Happy Birthday to My Dad

And my apologies to James Fallows, Jimmy Carter and Mitt Romney

At the beginning of 6^th grade in 1976, I voted for president, as did my classmates in Mrs. Burke’s homeroom, at a voting booth in the kitchen at Spring Glen School in Hamden, Conn.

Long before I ever filled out a mail-in ballot or touched an electronic screen, I pulled a handle and cast my vote for Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, for U.S. President.

When asked by Tommy Lee, my best friend, why I voted for Carter, I said that I liked his name.

Tommy cracked up.

I liked Jimmy Carter’s name because it sounded like that of Jimmy Cagney, one of my favorite actors.

As is quite apparent, I did not know much about politics at the time, though I was aware of Watergate and its cast of villains from discussions with my father.

My dad had told me about the corruption of Nixon, Haldeman, Erlichman, John Mitchell and others, such as John Dean, the young White House attorney, who testified against Nixon.

At some point in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, my mother took me to see All the President’s Men, a film which I enjoyed, though it scared me a bit during the eerie scenes in a parking lot with Hal Holbrook, concealed partly in the shadows, playing Deep Throat, one of the top sources for Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward.

I was not accustomed to watching modern political thrillers. I was much more comfortable with old Warner Brothers movies from the 1930s and ‘40s, gangster films and Westerns, swashbucklers and war pictures, many of them starring James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Errol Flynn and Edward G. Robinson.

I have in the past discussed my father’s imagination and memory, which, from my perspective, remain unsurpassed.

Bob Jaffee, my dad, had a prophetic gift.

I have alluded to my father’s gifts in a number of articles over the years, including “Punching Above His Weight,” a tribute to my dad in Thrive Global in May 2020, at the time he passed away at 86; “The Quiet Man,” another Thrive Global tribute to my dad in May 2022 at the time of his second Yahrzeit; and other articles, such as my recent Substack post, “Happy 80^th Birthday, Reggie Jackson.”

In these pieces and others, I have written about the genius of my father, who introduced me to so many things that I love, such as old Warner Brothers movies, baseball, geography, the colors green and blue, and elephants.

He was also a visionary as an investor.

My dad was so modest that only late in his life, on his 85^th birthday, did he tell me that he had gotten the highest score on an industry-wide test for security analysts when he worked on Wall Street in the 1960s.

He attained that honor more than once.

And my dad was so reputable and brilliant as a money manager that he was entrusted to oversee the funds of Paul Volcker, who had been the Fed Reserve Chair under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

I have not spoken so much about my dad’s views on politics, though I have mentioned that my dad loved Harry Truman and thought very highly of Reagan.

Given how much I admired and admire my dad, I too was a major fan of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. I wrote a piece about the late President Reagan in 2005 in L.A. Weekly, one that was titled, “The Vanishing.”

In that piece, I wrote of a chance encounter I had with Ronald Reagan in Santa Monica in December 1995, when I met the late president, who was accompanied by the Secret Service, as I jogged along the beach.

When I approached President Reagan, I talked to him not about politics but about old Warner Brothers movies.

I told him that I was a Warner Brothers buff, and Desperate Journey starring him and Errol Flynn was one of my favorite movies.

As I have noted in a few of my most recent Substack posts, should readers be interested, you can read many of my old articles, including that L.A. Weekly piece, on my website, www.robertdavidjaffee.com, where it can be found under Published Work.

Again, it was my dad, who introduced me to those old Warner Brothers classics.

And my dad was a supporter of President Reagan.

Like my father, I loved Reagan’s strong stance against the Soviet Union.

When Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” he was mocked by some, but President Reagan was not bashing the people of the Soviet Union. Reagan was standing up to the leadership of that country, which indeed was evil, in the pre-Gorbachev period. Of course, Putin, Russia’s president, is even more evil than his Soviet predecessors.

As for President Reagan, he was, as I say, a very strong leader, particularly in confronting our enemy.

That is not to say that he was a perfect president.

It is quite clear that supply-side economics, part of Reagan’s domestic agenda, does not work and that it exacerbated inequities in our economy, inequities that have morphed hideously and worsened in recent years.

But Reagan was, in so many ways, an outstanding president, who believed in free trade and amnesty for immigrants.

He famously worked well with Tip O’Neill, a Democrat from Massachusetts and the then-Speaker of the House, in passing legislation.

Hailed as the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan was also a fine speaker, as befitted a man who had been an actor and baseball broadcaster prior to going into politics.

If I may return to my love for Warner Brothers classics, films to which I was, of course, introduced by my dad, I sometimes got the sense that my father was a bit like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca.

Not unlike Bogey’s Blaine, who says early in that film, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” my dad at times could be cantankerous.

But as I have reflected back on my dad over the years, it has occurred to me that some of his cantankerousness was for effect.

Students of Casablanca will recall that Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo, an underground leader of the resistance against the Nazis, and Claude Rains’ Captain Renault both intuit correctly that Bogey’s Blaine, despite his embittered state and seeming indifference to the cause of the Allies, has a loving heart and has not lost his idealism.

If I can paraphrase Henreid’s character, he says to Bogey’s Blaine at one point in the film, “You sound like a man who is desperately trying to convince himself of something that he does not believe.”

It seems quite appropriate to invoke Bogey’s Rick Blaine in discussing my dad because like Blaine, a saloon owner in seemingly neutral Morocco, my dad was an independent.

My dad was not registered with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

His favorite president of his lifetime, as I noted earlier, was Harry Truman, who was not particularly popular in our country during his presidency.

And my dad had a fierce independence in the way he thought about everything, not only politics.

It is true that he seemed to have a contrarian streak.

In reality, my father wanted me to think for myself.

He wanted me to hear different arguments, different points of view, and to form my own opinion, one that should always honor the best ideals of our country and the world.

There is no question that my father sometimes criticized Jimmy Carter and claimed that he was not a good president.

I listened intently to my dad, who will always be my barometer, in so many ways the greatest influence in my life.

But my dad also wanted me to read between the lines, to hear what he was not saying, to tap into the deep idealism of our country, the deep idealism in his heart and mine.

While I was not very informed about politics as a kid and was much more of a film buff, I did sense that our country was not doing well during the Carter presidency.

We seemed to be losing ground to the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race. We suffered during the 1979 oil crisis, which caused gasoline prices to surge, after Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran and ushered in the Islamic Republic.

True, that was not the first oil crisis of the decade.

Our nation and others had been forced to endure a prior oil crisis in 1973, at the time of the Yom Kippur War, when OPEC clamped down on oil production, as it did in 1979, an attempt by some Arab nations at least partly to punish those countries that supported Israel at the time.

Perhaps, it is not surprising that I felt when I was a kid that our country appeared to be weak in the late 1970s after Watergate.

There was a failed attempt to rescue American hostages, who had been captured in Iran following Khomeini’s takeover of that country.

And our economy was not doing well.

Inflation was high, as were interest rates.

My dad would point out these issues to me.

But I know, deep down, that my father was happy when President Carter hosted the Camp David accords, which led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, a peace that has lasted for nearly 50 years.

This was a grand achievement by Jimmy Carter and his team.

And Jimmy Carter was an honest man, who cared about our environment, who cared about mental health issues, who cared about the LGBTQ community and who cared about minorities.

He was a true Christian, who served God and our country.

I remember hearing that Carter was so detail-oriented and thoughtful that he sometimes wrote his own speeches.

I don’t know if this was so.

I do know that he had two outstanding chief speechwriters, advising him during his presidency.

James Fallows, a former Rhodes scholar, was in his late-20s when he became the youngest person to serve as chief White House speechwriter.

And Hendrik Hertzberg followed Fallows in that capacity.

When I was working at L.A. Weekly from 1997 to 2006, I read a book by Hertzberg, Politics, which was a collection, primarily, of his political columns for The New Republic, which he served as editor-in-chief in two different stints, as well as The New Yorker.

The book also included some of his political speeches for Jimmy Carter.

Hertzberg’s writing was always elegant and funny.

If I am remembering correctly, Hertzberg wrote of Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court Justice, something along the lines of, “Though Samuel Alito is an anagram for I am a sellout, his integrity is not in question.”

I chuckled at that one, even harder than Tommy Lee, my best friend from 6^th grade, chuckled when I told him that I was voting for Jimmy Carter because I liked his name, because his name sounded like that of Jimmy Cagney.

I actually was not trying to be funny when I said that.

My comment, of course, reflected my love for those old Warner Brothers movies, which again were brought into my life by my dad when I was a little boy, just 6 years old.

Yes, my father loved those old Warner Brothers movies, too.

And he was very opinionated.

Sometimes, he could be quite critical not only of presidents, like Jimmy Carter.

Sometimes, my dad could also be critical of educational institutions such as Harvard.

My dad, who hailed from Massachusetts, was born in Worcester, and he graduated with honors from Tufts, which is located not far from Harvard.

After graduating from Tufts, my dad went to Columbia Business School, from which he graduated in one year, before he began his business career.

It is true that my father would sometimes criticize Harvard.

But my dad also knew that Harvard had produced Louis Brandeis, one of the most eminent Supreme Court Justices and one whom my father praised.

My father also would talk about Norman Mailer, the great novelist, who went to Harvard.

When I think back on it, even when my dad spoke a bit cantankerously about Mailer or about Harvard, he was in all likelihood probing to get me to think for myself.

I know that my father admired people of all backgrounds, irrespective of where or whether they went to college.

And not so far beneath the surface, my father rooted for the underdog, for the outsider.

My father loved Jackie Robinson and saw him play at Ebbets Field.

In fact, my dad recalled hearing the cheers coming from Harlem, some blocks north of the Columbia campus, in the fall of 1955, when Jackie Robinson led the Dodgers, then based in Brooklyn, to their first World Series title.

My dad also admired Martin Luther King, who gave speeches in the 1960s at Mishkan Israel, my old synagogue in Hamden, Conn., before we joined that temple.

And my dad was very fond of those old Warner Brothers movies from the 1930s and ‘40s, which had a somewhat subversive appeal. They were infused with a humanitarian ethos and indeed championed the underdog, including protagonists played by actors like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and John Garfield.

Yes, like my dad, I have at times been quite cantankerous.

I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post some years ago in which I was harsh in disagreeing with James Fallows, a writer at the time for The Atlantic, who had weighed in on the issue of anti-Semitism.

In the process of criticizing Fallows, I also was harsh to Jimmy Carter, whom Fallows, as I noted earlier, had served as chief White House speechwriter.

I am very sorry that I was so negative toward Fallows, who happens to be a Harvard graduate.

A little more than a year ago, on June 4, 2025, at the encouragement of Carol, my wife and chief angel, I came out of hibernation and wrote my first piece in a few years; it is an exclusive on my own site, www.robertdavidjaffee.com.

That debut piece on my website bears the headline, “Standing up for Harvard.”

In that piece, I discussed the rivalry between Harvard and Yale, and I opened with a lovely gesture by the Krokodiloes, Harvard’s preeminent singing group, at a jamboree in November 1983 at the time of the 100^th edition of The Game, the annual football clash between the two Ivy League schools.

The Kroks praised Cole Porter, a Yale graduate and one of the original Whiffenpoofs, at that concert, and they sang some Porter tunes that day in 1983.

The gentlemanly behavior of the Kroks that day remains in my memory.

It is also true that the rivalry between the two schools, while for the most part a good-natured one, has at times included some not so pleasant put-downs and insults.

I did not dwell on those insults in that piece on my website.

Instead, I focused on the fact that Harvard, Yale and all colleges and institutions in this country need to come together and stand up to the wannabe dictator who runs our nation.

My dad would agree.

We all need to stand up for our democracy, for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and the rule of law.

In “Standing up for Harvard,” I also pointed out that sometimes over the years I might have sharpened my attack a bit more at writers or political figures, who are Harvard graduates.

It was wrong of me to be so harsh.

My op-eds may have had an extra sting when I critiqued James Fallows, as they also may have when I critiqued other Harvard alums, such as Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and Nicholas Kristof.

I have apologized to President Obama and Nicholas Kristof in other columns.

And I now offer my apologies to James Fallows, a brilliant man and writer, and Mitt Romney, one of our nation’s bravest Republicans.

They are all impressive men, who care about our country and who contribute in a very positive manner to our national dialogue.

Their Harvard degrees, of course, confer stature.

But what really makes these gentlemen stand out is their leadership in inspiring all of us to think of something greater than ourselves.

Jimmy Carter also elevated our dialogue.

He too deserves praise and my apologies.

But few people in my life deserve as much praise as my father.

My dad will always be my hero. He was the strongest and most resilient person I have met.

My father came back from tragedy when he was a little boy, when his dad died by suicide.

I feel a very close connection to my dad and to my paternal grandfather, after whom I was named in Hebrew.

July 8^th is my father’s birthday.

Were he still alive, my dad, who passed away in May 2020, would be turning 93.

It truly was a stroke of genius on the part of my father when he brought into my life the world of Warner Brothers movies when I was a little boy in 1^st grade in 1971, a little boy who had stopped reading because of a trauma that I had endured in kindergarten.

Those movies have forever changed my life for the better, and it is my dad who blessed me when he plopped me, his 6-year-old son, on his lap and turned on our Sony TV set, before the WB shield appeared on the screen.

My dad transfixed me with his love, his imagination, his stories.

It is no wonder that I voted for Jimmy Carter because his name sounded like that of Jimmy Cagney.

Many years ago, Leslie Epstein, a wonderful novelist, whose father and uncle, Philip and Julius Epstein, along with Howard Koch, wrote the script for Casablanca, told me that I was right to forgive Pete Rose.

The betting scandal surrounding Rose, a baseball rogue, consumed Bart Giamatti, the Major League Baseball Commissioner, who passed away shortly after banning Rose from the national pastime in 1989.

It was, of course, not fair when some blamed Rose for the death of Giamatti, as I pointed out in an August 2003 L.A. Times op-ed, “For Love of the Game, if not for Pete’s Sake.”

Giamatti had battled health problems in the years prior to the Rose scandal.

And Giamatti was a chain smoker.

Sadly, Rose lied about his betting on baseball, and at the time he was not repentant or remorseful about Giamatti’s tragic death.

“Forgiveness is good,” Leslie Epstein told me.

Yes, forgiveness is good.

I hope that the people, whom I have mentioned in this piece, most of them Harvard graduates, can forgive me.

As I celebrate my dad, whose birthday approaches, it strikes me once again that my father did indeed at times resemble Bogey early in the film, Casablanca, when his Rick Blaine says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

But by the end of the film, Bogey’s Blaine thinks for everyone, including the futures of Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa Lund, the former lover of Bogey’s character.

Then Bogey does something selfless and heroic, not just for the other characters, but arguably for the whole world, as he helps the resistance in defeating the Nazis.

I know that my dad agreed with the decision of Bogey’s Rick Blaine, who is a hero.

My dad is a hero, too.

Happy Birthday, Daddy Bob!

Love, Robert