Chapter 26: The Godfather
Don Corleone and Don Trump
There are some noteworthy commonalities between the American political scene in 1969 and in 2025. Two politicians, Richard Nixon (1913 – 1994) and Donald Trump (1946 – ), whose careers seemed to have come to an end wound up in the White House. These are the two most impressive Presidential comebacks in American history.
Nixon managed to be both a professional politician and an outsider at the same time. He served two terms as vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 – 1969) from 1953 to 1961. He lost a close election for the Presidency to John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963) in 1960. In an effort to keep his name before the public, he ran for the governorship of his native California in 1962. His Democratic opponent was Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (1905 – 1996). Nixon lost.
Nixon held what came to be a famous press conference after the election. Angry and humiliated, he told reporters that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”1 All of Nixon’s petulance, his self-pity, his smallness was on display for everybody to see. The consensus was that he was finished in politics.
He wasn't. Nixon secured the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1968. Running as the “new” Nixon, he claimed he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. He beat Hubert Humphrey (1911 – 1978) in a close election and took the oath of office on January 20, 1969.
It soon became clear that there was nothing “new” about the Model 1969 Nixon. He still was the everlasting striver, the man whose life was defined by one humiliation after another, the man who was determined to get even with his ubiquitous “enemies.”
Donald Trump seemed to be finished in politics after his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. The mob he summoned to the Capitol that day defiled it. His fake elector scheme needed to be taken seriously. Without even having to claim he was a “new” Trump, he won a remarkable victory in 2024. He is back. Unapologetic. And what our nation has in store is yet to be seen.
On January 6, 2021, body camera footage from law enforcement officers captured the events at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. This video, presented at a subsequent hearing, provides a stark and unfiltered account of the chaos that unfolded that day. Viewer discretion is advised. Source
The year before Nixon’s inauguration, 1968 was dramatic in its high hopes and also its despair. Senator Eugene McCarthy (1916 – 2005) was campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He was opposed to the war in Vietnam, championed by the incumbent, President Lyndon Johnson (1908 – 1973); and he attracted the support of a lot of young people who shared his view. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army launched the Tet Offensive on January 30, 1968. The offensive was a tactical defeat on the battlefield but a strategic victory on the battlefield of American public opinion. Everyone except the policy makers in Washington knew after Tet that Vietnam was a war the United States could not win.
On March 16, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1925 –1968) announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President. Robert F. Kennedy had worked as an assistant counsel to Joe McCarthy’s (1908 – 1957) Senate committee in 1952. He was a problematic figure. But in 1968, he had all the charisma of his assassinated brother, President John F. Kennedy.
With Robert F. Kennedy running for the Presidency, there was hope that the dreadful carnage in Vietnam might be brought to a close. It is indeed a distressing sign of the degeneration of our public life that instead of having a man of Robert F. Kennedy’s stature in public life, we are today stuck with his moronic son, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., (1954 - ), an anti-vaxxer whom Trump is appointing to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929 – 1968) was assassinated. We all remember where we were on that dreadful day. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 6. That meant that the nation was forced to choose between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon for President in November. Hope against hope had turned to hope abandoned.
Two months after Nixon’s inauguration, Mario Puzo’s (1920 – 1999) novel, The Godfather,2 was published. Reading this novel today, one has to distill the basic story from the sex and violence which is so artlessly presented. Francis Ford Coppola (1939 - ), the director of “The Godfather” movies, has written that when he “sat down to read the book, my first impression was surprise and dismay” because the book was merely “a potboiler filled with sex and silliness.”3 Pauline Kael (1919 - 2001 ), America’s foremost film critic, found the novel unreadable trash.4 Indeed, Puzo himself said he wrote the novel to make money; and make money he did. But he also said it was “below my gifts.”5
Trash the novel unquestionably is. It is also a very easy read. And – this point is critical – it landed in the bookstores at the perfect moment, March 11, 1969. Martin Luther King, Jr., was dead. Richard Nixon was in the White House. The Vietnam War raged on.
And the nation confronted the fact that the master narrative of popular culture from the dawn on the television age after World War II up until 1969 was a lie. We did not live in a world of “Leave It to Beaver,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “Father Knows Best.” The Godfather was the anti-family novel for the age of the anti-Camelot President.
The Godfather was an altogether new kind of family story. Upon reading the book for a second time, Coppola “discovered what was lurking within it was a great story, almost classical in nature: that of a king with three sons, each of which had inherited one as aspect of his personality. . . .”6
The novel and the movie that followed it in 1972 transformed the benevolent situation comedy of the 1950s and 1960s into a nightmare world. Don Vito Corleone, in a way like Robert Young in “Father Knows Best,” does indeed know best. He is able to synthesize within himself the contradictions of life on the wrong side of the law, indeed on the wrong side of decent behavior, within himself. None of the other family members can do the same, however. The family and their world were dishonored and destroyed while making the effort.
The book portrayed a family which lived on lies and committed acts of savagery which family members papered over by appeals to family allegiance and religion. The pieties were the same as the standard fare on which the nation had been brought up. But the world of the Godfather was upside down. The book was a blockbuster, a complete success spending 67 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. The assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers and of Martin Luther King, Jr., showed the nation that the Camelot mystique was over. The Godfather showed the nation the inner workings of a grotesque, dysfunctional family.
The movie is a candidate for the greatest ever made. It remains gripping and horrifying to this day. Toward its conclusion, Don Vito Corleone has a heart to heart with his anointed son, Michael” “I knew that Santino [Don Corleone never called him Sonny] was gonna have to go through all this. And Fredo. . . . But I never wanted this for you. I worked my whole life – I don’t apologize – to take care of my family; and I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all those big shots. I don’t apologize. . . . That is my life. . . . But I thought that when it was your time that you would be the one to hold the strings. . . . Senator Corleone. . . . Governor Corleone.”7
Michael replies, “We’ll get there, pop. We’ll get there.”8 The viewer knows very well that neither Michael nor the remainder of the Corleones ever will.
One wonders if Fred Trump (1905 – 1999), whose middle name apparently was “Christ”, ever had such a conversation with his son Donald. If he did, did Donald ever say, as Michael Corleone did, that “we’ll get there, pop”? The difference is that Donald did get there. He has succeeded.
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Donald’s resurrection is a miracle of American political life. The true story of how it was accomplished has yet to be written. It does give one pause to reflect that, unlike any other President, Trump often sounds like a mobster himself. For example, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?”9 Or, speaking to Georgia officials in 2021, “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have because we won the state.”10 Donald’s motto could well be Don Vito’s: “I will make you an offer you can't refuse."
It is providential that Fred Trump named his son Donald. Perhaps Donald’s identification with Don Corleone should be complete by no longer using the second syllable of his first name. He is indeed our Don Trump.
Gladwyn Hill, “Nixon Denounces Press as Biased,” New York Times, November 7, 1962.
These two phrases are the titles of well known books by Nadezhda Mandelstam.
NewYork: Putnam, 1969.
Francis Ford Coppola, “Introduction,” to the 50th anniversary edition of The Godfather(Berkeley: Penguin, 2019) Location 38.
Pauline Kael, “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 10, 1972.
Pauline Kael, “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 10, 1972.
Francis Ford Coppola, “Introduction,” to the 50th anniversary edition of The Godfather(Berkeley: Penguin, 2019) Location 38.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9DHU1toJcU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9DHU1toJcU
Colin Dwyer, “Donald Trump: 'I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters',” The Two-Way, NPR, JANUARY 23, 2016.