Mister, we could use a man like WHO again?

All right, dummy up, all ‘o youz!

Here’s the story of the other U.S. presidential campaign scandal from 1972, though this one really was nothing more than third-rate.

And it’s about a transgression not by that bigoted vindictive liar Richard Nixon, who had treasonously sabotaged a peace agreement in 1968 to get in the White House in the first place, then obstructed justice four years later to stay there. Nope, this lapse in integrity was by the progressive George McGovern.

It was so tiny a lapse it is historically irrelevant -- forgotten by all but the most hardcore political history wonks. Which is why I am the person writing about it.

If a burglary and cover-up didn’t prevent President Nixon from trouncing the liberal senator from South Dakota by 22 percentage points in the popular vote, a little identity sleight of hand by a popular actor on behalf of the McGovern campaign didn’t stave off the resounding 1972 landslide loss either.

For context, consider the landscape of McGovern’s race in the autumn of that year: much of his own Democratic party is not with him, the AFL-CIO under the powerful George Meany has declined to endorse him, his central issue the Vietnam War has been wound down (and the Nixon campaign’s 1968 sabotage is still secret).

                                     
The '72 Race on the Airwaves: Each side defines Senator McGovern: He says he will make things fairer for the average American. Nixon says he would leave us defenseless.

As though his problems weren't enough, McGovern had to eat an unprecedented amount of crow days after the Democratic Convention by replacing his vice-presidential running mate Tom Eagleton with Sargent Shriver. As the fall campaign went on, the voters were not terribly concerned about the Watergate break-in, instead fearing McGovern’s perceived “radicalism.”

Now, addressing this r-word label, comes perhaps candidate George McGovern’s last hope: a TV ad featuring the very face of meat-and-potatoes American conservatism.

The ad opens with Carroll O’Connor striking exactly the seated pose of his signature character Archie Bunker when Archie would be in his iconic living room chair, the spot from which he would launch brusque and uninformed conservative salvos weekly to TV audiences.

In this ad for McGovern, O’Connor decries, “the radicalism of the present administration.”

Nothing misleading about that. But O’Connor then says:

 

“Radicalism is what any conservative must try to remove from authority, and that is why I, as a conservative man, am going to vote with confidence for Senator George McGovern.”

 

Calling Nixon radical makes perfect sense; his war on drugs is a radical right purge of minorities, his invasion of Cambodia opened the way for Pol Pot, and his agricultural policies would soon enable corporations to obliterate the small family farm. That’s the stuff of Juan Peron or Mussolini.

Whereas the “radicalism” label is correct, just who is the labeler? Carroll O’Connor is recognized on sight as the snarling bigot Archie, but off the set of the wildly popular and influential CBS show “All in the Family,” he is an eclectic and educated liberal.

O’Connor, who would go on to do TV ads for Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 runs in presidential primaries, is not the man who continually lauded “Richard E. Nixon,” in debates with his “pinko” and “Polack” son-in-law Mike. That was Archie Bunker.

It wasn’t O’Connor who tore into his wife’s cousin Maude’s pieties by declaring, “This country was ruined by Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” – or, for that matter, who started each show by harmonizing that, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!”

All that, as well, was Archie.

So just who is it who is telling the voters he is “a conservative man” in this ad for the most liberal Democrat to run for president?

Deceptive, or at least pandering though it may have been to represent Carroll O’Connor to the voters as Archie Bunker, the normally hyper-ethical Senator McGovern could read his dismal poll numbers during the fall of 1972. After the ad ran, McGovern talked it up, and did nothing to disabuse viewers who weren’t up on the fact that O’Connor was no Archie Bunker.

In a broadcast appearance by the candidate in Los Angeles featuring live phone calls from average voters, McGovern, as reported by the L.A. Times, said:

 

“I want to thank Carroll O’Connor for his endorsement…. Carroll O’Connor is known to most of you as Archie Bunker. The only thing we ask is that all of you who like Archie Bunker vote for George McGovern and Sargent Shriver.”

 

Those who liked Archie Bunker were in large part what demographers would shortly call “Nixon-crats.” These were blue collar working families who celebrated the clichéd social conservatism trumpeted each Saturday evening by the fictional Queens loading dock worker. Archie’s full-voiced pronouncements demonstrated no awareness of how his family’s comfortable life at 704 Houser St. was possible because of FHA mortgage guarantees, the G.I. Bill, minimum wage laws, farm subsidies, and the right to form unions – all given to him by the FDR he calls the ruin of America.

This array of once cherished New Deal reforms, obscure to the voting public by the 1970s, wasn’t working as a rallying call any longer for the Democratic Party. The liberal O’Connor seemed to realize this, never alluding in the ad to the traditional Democrat economic egalitarian ideal, content to fashion himself a conservative.

And George McGovern, for all his idealism and 2 am-acceptance-speech devotion to principle, also was a politician. Playing to that tendency of the American public (or as his endorser might call them, “dingbats”) to confuse TV actors with their characters is the kind of thing to which politicians will resort when they’re down by 22 points.

Brian Arbenz enthusiastically backed George McGovern in 1972, even to the point of welcoming the endorsement of "a conservative man" who appeared to be named Archie. Hey, in elections ya do what ya gotta do. 

WEST'S SLY STORY - The serial imposter who abused trust, hearts and souls in 1990s Cincinnati

He was glib, well dressed and punctual, and he dispensed pharmaceuticals and performed outpatient surgery with the competent air that reassures any hospital patient.
 

Thomas D. West of the Cincinnati suburb of Erlanger, Ky. had everything you could ask for in a doctor.

Except a diploma.

For 14 months in 1990 and ‘91, West, then in his early 30s, impersonated a doctor as he regularly roamed four hospitals in Cincinnati, donning medical scrubs and carrying stethoscopes and fake IDs while performing outpatient procedures, injecting people with medicine, and making false prescriptions.

Sometimes he would arrange to meet up with people at a particular hospital after getting to know them in restaurants and learning of their ailments.
Other times West would enter emergency rooms and patients’ rooms to seek out victims.

The procedures West performed are known to have included two pap smears and the treating of a leg lesion with a medicated cream and an unidentified type of acid.

The game was up in August 1991 when West was arrested for allegedly stealing travelers checks from one of the people receiving his treatments, who was also a police officer. The police investigation that ensued blew the lid off the 32-year-old West’s bogus medical practice.

Though all of West’s “patients” consented to the procedures, his lack of a medical school education changed everything: the pap smears got him charged with two counts of “gross sexual imposition” and the lesion treatment was alleged to be “felonious assault.”

West’s list of charges also included making false prescriptions, practicing medicine without a license, use of a scalpel on one person and of a hypodermic needle on two others, trespassing at one of the hospitals, and – as the original check thievery charge indicates – West was no more scrupulous away from hospitals. He was charged with stealing $11,000 from a girlfriend.

For Cincinnati’s Good Samaritan, Christ, University of Cincinnati, and Jewish hospitals, nationwide news reports that an imposter with no medical training had unfettered access to innocent people’s most personal realms brought the public image catastrophe of CEOs’ nightmares.

Yet, the hospitals seemed to adopt a PR strategy of downplaying this gigantic breach of safety and dignity. The Associated Press reported:

“Spokesmen for University and Good Samaritan hospitals have said they see no reason to change safety procedures. The hospitals use security cameras, require doctors to produce identification on demand and restrict access to drug cabinets.”

Nancy Strassel, spokeswoman for the Greater Cincinnati Hospital Council, also exuded ice water in the veins, telling media the Cincy area’s 34 hospitals were not exceedingly troubled by the revelation of West’s charade.

“Security at hospitals is something that is continually monitored,” she said. “I can't say that there has been one specific thing hospitals looking at this have found they needed to change.”

One absolute change was Thomas West’s residency. He was sentenced to three years in a prison at Lima, Ohio after pleading guilty to 12 charges in October 1991 in return for prosecutors’ agreeing to drop 13 others.

The hospital spokespersons’ statements sounded so understated perhaps because of the prospect of civil litigation by the people West had conned.

Indeed, three years later, the Ohio Court of Claims ruled that one of the four institutions, the then state-owned University Hospital, was 60 percent liable for the damage to three of West’s victims. The exact awards would be determined later.

"We will be arguing for high damages. These people suffered an invasion of the deepest privacy rights," John Metz, a Cincinnati attorney who represented the three victims, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The morning newspaper and its afternoon counterpart the Cincinnati Post quickly began digging into West’s past as soon as news of his 1991 arrest broke. And the deeper reporters probed, the stranger the story of Thomas David West became.

For starters, he had changed his name a few years after he graduated from Holmes High School in Covington, Ky. in 1976 as Thomas Wietholter. (Who am I to judge? I changed my legal name in my 50s -- but read on.)

The Enquirer reported that West/Wietholter had worked as a police dispatcher in nearby Florence, Ky. from age 21 to 25. He resigned for unspecified personal reasons, but his departure followed complaints he had passed himself off in public as a police officer and displayed other bizarre behavior on the job.

The Florence Police Chief told the paper West seemed to undergo an identity change, dressing, styling his hair, talking and walking in the manner of a particular Florence police officer, whom the chief would not identify. The fixation went so far as West buying an automobile like the one owned by the officer of his obsession, the chief said.

Between 1980 and ‘91, West married 

and divorced twice, had no children with either wife, but had two children with a third woman with whom he lived while he was single or separated. The paper said her name was Sandra Murray West, but did not indicate whether she changed her name because of their co-habitation, or the name was pre-existing. (His change from Wietholter to West was between 1978 and ’80, the Post said.)

The couple’s second child was born after West had moved out of the residence he and Sandra West had shared. Even though he had proposed what would have been his third marriage to another woman before the second child was born, Thomas West moved back in with Sandra West and both of their children, and soon moved with them to another Northern Kentucky apartment shortly before he was arrested.

On 1988 records of his second divorce, Thomas West listed his occupation as physician and his age as 38. He was in fact 29 and had never studied medicine, but the Enquirer interviewed several people who recalled West during that period telling them he was a doctor.

On his filing for his first divorce, in 1983, West listed his occupation as psychoanalyst.

Nancy Geppert, the woman West asked to become his third wife, had a long on-and-off association with him. Geppert, a co-worker with West in the mid-1980s in the repossession department of a furniture store, said West told her he was quitting that job to earn a law degree.

The two kept in touch, and she recalls West telling her a few years later he earned his law degree and would soon start pursuing a doctorate in psychology from the University of Cincinnati.

The Enquirer said the university had no record of West enrolling there, or in the UC medical school, where Geppert said West told her he was taking courses. The paper said Cincinnati police investigators found no record of West having any college degree.

Geppert told the Enquirer that West persuaded her to let him use the upstairs of her Cincinnati home as the office of a medical firm he was establishing. He told her it was called Physicians Consultations and Medical One, and though the Enquirer said it was listed in the telephone book, state records did not show West as the owner of any business.

One of several landlords West rented from in the Cincinnati area told the Enquirer West often used the excuse of a doctor’s busy routine to explain being late with the rent.

Joe Fischer, who rented an apartment in Erlanger, Ky. to Thomas West and Sandra Murray West and their children told the Enquirer that long before he evicted the family and sued for back rent and other charges, he figured Thomas West was making up his story of being a doctor.

"I quickly had his number. He had a story for everything… and they were always bizarre," Fischer told the newspaper. "He was either up with a 'patient' all night, had an emergency operation, or had to take his daughter to the hospital…. I learned after a while he was full of bull. I even told him once: 'Just save your breath, Tom, I'm not buying it.'"

The Ohio parole board in late 1993 was buying the idea that West had learned his lesson and paroled him from prison after he served 18 months of his three-year term. They were right, in that he stopped faking it as a doctor.
 
But in not much more time than it took him to drive the 200 miles home from Lima and get resettled in greater Cincinnati, the free man Thomas David West was on the phone asking two private investigators to help him weed out corruption in Kentucky politics as – wait for it -- Thomas D. West attorney at law.

Before heading back to prison for posing
 as a lawyer, a somber appearing Thomas
D. West confers with his real lawyer. 

West told the PIs he was a lawyer with the Cincy-based law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister investigating an unnamed state senator in connection with the construction of a $20 million juvenile detention center in Northern Kentucky.

Though anyone who knows Kentucky politics would know you don’t have to look far to find a legislator worthy of investigating, this example of corruption existed only in the toxically overactive imagination of Thomas David West.

And because three years ago he got caught lying to untrained people such as landlords, restaurant customers and significant others, maybe trying to fool private investigators this time would be safer. Nope, West’s parole was quickly revoked.

He was sent back to the same prison, sentenced to six to 15 more years, his tearful statement to judge John Keefe that, “All I ever wanted to do is help people” contradicted by the harm, insecurity, stress and mistrust West's misdeeds inflicted on Ohio and Kentucky residents.

"You say that,” Keefe replied, “But actions speak louder than words.” Sharper observations came from some of West’s victims and acquaintances.

"I think the system failed the first time," said Roberta Frazer of Cincinnati, one of the people to whom West passed himself off as a doctor. "I think he needs help. I think he needs counseling."

Erlanger, Ky. Police Detective Dave Wood knew West’s family, and worked as a patrolman with West’s brother, officer Ronald Wietholter, in nearby Fort Wright for five years. After West’s 1991 arrest, Wood told the Enquirer: "It just floored me, because I'm such good friends with his brother. His parents are such good people.”

Yet, Wood knew of West’s claim to be a doctor, though he figured it was just harmless fantasizing. "I certainly didn't know he was practicing."

Also after West’s 1991 arrest, the woman in whose home he set up a bogus medical company before proposing marriage to her talked freely to media about being bamboozled.

"I'm very hurt by it. I don't understand why he's done what he has done," Nancy Geppert said. "He used my car, used my house, my money, my emotions.”

                           ____________________

Brian Arbenz contributed news coverage of the Thomas David West story as a reporter and desk editor for Associated Press in the early 1990s. His legal name and byline then was George Morrison, though his new name did not portend any fake professional practices.