BIGOTRY, THEN AND NOW -- there was a time when we shrugged it off and protected haters and discriminators

White America believed it was noble of minorities to accept, or downplay racism.

by Brian Arbenz
Yes, summers are always hot in Washington, D.C., but there was much else steaming by the Potomac in August 1973 during H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman’s testimony before the Watergate Committee.
First, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, after maintaining admirable composure and neutrality during Ehrlichman’s stonewalling insistence that his former boss President Nixon was innocent, ended his questioning of Ehrlichman, then made an untoward visceral observation while not realizing his microphone was still on:
“What a liar,” Inouye mumbled clearly to a national television audience.
Though Ehrlichman’s eventual conviction for perjury vindicated Inouye’s words, the former White House staffer’s attorney John Wilson threw a fit in an interview with United Press International during an upcoming break in the hearings.
When asked by the UPI reporter if Senator Lowell Weicker’s questioning of Haldeman, another of his clients, was harsh, the legendarily abrasive and tenacious Wilson responded: “Oh, I don’t mind Senator Weicker.… What I mind is that little jap.”
The TV networks immediately broadcast the audio of Wilson’s slur against Inouye, a Honolulu native and decorated World War II veteran who had his right arm shot off by the Germans while throwing a grenade during a battle in Italy.

So naturally, Wilson was dropped by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, apologized for the remark, was reprimanded by the bar association, lost numerous other clients, maybe faced a boycott and decided to retire (he was 72). The shock and outrage overshadowed the purpose of the whole hearing, and the “WaterHate” 1970s equivalent of a hashtag was born.
Nope.
Here’s how a racist verbal attack, aka hate speech, was responded to 46 years ago:
When informed of Wilson’s statement, Inouye, the U.S. Senate’s first Asian-American member and a passionate supporter Civil Rights laws, told the press, “Well, it must be the summer heat.”
Asked for a specific response, Inouye said, “I think his statement speaks for itself.” And on went the Watergate hearings, uninterrupted by, and to this day not recalled for a racist put down of a Senator and war hero by a lawyer representing the two most powerful witnesses.

Some might say it was better that way. Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the president were the real villains and bringing out the truth about their actions was the hearings’ aim. John Wilson, a master of legal technicalities, was known for trying to provoke judges and prosecutors into actions that could make for an appeal and eventual dismissal of charges against his clients.
A 1975 Rolling Stone article regarding the trials of Haldeman and Ehrlichman in the court of Judge John Sirica, who it so happened was an acquaintance of Wilson, said:
“While most of the other lawyers were careful to address Sirica in tones of courtly deference, Wilson immediately struck a note of aggressive familiarity. Each day the familiarity became more petulant, disrespectful, contemptuous. By late October, Wilson was openly picking fights with the judge…. He claimed to be keeping an ‘error bag.’ ‘It’s getting pretty full,’ he crowed. Naturally, Sirica got mad.”
So, whereas Inouye may have been showing he was too smart to be provoked into a fight with Wilson, the outrage is that Wilson could use open racism as a tool of this provocation and continue to thrive professionally in the epicenter of the lawyering profession.
What did he have to say about his calling Daniel Inouye a “little jap?”
“I consider it a description of the man,” Wilson told UPI. “I wouldn’t mind being called a little American.” Trivializing calling someone by a racial slur, and conflating ethnicity with a person’s nationality reflected Wilson’s lifetime of racism.
That 1975 Rolling Stone story said: “Wilson was a self-proclaimed reactionary who had fought the desegregation of the D.C. Bar Association, and who had long ago belonged to an exclusive lawyers’ club….”
While Wilson smugly walked away from damage after making his racial and ethnic slur, the target of his hate actually enjoyed a rush of public support following the attack, and the Senator from Hawaii quickly garnered favorable publicity from the wider story of his serving on the highly visible Senate Watergate committee.
Sixty Minutes immediately did a profile of Inouye, whose life story and personable, judicious style were instantly winning to an American public starting in the mid-1970s to face their nation’s racism.
Everyone was rallying around Daniel Inouye, but the fact that he had shrugged off being called a “little jap” by a powerful lawyer was part of the equation. In those days, White America believed it was noble of minorities to accept, or downplay racism. Doing so was not making excuses for your oppressor, but showing you had class.
Another case from the early 1970s that involves this misplaced applauding of a person’s refusal to call racism what it is happened not in Washington, D.C., but that other entertainment capital, Hollywood.
Iowa native Marion Morrison, best known to us all as John Wayne, was simply too big to allow to fail. Too big an icon, but more importantly, too big in the bank account; Wayne’s name on the marquee could make a movie a financial success. For instance, Darryl F. Zanuck’s “The Longest Day,” a 1962 portrayal of D-Day, put Wayne in a few scenes that took only four days of work by him. Yet, Wayne was paid the most money of anyone in the otherwise overworked cast of a massive and arduous re-creation of the 1944 invasion.
Wayne also got top billing. Oh, and the actor was 54 and played a commander who was 27 during the actual D-Day landing. Yea, a natural.
But John Wayne was John Wayne, the embodiment of hyper-Americanism to impressionable fans of a movie industry made puerile by McCarthyism and studio anti-unionism.

In 1971, John Wayne launched a series of bigoted salvos similar to John Wilson’s – with the same immediate “all is forgiven” result. In a Playboy interview, Wayne called himself a white supremacist, though he kept wavering in the interview about whether he meant that in the genetic superiority sense. The full quote was: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”
So, was that just saying that more education will enable blacks to live better? In an interview full of outlandish statements – including that American Indians were ”selfishly” keeping their land by fighting off American invaders -- Wayne paints a curious picture of the era of Plessy v. Ferguson during which he lived: “I don't know why people insist that blacks have been forbidden their right to go to school. They were allowed in public schools wherever I've been.”
Wayne revealed himself in this interview as a racist, or at least too myopic and simpleminded to be a qualified spokesperson on the issue (of course, what does qualification matter to someone who condemned Vietnam War draft resisters when he got out of fighting in World War II using two kinds of deferments to avoid the draft?)
As in the case of lawyer John Wilson, those who were poised to hold Wayne accountable for his statements instead excused him. When Dick Cavett asked Kirk Douglas about Wayne’s Playboy interview, the liberal Douglas made no mention of Wayne’s white supremacy self-label, his calling Native Americans selfish, or the fact that in the interview, Wayne called gay men “fags.”
“I’ve made a lot of movies with John Wayne," Douglas said. "We’ve never seen eye-to-eye -- on a lot of things. But professionally, I think he’s one of the most professional actors I’ve ever worked with…. We get along very well. We never discuss politics.”
A wide-eyed Cavett added: “He really is a giant personality on the screen.” Cavett also fails to mention Wayne’s white supremacy or homophobic remarks, then, noting that John Wayne is 6-foot-4, wraps up the whole issue with a jovial, “No wonder you don’t see eye-to-eye.”
The audience laughed at that, and earlier they had broken into applause after Kirk Douglas’ praise of his politically counterpoised co-star’s professionalism, as though Douglas’ refusal to criticize Wayne was the good character of restraint. In fact, it was just economic self-preservation; “The Duke” was too big to allow to fail.
To the left of Kirk Douglas, gifted singer and activist Cass Elliot left us too soon at age 32, dying in London of heart failure during a performing tour in 1974.
The specifics of why she died are related to an obstacle rare among young pop music stars, but which Cass Elliot faced – weight discrimination. And 50 years ago, just as with racism by screen icons and D.C. lawyers, that issue as well was kept out of the spotlight by the victim.
Elliot, a Baltimore native born Ellen Naomi Cohen, was an eclectic talent who loved folk, classical music and Broadway show tunes more than rock. Despite having spectacular singing ability and fluid finesse on stage, it reportedly took Elliot two tries to persuade co-founder John Phillips to admit her to the group that was developing into the Mamas and the Pappas.
Rather than just state candidly the reason for the initial rejection, Cass Elliot, who had struggled with overweight since she was seven, explained it with a legend.

Writer and researcher Linnea Crowther wrote on Legacy dot com in 2012:

“Elliot claimed that she was only invited to be part of The New Journeymen (the band that was later to become the Mamas and the Papas) after she gained three notes at the top of her range – thanks to an unfortunate collision between a copper pipe and her head. In Elliot's version of the story, she had a headache for two weeks after the accident and then, miraculously, she was singing higher. She could then hit the notes in The New Journeymen's songs, and the rest was history.”
Crowther wrote that the rather out-there explanation is false.
“Friends of Elliot and the rest of the group have since asserted that her range was just as impressive before the accident as it was after – there was no change. The real reason she was kept out of The New Journeymen, they say, wasn't a limited singing ability – it was her weight.”
Michelle Phillips, in a 2007 Vanity Fair profile, denied that Cass Elliot had been passed over by the New Journeymen, saying Elliot’s first proposal that she join the group was agreed to.
However, band member Denny Doherty said in a documentary film that Elliot indeed had been turned down at first by John Phillips. Crowther wrote that Elliot “didn't fit band founder John Phillips's image for the group, so she wasn't asked to be a part of it (though she hung around with the band members quite a bit). Eventually, Phillips realized how fantastic her voice made their songs sound, and he got past her appearance and made her a band member. Elliot made up the pipe story to cover for her embarrassment and Phillips's prejudicial attitude."

Cass Elliot, on a 1972 Midnight Special, excels at music, wit and concern for democracy.

After the Mamas and the Pappas broke up, Cass Elliot eagerly started off on a successful and liberating solo career making better-than-ever use of her performing skill.
But despite singing joyously captivating songs like “New Day Coming” and “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” and speaking upliftingly about social justice, voting and individuality, Cass was hampered by societal pressure about her weight from start to the literal finish.
An attempt at starting a Las Vegas act crashed after just two nights because her voice very uncharacteristically became strained while she was singing. Other ailments kept cropping up, until the fatal heart failure in July 1974.
“She’d been reporting symptoms of illness, including regular vomiting for several weeks, which… possibly was the result of strict dieting,” Linnea Crowther wrote. “She’d already canceled a TV appearance after falling ill just before broadcast. A previous diet regime saw Elliot eating almost nothing for four days of every week, according to friends, and that may have done permanent damage as she tried to reboot her career in the late ‘60s.”
It isn’t clear whether illicit drug use contributed. Elliot may not have used drugs much then; she had been greatly cutting back on alcohol recently as part of a health emphasis.
As news of Cass Elliot’s death broke, an incorrect report by a first responder of a half-eaten ham sandwich by her bed launched a fallacy that lives on that she choked to death. In fact, the autopsy said the sandwich had not been touched and heart failure was what killed Cass Elliot.
If the ham sandwich falsehood as an overweight vibe unfairly stays with Elliot’s image, it was errors of omission that were the sins of obituarists and the public memory in 1979 when John Wayne died.
A 5,300-word Los Angeles Times story of marvels and plaudits for the movie legend includes not one mention of “white supremacy” and in unprecedented hypocrisy tells of Wayne’s creed that “a man’s first commitment must be to his duty as his inner instincts define it,” while leaving out the elephant in the living room that John Wayne’s inner instincts led him to evade fighting in World War II.
Journalistic whitewashing also pervaded coverage of Washington lawyer John Wilson’s passing in 1986. Obituary stories by The Washington Post and Associated Press made no mention of Wilson’s segregationist efforts, or the slur against Daniel Inouye.  The Los Angeles Times mentioned the “jap” outburst, but the most straightforward adjective the Times used in describing Wilson was “outspoken.”
The Post’s opening sentence called him “sometimes abrasive, sometimes charming, generally resourceful,” and quoted a one-time opposing lawyer as saying of Wilson: "I thought him very nasty and petty at first. But he just fights like hell for his client. And once you get over that rough, gruff exterior, it's a pleasure to deal with him.”
And thanks to the Washington’s Post’s amnesia about the blunt public racism of one of the capital’s power hitters, it always will be.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA