Miami and the Siege of Chicago (14 page)

“Oh,” said McCarthy, “tell me, what was the best?”

And another questioner jostled the circle about McCarthy to ask another question, the Secret Service man in the gray suit at McCarthy's elbow stiffening at the impact. But McCarthy held the questioner at a distance by saying, “No, I'd like to listen for awhile.” It had obviously become his pleasure to listen to others. So the reporter told a story about Vito Marcantonio making a speech in Yankee Stadium in 1948, and the Senator listened carefully, almost sadly, as if remembering other hours of oratory.

On the way out the door, in the press of guests and local party workers up to shake his hand before he was gone, a tall bearded fellow, massive chin, broad brow for broad horn-rimmed glasses, spoke out in a resonant voice marred only by the complacency of certain nasal intrigues. “Senator, I'm a graduate student in English, and I like your politics very much, but I must tell you, I think your poetry stinks.”

McCarthy took it like a fighter being slapped by the referee across the forearms. “You see what it is, running for President,” said the laughter in his eyes. If he worshipped at a shrine, it was near the saint of good humor.

“Give my regards to Robert Lowell,” said the reporter. “Say to him that I read ‘The Drunken Fisherman' just the other day.”

McCarthy looked like the victim in the snow when the St. Bernard comes up with the rum. His eyes came alight at the name of the poem ... “I will catch Christ with a greased worm,” might have been the line he remembered. He gave a little wave, was out the door.

Yet the reporter was depressed after the meeting. McCarthy did not look nor feel like a President, not that tall tired man with his bright subtle eyes which could sharpen the razor's edge of a nuance, no, he seemed more like the dean of the finest English department in the land. There wasn't that sense of a man with vast ambition and sufficient character to make it luminous, so there was not that charisma which leaves no argument about the nature of the attempt.

If that meeting had been in the beginning of June, there were differences now by the end of August. McCarthy, at Midway Airport to greet his followers, looked big in his Presidential candidate's suit this sunny afternoon, no longer tired, happy apparently with the crowd and the air of his reception. He went down the aisle of friends and reporters who had managed to get ahead of the restraining rope for the crowd and shook hands, gave a confident wink or good twinkle there, “Whatever are you doing
here
, Norman?” he said with a grin, quick as a jab, and made his way up to the platform where a clump of microphones on spikes garnished the podium. But the microphones were dead. Which set McCarthy to laughing. Meanwhile posters waved out in the crowd: AMERICA'S PRIMARY HOPE; LUCIDITY, NOT LUNACY; MAKE MINE McCARTHY. He scanned the home-made posters, as if his sense of such language, after a decade and more, had become sufficiently encyclopedic to treasure every rare departure, and he laughed from time to time as he saw something he liked.

Finally, he called out to the crowd,
“They
cut the power line.
We're
trying to fix it.” Great college moans at the depravity of the opposition—wise laughter at the good cheer of the situation. “Let's sing,” said Gene McCarthy; a shout from the crowd. His standard was theirs: good wit could always support small horror. So they sang, This land is your land, this land is my land, and McCarthy moved along to another mike, much shifting of position in his entourage to be near him, then gave up and came back to the first mike. Things were now fixed. He introduced Senator Yarborough from Texas who would in turn introduce him. Yarborough looked like a florid genial iron-ribbed barrel of a British Conservative M.P., and spoke with a modest Texas accent; he told the audience that McCarthy had “won this campaign in the hearts of the American people.” While he spoke, McCarthy sat next to his wife Abigail, a warm-colored woman with a pleasant face full of the arch curves of a most critical lady of the gentry. Something in her expression spoke of uncharitable wit, but she was elegant—one could see her as First Lady. Indeed! One could almost see him now as President. He had size, he had humor. He looked strong. When he got up to speak, he was in easy form. Having laughed at a poster which said, “Welcome to Fort Daley,” he began by paying his respects to the Mayor of Chicago who is “watching over all of us.”

“Big Brother,” shouted a powerhouse in the crowd.

McCarthy talked for six or seven minutes. The audience was looking for a bust-out-of-the-corrals speech but the Senator was not giving it. He talked mildly, with his throw-away wit, his almost diffident assertion—“We can build a new society and a new world,” said he at one point in the mildest tones of his mild register, and then added as if to take the curse off such intellectual presumption, “We're not asking for too much—just a modest use of intelligence.”

“Too much,” murmured a news-service man admiringly.

A good yell came up. Even a modest use of intelligence would forbid Vietnam.

McCarthy drew one more big cheer by declaring he was not interested in being Vice President. “I'm not here to compromise what we've all worked for,” he said to cheers, and shortly after, to the crowd's disappointment, was done. The band played—Warren King's Brass Impact, four trombones, two guitars, drums, six trumpets, one tenor sax, two Negroes not very black among the musicians.

Yes, he had compromised nothing, not even the musicians. If he was at heart a conservative, and no great man for the Blacks, then damned if he would encourage harmoniums and avalanches of soul music. No, he had done it his way up to now, cutting out everyone from his councils who was interested in politicking at the old trough, no, his campaign had begun by being educational, and educational had he left it—he had not compromised an inch, nor played the demagogue for a moment, and it had given him strength, not strength enough perhaps to win, certainly not enough to win, but rectitude had laid the keel, and in that air of a campaign run at last for intelligent men, and give no alms to whores, he left.

It was no great meeting, but excitement was there, some thin weal of hope that victory, impossible to spring aloft, might still find wings. Take a good look, for it is the last of such pleasant occasions. Later that day, Hubert Humphrey came into O'Hare, but there was no crowd to receive him, just a few of the Humphrey workers. Hubert Humphrey had two kinds of workers. Some, with crew cut or straight combed hair, could have gone with Ronald Reagan. Others were out of that restaurant where Mafia shakes hands with the union. Let no one say that Hubert was unfriendly to the real people. But there is more to see of all these men.

It may be time to attempt a summary of the forces at work upon the convention of 1968.

A similar consideration of the Republican convention never seemed necessary. The preliminaries to Miami Beach were simple: Nixon, by dint of an historical vacuum whose presence he was the first to discern, and by the profit of much hard work, early occupied the Republican center—the rest of the history resides in Rockefeller's attempts to clarify his own position to himself. Was he to respond only to a draft of Republicans desperate not to lose to Johnson, then to Kennedy, or was he to enter primaries, and divide the party? Since he was perfectly capable of winning the election with a divided Republican Party, because his presence as a nominee would divide the Democratic Party even further, the question was academic. But Rockefeller's history can not be written, for it is to be found in the timing of his advisers and the advice of his intimates, and they are not ready, one would assume, to hang themselves yet.

Where it is not to remain hidden, the Republican history was relatively simple and may be passed over. It is the Democratic which insists on presenting itself, for no convention ever had such events for prelude.

On March 31, on a night when the latest Gallup Poll showed LBJ to be in favor with only 36% of the American public (while only 23% approved his handling of the war) Johnson announced on national television that he would not seek nor “accept the nomination of my party as your President.” On April 2, there was talk that Humphrey would run—McCarthy had taken the Wisconsin primary with 57% of the vote to Johnson's 35% (and it was estimated that if Johnson had not resigned, the vote would have been more like 64% to 28%).

On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a white man, and violence, fire and looting broke out in Memphis, Harlem, Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Newark over the next week. Mayor Daley gave his famous “shoot to kill” instruction to the Chicago police, and National Guard and U.S. troops were sent to some of these cities.

On April 23 Columbia students barricaded the office of a Dean. By another day the campus was disrupted, then closed, and was never to be comfortably open again for the rest of the semester. On May 10, as if indicative of a spontaneous world-wide movement, the students of the Sorbonne battled the Paris police on barricades and in the streets. On the same day, Maryland was quietly pledging its delegates to Humphrey.

On June 3, Andy Warhol was shot. On June 4, after winning the California primary 45% to 42% for McCarthy, and 12% for Humphrey, RFK was shot in the head and died next day. The cannibalistic war of the McCarthy and Kennedy peace forces was at an end. McCarthy had been all but finished in Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota; Kennedy had been badly mauled by his defeat in Oregon. Meanwhile Humphrey had been picking up delegates in states like Missouri, which did not have primaries, and the delegates in states which did, like Pennsylvania, after it had given 90% of its vote to McCarthy.

So went the month. Cleveland with its first Negro Mayor still had a riot. Spock, Goodman, Ferber and Coffin were sentenced to two years in jail. Kentucky with 46 delegates gave 41 to HH, and the McCarthy supporters walked out. There were stories every other day of Humphrey's desire to have Teddy Kennedy for Vice President, and much comment in columns on the eagerness of the Democrats to move the convention from Chicago. Chicago had a telephone strike and the likelihood of a taxi strike and a bus strike. Chicago was to be unwilling host to a Yippie (Youth International Party) convention the week the Democrats would be there. Chicago had the massive bull temper of Mayor Daley for the Democratic Party to contend with—much work went on behind the scenes to move the convention to Miami where the telephone and television lines were in, and Daley would be out. But Daley was not about to let the convention leave his city. Daley promised he would enforce the peace and allow no outrageous demonstrations, Daley hinted that his wrath—if the convention were moved—might burn away whole corners of certain people's support. Since Hubert Humphrey was the one who could most qualify for certain people, he was in no hurry to offend the Mayor. Lyndon Johnson, when beseeched by interested parties to encourage Daley to agree to the move, was rumored to have said, “Miami Beach is not an American city.”

The TV networks applied massive pressure to shift the convention. In Chicago, because of the strictures of the strike, their cameras would be limited to the hotels and to the Amphitheatre—they would not be able to take their portable generators out to the street and run lines to their color cameras. That would not be permitted. They were restricted to movie cameras, which would make them half a day late in reporting action or interviews in the streets (half a day late for television is equal to being a week late). How they must have focussed their pressure on Daley and Johnson. It is to the Mayor's curious credit that he was strong enough to withstand them. It should have been proof interior that Daley was no other-directed twentieth-century politician. Any such man would have known the powers of retaliation which resided in the mass media. One did not make an enemy of a television network for nothing; they could repay injury with no more than a chronic slur in the announcer's voice every time your deadly name was mentioned over the next twelve months, or next twelve years. Daley, however, was not a national politician, but a clansman—he could get 73% of the vote in any constituency made up of people whose ancestors were at home with rude instruments in Polish forests, Ukrainian marshes, Irish bogs—they knew how to defend the home: so did he. No interlopers for any network of Jew-Wasp media men were going to dominate the streets of his parochial city, nor none of their crypto-accomplices with long hair, sexual liberty, drug license and unbridled mouths. It was as if the primitive powers of the Mayor's lungs, long accustomed to breathing all variety of blessings and curses (from the wind of ancestors, constituents, and screaming beasts in the stockyards where he had once labored for a decade and more) could take everything into his chest, mighty barrel of a chest in Richard J. Daley, 200 pounds, 5 feet 8 inches tall. These blessings and curses, once prominently and in public breathed in, could be processed, pulverized, and washed into the choleric blood, defiance in the very pap and hemoglobin of it—“I'll swallow up their spit and shove it through,” the Mayor could always bellow to his electorate. So Daley was ready to take on the electronic wrath of the semi-conductors of the world, his voter-nourished blood full of beef and curses against the transistorized communicatory cabals of the media. And back of him—no evidence will ever be produced to prove such a thought—must have been Lyndon Johnson, great wounded secret shaman of the Democratic Party. If Teddy Roosevelt had once wrecked William Howard Taft and the Republican Party by running as a Bull Moose, so Lyndon Johnson was now a warlock of a Bull Moose, conceiving through all the months of June, July, and August how he would proceed to create a cursed convention, a platform, a candidate, and a party which would be his own as much as the nightmarish vision of a phantom ship is the soul of a fever; he would seek to rend his party, crack it in two—that party to which his own allegiance in near to forty years could hardly be questioned—because that party had been willing to let him go. In revenge he would create a candidate who need never run, for his campaign would be completed by the nomination. Conceive what he would have thought of a candidate who could attract more votes than himself.