Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
A lot of people don’t want to believe that Thomas Matthew Crooks was actually a registered Republican and a gun enthusiast. They’re convinced he was some sort of a plant from a Trump-hating organization. People who do not believe the news or the government are part of the Trump phenomenon.
When I heard the description of Crooks, I was not the least surprised. Idealistic young men who grow to hate the kings they once loved is a story as old as mankind itself. When he was young, Brutus loved Caesar, but on the Ides of March, he slew him.
Charismatic leaders make me nervous. They’re the ones people try to assassinate. An assassin killed Kennedy, and another almost killed Reagan. In both cases, it seems the president’s notoriety is what attracted the assassin. In between them, as much as people hated Nixon, the only man who tried to kill him literally never got off the ground.
I was too young to remember the phenomenon of Ross Barnett. He was a charismatic leader. Nobody wanted to talk about what he represented and what he wanted, which was to keep Mississippi white and a boot on the neck of the black man, so they talked about how charismatic he was.
By the time I met Ross Barnett, all I really knew about him was why people hated him. My father spoke about him either with a glint of anger in his eye or a smile intended to hide that glint of anger. My father almost never let his actual emotions show through. You had to know him to have an idea of what he was actually thinking and feeling.
I knew enough stories about Ross Barnett to write a book, including at least twelve different stories about how his name came to be attached to the Pearl River Reservoir that every real estate developer in Mississippi wanted. I can’t tell you which one is true, but they’re all worth telling.
When I finally did meet Ross Barnett, he was drunk and playing the ukelele at the Old Capitol Museum to try to win favor with a bunch of nineteen-year-old boys from Millsaps College. As young as I was, I thought to myself, “damn, is this how this story ends?” and, yeah, that’s how that story ended. He died just a few years later.
Cliff Finch was the first charismatic leader I encountered when I was old enough to understand what was going on. Finch ran on the platform that rich white Jackson hated him. Chokwe Lumumba ran on the same ticket. Both were technically correct, but the secret nobody knows is that rich white Jackson has never been as rich or as white as people let on.
When I was a little boy, I encountered Elsie Hood sitting in her backyard and shelling purple-hull peas during my daily adventures. She asked if I wanted to help and gestured to a metal Griffith chair painted dark green. We shelled peas and talked about all the snakes that lived in the woods between her house and mine.
Elsie Hood might have been a social lion and voted the controlling share in the biggest bank in Mississippi, but she wasn’t beyond shelling her own peas. I’m pretty sure she cooked them with bacon and ate them with cornbread.
Cliff Finch intended to prove to the people of Mississippi that he was one of them. He carried a pressed metal lunchbox with him to prove it. Apparently, he had operated a bulldozer one summer when he was in Law School. I asked my daddy if most lawyers carried a lunch pail to work. He laughed and said, “You know better than that.”
In the primary, Finch ran against William F. Winter and Maurice Dantin. Daddy said we’d be fine with either, but I favored Winter. Winter called Finch’s lunch pail and stunts like spending the day bagging groceries “theatrics.” He was right, but it backfired against him. Winter and Dantin were both supported by the kind of people Finch said he wasn’t one of. That’s true. He wasn’t part of the moderate, middle-class white Mississippi who wanted to move into a new era after the disaster that happened here in the sixties.
Having miraculously won the Democratic Nomination, Finch faced Republican Gil Carmichael. Daddy was a registered Democrat, but he recognized the rising Republican party in Mississippi. He got along pretty well with about half of them, avoided another third, and was stoically polite to the last twenty percent. He liked Carmichael quite a lot.
Carmichael’s platform included a new Mississippi state constitution, the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (some of you might have to look up what that was), the supply of federal financial aid to New York City, gun registration, reduced penalties for marijuana possession, and mandatory school attendance for children. Calling the Republican party “the party of emancipation,” he called back to the days of the Black and Tan Republicans and invited black leaders into his cabinet.
There are those reading this story who probably think I’m making up stories about a progressive Republican in Mississippi in the seventies, but it’s all true. Considering who actually became Mississippi’s first Republican Governor, we missed a hell of an opportunity to do good here.
Carmichael ended up with forty-seven percent of the vote—not enough to win, but enough to make people rethink this whole business of Republicans and progressives in Mississippi. William Winter took from this to start letting some of his progressive tendencies out where the public could see them.
Cliff Finch and his lunchbox and his “theatrics” were governor of Mississippi. That was probably my first lesson in politics. “It won’t always go your way. Even if you’re absolutely right, goddamnit.”
One day, Daddy came home and said, “Somebody tried to assassinate Cliff Finch.”
“Oh, my God! Who?” My mother said.
“His Wife!” Daddy said with a grin.
Now, this is not the official story. No law enforcement official has ever said that the first lady shot the governor. No responsible journalist has ever staked their reputation on the story that Zelma Finch shot the governor. I, however, am not a responsible journalist. I’m not any kind of journalist. I’m a storyteller, and anybody old enough in Mississippi knows the story of the first lady shooting the governor.
A few years ago, they had an exhibit in the Old Capitol Museum where they hung some two dozen official First Lady portraits. Observing the enormous painting of Zelma Finch, I grinned at the docent.
“There’s ole’ Zelma,” I said. “They say she never could shoot straight.” The docent laughed and then restrained herself.
I will love a candidate when they are no longer a candidate. There will be plenty of time afterward for that. While they are a candidate and while they are in office, even if I agree with everything that comes out of their mouth, they are still a threat to my liberty because they are in that position, and they are but men—and all men are fallible.
A young man who loves his party but shoots its candidate is a story as old as mankind. It happens because no candidate can measure up to that kind of adulation, and the more charismatic a candidate is, the more adulation they require.
Donald Trump requires a great deal of adulation from the world around him. He has a golden toilet, for god’s sake. Anyone who takes that challenge and loves him risks growing to hate him. No human is worthy of the kind of love that Donald Trump requires.
If you’ve seen the photos, Thomas Matthew Crooks’ head was split in half by a Secret Service sniper’s bullet. We’ll never know his story from his mouth. Whatever he was thinking wasn’t rational; for that reason alone, he has my sympathy.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
