Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (39 page)

Wisconsin was the place where he found a working model for the nervous coalition that made the rest of the primary campaign a downhill run. Wisconsin effectively eliminated every obstacle but the corpse of Hubert Humphrey—who fought like a rabid skunk all the way to the end; cranked up on the best speed George Meany’s doctors could provide for him, taking his cash and his orders every midnight from Meany’s axe-man Al Barkan; and attacking McGovern savagely, day after day, from every treacherous angle Big Labor’s sharpest researchers could even crudely define for him . . .

It was a nasty swan song for Hubert. He’d been signing those IOUs to Big Labor for more than twenty years, and it must have been a terrible shock to him when Meany called them all due at the same time.

But how? George Meany, the seventy-year-old quarterback of the “Stop McGovern Movement,” is said to be suffering from brain bubbles at this stage of the game. Totally paralyzed. His henchmen have kept him in seclusion ever since he arrived in Florida five days ago, with a bad case of The Fear. He came down from AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington by train, but had to be taken off somewhere near Fort Lauderdale and rushed to a plush motel where his condition deteriorated rapidly over the weekend, and finally climaxed on Monday night when he suffered a terrible stroke while watching the Democratic Convention on TV.

The story is still shrouded in mystery, despite the best efforts of the five thousand ranking journalists who came here to catch Meany’s last act, but according to a wealthy labor boss who said he was there when it happened—the old man went all to pieces when his creature, Hubert Humphrey, lost the crucial “California challenge.”

He raged incoherently at the Tube for eight minutes without drawing a breath, then suddenly his face turned beet red and his head swelled up to twice its normal size. Seconds later—while his henchmen looked on in mute horror—Meany swallowed his tongue, rolled out of his chair like a log, and crawled through a plate glass window.

The Young Bulls Take Charge; Cronkite and the Wizards
Take a Fall; Humphrey Croaked and the Squeeze Play
Explained on the Beach

What happened in Miami was far too serious for the kind of random indulgence that Gonzo Journalism needs. The Real Business happened, as usual, on secret-numbered telephones or behind closed doors at the other end of long hotel corridors blocked off by sullen guards. There were only two crucial moments in Miami—two potential emergencies that might have changed the outcome—and both of them were dealt with in strict privacy.

The only real question in Miami was whether or not McGovern might be stripped of more than half of the 271 delegates he won in the California primary—and that question was scheduled to come up for a vote by the whole convention on Monday night. If the “ABM Movement” could strip 151 of those delegates away, McGovern might be stopped—because without them he had anywhere from 10 to 50 votes less than the 1,509 that would give him the nomination on the first ballot. But if McGovern could hold his 271 California delegates, it was all over.

The “ABM Movement” (Anybody but McGovern) was a coalition of desperate losers, thrown together at the last moment by Big Labor chief George Meany and his axe-man, Al Barkan. Hubert Humphrey was pressed into service as the front man for ABM, and he quickly signed up the others: Big Ed, Scoop Jackson, Terry Sanford, Shirley Chisholm—all the heavies.

The ABM movement came together, officially, sometime in the middle of the week just before the convention, when it finally became apparent that massive fraud, treachery, or violence was the only way to
prevent McGovern from getting the nomination . . . and what followed, once this fact was accepted by all parties involved, will hopefully go down in history as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Democratic process.

It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public. By noon on Sunday both Humphrey and Muskie were so desperate that they came out of their holes and appeared—trailing a mob of photographers and TV crews—in the lobby of the Fontainebleau, the nexus hotel about five hundred yards down the beach from the Doral, racing back and forth from one caucus or press conference to another, trying to make any deal available—on any terms—that might possibly buy enough votes to deny McGovern a first-ballot victory.

The ABM strategy—a very shrewd plan, on paper—was to hold McGovern under the 1,500 mark for two ballots, forcing him to peak without winning, then confront the convention with an alternative (ABM) candidate on the third ballot—and if that failed, try
another
ABM candidate on the fourth ballot, then yet another on the fifth, etc. . . . on into infinity, for as many ballots as it would take to nominate somebody acceptable to the Meany-Daley axis.

The name didn’t matter. It didn’t even make much difference if He, She, or It couldn’t possibly beat Nixon in November . . . the only thing that mattered, to the Meany-Daley crowd, was
keeping control of the party
; and this meant the nominee would have to be some loyal whore with more debts to Big Labor than he could ever hope to pay . . . somebody like Hubert Humphrey, or a hungry opportunist like Terry Sanford.

Anybody but George McGovern—the only candidate in Miami that week who would be under no obligation to give either Meany or Daley his private number if he ever moved into the White House.

But all that noxious bullshit went by the boards in the end. The ABM got chewed up like green hamburger on opening night. They were beaten stupid at their own game by a handful of weird-looking kids who never even worked up a sweat. By midnight on Monday it was all over. Once McGovern got a lock on those 271 delegates, there was never any doubt about who would get the nomination on Wednesday.

The bedrock truths of the McGovern convention were not aired on TV—except once, very briefly, on Monday night; but it hardly mattered, because all three networks missed it completely. When the deal went down, Walter Cronkite saw green and called it red, John Chancellor opted for yellow, and ABC was already off the air.

What happened, in a nut, was a surprise parliamentary maneuver—cooked up by over-ambitious strategists in the Women’s Caucus—forcing a premature showdown that effectively decided whether or not McGovern would get the nomination. The crisis came early, at a time when most of the TV/press people were still getting their heads ready to deal with all the intricate possibilities of the vote on the ABM challenge to McGovern’s California delegates . . . and when Larry O’Brien announced a pending roll-call vote on whether or not the South Carolina delegation included enough women, very few people on the Floor or anywhere else understood that the result of that roll-call might determine exactly how many delegates would later vote for McGovern on the California challenge, and then on the First Ballot.

On the evidence, less than a dozen of the five thousand “media” sleuths accredited to the convention knew exactly what was happening at the time. When McGovern’s young strategists deliberately lost that vote, almost everybody who’d watched it—including Walter Cronkite—concluded that McGovern didn’t have a hope in hell of winning any roll-call vote from that point on: which meant the ABM could beat him on the California challenge, reducing his strength even further, and they stop him cold on the first ballot.

Humphrey’s campaign manager, Jack Chestnut, drew the same conclusion—a glaring mistake that almost immediately became the subject of many crude jokes in McGovern’s pressroom at the Doral, where a handful of resident correspondents who’d been attached to the campaign on a live-in basis for many months were watching the action on TV with press secretary Dick Dougherty and a room full of tense staffers—who roared with laughter when Cronkite, far up in his soundproof booth two miles away in the convention hall, announced that CBS was about to switch to McGovern headquarters in the Doral, where David Schumacher was standing by with a firsthand report and at least one painfully candid shot of McGovern workers reacting to the news of this stunning setback.

The next scene showed a room full of laughing, whooping people. Schumacher was grinning into his microphone, saying: “I don’t want to argue with you, Walter—but why are these people cheering?”

Schumacher then explained that McGovern had actually won the nomination by
losing
the South Carolina vote. It had been a test of strength, no doubt—but what had never been explained to the press or even to most of McGovern’s own delegates on the floor was that he had the option of “winning” that roll-call by going either up or down . . . and the only way the ABM crowd could have won was by juggling their votes to make sure the South Carolina challenge
almost
won, but not quite. This would have opened the way for a series of potentially disastrous parliamentary moves by the Humphrey-led ABM forces.

“We had to either win decisively or lose decisively,” Rick Stearns explained later. “We couldn’t afford a close vote.”

Stearns, a twenty-eight-year-old Rhodes Scholar from Stanford, was McGovern’s point man when the crisis came. His job in Miami—working out of a small white trailer full of telephones behind the convention hall—was to tell Gary Hart, on the floor, exactly how many votes McGovern could muster at any given moment, on any question—and it was Stearns who decided, after only ten out of fifty states had voted on the South Carolina challenge, that the final tally might be too close to risk. So he sent word to Hart on the floor, and Gary replied: “Okay, if we can’t win big—let’s lose it.”

The Late, Late Show; Time to Flee Again

It was somewhere around eight thirty or nine on Sunday evening when I dragged myself off the plane from Miami. The ’72 Democratic Convention was over. McGovern had wrapped it up just before dawn on Friday, accepting the bloody nomination with an elegant, finely crafted speech that might have had quite an impact on the national TV audience . . . (
Time
correspondent Hugh Sidey called it “perhaps as pure an expression as George McGovern has ever given of his particular moralistic sense of the nation”) . . . but the main, middle-American bulk of the national TV audience tends to wither away around midnight, and anybody still glued
to the tube at three thirty AM Miami time was probably too stoned or twisted to recognize McGovern anyway.

A few hundred ex-Muskie/Humphrey/Jackson delegates had lingered long enough to cheer Ted Kennedy’s bland speech, but they started drifting away when George came on—hurrying out the exits of the air-conditioned hall, into the muggy darkness of the parking lot to fetch up a waiting cab and go back to whichever one of the sixty-five official convention hotels they were staying in . . . hoping to catch the tail end of a party or at least one free drink before getting a few hours’ sleep and then heading back home on one of the afternoon planes: back to St. Louis, Altoona, Butte . . .

By sundown on Friday the “political hotels” were almost empty. In the Doral Beach—McGovern’s oceanfront headquarters hotel—Southern Bell Telephone workers were dragging what looked like about five thousand miles of multicolored wires, junction boxes, and cables out of the empty Press/Operations complex on the mezzanine. Down in the lobby, a Cuban wedding (Martinez-Hernandez: 8:30–10:30) had taken over the vast, ornately sculptured Banquet Room that twenty-four hours earlier had been jammed with hundreds of young, scruffy-looking McGovern volunteers, celebrating the end of one of the longest and most unlikely trips in the history of American politics . . . it was a quiet party, by most convention standards: free beer for the troops, bring your own grass, guitar-minstrels working out here and there; but not much noise, no whooping & shouting, no madness . . .

I was trapped in the Doral for ten days, shuttling back & forth between the hotel and the convention hall by any means available: taxi, my rented green convertible, and occasionally down the canal in the fast white “staff taxi” speedboat that McGovern’s people used to get from the Doral to the hall by water, whenever Collins Avenue was jammed up with sightseer traffic . . . and in retrospect, I think that boat trip was the only thing I did all week that I actually enjoyed.

There was a lot of talk in the press about “the spontaneous outburst of fun and games” on Thursday night—when the delegates, who had been so deadly serious for the first three sessions, suddenly ran wild on the floor and delayed McGovern’s long-awaited acceptance speech until three thirty by tying the convention in knots with a long outburst of
frivolous squabbling over the vice presidential nomination.
Newsweek
described it as “a comic interlude, a burst of silliness on the part of the delegates whose taut bonds of decorum and discipline seemed suddenly to snap, now that it didn’t make any difference.”

There was not much laughter in Miami, on the floor or anywhere else, and from where I stood, that famous “comic interlude” on Thursday night looked more like the first scattered signs of mass Fatigue Hysteria, if the goddamn thing didn’t end soon. What the press mistook for relaxed levity was actually a mood of ugly restlessness that by three o’clock on Friday was bordering on rebellion. All over the floor I saw people caving in to the lure of booze, and in the crowded aisle between the California and Wisconsin delegations a smiling freak with a bottle of liquid THC was giving free hits to anybody who still had the strength to stick their tongue out.