That’s the length of time it took to record an impulsive act in public; a totally unpremeditated instinctive gesture that could have fostered dire consequences were it conducted in today’s NSA-regulated world; a moment of irresistible improvisation that could have easily landed me in the immediate company of men in dark suits and darker sunglasses, to be interrogated endlessly regarding any connections to subversive terrorist activity, never to be heard from again.
But in 1969, the world, though only six years removed from the haunting Kennedy assassination, was still leading with a cautious innocence, conducting the regular day-to-day without the burdensome over-the-shoulder fear that all decent neurotic people everywhere carry today.
I READ IT IN THE NEWS
It was an early spring weekday morning with the usual madness centered around the daily prep-for-work ritual: Rise, shower, scarf down a bite, squeeze by my wife in the cramped hallway of our Lexington Avenue apartment in New York City, as each fought to get out the door first.
The New York Times, a recent and reluctant substitute for our beloved Herald Tribune that had shut down three years previously, awaited our attention at the threshold outside the door. No time to read, but…what was this? A headline announced that the president was coming to town. That night, in fact. Riding the elevator together, I scanned the story.
“Listen to this,” I said, reading one bulletin out loud. “Nixon’s motorcade is going to run right through here!”
The article detailed a travel route through the city for the Nixon entourage following their touch down at LaGuardia Airport later that day. To our surprise and ultimately great convenience it mentioned that the president’s cavalcade—destined for a distinguished hotel on Fifth Avenue—would take the 79th St. crosstown thoroughfare.
“Man, he’s coming within a block of us!”
Indeed, the planned route called for the caravan to cruise by just one block north of our East Side two-room 78th Street abode. The president’s schedule called for an early evening arrival, which meant we would be home from work in time to witness it if we chose.
We agreed to check it out.
NIGHT RIDER
It must be remembered that to many of us in that pre-Watergate era Nixon was a villain, a snarky pol with an evil eye who personified a growing distrust with government. To those still lost in the Kennedy euphoria, Camelot had been replaced by Mordor.
That night, shortly after shuffling the lone block up to the travel route, news circulated among fellow onlookers that apparently a delay had slowed the official procession en route from LaGuardia. We lucked out, securing a prized gawking post right off the street on the north-side curb of 79th, a site that would yield the closest proximity to the delegation when it passed by. The unexpected lag had nurtured idle, time-killing comments from the sidewalk assembly. Sporadic laughter lit up the twilight, mostly jokes aimed at the president.
The festive atmosphere had the ring of an impromptu street party replete with anonymous jesters holding the attention of the crowd-in-waiting. But the timbre of that hubbub abruptly and universally morphed into one expectant onrush of excitement, as someone yelled:
“It’s coming!”
GOING MY WAY?
It was dark now. Every neck in the vicinity craned forward, peering left, eastward. Police had cleared the bustling street a half hour earlier of traffic, rerouting it elsewhere into the numbing city maze in anticipation of the motorcade’s impending arrival. Suddenly, a chain of headlights appeared coming up from Third Avenue, funeral-style but at a quicker pace. The inevitable police escort preceded the convoy. A full 20 feet separated the last NYPD motorcycle from the first official car. That would later prove an invaluable window of opportunity.
My pulse quickened as the train of black government vehicles amid swirling blue lights approached. It seemed like something was needed for the moment, something that would make this a postcard memory. But likely it would pass uneventfully, nothing more than a quick glimpse at a passing series of dark tinted windows at night. But maybe, just maybe the president would actually be looking at the people he was passing by. What if?
The first car was now no more than 100 feet away, when without warning something wildly impulsive came over me, the telltale surge of adrenaline an indicative clue.
I was about to do something!
Immediately after the final cop bike passed within six feet of us—in that thinnest of windows, in that instant between twilight and darkness, before instinct, reason, or calculation could step in the way—I dropped my right leg down off the curb as the first car approached, not 10 feet away. Then, with a look that bordered on the whimsically earnest, I dropped my right thumb down into the classic hitchhiker stance.
This pose I maintained for the full duration of the motorcade, not knowing of course which of the black sedans the president inhabited. Perhaps the secret service nursed the barest trace of humor back then, because today, should any fool willfully step off a curb in front of the president’s car, that person should expect to be immediately apprehended as a diabolical threat—yes, never to be heard from again!
The crowd of heads now swiveled to the right, watching the line of bobbing red taillights trail off toward Park Avenue. The whole thing had taken no more than half a minute.
We laughed the short walk home. Then I never gave it another thought for 45 years. But I now wonder. Did Nixon see my gesture? If so, was I written off as just another irksome dissenter, smirked at in disgust after what he might have perceived as disrespect?
I like to think that the man who worked tirelessly to earn the ignominious moniker of Tricky Dick could somewhere in his own twisted mind see the humor, or rather, the lightness in it all; a nervy attempt by an unknown member of the proletariat at lightening up a moment top heavy with over-ceremonious pomp and reserve. Yes, I’d like to think Dick Nixon was smiling at the odd pantomime taking place outside his magic carpet. Who knows what positive changes might have come for the man, and for the entire world for that matter, from the residue of that one moment of unbridled impulse?
A far scarier thought: What if they’d picked up that hitchhiker from another galaxy?
One didn’t have to reach far for moments of light-hearted irony in New York City in the Sixties.
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