On November 23, 1996, I appeared at the annual event held to commemorate the anniversary of JFK’s death at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. John Jr. had asked me to explain how politics had changed in the computer age as part of a panel called “Presidential Campaigning from 1960 to 1996: From Televised Debates to the Internet and Beyond.”
Needless to say, I was definitely an oddity at this gathering. As I sat there waiting for the panel to begin, I could not help but wonder what my father, a true cow-shit-on-his-boots, rock-ribbed-Republican Wyoming politician, would have thought about my presence at this event. If my dad had lived long enough to experience virtual reality, he would have thought that this was where the Kennedys had come from.
Other members of the panel were veteran TV newsman Sander Vanocur, who had been one of the questioners at the Kennedy-Nixon debates; Kiki Moore, a former press secretary for Tipper Gore who was now a commentator on CNN; and Lisa McCormack, the publications and online communications director for the Republican National Committee. In other words, I was the token geek.
The program began with long cuts from the debates, a spectacle I had last watched through my twelve-year-old eyes back in Wyoming. Seeing them again, I realized they had been important not because they had decided the contest for young Senator Kennedy but because they had also fundamentally changed the nature of the office itself.
From that point on, the president of the United States became more a movie star than a leader, more myth than manager, more affect than intellect. After those debates, it was far more important that a presidential candidate did not have a five o’clock shadow than that he offered ideas that could suffer real scrutiny.
Far be it from me to defend the genuinely vile Nixon or to defame the genuinely dashing Kennedy, but I was surprised by the clarity and persuasiveness of what Nixon actually said during those debates. On the other hand, Kennedy said some things that were not very thoughtful, such as his assertion that it was more important for our country to have good missile technology than abundant color televisions.
But his appearance, the visual semiotics of his virtual self, was just as smooth as Nixon’s was lumpy. I was looking at the first decisive national instance in which what a politician said meant far less than his ability to look like he really meant it. The most striking realization that came to me as I watched the tapes was that Kennedy was not so much elected president by television as he was elected president of television itself, the strange projection from which most Americans have since derived their map of reality.
Kennedy was also an integral part of the process by which television itself became the president. Ever since then, this medium has defined our national agenda in ways that were often at odds with what might have been dictated by either sense or experience, until what we’re left with today is what I like to call Government by Hallucinating Mob.
As I watched all those shiny old black-and-white kinescopes, I felt I was seeing the transformation to this malignant new form take place right before my eyes. During several sequences, it also became clear to me that the most important debater was not Kennedy or Nixon but Sander Vanocur. Like when he sprung it on Nixon that his former boss, President Eisenhower, had said he couldn’t think of any policy decision in which Nixon had played a decisive role. It was a lot harder and a far more damaging shot than any taken by Kennedy. Never before had a mere reporter been able to exercise such power in real time before an entire nation.
As the only geek on the panel, I spoke last. While I waited for my turn, I had to listen to all these bland encomiums generally larded upon the Internet by politicos whose only knowledge of it had come from traditional media. At least none of them called it “the Information Superhighway.”
They all talked about the Internet as though it were the nineties version of the space program, a wonderful and huge government project that America needed to undertake for reasons that were not entirely clear. However, they acknowledged that it would have a role in upcoming elections, much like the one the first televised presidential debates had played so decisively.
I must have said something fairly interesting when I sat on that panel because two years later, I was invited back to Harvard to become a fellow at the school’s Institute of Politics. I spent the spring semester there leading a study group called “Cyberspace vs. Metaspace: Border Conflicts Between the Virtual and the Physical Worlds.”
I got to live in the two-room suite in Winthrop House that John F. Kennedy had occupied during his senior year at Harvard. I was smoking quite a lot at the time, even though I wasn’t supposed to do so in those rooms. Given my long-standing relationship with John F. Kennedy, Jr., I felt like I was desecrating the place.
The seminars themselves were great. Twice a week for an hour and a half, I would meet with about thirty people from the entire Harvard archipelago—undergraduates as well as students from the law school, the business school, and the Kennedy School of Government. I wanted to expose them all to the founding fathers of the Internet, so I brought in a grab bag of people, including Vint Cerf, Alan Kay, Len Kleinrock, and Acid Phreak.
After having spent eighteen years representing Wyoming in the U.S. Senate, my lifelong friend Alan Simpson was then running Harvard’s Institute of Politics. I’d actually had something to do with helping him get the appointment, and the two of us had a fine time there. Nobody has a more obscene mouth than Al Simpson. He literally cannot get through a sentence without using at least one shockingly creative bad word. We would get into these disagreements and write emails back and forth to each other that were just unconscionable.
Both of us had a lot of latitude there, and we would pick the people we wanted to speak at the seminars and then take them to dinner, and it was great. This was the first time the two of us had been able to just hang out together, and I would amble down the hall to his office and put my feet up on his desk and we would sit there talking about Wyoming politics.
Alan Simpson is the only U.S. senator I have ever truly loved. Back when he was running for reelection to the Senate for the first time, he decided to try to shake the hand of every voter in Wyoming. On the day before the election, he found himself at a party in a remote part of the state. After working his way through everyone there, Alan walked up a hill to where a drunk cowboy was leaning against a tree with his hat pulled down low over his face.
Putting out his hand to the cowboy, Alan said, “I’m running for Senate and I’d like your vote.” Shaking Alan’s hand, the cowboy said, “You got it. Because that sumbitch we got there now is no damn good.”
Alan’s parents, Milward and Lorna, were contemporaries of my folks, and so Alan himself was always like a member of our family. Al is sixteen years older than me, and our relationship was fraternal, almost like he was an older brother. For many years, I described myself as an Al Simpson Republican, and I would still do so if that meant anything to anybody besides Al Simpson. He was a conservationist, a fiscal conservative, and a social liberal. He wasn’t enthusiastic about abortion, but he also recognized how things were.
Al’s wife, Ann, is unquestionably one of the most graceful, beautiful, self-contained human beings I have ever known. They just do not come any better than Alan K. Simpson, but Ann has always really been his saving grace. Back when they were arguing about immigration reform in the Senate, Al was the head of the immigration subcommittee. There were like ninety amendments that had to get voted on up or down, and all this had to be done in a single afternoon that wound up going on until about two o’clock in the morning.
It was one of those rare times where the entire goddamn U.S. Senate was in the room together, a spectacle you do not see every day, which is just as well. I was sitting in the gallery with Ann, and after this had all been going on for hours, I turned to her and said, “God, it’s a marvel they get anything done.” And she said, “It’s a grace they don’t do more.”
I also had a role in talking Al out of running for his fourth term in the Senate. I felt he had reached a nadir while questioning Anita Hill during the hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Al was not just on the committee, he was also engaged in active nastiness and cruelty to her, and he knew it. He just got caught up in the mob, as one sometimes can.
During the time I was at the Institute of Politics, I actually took Anita Hill out. We had the same speakers bureau and she contacted them and said, “This guy John Perry Barlow seems really interesting. I wonder if you could get us together.” This was quite a while after the hearing, and she was then teaching at Brandeis. I don’t think she knew about my connection to Al Simpson.
We went on about three dates, and it was pretty casual. She was still somewhat traumatized by what she had gone through, but Anita is a tough cookie and not quite the victim that one might conclude. I tried really hard to get her and Al together, because I felt like they owed each other a conversation. But he was still truly embarrassed about that phase of his political life, and so it never happened.
After he was displaced as the Republican whip by Trent Lott, Al decided that he didn’t want to do it anymore. He felt that serving in the Senate for so long had turned him into something he did not want to be. Al and Ann and I talked about it at some length at a Thanksgiving dinner we had together, and that was the conclusion we all drew.
Everybody in Wyoming still loved Alan Simpson, and had he run he would have definitely been reelected. The only way that would not have happened, he said, was if he had been found in bed with a live man or a dead woman.