Quote Of The Day (44 Yrs. Ago)

TNR doesn't give the date, but we'll assume it was after Kuchel's primary loss in 1968. Anyway, from the plus ça change ... file:

When conservatives defeated moderate California Senator Thomas Kuchel, he lashed out at what he called a “fanatical neo-fascist political cult” in the grips of a “strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear.”

And something interesting we didn't know:

While Kuchel was campaigning against Goldwater, there circulated a "vicious document" that purported to be an affidavit signed by a Los Angeles police officer, saying that in 1949 he had arrested Kuchel. The document said the arrest was for drunkenness while Kuchel had been in the midst of a sex act. Four men were indicted for the libel: Norman H. Krause, bar owner and ex-Los Angeles policeman, who in 1950 did arrest two people who worked in Kuchel's office for drunkenness; Jack D. Clemmons, a Los Angeles police sergeant until his resignation two weeks before his arrest; John F. Fergus, a public relations man for Eversharp, Inc., who in 1947 was charged with possession of a concealed weapon and given a suspended sentence, and Francis A. Capell of Zarephath, New Jersey, the publisher of a right wing newsletter.

Kuchel was narrowly defeated in the Republican primary in 1968 by conservative state Superintendent of Public Instruction Max Rafferty, who went on to lose the general election to Alan Cranston, the former state Controller, a position once held by Kuchel himself.

Full disclosure (as if it means a damn thing): Our dead as a fucking doorknoblate mother was a volunteer in Rafferty's 1962 campaign, & there exists somewhere (Maybe.) a photograph of physically violent asshole Rafferty

(While an undergraduate at UCLA, Rafferty "took umbrage at many of the things" in the college newspaper, the Daily Bruin, "particularly the editorial page," editor Stanley Rubin recalled in 1970, "to the point of charging into the office and physically attacking me."^[3] In 1937 Rafferty wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times in which he described The Bruin as "one of the most prejudiced newspapers on the Pacific Coast" and complained that the Bruin's "radicalism is not so funny if it keeps you from getting a job."^[4])

autographing the cast on this at the time eight-yr. old reporter's broken right arm in the San Mateo Rafferty office.

Added value! Cast-autographing song:"I hope you heal up real quick!"