(Photo is a copyright-free image produced by the United States government.)
With all due respect to President George W. Bush, Richard Nixon was the Oval Office's most rabid baseball fan.
During his years in congress (1948-1952), the Congressman from California would often duck out of meetings and head over to Griffith Stadium to watch the Senators play. He once told Senators' manager Ted Williams that he had watched more than 200 games at the old park during the 1950's.
The then vice president spoke out against Calvin Griffith's move of the Senators to Minnesota, and was ecstatic about the city receiving a replacement expansion franchise the following year.
When he lost the 1960 presidential election, Nixon returned to his home state of California and became a fan of the newly created Los Angeles Angels, owned by his good friend and former western movie star Gene Autry.
After losing the White House in 1960 and the California govenor's office in 1962, Nixon remained a private citizen until 1968 when he beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey to become President of the United States.
Nixon was a familiar face at RFK Stadium during the 1969 season, the lone highlight of the expansion Senator's decade in Washington.
The Senators had a new look in 1969. The team had been owned by area stockbrokers James Johnson and James Lemon through the mid 1960's and they were able to absorb the team's staggering losses. Johnson, however, died in 1967 and Lemon sold the team to former Democratic National Committee chairman Bob Short a year later.
Short fired manager Jim Lemon and replaced him with Hall of Famer Ted Williams, and the team responded with an 86 win season, renewing hope in a city decimated by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy the previous year.
Resurrection City was gone from the mall and blacks and whites seemed comfortable with each other for the first time in memory. Most Washingtonians believed that Nixon would keep his campaign promise and get the country out of Vietnam quickly.
It was a hopeful time for all.
Things changed quickly, however.
By 1971, Bob Short was having real financial problems. The great majority of the $9 million he used to buy the team was borrowed, leaving little cash to run the team. He began floating the idea in late 1970 of moving the team if the D.C. Armory board, which had oversight authority for RFK Stadium, would not negotiate a new lease.
The Armory board, however, couldn't possibly have agreed to the one-sided lease that Short demanded.
The acrimony reached the sports page of the Washington Post as both sides hammered the other throughout the summer.
On July 1st, Roger Ailes, then a Republican strategist, contacted White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman and suggested that it would help the president's image if he got involved in the Short-Armory fight.
Ailes thought that Nixon's involvement might end the standoff and save the team. By mid summer, fans were beginning to worry that Short might actually move the Senators.
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