Friends,
Check out the video, as this was a great action. If you have
not seen the video, Nixon welcomes the Ray Conniff Singers to the White House.
He says he likes them because they are "square." Even the squares
were against that awful war. Note that another of the singers held the
banner with Carole Addesso.
Kagiso,
Max
The Canadian who shocked the White House
nowtoronto.com
Justin
Trudeau's recent visit to Washington reminded one Torontonian about the time she
challenged Richard Nixon
March
16, 2016
7:00
PM
The
gushing coverage of last week’s Justin Trudeau-Barack Obama “bromance” in
Washington, DC, had one former Canadian visitor to the White House scratching
her head.
When
Cabbagetown-born Carole Addesso (née Feraci) attended the Reader’s Digest 50th
anniversary party at the White House as one of the Ray Conniff Singers in
January, 1972, she defiantly challenged Richard Nixon to his face over his
ongoing war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Addesso,
by then a Hollywood veteran who had appeared frequently on The Smothers
Brothers Show and sung with everyone from Johnny Mathis to the Doodletown
Pipers, had been invited two weeks earlier to join the Conniff singers for the
unpaid White House gig.
She
originally turned it down, because “I didn’t want to sing for a man who’s
killing people. But after thinking about it, I thought I should go and say
something.”
Planned
protest in mind, she found herself on a pre-show tour of the White House.
Recalling the incident by phone from her home in Temecula, California, Addesso
says, “We were in the Oval Office, and Nixon and his gang were next door in the
war room planning their next moves in Vietnam, and I thought, ‘Man, I am so
glad I am here.’ Thinking about what they were doing gave me a lot of courage
to do what I was going to do.”
As
the singers in elegant gowns filed onto the stage, Addesso pulled a handwritten
banner from her dress that read “Stop the Killing.”
She
then said: “Mr. President, stop the bombing of human beings, animals and
vegetation. You go to church on Sunday and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus
Christ were in this room tonight, you would not dare to drop another bomb.
Bless the Berrigans and Daniel Ellsberg,” Addesso added, referring to two
Catholic priests then in jail for destroying draft records and the
whistle-blower who leaked the Pentagon Papers, the Edward Snowden of his day.
“I
looked at him the whole time. Nixon was sitting there with a frozen smile, and
he never bloody moved a muscle.”
The
star-studded gala included Bob Hope, American jazz legend Lionel Hampton,
preacher Norman Vincent Peale, Charles Lindbergh, Rev. Billy Graham and the
complete cast of what would later be the long-running TV saga known as
Watergate.
After
the first song, Conniff apologized to the audience, saying to Nixon, “I guess
I’ll have to make sure from now on that my singers listen to your speeches.
They don’t seem to know what’s going on.”
As
cries of “Throw the bum out” filled the room, Martha Mitchell, the wife of U.S.
attorney general John Mitchell, shouted out that Addesso should be torn “limb
from limb.” Conniff asked Addesso to leave, and with typical Canadian
politeness, she replied, “Certainly.”
She
was taken downstairs to a room where secret service personnel, White House
counsel John Dean and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman were waiting for her.
“Dean
and Haldeman were just freaking out, and they kept saying, ‘It’s an incident,
it’s an incident! We have to be careful how we handle this,’” she laughs. Both
men would soon be facing their own questioning over -illegal actions in the
Watergate scandal.
“Then
they started questioning me. Is there [mental] illness in the family? Did I
plan to kill the president? All kinds of dumb ****. I told them, ‘You didn’t
hear a word I said.’”
The
interrogation eventually ended and they called her a cab, even though that went
against White House protocol.
“I
was very calm throughout,” Addesso says. “I knew what I wanted to say, and
nothing was going to stop me. I would do whatever I could to stop the war.”
Addesso
became the subject of almost daily conversation at the White House, as we know
since the release of the Nixon tapes.
“For
the next three months, every day when they had their Oval Office meetings I was
talked about. What is she doing? Is she going to sue us? They were worried I
would start an even bigger problem.”
She
found herself the target of the FBI and was constantly hounded by the press.
Job offers dried up, and when she faced deportation to Canada, she received
calls from the era’s leading civil rights lawyers, including Mark Lane and
William Kunstler of Chicago 7 fame.
She
has no regrets. She remembers being just outside Selma, Alabama, during
historic anti-segregation demonstrations while on tour in the mid-60s with
Johnny Mathis and the Young Americans, a racially integrated singing
group.
“We
were at a truck stop where they refused to serve the two black members of the
group, so I said, ‘We’re not eating here,’ and we got up and left. A short time
later, a big truck caught up with us and tried to run us off the road.”
As
Addesso surveys the current American scene, she despairs at the widespread
obsession with celebrity in American politics.
“I
don’t get it. How could they go and feel like it’s an honour to be there when
they’re sitting in a den of killers? It’s just crazy.”
March
16, 2016
7:00
PM
This Week's Issue
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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