I Wanted to Vote for Eldridge Cleaver

       How could so many people have voted for Donald Trump—not once, but twice? What were they trying to say, if anything? Or were they just saying a big fuck you to us all?

      I think I may now understand that attitude because more than 50 years ago, during a national election, saying a big fuck you was exactly what I wanted to say.

      My first vote in a presidential election was 1968: Nixon v. Humphrey.

      Nixon, of course, unthinkable. But Hubert Humphrey’s support of the war in Vietnam made him unthinkable for me, too. (Also: I still have a strong memory of Humphrey, in his hotel suite during the chaotic 1968 Democratic Convention, joyfully kissing his TV set when his wife Muriel’s image appeared on the screen—all while protestors were being savagely beaten outside his hotel in a “police riot.”)

      What a choice. Which is why, in 1968, I wanted my first vote for president of the United States to be for Eldridge Cleaver of the Peace and Freedom party. Furious with the standard choices, I—like many of us—thought I had no other option. Like so many of us, I wanted to say fuck all of this. (Sounds maybe like Trump’s 2024 voters?)

The difference, of course, is that I knew Cleaver had no chance.

      In 1968, Cleaver, author of the acclaimed “Soul on Ice,” was the minister of information for the Black Panther Party. Earlier, he had been convicted of a series of crimes including rape and attempted murder and eventually served time in Soledad, Folsom and San Quentin, where he started writing.  

      Released from prison with the help of the founder of Ramparts, that quintessential radical magazine of the sixties, Cleaver hung out with people like the playwright Ed Bullins and the poet Amiri Baraka, along with the Panther founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. For leftie-type white people like me, he was sort of the embodiment of radical chic.

      In April of that tumultuous year, the Panthers were involved in a shoot-out with Oakland police that left one man dead and Cleaver wounded. After being jailed, he was released on bail, which allowed him to run for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Because of course, back then, it was the far left, not the MAGA right, that was ok with supporting a convicted felon and a judicially determined sexual offender to lead our country.

     The Peace and Freedom Party had Cleaver as its candidate in some 20 states. But a court kicked him off the New York ballot because he was only 33 years old, not the constitutionally mandated 35.  

      So, I couldn’t vote for him. Instead, I cast my vote for the candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party, a dissident group which had recently broken off from the Peace and Freedom Party.

      Still following?

      The Freedom and Peace Party candidate was comedian and activist Dick Gregory, who had previously run for mayor of Chicago against Richard Daley. Gregory’s running mate in several states was Dr. Spock—the pediatrician, not the Star Trek guy. He maybe wasn’t as chic as Eldridge Cleaver, but he’d do.

      Gregory didn’t win the presidency. Neither did Cleaver. And this is when his life seems to have become a scrapbook of the ‘60s and ‘70s, a roll call of names and places and ideas from the most turbulent—and maybe thrilling?—time of our lives. It’s also a kind of cheat sheet for how we got from there to here.

      After the election, Cleaver was charged with attempted murder for the police shootout, but jumped ball and fled to Cuba. Then he became unwelcome there when Fidel Castro apparently received information that the CIA had infiltrated the Panthers.  

      So, Cleaver headed to Algeria, with stops in North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China, where he set up a Panthers “government in exile.” And where he welcomed LSD guru Timothy Leary, another fugitive from justice. The Weather Underground had smuggled Leary out of prison, where he was serving 20 years for marijuana possession, and then out of the country. (Leary’s compound previously had been raided multiple times by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy.)

      Leary stayed with Cleaver until the minister of information placed him under "revolutionary arrest" as a counter-revolutionary for, surprise, promoting drug use.

      Then Cleaver fell out with the Panthers, left Algeria, moved to Paris and became a born-again Christian and a fashion designer. His main design was "virility pants" that he called "the Cleavers.” Featuring a codpiece, they would give men, he said, "a chance to assert their masculinity" and be liberated from "penis binding."

      Cleaver eventually returned to the U.S., plea bargained to a charge of assault and received community service. Despite running a factory and selling his pants in a West Hollywood shop, he became disillusioned with what he saw as the commercial nature of evangelical Christianity. So, he dabbled in Sun Myung Moon’s campus ministry and also in Catholicism and led a short-lived ministry called Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, a hybrid synthesis of Islam and Christianity he called “Christlam,” along with an auxiliary called the "Guardians of the Sperm."

      By the 1980s, now a baptized Mormon, Cleaver had become a conservative Republican, running for election to the Berkeley City Council and in a Republican senatorial primary.

      He lost both times. But he proved, decades before the current occupant of the White House, that Scott Fitzgerald was clearly wrong when he wrote “there are no second acts in American lives.”

    It may have been a long strange trip indeed, but in our bizarro world of today—RFK jr. as secretary of health and human services?—maybe it’s not so strange anymore.