Deanker.com

Strong Networks, Strong Family.

50 years ago: "1968 was a horrible year"

1968 was a horrible year

Horses are big business in Kentucky, and even schoolchildren were aware of the controversy in Louisville 50 years ago. It started with the horse race on the first Saturday in May, as far as we knew.

With the Governor of Kentucky. Louie Nunn and presidential candidate Richard Nixon watching from the stands, Dancer’s Image came from last place, 14 lengths behind, to pass 13 horses and cross the cable one and a half flights ahead of the Forward Pass. Nunn chuckled when Nixon dramatically tore his losing ticket in half.

But Nixon may have been a bit hasty, depending on the horse he chose. Three days after the race, Churchill Downs stewards ordered Boston dealer Peter Fuller to return the trophy and winning bag, and named Forward Pass the winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby. Post-race testing revealed that Dancer’s Image had phenylbutazone in his blood sample.

It is an anti-inflammatory pain reliever, which is commonly used today when horses suffer from joint swelling. But in 1968 it was illegal on Kentucky racetracks. Fuller’s vet prescribed it during training, but allowed six days for it to disappear from the horse’s bloodstream before the race. Fuller, his veterinarian and the horse’s trainer were unable to explain why Dancer’s Image still had phenylbutazone in its system on race day.

I was a curious eighth grader who was fluent in previous Racing Form performance charts and had memorized many racing trivia. But we were also a politically conscious family. My father ran for the House of Representatives on McCarthy’s pacifist list in Kentucky’s 1st Congressional District. Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for the presidential nomination across the river in Indiana.

Martin Luther King was shot down exactly one month before the 1968 Derby, but he was in Louisville a year earlier to help local blacks, led by his brother, AD King, to protest against housing discrimination.

The locals had disrupted a race at Churchill Downs the year before and wanted to disrupt the 1967 Derby, but were persuaded by King to hold the protests downtown, due to the potential for chaos on the track.

In April 1968, Fuller entered Dancer’s Image in a set-up for the Derby, Wood Memorial Stakes at Aqueduct Racetrack in New York City.

When his horse won, Fuller donated the bag to Coretta Scott King, who had just been widowed. I have seen two different numbers: $ 62,000 and $ 77,415. Either way, it was a lot of money in 1968 dollars. He didn’t make it public, but it was common knowledge on the track and one announcer from the race mentioned it on television.

The gift made friends and foes for Fuller. There was hate mail. There were anonymous death threats. There was a mysterious fire in one of his stables. So he asked Churchill Downs management to put more security. They refused.

Fuller was a pretty picky guy. He was a former Marine and the son of a former Republican Governor. His father was one of the richest men in America, and Fuller is not far behind, either.

After growing up in a household with 11 domestic servants, Fuller was used to getting his way. It was customary to provide Derby horse owners with four tickets. He demanded 50.

The hot-headed and aggressive Yankee may have alienated southern courtiers whom he should have tried to charm. Instead, he made condescending remarks about “rednecks.”

The bottom line is that he did not get the additional security from Churchill Downs and did not hire his own. The security in his racing barn, he recalled, was “an old man in a chair and asleep.”

Fuller later said he believed he was “lying” that an unknown intruder entered his horse’s stable to inject the disqualifying phenylbutazone. Either that or the blood sample was adulterated.

Fuller appealed the track administrators’ decision to the Kentucky Racing Commission and lost. He took his case to court and won in 1970. Dancer’s Image was once again the winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby.

But then the state of Kentucky took that decision to federal appeals court and won its case against Fuller and Dancer’s Image. That was final. Fuller said he spent $ 250,000 on his futile lawsuits.

A billboard on his horse farm in New Hampshire stubbornly boasts that it is the home of Dancer’s Image, winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby. But that sign is false.

Forward Pass is the winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby. The colt wasn’t a fluke either: he went on to win the Preakness and barely missed a Triple Crown sweep on June 1 after leading the Belmont to last position in 16th. pole.

Three days later, as the 13-year-olds began their summer vacation, there was another real-world tragedy, the second in two months. that made horse racing seem terribly frivolous.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses that yearn to breathe freely, the miserable wastes of your overflowing shore,” wrote the poet Emma Lazarus, addressing the Old World. Send me these, hurled by the storm. I hold up my lamp by the golden door.

And so the Palestinian immigrant Bishara Sirhan brought his family to the United States. The poet also ordered the Old World to “guard, ancient lands, their historical pomp.” But when Bishara brought her 12-year-old son Sirhan Sirhan to California, she imported a monstrous ego and many centuries of ancient hatreds into her American sanctuary.

The youngest Sirhan looked westernized in his teens, with a pompadour hairstyle, and even in old age he seems like a gentle gentleman today. But he testified in court that he murdered Bobby Kennedy “with 20 years of malice beforehand.” His diary confirmed that he was seething with resentment against Jews and against the New York senator who favored the sale of fighter jets to Israel.

He checked the Los Angeles hotel where Kennedy would view the primary election results with his supporters. Kennedy won the California and South Dakota presidential primaries on June 4. Acting President Lyndon Johnson had long since retired from the race. There was great hope among the Americans who had supported the late President John F. Kennedy eight years earlier.

As Bobby Kennedy was leaving the celebration through a hotel kitchen, Sirhan intercepted him and put three bullets into him, one in the head and two in the back. Like phenylbutazone, Sirhan nullified the victory. And in my mind, I see Richard Nixon rebuilding the tatters of his Derby ticket.

Of course, no one can guess how the world could have been different if Bobby Kennedy were elected president that November in place of Richard Nixon. Like his older brother, he had a predilection for adultery. But he was a practicing Catholic, under the influence of Cardinal Spellman. Unlike his younger brother Teddy, he did not try to harmonize public policy with his personal immorality.

If older brother John’s only nomination to the Supreme Court is any indication. a court populated by three nominations from Bobby Kennedy could have decided Roe v. Wading differently.

Byron White, JFK’s appointment to the Court, dissented not only from Roe, but from all subsequent decisions that applied him as binding precedent. Nixon, in contrast to JFK, nominated pro-abortion judges Lewis Powell and Harry Blackmun, and pro-abortion court chief Warren Burger to the Court.

If Bobby Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon had filled those Supreme Court vacancies with the same type of justices As Byron White, they could have combined with William Rehnquist and White to form a 5-4 majority for the protection of unborn children. . Tens of millions of American children could have been saved from the abortion holocaust that occurred after Roe v. Wade, and continues today. Thanks to Sirhan Sirhan and the people who welcomed him to our country, we will never know for sure.

“1968,” Fuller said, “was a horrible year.”

by Bart Stinson

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *