Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.
–Secretary of State, fmr. Gen. Alexander Haig, speaking to reporters after the assassination attempt on President Reagan
Ahh, who can forget Alexander Haig — White House Chief of Staff under Nixon, Secretary of State under Reagan, Allied Supreme Being in Europe, a guy who looks like he could play himself in a Robert Ludlum story? And, who can forget that memorable occasion — while we’re on the subject of the media and government getting weird together — when in answer to some question or another, Secretary Haig blurts out an assertion that he was “in control here” following the assassination attempt on Reagan downtown?
Leave it to my pal Gregor, who ran the Yippies’ print shop in DC — and his dryly-barbed sense of humor to give my muse a kick in the ass, with his comments that Haig was behaving like the coup leader and El Presidente of some Central American banana republic, giving his first address to the People, and his sarcastic throwing of stiff-armed fist salutes into the air and shouting, “Haig, Haig, Haig For Life!”
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One thing about this period was that it was that time when things started getting weird in Media And Government Land, ranging from frivolity like Reagan inadvertantly mouthing off around live mics, mentioning his plan to “…begin bombing in five minutes…”, to far more evil intentional mouth-offs, such as then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s declaration that a nuclear war would be “winnable”.
I remember being absolutely gob-smacking amazed at that. How the hell does he decide whether or not we’ve “won”? I’d ask myself, would it be if our side had enough people left to put on a halfway decent victory parade, as opposed to the pathetic, raggedy-assed second-generation mutant rumble shown above?
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Come ’round the bend, you know it’s the end —
the fireman screams, and the engine just gleams!
–grateful dead
Smoke-In’s over, summer was survivable, time to quit bitching and get back to some ball-busting.
The MX “Peacekeeper” mobile launcher system was, basically, an entire railroad designed to move MX launchers from one bunker to the next, presumably with the idea that if you ran an atom bomb railroad, you could keep your atom bombs from being hit so easily — because, as everybody in the atom bomb business will tell you: it only takes one to hit it.
Just how the beer ad analogy came in, I don’t quite remember… something about “Night Train” wine, or the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull, or something…
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I don’t know about anyone else, but at the time, it seemed like a single year under the Reagan Mob was forever, and getting worse. What a relief to finally quit doing cartoons about how grim things were getting and do a good old Smoke-In poster, this time with a Hollywood theme (of course) in honor of our esteemed host of Death Valley Days (or “Daze”, which things were in at the time). This is one of the last serious Smoke-Ins they were able to pull as the Just Say No™ rhetoric was just starting to take hold, and a generation of high-school and college kids decided they all wanted to be Gordon Gecko and Timothy Geithner when they grew up.
This piece wound up as a color full-age ad for the 1981 White House Smoke-In appearing in High Times magazine. Sadly, that’s the only piece I ever got into High Times, likely because their art director, a guy named Jeff Tiedrich, was also the art editor of the Yipster Times around 1977-79, and was shit-canning my stuff there as well — before he moved on, and the task of picking out the art fell to a guy who was quite a fan of mine back in the day: Yipster Times co-founder/co-editor and Yippies co-founder Dana Beal.
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