A rare and strange thing has happened to me recently not just once, but twice:  People I used to know in real life are portrayed in the movies – “Milk” and “Frost/Nixon” to be specific.

You may notice a connection – both movies are about politicians, and yes, both people are political operatives.  But one’s a diehard Democrat and the other a diehard Republican (just guess which appears in which movie).  The eerie experience of seeing them on screen – albeit fleetingly -- has brought back strong memories of how I knew them and made me reflect on what two such seemingly different men have in common.


In 1969, when I was eleven years old, my family moved from Washington, D.C. to San Clemente, California.  At the time, SC was a sleepy little beach town of 16,000 people with no major businesses or attractions other than great beaches, which the locals used enthusiastically and budget vacationers flocked to.  But the small town peace was broken not long after we settled in when this guy copycatted us and made the same move from DC to SC.  His name was – oh gee, what was it? – oh yes…Richard Nixon.

No, I didn’t know Nixon, even though he lived in SC for many years, on vacation as President (when his home was called “The Western White House”) and then full-time after he resigned.  I did see him pass once in his limousine, glimpsing a perfect dark silhouette of that iconic and unmistakable profile.  But mostly he hunkered down in his fortress, and so while the city renamed whatever they could “Del Presidente” in his honor (everything in town had a Spanish flavor), his penchant for seclusion left hopeful tourists begging to be let past security gates in order to rubberneck at first a current, and then a disgraced ex-President.
    
No, the person that I knew was Ken Khachigian, who started out as a junior aide in the Nixon White House and worked his way up to speechwriter before moving to San Clemente after the resignation to serve as co-writer of Nixon’s memoirs.  Still later, Ken would go on to greater heights, as a political consultant and as writer of some of Ronald Reagan’s most important speeches, including his first inaugural address and his farewell speech when he left office.  He’s been dubbed the “lion” of the California GOP, and I often see him quoted in articles (including on Salon.com) about political campaigns.

Ken Khachigian with Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office

I was 16 when Ken and his wife Meredith and their two adorable young daughters moved in across the street from us.  It was a cozy little neighborhood, as the developer had only built three streets of houses before running out of money, and being up on a ridge in the hills surrounded by then undeveloped canyon land, we were set apart from the rest of the town.  For those reasons, we neighbors tended to share a special bond (one that only deepened after the night a brush fire consumed the canyon, and a wall of flames advanced as far as the Khachigians’ backyard before firefighters got it under control and saved all our houses).

The couple the Khachigians had bought their house from recommended me as a babysitter and so I came to spend many an evening in their home.  (Unfortunately, unlike my parents, I didn’t get to go to any of the parties they threw, including the one at which my mother chatted with a young Diane Sawyer, also a Nixon employee at the time.)  After they’d left for the evening and I’d played with the girls and put them to sleep, I’d stroll the halls of their house and peek into Ken’s study, examining the many photographs of famous conservatives, including the ex-Presidente.  

At the time, I was completely uninterested in politics, and my parents had always been staunch independents, so I had no particular attraction nor animus towards Republicans, and was more bored by the recently concluded Watergate scandal than anything else.  A few years later, college would turn me into a Democrat and I’ve only moved farther left with age.  But as much as I may have come to disagree with their politics, and even despise the actions of the men that Ken has worked for, Ken and Meredith Khachigian will always hold a place in my heart as two of the nicest people I’ve ever known.

They weren’t just polite, friendly people raising the two best-behaved yet lively and intelligent kids I’ve ever had in my charge.  No, they were the kind of people that neighbors talked about behind their backs – to say how nice they were. They were genuinely interested in me and asked about my life, something a teenager always finds flattering.  When they learned that I had ambitions to be a writer and had edited school literary magazines, Ken told me the story (which I see he has repeated to his alma mater’s newspaper) about how he’d had to take “Bonehead English” as a freshman in college, and yet by applying himself, he’d gone on to become a successful professional writer.

In researching this post, I found Ken’s Wikipedia page and was shocked to see that he’s only 14 years older than me, and so was barely 30 years old when I first knew him.  This journey he spoke of from “bonehead” student to writer for a President was a relatively recent one, and its freshness may be what inspired him to try to mentor me.  Yet at the time, he seemed far older, in some ways more of an adult than I feel myself to be even now, at 50, and like many teens, I was resistant to what my “elders” advised. After I was in college, he urged me to get involved in politics as a way to get writing experience, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if I did so, it would not be his brand of politics.

When I’d decided to attend their alma mater, UC Santa Barbara, I think the Khachigians were even more excited and pleased at my decision than my family was, and they continued to ask my parents for updates about me for many years after I left home.  For despite Ken’s growing success, they remained in their modest ranch style house for as long as we knew them, and it was my parents who finally moved away, and some time after, we lost touch with them.

Ken doesn’t fare well in Frost/Nixon – he’s listed in the credits, and was a key figure in preparing Nixon for the Frost interviews, but exists on-screen only as a guy standing in the background (he’s the dark haired one with glasses, usually shown next to the actress playing Diane Sawyer).  I didn’t hear him speak a single line, although he whispered in someone’s ear once. But I later read that he was a technical advisor on the film, so perhaps this was his preferred portrayal – and a fitting one for a man who has spent most of his life writing words for other, more famous people to speak on camera.



I met Michael Wong when I went to work at a major California bank.  A recent college graduate, I had earned a quick promotion from secretary to technical writer and Michael was the co-worker who patiently and generously taught me the ropes of my first professional job.  He was even more gracious when I became his boss a few years later, despite his being older and having longer tenure.  We continued to work together for another few years, before I changed jobs and subsequently lost touch with him.

How to describe Michael Wong?  There’s no other way to say it:  Michael was a character.  He was a small legend within not only our administrative offices but in the larger group we supported with our policy/procedure manuals.  We had to interview and work with employees all over the state to document the business, and Michael was known as a particularly persistent interlocutor.  I always thought his work style bore a distinct resemblance to Lt. Columbo’s famous “Oh, just one more thing” shtick.  In one famous exchange, an employee he’d been interviewing by phone took yet another call from him by answering with her name, “Lisa Jones,” but when he said, “This is Michael Wong,” she said, “Lisa’s gone home” and hung up.  

Which is not to say Michael was obnoxious. He was just persistent, and he often talked in a meandering sort of way that made you a little eager for him to get to his point.  Other times, he was oddly abrupt, spouting sudden questions or pronouncements that startled you and made you wonder if he was serious or not, such as the time he questioned how tomato sauce could possibly be made from tomatoes, since he loved the former and loathed the latter.  He was also famous for his sartorial combinations, which hadn’t been updated since the mid-1970’s, and featured particularly wide and loud ties.  He defended his attire against our put-downs and once was kissing his tie passionately to show how much he loved it only to realize that a senior manager was passing by. “So,” he reported triumphantly.  “I covered up what I was doing by wiping my lips on the tie like I’d been eating something instead.”

Michael was a master of what my mother called “dumb like a fox” behavior.  To use a more recent political coinage, people constantly misunderestimated him, but, as his boss, I knew how good he was at his job.  And when the subject turned to certain things, his goofy behavior disappeared and his mind became razor sharp.  His two main topics of obsession were Motown music of the 1960’s and politics.  I’m sad to say that 25 years later, I’ve forgotten much of what he told me about both, but I do know that as much as he talked about San Francisco politics, it was a few years before I understood how involved he really was.

That moment came in 1982, when Randy Shilts’ biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, was published.  Michael excitedly went out at lunchtime to buy the book the first day it was available, and when I happened to wander into his cubicle later and look over his shoulder, I was startled by what I saw:  He was using the index to see what Shilts had written about him in the book.  And what really surprised me was how often his name appeared.  

It turned out that Michael was a major source for the book, as he’d kept detailed diaries of his time working with Harvey.  Perhaps I hadn’t been paying attention, but that was the first time I’d heard that Michael had even known Harvey.  I still haven’t read Shilts’ book but I’ve read sections that Michael appears in and found out things I never knew, including that he’d harbored political ambitions of his own and had hoped to become the first Chinese-American supervisor in SF.  By the time I knew him, he was resigned to being a behind-the-scenes guy, and even that role was shrouded in mystery – I honestly can’t tell you what he did, although it was clear he knew the major SF Democrats.

Perhaps because I’d lost contact with Michael in the mid-1990’s, I’d forgotten all about his connection to Milk, and when I read about the movie being made, all that came to mind was anticipating seeing it.  So I was completely startled one night in a movie theater when the preview for “Milk” came on, and one of the first shots showed a Chinese American guy with longish hair and big glasses standing behind Sean Penn, so instantly recognizable to me that I gasped.  “Oh my god, that’s Michael Wong!” I thought, stunned at seeing someone I’d known represented on the big screen.

Michael with Harvey in front of SF City Hall

Eager to find him and catch up, I tried searching online, but looking for a Michael Wong in San Francisco is the proverbial needle in a haystack.  I did find the website of Kelvin Yu, the actor who plays him in the movie, and Kelvin talked about Michael now being “a dear friend,” so I emailed, explained who I was and asked if he could forward my email (I also noted the incongruity of asking a movie actor to find a “regular person”) and I soon had a long reply from Michael updating me on his life.  Although I asked more than once how he felt about the movie, he would only say that it was very good.  Later I found a news article that suggested how affected he was by it.

Sadly, Michael (aka "Lotus Blossom" as Harvey dubbed him) has only a few lines in “Milk,” although he appears in the background of many scenes.  The real Michael wrote me that he shouldn’t have been in it at all, as by the time period of the movie, he’d gone on to helping other politicians. But the screenwriter had included him in the film as a “tribute” since once again Michael and his diaries were a major source of information.


I can only imagine what might happen if my old acquaintances Ken Khachigian and Michael Wong were to meet up.  Perhaps they’d argue over their extreme differences of opinion. Or perhaps they’d have the kind of conversation that opposing lawyers have, in which the bond of a common profession overrides other differences or disagreements.  

Perhaps they’d each share their unique experiences of very different sorts of politics, not just by party, but by level and flavor:  Michael having worked in the grubby grass roots of city politics, fighting for the underdog, minorities and those who tend to get trampled by power, and Ken having spent his life in those halls of power, working for the highest levels of politicians in a party that is known for catering to the rich and powerful. Both are quintessential Californians, but also of differing types:  Michael a native San Franciscan who never wants to live anywhere else but his beloved city, and Ken a native of central California and a long-time resident of conservative Orange County suburbs.

Since I can’t see them meet up, I fantasize about a movie where these behind-the-scenes guys get more screen time.  Perhaps the viewers would find, as I did in knowing them, that those standing behind the curtains of power are at least as interesting as the front men (and not nearly so egotistical).  They might also see that you can’t judge people by your immediate impression, and that liberals and conservatives alike have hidden depths that those very labels diminish (a message that our new President seems to want us all to hear and heed).

In any case, I’m tickled to have seen both of my old friends honored, however briefly, on the silver screen.

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