, drinking about half as much beer, increasing my dosage of Lisinopril, getting as much rest as possible, and quitting smoking, with the possible exception of one small cigar in the evening.

We were about to take me somewhere last night at 5:00 when I was about to go on my walk, but I told her to let me go down the hill, have a few beers and my cigar, and we’d check.  I was through thinking about politics or any thing else for that matter.

The second number, which Babbie says is the important one, went from 112 at 5:00, to 95 at 6:50, and 78 at 8:00.  We may be able to manage this, if we keep on top of it.  This is now my number one goal.

I have several others, the most important of which is planning a party for Babbie for our 45th wedding anniversary, Nov. 7th, 2016.  Ideally we’ll have it at the Piedmont Country Club, where Babbie spent a lot of time as a kid.  One of her girl friends is still a member, so it’s a possibility.

I’ve told most of them to save the date, and haven’t gone beyond that.  We have lots of time.  The main thing I need is an idea for a present, which has got to be very special.  In addition there will be a special surprise, which will be awesome if I can pull it off.  There’s one person who owes her a special thanks that day, and I’m going to call in a favor.  It’s a big one, but she deserves it.

I’m starting to get all jacked up about this idea, and may have to take a break.  It’s 4:10 and Babbie just came in to check on me.  She says I’m getting all excited again, and should read a book.  So that may be what I do.

But at least I have a plan.

 

Babbie and I have spent a good amount of time together today.  She and Brendan were worried about me, and they were right to worry.  I was in a manic stage, and I was getting scary.  I’ve put everything in her hands as far as recovering from this couple weeks.  I’ll check the news, but I’m really not that interested.  If Cruz was in Idaho today, and said something, I’ll find out about it soon enough.  Cruz and his campaign are super competent, and don’t need any advice from me.  The guys at the Task Force don’t need my help either.   I’ll keep track of them.  I’m turning the management of Babbie’s mother’s money over to her new stock broker, who I talked to for the first time today.  He’ll come up with the best plan, and I’ll just keep an eye on him.  There’s no problem there.

The best news is that I didn’t come out of this empty handed.  I bought near the bottom, and have enough of a paper profit to take from if we need money.  We will not touch principal, which is a great sin in Babbie’s family.

Not so in mine, but that’s another story.

I’ve been frantic for money ever since Babbie told me she’d be cleaning the toilets.  That really set me off, and I’ve been on a money tear ever since.  I picked up a nice piece in the market after the Cruz Alaska win.  But it looks like the easy money there is gone.  The stock I bought, COP, is now a long term value play.   It’s got a long ways to go, but with short term potential.  I’ll leave it there.  She feels better now, and says she won’t clean the toilets any more often than she always does.  What a relief.  She really had me going.

The day after the Trump hit in Alaska, I began to think about all the times I’d done that before.  After I took the bar exam in September of ’74, I caught up on the local news.  It turns out a guy I hated, and intended to personally take out of the Senate, Mike Gravel, was running for reelection.  I didn’t know he was up.  Al I knew was there was a Democratic Senator in Alaska that everybody hated.  That was all the intel I needed.  My target was identified.  This was so late in the campaign that the only thing I could do was write a letter to the editor of the Republican paper, the Anchorage Times.

I put together the most scathing denunciation I could think of. I wanted to assassinate this man’s character, to hurt him, to piss him off. I wanted him to know who I was, because he’d be hearing from me again.

Well, they printed the thing, because it was a pretty damning letter.  And funny, to boot.  I said he was a fork tongued politician. That was the phrase that stuck with people, because that’s in fact what he was.

My problem was I didn’t have a job yet.  I was so stupid I didn’t realize that attacking a United States Senator, who was getting overwhelmingly reelected, and was known as a vindictive and hateful man, might not improve my employment prospects.  I just thought that letter was pretty  funny, and I was quite proud of it.  Babbie was five months pregnant, with our first child, about to face her first winter alone, thousands of miles from her family and friends. That letter changed my life.

That’s the story I want to tell, after this is all over.  It’s a story of my wife.

But I don’t have time for all that now.  I want to sell that story to a literary agent, and see what they can get for it.

I need money for what I’m doing.  I’m going to get an advance for what I’m about to do.  And also, the story of my wife’s life with me.  Have wife, gun, will travel.  It’s been quite a ride.

The only explanation of the betting markets is their lack of American involvement.  This is a very good thing.  We don’t want anyone affecting a political race by gaming the betting markets, which would be very easy to do.

Englishmen have a very hard time understanding American politics.  To understand our politics, you must understand our people.  Gun control is a good example.  They have absolutely no idea how powerful the gun lobby is.  They’re just ignorant.

I could have caught the odds on Cruz wining the Presidency at 66-1.  They went to 50-1, and have only dropped to 25-1.  After Saturday’s results, that’s absolutely ridiculous.  Anyone who tells you they keep a close eye on the betting markets is a dope.

 

 

B.A.A.H. was Bob Clarke’s idea.  He liked the acronym because it sounded like a sheep.  The inner Hammond circle thought this was funny.

Hickel sat out the 1982 election, but was back in 1986, and Hammond was still not going to allow him to get his hands on that money.  I, personally, always thought Hickel was sort of crazy.   This was a bizarre man.   He dispatched one of his chief lieutenants, Bob Clarke, to take him out.

When lived in Juneau I stayed in a spare bedroom, and lived with Bob.  I met him on the Hammond campaign in 1978, and hadn’t seen him since.  I was quite surprised at the offer.  Free lodging and a place to shower and cook.  The thing is, I hardly knew Bob.  I was a fun guy to be around, but this was very generous, and Babbie and I had money problems.  I didn’t realize it, but I had been accepted as a foot soldier in the Hammond mafia.  And they had a specific role for me to play  — political hitman, a guy who would say or do any damn thing they needed, as long as it was true and legal.   I’d made my bones with Hands for Hammond, and I had a role to play.

The funny thing is, looking back on it, that’s probably what I looked like.  I was a pretty big guy, with a bunch of scars on my face.  And I had the attitude.  Plus, I was a state senator.  That made me a twofer.  These bastards should have paid me.  In fact, there were a lot of people in politics who were a little afraid of me.  If you were somebody I didn’t like, I let you know by just looking at you.  I tried to keep that to a minimum.

So I was brought in to form this group.  Bob himself could not be part of any of this.  Any political figure who got caught doing it would be in political trouble, and Bob was too  closely associated with Arliss Sturgulewski, the candidate Hammond wanted instead of Hickel.  Hickel already hated me, so I didn’t care.  But I was the House Minority Leader now, and anything I did reflected on them, and a lot of them were behind Hickel.  I was endangering my status as Republican leader in the legislature.  But Hammond didn’t want for me to do anything for him in the legislature, he had plenty of people who could do that, like Rick Halford  And I didn’t care one way or the other.  A title.  Still, I was hoping to pull this off without it being associated with me.  This was pretty  rough play.

Bob hated Hickel, and had done as much opposition research on a guy as you can do, and he’d found gold.  He could more or less prove that Hickel was a thief, except not in a court of law.  You had to connect the dots.  So he writes out this scathing indictment of Hickel, alleging, but not necessarily proving, a career of crime.  Like I said, rough stuff.  We had to get somebody to say it.  We found some college kid, Paul Olsen, who was a friend of the Sturgulewski family who said he’d do it. I think this kid was 19.  He had guts, he really did.  I explained what we were doing to him, he understood, and said he wanted to do it.

So I have my secretary, Ann Williams open up a post office under the name BAAH.  Now we existed.  Paul Olsen was the chair and only member.  How we handled the money, I don’t know.  Nobody ever paid me to do any of this stuff.  I was a volunteer.  So Bob buys this full page ad in the Daily News, and lays into Hickel.  This was stuff so bad the Daily News didn’t want to be associated with it.  I can’t remember exactly what was in it.  I trusted Bob, and the content wasn’t my job, which was very specific.

So all hell breaks loose, and everybody wants to know what the hell BAAH is, and who the hell Paul Olsen is.  Bob waits as long as he could, and after a few days of pressure we had to produce Paul.  I set up a news conference, and he had to make a statement and take questions.  I didn’t really want to be there, but I had no choice.  I just tried to stay away from the cameras.

This kid was a champion.  Now that I think about it, I’m going to look him up.  Maybe he wants to follow in my footsteps, and be a political hitman.  He did exactly as I’d told him, and didn’t screw it up.

But hell, the entire Anchorage media saw me there.  Everybody knew who’d done it.  But, what the hell, Hickel hated me anyway.  I was 44 years old and in my prime.  I thought I could do anything.