My boss on Capitol Hill was Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio, NOT Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri.
John had personally prevented the Martin Luther King Holiday, and the year he died it became law.
In 1982 John Ashbrook decided to leave the House after 22 years and run for the Senate against the super-liberal Democratic incumbent, Howard Metzenbaum. There was no doubt that John would get the Republican nomination in the May primary.
An incumbent senator like Metzenbaum almost never directs all his fire entirely at one person who is still just a nominee for the opposing party’s nomination. When he does that, he is announcing that that person already has the nomination sewed up and is already on the same plane with the incumbent senator.
That is exactly what we wanted, of course.
So some smartass on John’s staff –who shall remain nameless — started attacks on Metzenbaum long before the primary was to be held. Cleveland had a huge busing program, and as always busing was only aimed at working class white kids. Every judge I have ever known about who ordered busing sent his own grandchildren to private schools and the one in Cleveland was no exception.
The working class white vote was the one which would decide the vote on Metzenbaum’s re-election.
So we sent out press release after press release press release announcing that “Senator Metzenbaum casts his one hundred and fifty-fourth consecutive pro-busing vote.” Every vote that touched on the issue got a press release from us.
Metzenbaum went ballistic. We were perfectly correct, so all Metzenbaum could do was attack John.
Metzenbaum’s poll numbers against Ashbrook were dropping like a rock.
In April of 1982 John Ashbrook, who had always been perfectly healthy, died mysteriously of a hemorrhage from a tiny perforation on the inside his stomach. You get that from the old Borgia method of drinking crushed glass in a drink.
John’s brother had been strangled the year before by the mob for a gambling debt. I don’t say there is a connection, but this sort of coincidence is unusual even in hardball politics.
Some years later, Sonny Bono was also on his way to getting the Republican nomination against the leftist incumbent senator. Her poll numbers were also dropping fast in a one-on-one match up. Bono mysteriously went out skiing alone on a winter night and ended up having a fatal “accident.”
If either Bono or Ashbrook had died AFTER the nomination, a lot of questions would have been obvious. When the fellow running against you dies, questions always come up.
In fact, Ashbrook’s body was not in the coffin at his funeral because the Ohio police were investigating unnamed “suspicious circumstances.” They never named those “circumstances,” and you wouldn’t if they had anything to do with an incumbent senator and you couldn’t prove your case.
So, conveniently, both Ashbrook and Bono died before their primaries were held.
If Metzenbaum and the liberal California senator had had Italian names, a Mafia connection would be suspected in the convenient and mysterious deaths of their rivals. But Metzenbaum and the California liberal were not Italian. They were both Jews.
Jews have always had enormous power in the Mafia. Bugsy Siegel is just an outstanding example, not a unique one.
It sure looks like a duck to me.
John Ashbrook was my friend as well as my boss. So no matter if it does make me look like a conspiracy nut, it is my obligation to report this set of coincidences.
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