Tony Castro's America

Did Julían Castro Crap Out His Veep Shot?

MAYBE FORMER HOUSING SECRETARY Julían Castro just didn’t pay attention to those Iowa wind chill warnings about the signs of hypothermia: confusion, shivering, difficulty speaking, sleepiness and stiff muscles. Brrr! And in Nevada he may have ignored Las Vegas' biggest rule — that you don't bet more than you can afford to lose.

And that's proven costly because Castro’s nascent bid for the Democratic presidential running mate spot, along with his mantel as the rising star of Latino politics, may now be history after the first three contests of the 2020 presidential perimary and caucus season.

Julían Castro and Elizabeth Warren's campaign

After Saturday's Nevada Caucuses, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s disappointing showing so far not only threatens her struggling presidential campaign but has also unexpectedly brought Castro’s own political future crashing down to earth.

All that speculation that the former San Antonio mayor was jockeying for the No. 2 spot on the ticket? Forget it. That talk of how he would use his stumping on behalf of Warren to regroup for possibly another presidential run down the way? It’s not looking good. And the thought in this age of identity politics that Castro was destined to be the party’s Latino savior?

Well, Julían, you know that progressive icon, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? She’s the one looking like the future Democratic messiah. AOC and her mentor Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Latino outreach team out-politicked you for that much-ballyhooed small but rapidly growing Latino vote in Iowa.

It was a triumph in a small state with a smattering of Latinos. But it proved to be symbolic, and AOC and Bernie’ Latino organization did the same again in Nevada Saturday.

Bestselling ‘DiMag & Mick’ Now Out in Paperback

DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers has just been released in paperback, two years after its bestselling debut in hard cover by Lyons Press. It is the second installment in author Tony Castro's Mickey Mantle trilogy. The third book, Mantle: The Best There Ever Was, will be published in April by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.  Tony has also has written Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.

Q: Why did you decide to write a book looking at both Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle?

A: Dating back to my childhood, I’ve long had an undying interest in both Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle.

My father was a New York Yankee fan and returned home from World War II with a huge poster — off an old New York market calendar, I believe – of DiMaggio in that classic swing of his. A few years later, the DiMaggio poster in my bedroom was joined by one of Mantle finishing off his own powerful swing.

Check Out a Sample of My New Book

Check out a sample of my new book. #MantleTheBest http://bit.ly/2VNtyFW

A Girl Named Caroline in Excelsus

WHEN I WAS A WANNABE DEBATE champion in junior high school, I met my match in a girl whom I began calling Caroline. That wasn't her name. It was Carolyn. But this was 1961. John F. Kennedy had just become president, and his family, including his young daughter Caroline, was on almost every magazine cover in the world.

Caroline Quintero, Waco High School, 1965

So if I was going to lose a debate title to a girl, I was insistent that she be someone named Caroline.

And Carolyn Quintero didn't seem to mind. 

"If Caroline Kennedy is someone who reminds you of me, you'll never forget me," she said.

I was fourteen, a very immature fourteen. I didn't know what to say to her. We became pals in speech class but didn't see each other much outside that classroom. Then I changed junior high schools in the middle of the ninth grade, and I saw her only once -- at that year's speech and debate tournament where we each won champion's ribbons, though we didn't compete against each other.

As I said, this was the 1960s. It was not a friendly period in public schools in Texas for Latinos. Dropout rates were scandalous. In my hometown of about 100,000 residents in Waco, Texas, I knew only one Latino who had gone on to attend college, a standout All-State baseball player who had been recruited to Baylor. But there was no one else, certainly no women. As golf pro champion Lee Treviño once said, "To succeed in Texas then, you had to be 'Super Mex.'"

I hoped Caroline would help change that. In high school I received a beautiful letter of friendship and encouragement from her, and we may have spoken on the phone once or twice. But I think we were both too self-immersed in our own struggles to break the stereotypes, not to mention the landmines of growing up ethnically and culturally different in a small world that had little understanding or empathy toward anyone outside the homogeneity of the time.

So I lost track of Caroline, though she was right. Having christened her with that name, I would never forget her. A few years later, while in Washington D. C. on a book tour, I attended a cocktail party at the home of famed Washington Post editor Ben Bradley in Georgetown. Whom should I see while I was getting out of a taxi? Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with her two children -- John and, yes, Caroline -- leaving the home of a Kennedy administration friend who happened to live on the same street.

Caroline Quintero came immediately to mind. Of course, she did. As she did again several years later when I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, having lunch at Winthrop House, one of the residential dormitories for undergraduates. A young lady sat down across from me and introduced herself to those of us at the table.

It was 18-year-old Caroline Kennedy, an incoming freshman.

Caroline Quintero... that is, Carolyn Quintero Lee, and I reconnected again in the Age of Facebook. We exchanged a friendship request and confirmation, but never spoke, either by phone or via message. Fortunately, I did tell her how smart and brilliant I thought she had been when I knew her, that I treasured the letter she had once sent me, and that I regretted not having stayed in touch because I'd never forgotten her. I received a smiley face emoji.

Sadly, Caroline, née Carolyn, passed away this morning. Carolyn, our mutual friend Rachel La Travis Coronado wrote, "walked thru the gates of heaven this morning peacefully. She now wears the wings of an Angel. She was such a gentle soul, my best friend."

Go out-debate them where it counts, Caroline.

A Sneak Preview of 'Mantle: The Best That Ever Was'

IT WAS PHOTO DAY AT THE New York Yankees' 2019 spring training, and I always like to imagine what it would have been like to have been on hand in 1951 to watch Mickey Mantle on the first day of the spring training that would launch his incredible career.

This photo shows what might have been Mantle at nineteen -- he certainly looks like a teenager -- though the photo is from his second season with the Yankees. The patch on the left shirt sleeve was one the Yankees wore on their home uniforms in 1952 celebrating the team's 50th anniversary.

Mickey's 1951 rookie season had its highs and its lows for Mantle, but my forthcoming book Mantle: The Best There Ever Was -- to be officially released by Rowman & Littlefield April 12 -- presents it as his personal favorite year, his Triple Crown 1956 season notwithstanding. Here's a sneak preview from the book:

MICKEY MANTLE ONCE CORRECTED ME without hesitation when I called 1956, the year he won the Triple Crown and virtually every sports award given out, his “favorite season.” It was when he became “Mickey Mantle,” a household name in America, and the most popular athlete in a culture that worshipped them. It was his best season, he said. His greatest season, without a doubt. He had even put his name on a ghostwritten book about 1956 having been My Favorite Summer 1956. But his true favorite season, he insisted, was 1951, his rookie year despite all the learning bumps and bruises, regardless of the humiliation of having been demoted to the minors in mid-summer, and notwithstanding the awful knee injury in the World Series that would impact his abilities for the rest of his career.

“I could be me then,” he said about his rookie season. “Nobody really knew me. I was just a wide-eyed kid in the big city. Everything was new. It was fun getting an education to New York, to being a big league ballplayer, to being a Yankee. I had no money to speak of, barely any walking around money, but I was finding I didn’t need any. I was free, but I was also free to succeed and fail, and I guess I did both. But I was playing next to DiMaggio, and day-to-day I saw how he handled not just being a big leaguer but being Joe DiMaggio. This is important. If I was as good as Case was saying as I could be, as good as my daddy always told me I could be, I needed to see and know what that was like. And what better example than Joe. He had come to the Yankees while Lou Gehrig was there and got to see him and learn from him day after day. And I reckon it might have been the same way with Gehrig becoming a Yankee alongside Babe Ruth.”

PATRIOTS & TYRANTS - WORK IN PROGRESS

MURDER IN THE WHITE HOUSE

“Any Hispanics in the room?” 

DONALD TRUMP

IN EARLY FEBRUARY OF 2017, PRESIDENT Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, trudged around the Oval Office a little over a month after his inauguration while preparing his first address to a joint
session of Congress. Son-in-law Jared Kushner and adviser Stephen Miller were with the president as he practiced some scathing, campaign-style rhetoric on immigration that he said would cause his audience to go wild. He read aloud the names of criminals and their crimes — rapes, murders, drug dealers — felons he said he was planning to toss about in his speech. They were all Hispanic names, and the president seemed to relish saying each with an anglicized pronunciation. Trump told the two men that the tough talk on illegal immigrants was irresistible red meat for his Make America Great Again base, and predicted the audience would go wild when he talked about tossing them out of the country. Kushner and Miller reportedly laughed aloud at the president’s performance, but then that would have been expected. Trump was accustomed to such immediate support from Kushner, his senior adviser and daughter Ivanka’s husband of almost a decade. Miller was an anti-immigration hardliner and a chief champion of the Trump administration's decision to separate migrant children from their parents who entered the country illegally, as a policy that would deter migrants from coming to the United States. It was only when other White House aides heard of Trump’s plans to double-down on his anti-immigrant stance that the president reluctantly agreed with their suggestions that he tone down the blistering rhetoric on Latino immigrants that he would deliver to America in the nation’s Capitol.

Ageism, Racism or Just Character Assassination?

Democratic presidential candidates former vice president Joe Biden, left, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) 

In an age where demonizing the country's most unpopular politician is a national pastime, could it be that Democrats have forgotten that their own pols -– while perhaps more racially tolerant and less divisive than President Trump -– are themselves a far cry from being saints?

Who among us can honestly say that beginning a statement to an otherwise friendly acquaintance, saying "I don't think you're a racist..." isn't an opening that inevitably leads to the assertion, linguistically cradled as it can be made, that you believe he is precisely that?

In the Presence of Pope Tom

From the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, October 21, 1979

THE POPE WALKED INTO the office today. His presence was high-fashion pietistic.

Divine off-white three-piece suit, his manicured hands cradling a dark hat, looking all majestic, like a communion wafer you would wet on your tongue and then swallow as if Sanctifying Grace were a course of French cuisine at Perrino's.

There was nothing radical chic about the way he walked. Like an astronaut to a launch. He mau-maued a few newsroom acquaintances and caught no flak in our pump house gang known as the Herald-Eczema, where we celebrate mass with Kool-Aid acid-tested beer since we're too poor for Chateauneauf du Pape or whatever the pope orders at Perrino's or Elaine's in New York where he lives.

He seemed almost like a vision, one of those Ahas!, an exclamation point on a constipated key of an IBM Selectric because the pope sometimes writes as if suffering from colitis, and, of course, because he is the pope, he can get away with it.

Tom Wolfe walked into the office today. He is on his national tour mau-mauing his latest book, The Right Stuff, to critics, reporters, talk show hosts, to all the brethren of the written and spoken word. whose souls have a tinge of intimidation and spasms of insecurity around the man, the writer, Caramba! the pope of New Journalism himself, the only being among us with, yes, the right stuff.

More than any journalism school, more than any creative writing class, Tom Wolfe and the so-called New Journalists, who all seem to trace their ancestry back to the old New York Herald-Tribune, have had a greater influence on the kind of writing that is being practiced today in non-fiction, in magazines and now, in some places, in those dinosaurs of writing, newspapers.

But at the top of them, el numero, the writer who has never been left behind because he has the same eye for the word as he does for threads, is Tom Wolfe. Compared to him, the works of other writers read like Hallmark greeting cards. No one can touch him. He is the High Mass ... the right stuff.

You feel, uh, not worthy that his word should enter under your roof. When you see him, nothing about him out of place, you have to recite the New Journalists’ Creed:

I believe in Tom Wolfe, the Writer Almighty, Artist of Culture and Life. And in the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, His first Son, Our Model, Who was conceived of' the Holy Mind, born of the Virgin Word, suffered under Smaller Minds. was criticized, denounced and nearly banished. He ascended into legend, sitteth at the right hand of James Joyce, the Artist Almighty. From thence, He shall come to judge the Radical Chic and the Fad. I believe in the Holy Mind, the Holy Painted Word, the Communion of Style, the forgiveness of excesses. the reprinting of His works and fame everlasting.

Pope Tom Wolfe walked into the office today, and I looked at him in awe. Again.

I know he is the pope because every time I see him I become just like all those masses who lined the streets to see John Paul II. I freeze and go duh...

Once, I went to hear Pope Tom speak at Boston University, and I had a great front row seat. Pope Tom came out dressed in a white pin-stripe suit, snapping his fingers and strutting, yes, strutting like he'd just blown out the sun. He smiled and with that round face of his, he looked like the man in the moon, which convinced me that the entire American space program was conceived and designed just so that we could discover Tom Wolfe.

After he spoke, Pope Tom took questions from the audience. I waited, not wanting to be an early guest into his parlor, then I finally raised my hand.

And he pointed to me! The pope actually wanted me to ask him a question! My palms went clammy. I had this great question to ask him about the New Journalism, and it stayed written there in my head, because when I finally opened my mouth and got the words out, I blew the whole thing.

“I Iove your suit,” I said and sat down.

When Tom Wolfe walked into the office today, I again sat there staring with a copy of his latest book under my arrm. I was going to ask the Pope to sign it for me.

But I couldn't. My pulse rate was too fast and the blood pressure too high.

I would never have made it as an astronaut either.

...

Tom Wolfe, who died last year at the age of 88, had a long association with my late legendary editor Jim Bellows, who hired me in 1978 to write a column at the resurrected Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Bellows had been the editor of the New York Herald Tribune when Wolfe was there and is credited with helping in the development of Tom, Jimmy Breslin and other writers who came to represent the best of journalism and non-fiction in American literature. In 1979, Tom dropped by the offices of the Herald Examiner to visit with his former editor. When the column appeared a day later, Tom called me, befriended me, and invited me to a party in his honor at the home of Irwin Winkler, who was producing The Right Stuff based on Wolfe's book of the same title. Tom became a good friend and muse.

An Interview With Bestselling Author Tony Castro

Click on the photo to read the interview.

The Best There Ever Was, Book Trailer

This book trailer is for New York Times bestselling author Tony Castro's forthcoming Mantle: The Best There Ever Was from Rowman & Littlefield International. Pre-order at Amazon.