Published on November 30, 2015 at 08:05AM
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On the night of the 2010 midterm elections, a portly, silver-haired Jeb Bush stood on a stage in the courtyard of Miami’s luxe Biltmore Hotel, appearing to choke back tears. The beloved former governor of Florida was there to introduce the young conservative insurgent who had just pulled off a remarkable underdog victory in the U.S. Senate race.
“Bushes get emotional, so I’m gonna try my hardest,” Jeb told the ecstatic crowd of Republicans. “My wife told me, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’ But Marco Rubio makes me cry for joy!”
At the time, it looked like the culmination of a sturdy alliance and deep friendship — the proud mentor presenting his protege. Five years later, however, the two men are locked in a fight for the Republican presidential nomination, and recent headlines suggest the relationship has soured. According to the New York Times, Bush’s super PAC has threatened to spend $20 million in a blitz of negative ads intended “to damage … Rubio’s reputation and halt his sudden ascent in the polls.” And last month, an internal document leaked detailing the Bush campaign’s efforts to cast Rubio as “a risky bet” for donors. “Those who have looked into Marco’s background in the past have been concerned with what they have found,” the document cryptically warned.
The Bush campaign didn't elaborate on its innuendo. But, as I detail in my new book, The Wilderness, Jeb's allies went much further in a behind-the-scenes, last-ditch effort to keep Rubio from running in the first place.
Jeb and his team recognized the threat posed by Rubio nearly a year ago, and took aggressive action to knock him out of 2016 contention — with some in Bush's circle trying to smear the senator by allegedly circulating lurid, unsubstantiated rumors of infidelity.
Reached for comment Sunday, Bush spokesman Tim Miller said, “Our campaign has never said anything of this nature and doesn’t believe it. The candidates will be graded on their records both in the private sector and public office, as well as their plans for the future.”
But months before the campaign began, Republican donors, operatives, and politicos told a different story. The same day Mitt Romney bowed out of the 2016 race — marking the first and last real victory for Jeb’s “juggernaut” campaign — a California bundler who was being courted by Bush’s team told me, “They’re going after Rubio next. It’s like whack-a-mole. They’re going to try to take out everyone before the primaries even start.”
In March 2012, Marco Rubio charged Terry Sullivan — a loyal, salty-tongued aide out of South Carolina — with the task of running his political action committee, Reclaim America. The strategist's job was to lay the political groundwork for Rubio's next move, positioning him for either a spot on the 2012 Republican ticket or a future presidential bid of his own. And Sullivan knew immediately what his first priority would be: putting an end to the incessant drip-drip of damning intel on Rubio, and figuring out exactly what skeletons might be lodged in the senator's closet.
Ever since he began to make a name for himself in Tallahassee, Rubio had been trailed by a persistent series of unsubstantiated rumors about his sex life. Jilted mistresses, sordid affairs, secret love children — Rubio’s team had heard it all, and the more seasoned strategists among them knew that such tittle-tattle was commonplace in every state capitol. But even as Rubio indignantly denied any suggestion of infidelity, the unconfirmed gossip had proved difficult for him to shake, popping up frequently on local political blogs and via the endless behind-the-scenes speculation of his loose-lipped legislative colleagues.
All throughout Rubio's 2010 Senate bid, his campaign aides had worried that their flailing primary opponent would go public with the gossip — but the rumors never managed to bubble up to the mainstream press. Now that Rubio had emerged as the most buzzed-about prospect in the 2012 Republican veepstakes, however, he had a fresh target on his back, and journalists were scrambling to find new angles on the young freshman senator. It started when The Washington Post published a story poking holes in the inspirational tale of Rubio's Cuban "exile" parents; a few months later, I reported at BuzzFeed News that Rubio had been baptized Mormon as a child. Neither revelation was particularly scandalous, but they served to rev up the D.C. rumor mill, and soon the “zipper problem” rumors were resurfacing in the gossip among politicos. Taking note of the chatter, conservative columnist Marc Thiessen wrote, vaguely, that a “malevolent oracle is at work in Washington . . . seeking to undermine the ascent of a rising GOP star” by “suggesting that Rubio may look good on paper, but he cannot ‘pass vet’ for the vice presidential nomination.” Of course, no one in the staid, starchy D.C. press corps was willing to explicitly lay out the rumors dogging Rubio — but they gestured toward them all the time with broad suggestions that “another shoe” (a stiletto, perhaps?) was still waiting to drop on the Floridian.
To lay this meme to rest, Sullivan sought out a Sacramento-based firm named MB Public Affairs, known in campaign circles for its “political vulnerability research” and tight-lipped discretion. Sullivan pulled more than $40,000 out of the PAC’s bank account to cover the company’s fee, but before setting the researchers loose, Rubio’s top aides had a frank talk with the senator. They warned that the process they were about to undertake would be about as invasive and unpleasant as a prostate exam — but just as necessary to his political health. Rubio concurred. Though the senator had taken issue with the way the Washington Post handled the story about his parents, the truth was that the paper’s findings had genuinely surprised him: He had never heard the full story from his mom and dad. He realized now just how much damage could be wrought by a single, seemingly benign secret — even one that wasn’t his own.
The political rectal probe started right away, with the firm’s researchers eventually digging through Rubio’s messy personal finances and rounding up every piece of paper that had passed through his office in Tallahassee. Field operatives fanned out across the country, descending on the tiny Missouri town where his now-defunct former college once stood, and showing up on distant relatives’ doorsteps, from Miami to Las Vegas. Their mission was to dig up any and all dirt that political opponents might try to use against Rubio — especially anything likely to turn up in the vice presidential vetting process. That included quietly dispatching a private investigator to Florida to fully suss the extent of the infidelity rumors.
To Rubio's longest-serving aides, most of the stories they heard about their boss contained all the verisimilitude of Fifty Shades of Grey fan fiction — but they knew a couple of rumors were particularly persistent in political circles, and they targeted those for debunking. One that reporters in Florida had repeatedly tried to run down over the years dealt with a Tallahassee politico who Rubio had supposedly taken on several romantic out-of-state trips and paid for them with the state party's credit card. Another, even more pervasive rumor, held that Rubio was hiding a secret second family somewhere, and sending regular cash installments to support them (and keep them quiet). The details of this story varied substantially from one telling to another: sometimes the mother was a former Dolphins cheerleader; other times she wasn’t. Sometimes there was one kid living with his mom in New York; other times there were two kids and they lived in Florida.
Rubio’s operatives found these stories impossible to reconcile with the devoted family man and conscientious careerist they knew and admired. But they also knew that smoke routinely preceded fire in political sex scandals, and they needed to find out for sure if there was a “bimbo eruption” looming on the horizon. Acting on explicit instructions, the research firm investigated the rumors and determined that they lacked concrete evidence, which was enough to give Rubio’s advisers peace of mind. But along the way, the firm encountered enough dishy Miami-Dade politicos hocking titillating gossip to fill the entire newsroom of a supermarket tabloid. The firm concluded that, in many cases, the rumors were being fanned by the same South Florida Republicans who claimed to be Rubio’s supporters.
And unfortunately for him, many of those Miami gossips would, come 2015, join the cutthroat ranks of the Jeb Bush juggernaut.
Clay Rodery for BuzzFeed News
When new hires would show up for their first day of work at the Tallahassee offices of Florida governor Jeb Bush, they would find on their desks a bound copy of an 1899 essay titled “A Message to Garcia.” Even in its 19th century prose, the 1,500-word pamphlet was a breezy read that could easily be skimmed in the space of a coffee break — but the aides who wanted to thrive were expected to fully internalize its thesis.
In the essay, author Elbert Hubbard relates the story of a U.S. army officer assigned by President William McKinley to deliver an important message to the Cuban rebel general Calixto Garcia, deep in the island’s jungles. The exemplary officer takes the order “without asking any idiotic questions." He dutifully sets off on a boat, disappears into the jungle, and emerges weeks later having executed his mission flawlessly. Praising the officer’s quiet diligence, Hubbard writes, “There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book learning young men need...but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing — ‘Carry a message to Garcia!’”
Inside each pamphlet, the governor’s aides would find a handwritten inscription from their new boss: “Be a messenger.”
Some of the new staffers no doubt interpreted the gift as little more than a well-intentioned bit of fortune cookie management theory. But the ones who would become the governor’s most trusted aides were those who received it as it was intended: a new creed to live by, an invitation to convert. From those baptized into the Bush inner circle, Jeb demanded fierce obedience, a bullet-blocking sense of loyalty, and a monomaniacal drive to get the job done by whatever means necessary. Across Florida, allies and adversaries alike marveled at his Vader-like grip on his troops. “He instills something weird in you,” David Johnson, one of Jeb’s longtime loyalists, told me. “You really want to please him. It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or 50. You want to make Jeb Bush happy with your work, happy with your competence.” And often the fastest way to earn the boss’s attaboys was with sharpened knives and a killer instinct.
Indeed, beneath the glossy exterior of his public profile — that of the compassionate conservative, the happy warrior, the good-natured reformer — Jeb possessed a hard-edged, often ruthless political style that ran through his entire rise and reign in the Sunshine State. “He’s been the big, bad kid,” Chris Smith, a leading Democrat in the Florida House, complained to a reporter toward the end of Jeb’s term. “And he’s wielded that power mercilessly.”
Clay Rodery for BuzzFeed News
It wasn't until Rubio dazzled a roomful of donors at the Koch brothers summit in Rancho Mirage that Jeb and his tight-knit 2016 team decided the young senator needed to be neutralized. For their new mission, they adopted a code name: “Homeland Security.” Few of Jeb’s lieutenants believed they would need to subject Rubio to too much browbeating in order to sideline him, and their commander agreed. All he needed was a gentle reminder of his place in the pecking order. And so the word went out to Jeb’s army of foot soldiers: Carry the message.
Over the next several weeks, Jeb’s messengers rallied his vast matrix of Florida allies in an effort to lock down support in his home state. They set up conference call pep rallies with hundreds of self-proclaimed “alumni” of the Bush gubernatorial administration (including many Rubio supporters) and ginned up excitement about getting the band back together. They moved swiftly to extract endorsements from state lawmakers — wooing them over brown liquor and red meat at the exclusive Governors Club near the capitol, and then encouraging them to make their allegiances publicly known.
Meanwhile, Jeb’s ever-expanding political operation made a big show of its fundraising supremacy, particularly in Florida. At an event hosted by his political action committee in Tallahassee, his team branded the donors like cattle, with large red stickers exclaiming “Jeb!” — and then they invited reporters into the formerly private meeting so they could ooh and ahh and tweet about the impressive herd of millionaires.
Nine hundred miles away at the Capitol Hill offices of Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC, the message came through loud and clear.
Rubio’s advisers had hoped to stay off Jeb’s radar entirely, quietly raising money and assembling a lean and nimble staff while the juggernaut blasted away at bigger targets and boasted about its gargantuan fundraising hauls. The loudmouth lieutenants on Jeb’s finance team were already bragging to reporters that they had set a $100 million goal for the first quarter of 2015 — an astronomical sum that would shatter any and all fundraising records if achieved. By contrast, when Rubio had assembled his top donors in Miami Beach at the end of January, his advisers explicitly asked that they resist, for now, any urge to hype their contributions in the media.
“Don’t try to steal Jeb’s thunder,” one Rubio adviser instructed them. “It’s like a pendulum. Let them pound their chest and build themselves up, and when they don’t hit their goal, it’s gonna come crashing back [in] the other direction.” In the meantime, they would go about their business without Jeb’s interference, and when the fundraising totals were made public, Rubio’s haul would far exceed the low expectations.
Alas, the Bush brigade had Florida on full, threat-level-red lockdown, and with the exception of a few loyal backers, Rubio wasn’t getting anywhere in his home state. Meanwhile, as they tried fundraising outside of Florida, they began to notice a curious pattern among the Republican donors who were turning them down. Many of them seemed to like Rubio’s ideas and message, but when they explained their doubts about his 2016 prospects, they often used the same vague, coded language: concerns about the wealth of “oppo” that could drag him down, or the “talk coming out of Tallahassee,” or the importance of nominating a “fully vetted” candidate. This, of course, was nothing new for Rubio. But it seemed oddly top of mind all of a sudden in certain quarters of the GOP money world.
“It’s the same thing from the Jeb Bush camp. They keep telling me, ‘Oh, we’ve got the thing that’s going to take him down.’ But nobody’s ever produced anything that we all haven’t read in the Tallahassee Democrat.”
Justin Edmonds / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — This week, abortion rights activists are going to use tough language and modern political tactics to make the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Friday into a political moment they say will put abortion opponents on the defensive after a year that has seen them score a number of political victories against legal and accessible abortion.
That means abortion rights supporters using the word “terrorism” to describe what happened in Colorado Springs. That means confronting pro-life Republicans and asking them about what activists call “a culture of violence” directed toward abortion providers. And that means trying to engage Democratic allies in Washington to do the same — something that prominent Democrats like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz have already done — in the hopes, particularly, of turning a byzantine Senate vote as early as this week into a political opportunity for Democrats on the abortion issue.
The modern pro-choice movement has been infused with a new kind of political skill set born in the netroots left, the activist labor movement, and the tactical innovations from the Obama campaign. Listservs and email chains lit up in the pro-choice community almost immediately, and it didn’t take long for pro-choice activists to put resources on the ground to turn the tragedy into a moment they argue could turn Americans off to some of the more ugly rhetoric among abortion opponents — and put Republican presidential candidates in a tough spot.
The effort began less than 24 hours after the Colorado Springs standoff that left three dead and a suspect who reportedly said “no more baby parts” after the shooting in police custody.
On Saturday morning in Greenfield, Iowa, activists from NARAL Pro-Choice America confronted Ted Cruz during a campaign stop over the Texas senator’s recent endorsement from Operation Rescue, a fringe anti-abortion group long known for violent rhetoric against abortion providers. Cruz touted the endorsement in a release last week and enthusiastically praised Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue. Newman, an American, is notorious among abortion rights supporters: Last month, Australia banned Newman from entering on a visa after pro-choice politicians questioned his and writings that critics say advocate violence against abortion providers.
Within hours of the shooting, top NARAL officials in Washington were in contact with their activist network to discuss the incident and early reports of a motive connected to Planned Parenthood and abortion. It was decided that Cruz would be asked to answer for his Newman endorsement with a question that referred to the shooting the previous day, drawing a line between the deaths in Colorado and the anti-abortion rhetoric on the presidential campaign trail. Two NARAL activists — one to ask the question, one to take a video of the whole thing — approached Cruz after an event at The Corner, a small cafe in across from Greenfield’s Adair County Courthouse.
“The Planned Parenthood attacks in Colorado yesterday were very upsetting,” began the activist, an Iowan who a NARAL spokesperson stressed was “not a professional tracker.”
“Does it make you rethink your endorsement by Troy Newman, who advocates murdering abortion care providers?” the activist continued.
Cruz shut the attempted viral moment down quick, telling the activist, “We’ll have a chance to visit with media shortly.” The Cruz campaign referred BuzzFeed News to public statements the candidate made on Colorado in other campaign appearances including his call for prayers for the victims.
NARAL had been readying a case against Cruz over the Newman endorsement before the shooting in Colorado, using its research shop to blast out facts on the Operation Rescue president and create a clamor on liberal news sites. And NARAL has been building an infrastructure in Iowa for months, readying a grassroots organization to keep abortion rights in the political conversation ahead of the February caucuses.
The rapid reaction reflects the willingness of NARAL — and others in the pro-choice movement — to lean way into politics quickly in a way that abortion rights groups didn’t just a presidential cycle ago.
NARAL is run by Ilyse Hogue, a former top advocate at MoveOn.org, who was specifically selected to restore a pillar of the abortion rights movement and prepare it for the modern political age. As her activists were confronting Cruz in Iowa, Hogue was penning a Facebook post about Newman that was shared quickly and widely among the pro-choice left.
Newman and other anti-abortion leaders quickly condemned the Colorado shooting. On Sunday, Cruz cautioned against drawing conclusions from the Planned Parenthood shooting (and floated as an example the idea that the shooter was a transgender activist). Others have been quicker to define the shooting; former Gov. Mike Huckabee called it "domestic terrorism" that stands against the principles of the pro-life movement.
Abortion rights advocates contend those condemnations are a cynical attempt to put distance between Colorado Springs and mainstream anti-abortion rhetoric.
Hogue wrote Newman was “using Operation Rescue to call for state-sanctioned execution of doctors who serve women — and then crying crocodile tears when someone takes that vision into their own hands.”
NARAL was in the midst of a campaign to push the Obama administration to investigate reported instances of vandalism and attempted arson at abortion provider sites as acts of domestic terrorism when the shooting happened in Colorado Springs. On Wednesday, the group planned to deliver a nearly 60,000-signature petition to the Department of Justice calling for that investigation to begin. The petition now features mention of the Colorado Springs shooting and ties it directly to the surreptitiously-recorded Planned Parenthood videos — which accuse the organization selling aborted fetuses’ organs and tissues and include graphic descriptions — that have dogged that group for much of the year.
The word “terrorism” is important, activists told BuzzFeed News. They’re trying to make the case that anti-abortion rhetoric ties directly to abortion clinic vandalism and finally, to the Colorado shootings. “Terrorism” signals that the ideology behind the shooting was extreme in nature, activists said, and suggests a network of anti-abortion groups and advocates are helping to fuel violence.
Hogue said she knows a thorough investigation into the Colorado Springs shooting is ongoing, and that details of the shooter and his motivations will continue to come out. But the deaths at a Planned Parenthood clinic are about more than one man’s acts, she told BuzzFeed News in an interview.
“The story is not about this one guy,” she said. “The story is about a really well-funded, really well-connected infrastructure that outlives any one candidate, any one guy, and creates a culture.”
Hogue is not speaking from the fringe of the abortion rights movement. Her line is, increasingly, the line people on the abortion rights side are taking, and next week will be a core part of Democratic messaging on the Colorado shootings aimed at putting Republicans on their heels.
On Sunday, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called the Colorado shootings “an act of terrorism” in a statement to reporters and said, “Those running for president and those of us in leadership roles in our country's major political parties have an obligation to denounce these attacks and clearly say that violence and intimidation in the pursuit of ideology are not acceptable in America.”
A few hours later, Planned Parenthood vice president Dawn Laguens took a swing at her own version of the “crocodile tears” argument Hogue made. “It is offensive and outrageous that some politicians are now claiming this tragedy has nothing to do with the toxic environment they helped create,” she said in a statement. Laguens also directly called out Cruz for the Newman endorsement.
And on Sunday night, Martin O’Malley said in New Hampshire at the state party’s annual JJ dinner that the Planned Parenthood shooting was among shootings motivated by "intolerance, racism, and hate... acts of terror."
This week promises a potential moment in Washington, where lawmakers will return to Capitol Hill on Monday and Senate Republicans are expected to take up a bill that includes defunding Planned Parenthood soon after.
The measure will require only 51 votes to pass in the upper chamber because it's part of the reconciliation package — a complicated legislative tool that doesn't require a filibuster-proof majority. The politics are pretty much set: President Obama will veto the bill, which also includes repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act. But a debate over Planned Parenthood funding so close to the shooting in Colorado gives Democrats a chance to turn the vote into a political cudgel.
House Democrats will likely call for dismantling the recently formed Planned Parenthood Select Committee — designed to investigate the videos — in the aftermath of the shooting. The Democratic members on the committee have so far been reluctant to make the shooting too political before law enforcement establishes a motive for the shooter, but that could change quickly after House Democrats hold their first weekly closed-door meeting after Thanksgiving break.
On Saturday, California Sen. Barbara Boxer previewed the anti-select committee messaging in a statement to the press. Along with calling for new gun control laws, Boxer specifically singled out the committee as a political target.
“It is time to stop the demonizing and witch hunts against Planned Parenthood, its staff and patients, and the life-saving health care it provides to millions every day,” Boxer said. “Today, I am calling on Speaker Paul Ryan to disband the GOP's special committee, which was set up only to continue this witch hunt against Planned Parenthood."
The driving force behind next week’s political push over the Colorado shooting will be the more experienced, politically-capable abortion rights movement. Planned Parenthood — whose rapid response and messaging operations were tested and improved by the debate over the videos — is run by Cecile Richards, who used to run America Votes, the well- (and secretly-) funded group that attempted to remake Democratic politics by putting disparate liberal groups in the same room so they could act in a common direction. Overseeing rapid response for Planned Parenthood, and coordinating many of the post-Colorado efforts for the group is Anita Dunn, a key member of the Obama campaign brain trust who is now a powerful political consultant. Dunn helped run the campaign that remade Democratic politics with a focus on digital innovation and sharp political messaging.
While some activists bemoaned ongoing message coordination problems in the earliest moments after the Colorado Springs shooting and said the abortion rights movement still lacks the rapid, across-the-board response of the modern gun control movement, they say their movement is uniquely poised to at least alter the political conversation around abortion rights in the weeks after the Colorado Springs shooting thanks to a new generation of leaders ready to fight hard on the political battlefields of the moment.
“The pro-choice movement is more networked, more politically savvy,” Hogue said. “This generation grew up in a much more rapid response-based climate."
After two decades with the NBA, Bryant wrote a poem to the sport saying that he will retire at the end of the 2015-2016 season.
Jeff Chiu / AP
Kobe Bryant, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, announced that he is retiring from the game in a poem titled, "Dear Basketball."
The 37-year-old posted the poem in The Players' Tribune on Sunday, writing about his love for basketball since he was just a young boy, but that he is "ready to let go."
Bryant had said he was considering making his 20th season his last in recent weeks, according to the Associated Press.
In April 2013, Bryant tore an Achilles' tendon, which was followed by knee and shoulder injuries that have limited his playing the last two seasons, the Los Angeles Times reported.
"My heart can take the pounding, my mind can handle the grind, but my body knows it's time to say goodbye," Bryant wrote.
During the past two decades, Bryant has earned 17 All-Star selections, five championship rings, and two Olympic gold medals, the AP reports.
Dear Basketball,
From the moment
I started rolling my dad's tube socks
And shooting imaginary
Game-winning shots
In the Great Western Forum
I knew one thing was real:
I fell in love with you.
A love so deep I gave you my all —
From my mind & body
To my spirit & soul.
As a six-year-old boy
Deeply in love with you
I never saw the end of the tunnel.
I only saw myself
Running out of one.
And so I ran.
I ran up and down every court
After every loose ball for you.
You asked for my hustle
I gave you my heart
Because it came with so much more.
I played through the sweat and hurt
Not because challenge called me
But because YOU called me.
I did everything for YOU
Because that's what you do
When someone makes you feel as
Alive as you've made me feel.
You gave a six-year-old boy his Laker dream
And I'll always love you for it.
But I can't love you obsessively for much longer.
This season is all I have left to give.
My heart can take the pounding
My mind can handle the grind
But my body knows it's time to say goodbye.
And that's OK.
I'm ready to let you go.
I want you to know now
So we both can savor every moment we have left together.
The good and the bad.
We have given each other
All that we have.
And we both know, no matter what I do next
I'll always be that kid
With the rolled up socks
Garbage can in the corner
:05 seconds on the clock
Ball in my hands.
5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1
Not what his neighbors thought. Cruz was trying “to make the point that we don’t have all the details,” a spokesperson says.
Scott Olson / Getty Images
While urging caution about drawing conclusions about the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting that left three dead, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz Sunday pointed to claims on conservative blogs that the suspected shooter is a "transgendered leftist activist."
"The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when at this point there's very little evidence to indicate that," Cruz told reporters in Newton, Iowa on Sunday, according to journalists at the event.
Published on November 30, 2015 at 02:15AM
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Raphael Cohen climbed into the ring, through the gap between the taut ropes, one leg first, before snaking his torso through and then pulling his other foot in. His cornermen, Benny Carroll and Jimmy Halloran, who worked with him shoveling coal for the engines, held him by the shoulders, as cornermen do, and they would have steered him and kneaded his shoulders and rubbed his arms.
As he entered the ring for the first round and heard the roar of the men, his secret was surely apparent — this was Cohen’s first time in an actual boxing ring, and that moment of recognition can’t be blustered. Yes, he may have fought on street corners, and sparred and brawled in the hidden corners of the warship, but this was different. The ring was enormous. It dwarfed the space where he shoveled coal, where he had worked for precisely 614 days. And he had never stood before all these men like this, as they laughed and clapped and whistled.
He must have had the nervous panic and impatience of any first-time fighter. Boxers suffer stage fright just as actors do. Too hot, then too cold. Hands clammy in the foul-smelling 5-ounce boxing gloves borrowed from another ship. And the formal minutes before a fight, the deafening clamor of the jeers and the shouts, the panic one has to bluff and swagger through, they were new to him.
The light was dim, though the boxing ring was lit by the most advanced electric Navy deck lights of the day, 32 candlepower lamps. (A modern car headlight is 5,000 candlepower.) Diagonally across the ring, Cohen could see Jordan Johnson, a black man, calm and silent, an experienced fighter, waiting in his corner.
It was shortly after 9 p.m. on July 8, 1905. The captain of the USS Yankee, Edward Francis Qualtrough — 55, overweight, fond of liquor — looked down at his ship’s foredeck. He was entertaining a fellow skipper, and, watching from the bridge, he must have felt an irritating lack of control at what was happening on his own ship. In a makeshift boxing ring, a black man and a Jew, bare-chested in the Caribbean heat, were pummeling each other.
The fighters, both small and fast-moving men, sparred. Around them, the ship was crammed, virtually infested with spectators: Marines and sailors from every ship in the squadron languishing in the doldrums off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Six hundred men in uniform, standing, sitting, perched on the rigging and the rails, watching and laughing.
Edward Francis Qualtrough
A spectacle like this — a chaotic boxing fight taking over the ship — wouldn’t have occurred so overtly back when Qualtrough graduated the Naval Academy in 1871, 34 years earlier. But now, with Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency and his public passion for the manly art of boxing, captains were to encourage matches aboard their ships. They were called "smokers." Of course, the irony was that this smoker, between the Jewish sailor and the black sailor, conflicted with Roosevelt’s other passion, the mythology of Anglo-Saxon Teutonic America and its place in history.
It was also clear to Captain Qualtrough from 40 yards away that the black man was the far better fighter. His name was Jordan Johnson, a gunner’s mate from the USS Olympia, and as he stood in the dim but harsh artificial light and the heat of the tropical night, he displayed the chiseled physique of a Greek god, similar to those of the bronze nude statues that Qualtrough’s wife collected, back in Washington, D.C.
Johnson also would have been one of the only black men in sight, anywhere. All those jeering faces in the crowd, visible in the dimness, though the sun had just set — nearly all those faces belonged to white men. Black men had been shunted out of the Navy under Roosevelt. Those who remained worked in the mess halls or as obsequious servants for the officer cadre; they were made virtually invisible on the decks.
For Captain Qualtrough, too, this disappearance of the black men in the fleet was new, because when he first came aboard as an ensign in 1870, black sailors were common. But now, from his perch high on the bridge, Qualtrough could have heard the crowd of sailors under his command hissing at the bare-chested young black man in the ring.
During this period, a Jew and a black man boxing on a U.S. warship would have been seen by many as objects of ridicule — performing clowns, rather than gladiators.
As for the Jewish fighter, Raphael Cohen, he was a sailor on Qualtrough’s Yankee, though the captain never met him. Cohen worked shoveling coal in the boiler room for the engine, unskilled hard labor that didn’t bring much of a promise of a future, though it did build a distinctively muscular physique. Cohen’s torso was hairy and a pale white, but his face and arms were stained black with coal dust. In fact he and the men he worked with were known as “the black gang” aboard these coal-powered warships, and his face, dark against pale lips, must have looked like a grotesque attempt at blackface. During this period when the Navy was scrubbing itself of African-Americans, a Jew and a black man boxing on a U.S. warship, no matter how they fought, would have been seen by many of the men as objects of ridicule, perceived as performing clowns, rather than gladiators.
The Yankee was deployed to the Dominican Republic not in defense of American land or liberty, but rather on a new form of gunboat diplomacy enforced under the brash President Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s project: to take over the finances of a foreign country whose crime was that it owed money to a powerful American company. It launched a new era in American military intervention — an expedition for profit, not principle.
Indeed, Roosevelt’s influence is threaded through this story: Not only did he send the fleet on its mission, but he was also an impassioned champion of boxing in the military. And whether the idea originated with him or not, he presided over the systematic removal of black Americans from Navy life.
That boxing match between a young black sailor and a Jewish sailor aboard an American warship, and the death of one of the fighters, caused a scandal 110 years ago, threatening the careers of powerful men. Newspapers across the country picked up the story, citing lurid allegations that the bout was held “for the edification” of the officers, and that the fighter who died had pleaded that he was sick and was forced to box, even after he’d been hit so hard that an artery in his brain tore, flooding his brain with blood. It was testament to a mix of grit, glory, and stupidity. Or perhaps just obstinate greed by a crew of men hoping to win a cash prize.
And the victor, who had literally grown up in the Navy, a man who had spent nights in chains in harsh discipline, who’d been handed to the military by his parents when he was only 15 years old, he was soon ushered out of the service, abandoned and destitute in a civilian world he didn’t know.
The fight, and the fighters, are long forgotten now, but the records — the ship’s logs, transcripts of military inquests, the enlistment reports — illuminate a dramatic turning point in American ethnic and military history.
USS Yankee
Raphael Cohen was born in 1880, at 15 Suffolk St., a tenement building full of more than 50 Russian Jews who had been part of the beginning of the migration over from the old country. Tobias, Raphael’s father, had been in the first wave, arriving from Russia in 1866, via Germany, right after the Civil War, and became a successful tailor. The seven Cohen children all grew up in one of the most crowded neighborhoods on earth.
Journalist Jacob Riis, a social reformer of the era, explored the area in 1890 when Cohen was 10 years old, and in his book How the Other Half Lives Riis called the neighborhood “Jewtown.” He wrote that “the manner and dress of the people, their unmistakable physiognomy, betray their race.” “Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown,” he added, “as of its people the world over.” Riis captured the core of the American ghetto: “Life here means the hardest form of work almost from the cradle,” he wrote.
Of course it’s a place that survives now as imagined kitsch, evoked on the walls of Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse, and countless delis with their knishes and lox and herring. But even those foods meant something other than what they do now. “Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown,” wrote Riis. “They are filling, and keep the children from crying with hunger.” He recounts walking the streets at night, when a “dirty baby, in a single brief garment,” as he describes it, “tumbles off the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches my leg with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly head pillowed on my boot.”
It was a noisy neighborhood, and it evolved fast as Cohen grew up, just around the corner from the giant Beth Hamedrash Hagadol synagogue. A former Baptist church, it was transformed into a thing of the Old World by the immigrants from eastern Europe. The hulking building still stands, derelict now, after years of Hasidic prayer.
Down the street from Cohen’s building on Suffolk Street was Sach’s Café; the place was the unofficial headquarters for the radicals and atheists of the day. Emma Goldman, the fiery anarchist, held court, loud and fast in Russian and Yiddish.
Then, in 1898, when Cohen was 17, a patriotic fervor washed through the Lower East Side. Youngsters started dreaming of being soldiers. War with Spain was coming. The Hearst newspapers provided daily accounts of Spanish atrocities to the rest of America, and so did the Yiddish newspapers.
It was so over-the-top that the Commercial Advertiser in the spring of 1898 ran a story titled “Ghetto War Spirit,” with a subheading: “Jews Bear Spain an Old Grudge — Manila a Victory for Israel — ‘God Gave America the Job of Smashing Spain.’” Somehow the Spanish-American War, the reporter found, was now seen as a vehicle for vengeance against Spain for its atrocities of centuries past, for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand’s old war against the Jews, and the crimes of the Inquisition. America — through this war — was offering its new Jewish immigrants not just the chance to remake themselves, but the chance to seek vengeance against the old, cruel Europe that had treated them so disdainfully.
A tailor quoted in the article said, “They tortured the Jews and banished them from their land and now the God of Israel is getting even with them. It is an old story, more than four hundred years old, but the High One never forgets.”
Cohen's enlistment papers
It was in this environment that, in May 1898, Cohen's father accompanied Isidore, Raphael’s older brother, to the recruiting office. Because Isidore was a minor, a witness had to sign. The recruitment document shows that the witness was Moritz Tolk, a notary, and later an alderman, who operated out of his brother’s saloon down on Canal Street, where he helped sweatshop workers get their papers.
Isidore enlisted in Troop I of the 4th Cavalry, although it is impossible to see how he could ever have ridden a horse in his life. He was sent off to Kentucky for basic training and from there he joined his unit to steam to the Philippines. In the end, he was too late to fight the Spanish, who abandoned the troublesome colony to America shortly after the U.S. invaded.
Instead of vengeance for the Jews for the atrocities of the Inquisition, the 4th Cavalry just did battle with angry Filipino rebels. U.S. troops used the “water cure” — known today as waterboarding — to get the rebel captives to talk; they sometimes killed prisoners. But while his brother fought jungle warfare in Mindenao, Raphael, back in New York, just worked as a day laborer.
He got married in March 1903 to a girl from the neighborhood, a block away, named Sadie Shasam. The two didn’t live together for long. It’s unclear what went wrong, because the records on him go blank for some months, right after the marriage. But in September, he walked to the doors of the big Navy recruiting station down on 319 Market St. in Philadelphia. On his enlistment form, as he signed up for a four-year stint, Cohen wrote “single.”
The records show that he was given a cursory physical examination. Height 5 foot 4½ inches. Eyes brown and hair black. Weight 123 pounds. “Hirsute,” wrote the Navy surgeon who examined his hairy body, when Cohen was standing naked.
“Circumcised,” the doctor noted, too.
Bill Bragg for BuzzFeed News
Just as the noise from the crowd was overpowering, in that instant, after the bell rang, was when Cohen stopped hearing it. Cohen rushed in hard and fast, all intensity of a spider, not fine boxing but bullying. He tried to buffalo Johnson into a corner with a right swing and then a left.
A zbokh, they might have said in Cohen’s old neighborhood, on the alley near Grand Street, if he landed a punch, Yiddish for a hard hit. And then a zetz. Wild swings.
But Johnson slipped both punches with ease, sidestepping with the gentle ballet steps of a fighter, and his move left him wound up like a spring to unleash a powerful left hook to Cohen’s head. A klap, as they would have said.
A sudden hammer of pain. Cohen staggered, and Johnson moved in closer with a right, then a left, and Cohen toppled to the platform.
In the end, it would have been better if Cohen had stayed down.
The fight might have ended then, after the first few seconds. Cohen was down. The crowd hissed at Johnson, who headed to the neutral corner, leaning on the ropes, and they laughed at the little Jew lying there. The referee, George Pettingill from over at the USS Detroit, began the slow count as Cohen lay groggy.
As he lay there, knocked down that first round, the bright deck lights were above Cohen, set against the night Caribbean sky and the silhouette of the bridge and the 5-inch guns. Pettingill was silhouetted there too. And Pettingill counted loud and slow. “One!” he said. “Two!” “Three!” “Four!” Five! Six!” Cohen scrambled to his feet finally.
Pettingill waved the fighters together again. They fought hard to the end of the first round, but Johnson kept Cohen heading back, retreating, and retreating.
In the end, it would have been better if Cohen had stayed down. If he had, he might have lived.
