Deacon Blues: Manfred Schmidt, #1

By Karl G. Trautman

Flawed Hero

 

Jolted by an arrested adolescence, Manfred Schmidt is a lonely teenager who craves for belonging and respect. His unconscious rage and forming identity are fused together at a time when a new leader is offering hope to a troubled, post-Watergate nation. He takes on Jimmy Carter as his hero, offering hope to his evolving self.

 

Set in the suburbs of Washington DC, Ireland, Boston and New Hampshire, the story is about Manfred's foibles as he journeys through high school, a semester at college and a stint working in Carter's re-election campaign. Even though Carter's political journey ends in failure, the impact of his brief venture into American politics leaves a lasting influence on his emotional development. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flawed Hero Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393379157

Karl G. Trautman

Karl G. Trautman is the author of the Manfred Schmidt series of fiction books. The first three volumes, Deacon Blues, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This and Road To Nowhere have been published. He is also the editor of the non-fiction book, The New Populist Reader and the author of the non-fiction book, The Underdog in American Politics The Democratic Party and Liberal Values. He received his doctorate in political science from The University of Hawaii and has taught in Denmark and Japan as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer. He has been a college teacher in Michigan and Kansas and been a research assistant for Meet The Press. He currently teaches in the Public Service and Social Sciences Department at Central Maine Community College.

Book preview

— 1 —

I LOOK UP FROM THE TV set and see my mother standing over in the doorway.

Will you ask your father if the steaks are done?

I heard you. I’m just pulling them off the grill now.

A few moments later, I see my father carrying a plateful of steaming sirloin steaks into the house.

Although they look delicious, I don’t want to eat dinner now. For the last hour, I have been glued to the TV watching a show, and it is almost over.

Can I come in ten minutes?

No Manny, the dinner will be cold. Besides, it’s a rerun, isn’t it?

I reluctantly get up from my chair, turn off the TV, and sit down at the dining room table. My older brother David is across from me, my father is at the head, and my mother sits at the foot directly across from him. Our weekly Sunday night dinner routine is about to begin.

I always look forward to these dinners because my parents seem more relaxed than on weeknights. My father loves to grill but never does during the week because he usually gets home after six o’clock. When I see a bowl of mashed potatoes and a huge plate of corn on the cob, I quickly forget my disappointment and eagerly anticipate gorging.

Just as I am about to start, I look at my parents’ faces and feel something is wrong. They aren’t smiling; instead they look somber. My father glances at my brother and then quickly over to me and announces in a calm voice, Boys, your mother and I have decided to get a divorce. Now, you will be staying with me in the house, and your mother will move out and get a place somewhere near.

I begin to tremble because my worst nightmare has come true. Now it’s my mother’s turn. The therapist says this will be best for you two because boys need a male role model. Now I won’t be far, I’ll probably get an apartment a few miles away, maybe in DC. We will be able to see each other a lot.

I look at my dad, and he is expressionless. There is nothing in his eyes that hints that he is feeling anything at this moment. My mother’s face is also impassive, which surprises me. She is usually full of passion for just about everything. Now I feel numb. The terror of the moment is too frightening to feel, so I don’t. Everything stops for me. Yet the pain begins to intensify so quickly that I feel I must let something out. So I attack. I look directly in my mother’s eyes and say, I don’t think I would want to see you.

It is meant to hurt. I want to puncture that perfect presentation that I assume they practiced before delivering the blow. Since I am devastated, she must be as well. I feel satisfied but also a little guilty. I look over at David, and he just sits there, expressionless, just like my father.

As my parents talk about the logistics of what will happen after the divorce, I tune them out. Cold details are the last thing I want to hear now. I feel that nothing will ever be the same, and I am scared.

But I am also enraged. The anger is too scary to even allow myself to acknowledge that it exists, so I tense up my body so hard that it begins to hurt. How can I hate my parents for what they did to me? I am not in a position to hate them because I am the child. Yet I know they deserve my hate.

Just as everyone is finishing eating, my father says, Well, the Orioles almost came back to win today. But at least they made it close. They need Buford to start hitting. He looked at David and me, and said, Hey boys, do you want to go to a game next Sunday? The Tigers are playing.

I look over at David and see a sparkle in his eyes. My mother notices his reaction and smiles soothingly. As I feel everyone’s eyes on me, I double down on my confrontation. I keep my body tense and my face unreadable and think, Do you think going to a baseball game makes everything all right? Do you think I am that easily bought off?

I won’t give my parents the satisfaction of seeing a sparkle in my eyes. Even though I love baseball, I hold back my feelings because I know that’s exactly what they want from me the most at this moment. Yet I have to say something, so I dispassionately answer, Sure.

My heart is racing even faster now as I quickly leave the table to go outside. I want to walk and try to sort out what just happened. Before I go out the door, my mother comes up, looks me in the eyes and says, Don’t worry, Manny, I know this is hard, but everything will be all right. And never, ever forget that you are special.

As I walk the neighborhood, I become calmer as I think about that word special. It makes me feel sort of like Superman, that I have some unique trait that makes me different from everyone else.

My mind then turns to Tony, a new kid I met a few weeks ago. He’s my age and he lives in the house across the street. After walking up to his house, I notice the morning’s Washington Post still on the doorstep. I pick it up and tighten my jaw as I read the headline: 5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here. That’s strange, I think. Who would do that?

— 2 —

MY DAD WAS A REPORTER, and my mother used to work on Capitol Hill. As I grew up, politics was all around me. It was in my air, something that I breathed in and out instinctively. Yet between the summer of 1972 and the summer of 1974 as the Watergate scandal unfolded, I didn’t just breathe it; I inhaled it. Those two crucial years congealed my views about politics. The Nixon administration’s continuous deception and lying made me long for truth. The struggle was so basic that even a teenager could understand it; someone had been caught in a lie and tried to cover it up. Where it would it end?

Watergate was great TV drama. I watched the televised congressional hearings religiously, coming home from school, turning on the TV and plopping on my bed to see what new information was being revealed. I even watched them during the summer, shunning the outdoors for the daily drama of improbable revelations and building tension. I remember the legislative maneuverings of the old country lawyer Sam Ervin from North Carolina, who was just trying to get at the truth.

The solemn testimony of presidential aide John Dean sent a chill down my spine: I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it. Deep-rooted emotional memories were created then, ones that were imprinted into my political soul.

I have a special fondness for Dan Rather, the White House correspondent for CBS News during Watergate. I admired his guts when he famously answered Nixon, in his May 1974 press conference. When Rather was called upon by Nixon, there was tremendous applause in the room. It seemed like all the accumulated hatred of Nixon that the press corps had been storing up for decades exploded at that very second. I could tell this startled Nixon. He awkwardly said to Rather, Are you running for something?

Rather confidently shot back, No, are you?

Nixon was not above the law. He could be taken down. He was.

I also discovered that the media could teach me a lot about politics.

I loved reading The Washington Post. It was delivered every day to the house. My father would bring it inside before I got up. Even though I saw it sitting on the living room table every weekday morning, I never read it then. I was too rushed, getting to the bus for school. Instead, I opened the paper after I got home and read it lightly between four and five. I stopped at five, because that’s when the TV news came on.

Yet I devoured it on Sundays. I loved the thick Outlook section. I skimmed the whole section to see what information excited me the most. I turned the pages, my eyes darting from the lengthy news analyses to the well-reasoned editorials to the biting columns of Carl Rowan, and finally flipping back to the brilliant and satirical cartoons of Herblock.

I got most of my news through television. Most every weekday, I watched TV for hours on end in my room. I would close the door and immerse myself in the broadcasts and savor every detail. I fancied myself a budding intellectual and artist, as I learned about politics and enjoyed how it was presented. I loved the news broadcasts of WTOP, the CBS affiliate. They started at five with light news. The anchor was usually an attractive woman who delivered human interest stories and offered up short teasers about stories that would come on later. The way these women broadcasters alluringly smiled and gently laughed fired up my teenage loins. The more serious weather and traffic reports were interspersed throughout.

The pièce de résistance was the main broadcast at six, which starred Gordon Peterson and Max Robinson. They complemented each other splendidly and had top ratings to prove it. Gordon was a white former marine from Massachusetts. He was gruff, but not overly so. Authoritative, but not judgmental. Max was a tall, intense, young African American journalist from Virginia. Visually, he didn’t apologize for being black as he proudly sported a mustache and a full Afro. He reported on the riots in Washington after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and he won a local Emmy award for it. Their successful pairing showed that racial integration could be optically appealing. Their chemistry showed it could also be fun. Their warm repartee confirmed the righteousness of my liberal instincts.

Sports were with Warner Wolf, a short man with bushy black hair. He was a local boy and came from a show business family. He was the comic relief—the over-the top cheerleader for the local teams, with his Boo of the Week. He cheerfully bantered with Gordon on the ups and downs of the Washington Redskins football team. Then at seven, the preliminaries were done, and the service began: the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. His gravitas reinforced the importance of my passion for politics. He was the trusted father of civics to millions of Americans, and I was one of them.

On Saturday nights, I watched Agronsky and Company, a local talk show that featured journalists discussing national politics. It was like a newspaper op-ed page on television. I devoured the good-natured banter between liberals and conservatives as I tried to understand the significance of what was transpiring. I was hungry for knowledge, but also for recognition.

— 3 —

THE 1976 PRESIDENTIAL campaign deeply touched me. It was so perfect, with the bicentennial, the hunger for reform, and the triumph of the underdog. The most electrifying part was the battle for the Democratic nomination, in particular the unexpected back-to-back wins by Jimmy Carter in the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary. The press in Washington was amazed at how this outsider was upending the establishment. So was I.

I was fascinated by the strategy and process of the campaign. It seemed like there was a new contest every week. After Carter’s two early wins, where could he lose? Who could beat him? It was great drama and perfect for television, like my version of the game of the week. I looked forward to Tuesday nights. The networks had special campaign broadcasts which started at either nine or ten. The best part of the show was the first few seconds; that’s when they showed the number of raw votes on the screen. Just after the numbers, they focused on close-ups of the TV journalists. Sometimes they looked shocked, other times surprised, and many times there weren’t enough votes in for them to express any emotion except anticipation.

My father covered the campaign for UPI. He wore button-down, Oxford dress shirts for work. They were usually white, but sometimes an off-white or light blue. He fastened his collar buttons the way he did his reporting: accurately and precisely. He knew the political analysis and campaign strategies down pat. Even though I was learning fast, there was no way I could tell him something that he didn’t already know. His job was to thoroughly learn everything about what he was covering. I greatly admired him for that.

My dad worked many Saturday nights, usually in exchange for having a day off during the week. I was typically alone that night and stayed in my room most of the evening, lying on my bed watching TV. My two favorite shows were The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show. I lusted after Mary and envied Bob. Mary was the idealistic, liberated, and gorgeous associate producer for a local news show. Watching her nervously flirt with her boss, Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner), made her just vulnerable enough to be sexually enticing.

Bob was the balanced, Midwestern psychologist who spoke openly of feelings. Seeing Bob and his wife Emily (played by Suzanne Pleshette) gave me a model of how a happy marriage could work. They both worked full time at professional jobs. When they arrived home to their upscale Chicago apartment, over cocktails each would try to pry out of the other any undesirable emotions they had repressed during the day. They bantered with each other. They’d begin to let down their masks before the comic relief—the bachelor airplane pilot—barged into their conversation.

While the show was built around Bob, I thought Emily was the ideal helpmate. She was perfect as the smart and sexy dedicated public school teacher, who was always there for her husband. And Bob never took her for granted. Well, mostly he didn’t. But when he did, she confronted him. He’d eventually own up, and they’d come back together. No one stormed out of the house. There was no deliberate emotional cruelty. They were allowed to fight without devastating results.

I also liked it when Mary Tyler Moore confronted Lou Grant. It felt like she was tentatively testing out her own power when she stood up to him. It was that tentativeness, the way she showed her vulnerability that turned me on. Lou wasn’t violent to Mary. When he was vulgar or insensitive to her, he usually apologized for it. Eventually.

These shows gave me images of healthy male vulnerability, gorgeous professional women, and above all, relationships that could be balanced. It was how the man related to the woman’s assertiveness that gave me peace. This was just what I needed after my parents’ divorce. These characters gave me something to hold onto. It didn’t make any difference that they were fictional. They were real to me.

After I watched both of those programs, The Carol Burnett Show came on at ten. While it was funny, it always seemed a little too superficial to me. I would begin to watch it but was always cognizant of the time. The magic started as I began to listen for my dad coming home from work. When I heard the sound of a motor approaching, I reached for the TV volume knob and turned it all the way down. I listened intently for a few seconds. If the noise was getting more distant by the second, I knew it wasn’t my dad’s car, so I turned the volume back up and resumed watching for a few more minutes. I tried to pay full attention to the show, but my concentration was divided.

When another low hum in the distance became recognizable, I turned the volume down again. If the sound was getting louder, I felt my heart race. Then I would spring out of bed, go to the window, quickly pull open the drapes, and spot my dad’s approaching Mustang. As the car turned the corner and parked in front of the house, I quickly backed away from the window, turned the volume back up, and went back to watching TV. I didn’t want my dad to know how desperate I was to see him. In a few moments, he would open the door, and my loneliness would end. I had so much I wanted to talk to him about since he’d left for work. I knew the current news because I had watched the local TV news at six. At the top of the hour throughout the evening, there were local news breaks too. I wanted to ask my dad about all of it.

He’d always come home with a big bag of potato chips as well as the early Sunday edition of The Washington Post. My father would spread out the paper on the big white table in the living room, pour some beer into a glass, and then pop open the bag. As he sipped his beer and glanced over the paper, I sat beside him, drinking a soda. We would then begin to bond.

On a Saturday night in March 1976, I asked him a hypothetical question: Is it possible that Carter is using the hunger for honesty in the country as a tactic to win the presidency? Although I was playing the devil’s advocate, I wanted my dad to know that I could see how someone could theoretically do this. Before he could answer my question, an unsettling idea rushed into my mind. I thought, My God, if Carter is doing that, isn’t it evil? Can he really be cynically using honesty as a tactic just to gain power?

All at once, two emotions simultaneously rushed into my body: fear and excitement. They came out as a single force, starting in my head and the back of the throat and then shooting downward into my lower stomach and groin. My whole body felt loose and powerful; it instinctively knew how to create. This scared me. That a candidate could do this disgusted me because I realized how manipulative politics could be. I immediately tightened my stomach muscles, shutting down the energy in my body.

My father nonchalantly answered my question. Well, I suppose he could be doing that.

His answer pleased but didn’t satisfy me. I already knew that; my body had registered that truth just a few seconds earlier. I thought, Come on, Dad, the force that creates could also manipulate. What stops a person from manipulating?

Although I wanted guidance, his cold-eyed reply stopped me from getting deeper with him. Yet I knew that I wanted politics to be straight. Candidates should clearly tell the voters where they stood on the issues—period. I craved honesty.

IN THE SPRING, A REPRESENTATIVE of Mo Udall’s campaign came to speak in my tenth-grade contemporary issues class. My teacher was Mr. Perry, a former Peace Corps volunteer and a nice, gentle liberal. Udall was a liberal seven-term congressman from Arizona who was challenging Carter. The name of my high school was Walt Whitman. The aide’s visit would have a dual purpose: to educate the students about democracy and try and snag some students into making phone calls for Udall. The campaign worker was supposed to arrive at 10:40 a.m., ten minutes after the class started. When the bell rang for class to start, Mr. Perry told us to study at our desks while he went to the office to meet our guest.

I knew that many top congressional Democrats were hostile to Carter. They had controlled Congress for more than twenty years and considered Carter to be an upstart. I had heard of the acronym ABC, which stood for Anybody But Carter. It was a last-minute attempt by some members of the Democratic establishment to stop Carter.

I wanted Udall’s rep to see that lowly high school students knew about this movement. Even teenagers could recognize that this was a crude power play. What could I do to show that? I decided to write something clever on the blackboard. Udall’s rep would be here soon, so I needed to come up with something pretty quick. It finally came to me.

I stood up from my desk and started walking toward the blackboard. I was nervous. The other students were busy talking at their desks and didn’t notice my approach. I got to the blackboard, pushed my uneasiness inward, and confidently picked up a piece of chalk. I wrote in big capital letters, HERE AT WALT WHITMAN, WE KNOW OUR ABCs. More relieved than pleased, I turned around and went back to my seat.

Five minutes later, my teacher and the rep arrived. Mr. Perry tried to get our attention, Okay, class, as promised, here is a staff member from the Udall campaign. His name is— Before he could say the name, he spotted my sentence on the blackboard. Why, I think we may have an astute student in class, he said.

My wit had been recognized. I felt alive with power and nerve. Mr. Perry had noticed and so had the person from the Udall campaign. I’d shown the adults that high school students weren’t naïve.

I wanted adults to recognize that I understood their political games and that nothing would get by me. This would separate me from my dad, who I felt let things get by him all the time. I thought my dad was so damned objective about everything, not willing or able to connect the dots.

Another time I was passionately recounting the latest revelations of Watergate and offering up my analysis to my dad. Even though he nodded to confirm what I had said, it felt like a qualified confirmation. He didn’t contradict me, but instead pointed out where the known facts did not confirm to my view. Not that I was wrong, but that the big picture just wasn’t supportable. Yet.

This upset me. I didn’t understand why my dad was so restrained. Why didn’t he just admit that Nixon was a crook and that he knew all about the cover-up? I wanted to yell at him, Okay, Dad, here is the list of lies, half-truths, and processes