GARRISON: I want to show you something. Take a look here. 544 Camp Street. 531 Lafayette Street. Same building, right? Different addresses, different entrances, both going to the same place...to the office upstairs. Guess who used it? Lee Harvey Oswald. How do we know that? This address was stamped on...pro-Castro leaflets he handed out in the summer of '63 on Canal Street. The same leaflets they found in his garage in Dallas. After the arrest, 544 Camp St. never appeared on the pamphlets again. He was arrested for fighting with anti-Castro Cubans. But he'd contacted them already...as an ex-Marine trying to join their anti-Castro crusade. When they heard he was now pro-Castro, they paid him a visit. "What's this Fidel shit? You lied to me!"
—Oliver Stone/Zachary Sklar, JFK
CLEVELAND, OHIO—On the morning of this year's Indiana primary, He, Trump suggested that Ted Cruz's father, Rafael, was part of the very scene depicted in that slice of Oliver Stone's movie. He wasn't saying that the elder Cruz was hanging out in the French Quarter with Lee Harvey Oswald, mind you.
"You know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being—you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this? "Right prior to his being shot and nobody even brings it up. I mean, they don't even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it."
Of course, it was "reported" in the National Enquirer, which published a grainy photo of a guy standing behind Oswald who looked a little like Rafael Cruz. The man also looked like your Uncle Manny. This was another one of those things that He, Trump had heard somewhere and it was just something that was out there. Just like how we have to keep Muslims out of the country "until we figure out what's going on," and, more recently, how the president was maybe, possibly complicit in the killing of police officers because "something's going on there" and he doesn't know what it is. Donald Trump is Mr. Jones.
That is how, in the overfilled catch-basin that is He, Trump's conscious mind, Tailgunner Ted Cruz somehow got linked in patriarchal line with the murder of John F. Kennedy. So, on Wednesday night, when Cruz declined formally to endorse the candidate, and when he got lustily booed for his trouble, it was hard not to admire the pure cussedness of the man. He certainly showed more stones than the rest of the lickspittles who are riding in the cattle cars of the Trump train, and that includes Young Marco Rubio, who beamed his surrender into the hall by video.
Then there was Cruz:
"I congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination last night. And like each of you, I want to see the principles that our party believes prevail in November… Don't stay in home in November. Stand and speak and vote your conscience."
And that was as far as he went. He ignored a sneering cheap shot from radio terror Laura Ingraham. Trump roughnecks in the cheap seats heckled his wife, screaming, "Goldman Sachs," until security hustled them out. He went as far as he did and he went no further and, truth be told, he's the most principled politician who's stepped to the podium all week.
This is not to say that the speech he did give was anything more than the same weird concoction he was peddling all over the country all year. It takes an amazing leap over an amazing cognitive canyon to say:
And freedom means recognizing that our Constitution allows states to choose policies that reflect local values. Colorado may decide something different than Texas. New York different than Iowa. Diversity. That's the way it's supposed to be. If not, what's the point of having states to begin with?
And then follow it, not five minutes later, with a paean to the Republican Party's largely abandoned historical roots.
Our party was founded to defeat slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. We passed the Civil Rights Act, and fought to eliminate Jim Crow laws.
There's not much I know for absolute goddamn certainty, but this is one thing I know for absolute goddamn certainty: States rights were on the losing side at Gettysburg, and they were on the losing side in Little Rock, and they were on the losing side on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. So, no, Tailgunner Ted Cruz's brand of snake-oil is no more palatable now than it was in Des Moines last January.
But when He, Trump deliberately walked into the hall to disrupt and to drown out Cruz's peroration and whatever ovation he was going to get—which, I must admit, is an old-school James Michael Curley elbow to throw—Cruz left the stage with no little dignity. (According to CNN's Dana Bash, he got confronted several times in the hallway by outraged Trump supporters.) He is one of the few people who have spoken here who can honestly say that. And I most emphatically include the candidate himself.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
