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“Hey Larry, Jesse Ventura here, how are you? I’m in town doing this book tour thing. Larry King, Wolf Blitzer….I’m free for dinner on Friday if you are.”
“Sure,” I said, “I’d love to see you governor.” Former presidents still get called president, so I guess former governors should get the same respect. He was back in the private sector but not out of the public eye. He began life as Jim Janos but took on the moniker Jesse “The Body” Ventura when he became a professional wrestler, dying his long hair blond and wrapping a feather boa around his neck to play the smiling villain in wrestling’s pageant plays. Then when he ran for governor of Minnesota as an Independent in 1999 he changed “The Body” to “The Mind.” After I went to see him for Playboy, the magazine headlined it as Jesse “The Interview” Ventura. And now that he was blasting away at the religious fanatics, the corporate lobbyists, and the current Administration, he’s Jesse “The Mouth” Ventura.
To me, he will always be the governor who turned the media spotlight on me when the things he said in our interview made headlines all across the country.
“You know who I ran into a few months ago?” he said, changing the subject. “Our friend Oliver.”
He was referring to Oliver Stone, who had joined us for dinner eight years ago. The governor had told me that if he could have dinner with anyone in history he would choose Stone because of his movie JFK, which Ventura thought was brilliant and had enough elements of truth to support his own theories about who killed Kennedy.
“I had dreadlocks and a beard and he said to me, ‘You look like a biker.’ And I said, “I am a biker. I’m just returning to my roots.’”
He was back in the private sector but not out of the public eye. He began life as Jim Janos but took on the moniker Jesse “The Body” Ventura when he became a professional wrestler, dying his long hair blond and wrapping a feather boa around his neck to play the over-the-top villain. Then when he ran for governor of Minnesota as an independent in 1999 he changed “The Body” to “The Mind.” After I went to see him for Playboy, the magazine headlined it as Jesse “The Interview” Ventura. And now that he was blasting away at the religious fanatics, the corporate lobbyists, and the current Administration in his new book, Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me!, he’s Jesse “The Mouth” Ventura.
To me, he will always be the governor who turned the media spotlight on me when the things he said in our interview made headlines all across the country.
What went out over the Associated Press wire on what was a slow news day were Ventura’s controversial remarks about organized religion, the Navy’s sexist chauvinistic behavior toward women, his take on fat people, flag burning, the JFK conspiracy theories he believed in, and about his wish to be reincarnated as a 38DD bra.
“Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people,” he said as part of his response to my asking him about the legalization of prostitution. The Navy is “not going to consider grabbing a woman’s breast or buttock a major situation. That’s much ado about nothing.” The problem with fat people is that “Every fat person says it’s not their fault, that they have gland trouble. You know which gland? The saliva gland. They can’t push away from the table.” On those who protest American policies by burning the flag: “If you buy the flag, it’s yours to burn.” Who killed JFK? “I don’t want people to think I’m some sort of erratic nut running the state of Minnesota. But if you truly want to know, I believe we did. The military-industrial complex.”
After the media picked up these remarks I got a call at six A.M. from ABC News, asking for my comments. I was still in bed and not sure what they were asking me about. In the next two hours I got calls from NBC, CBS, CNN, C-Span, Entertainment Tonight, Newsweek, and a half dozen others, all wanting my take on what Governor Ventura said. Over the next few days, I became a media darling. I appeared on the Today Show, grilled for fifteen minutes by Matt Lauer; on the Geraldo Show; on a half dozen other TV shows, countless radio programs, and Newsweek wound up turning the brouhaha into a cover story. The governor wound up on numerous television news shows defending what he said to Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, George Will, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Barbara Walters and David Letterman. I was stunned by this attention, for I didn’t think anything Ventura had said to me was that original. He was known to be an iconoclast who thrived on outrageous remarks. But somehow, combining them in one long interview hit a nerve.
But the interview had repercussions for the governor. His popularity went from over 70% down to below 50%. Yet he didn’t blame me. He acknowledged saying what I reported, and he even wound up coming to my house six months later for dinner. He proved an engaging guest.
When his term was up he decided against running again. He took a long vacation and was invited to host a talk show on MSNBC. But after just five appearances, the show was cancelled and for the next three years Jesse “The Mouth” Ventura was silenced. He said it was in his contract that he couldn’t talk. But eventually that contract dissolved and Ventura decided to consider a run for president in 2008. He didn’t like what he saw among the Republicans and Democrats and felt that he might recapture some of the glory and magic of his independent run for governor back in 1999. The first step for him was to write a book, to give him some talking points. So Jesse Ventura, with a collaborator named Dick Russell, found a publisher and wrote Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me! In it he writes about his disappointment with our political system, calls the religious fanatics and corporate America fascists, and calls himself a “prophet” for his remarks about organized religion.
But here’s what happens when you are a maverick political figure in America. You leave the scene, go on vacation, reflect for a few years, and you become marginalized. But just because he dropped out of the public eye after his term as governor was up shouldn’t make him irrelevant. Didn’t Al Gore do the same thing? Time can bring perspective, even wisdom. Jesse Ventura was a refreshing entrée into the political scene when he ran for governor. He proved an independent Reform Party third-party candidate could win a high-powered office, and he never backed down from his opinions. He was unlike any other politician in the country.
“I’ve been compared a lot to Reagan,” he told me. “I appoint experts in their field as my commissioners and then I get out of the way.”
He explained his appeal this way: “I’m fiscally conservative, but I’m socially liberal. If you’re a Republican you have to be fiscally and socially conservative. If you’re a Democrat you have to be fiscally and socially liberal. I’m half of each.”
His positions on drugs and prostitution were that they were consensual crimes and they shouldn’t be imprisoning crimes. He supported medical marijuana and thought that if prostitution was legalized, “the girls could have health checks, unions, and benefits” and it wouldn’t be run illegally “by dirtbags who are criminals.”
One of my favorite exchanges with him never even made it into our first interview. We got into a discussion about art and he said his definition was that if he could do it, it wasn’t art. I brought up Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, which he stuck on a museum wall, where it remains. “Who’s he?” the governor asked.
What about Picasso’s bike handlebar sculpture? I wondered.
“”Picasso’s terrible. He ain’t art.”
He was Time magazine’s artist of the 20th century, I pointed out.
Not an artist, Ventura said. “You know why? Because his sun is a circle with lines going off it, and I used to do that in kindergarten. He has a stick guy sitting on a horse with the sun there. It ain’t art.”
“How about Matisse?” I asked.
“Who’s Matisse?”
Now, how can you not get a kick out of a sitting governor who answers questions like this? So when he came to Los Angeles to promote his new book and suggested we have dinner—for old time’s sake–I was game.
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