After the Tall Timber (17 page)

That afternoon, the White Radical Caucus was troubled. Its coup against a third ticket and in favor of local organizing had never got off the ground, and, as one member after another pointed out, the Israel resolution would scare off liberal money, and the bad press that the morning’s developments would receive might scare off everyone else. No one mentioned the possibility that the resolutions might be substantively wrong—only the possibility that they might alienate support. Several members of the caucus proposed that the white local organizers withdraw from the convention and form an organization of their own. Todd Gitlin pointed out that “the convention might still rise from its ash,” that, in any case, most members of the White Radical Caucus had voted for the resolutions, and that it might be worthwhile staying around to “neutralize” the convention. Eric Mann, a white organizer from Newark, and one of the few radicals present who never cast a disingenuous vote, suggested that the organizers remain at the convention to paralyze it by keeping the others from endorsing a national ticket and “from doing all the screwy things they want to do.”

Saturday evening, the plenary voted down the proposal to form a permanent third party. Again, a delegate proposed that the plenary adjourn until the Black Caucus, which had again withdrawn into itself, was present, but his proposal was not accepted. The Black Caucus itself was in a state of shock. The advocates of withdrawal from the convention, who had rammed the thirteen proposals through the caucus in the first place, had been certain that the plenary would turn the proposals down, leaving the blacks with an excuse to move to the Black People’s Convention on the other side of town. Now they walked out anyway, leaving the Black Caucus to the moderates. Claude Lightfoot, of the Communist Party (rated as moderate by the radical left), and several members of the Du Bois Clubs, also Communist, soon took over, to give the Black Caucus some direction.

The White Radical Caucus, meanwhile, was in session on another floor, still plotting whether to sway the convention from the idea of putting up even a temporary third ticket or to leave the convention. Theodore Steege, a white member of the Ann Arbor SDS, announced that the Black Caucus had come to a new conclusion: Since the white delegates had been willing to accept the Black Caucus ultimatum, the Black Caucus knew that it was not dealing with real radicals; it would therefore either withdraw from the convention or consider supporting a third-ticket proposal and withdrawing support from the local organizers. The only black present—who later turned out not to have been a participant in the convention at all—shouted from the back of the room that this information was false. His word was accepted. A delegate from the Third Ticket Caucus appeared before the White Radical Caucus to offer what came to be known as the California Compromise. The California people, mainly the staff of
Ramparts
, wanted to be free to put up a ticket of their own, and the proposed compromise was for all states to be free to put up local and national third tickets if they liked, but for the convention to go on record as mainly supporting non-electoral organizing. The White Radical Caucus adopted the California Compromise.

The delegates at Saturday night’s plenary, however, did not understand the California Compromise. In fact, most of them had never heard of it. A little old woman got up to say that she never liked to make an important decision without “sleeping and praying,” that she disapproved of all the “intrigue,” and that she hoped no vote would be taken before morning. She was applauded. A hippie wearing a headband and a card reading “Free”—one of two hippies who showed up at the convention—tried to speak and was denied the microphone. Before the California Compromise could be introduced, a vote was taken and the third ticket was defeated by two votes. A black delegate appeared and announced that the Black Caucus was once again being excluded from the decision-making process and that it would announce the method of its participation in the morning. A motion to postpone all decisions until then was defeated. Delegates from the White Radical Caucus and the Third Ticket Caucus agreed privately to reintroduce the California Compromise the following day.

Sunday afternoon, Rap Brown was scheduled to speak to the plenary, but, at the insistence of James Forman, who was once the executive secretary of SNCC and is now its international-affairs director, he agreed to speak to the Black Caucus instead. Forman, however, addressed the plenary session—originally announced as a Black Liberation Panel—for several hours, in the course of which he “passed” whatever resolutions he chose (although it was not a voting plenary); denied the microphone to anyone else; declared himself “dictator” at one point and then, when Peretz and some other whites at last walked out, dismissed the whole thing, rather unconvincingly, as a joke; and made a proposal that both calumnied the genuine plight of the poor and may puzzle genuine revolutionaries in other countries for years to come. As an act of revolution, he suggested a boycott of 1968 General Motors cars. He was given several standing ovations, and by the end of his harangue most people present agreed with the amphetamine radicals that although he might not have said anything either true or important, he had “really turned them on.” (Bertram Garskof declared himself honored, at this point, to be part of “the white tail on the real movement.”)

In the late afternoon, before the evening plenary, the Black Caucus made its new demands known: the plenary was to be regarded as merely another committee of the convention, and the Black Caucus was to be granted fifty per cent of the total convention vote. The White Radicals, who had been thinking of nothing but their conspiratorial compromise, were bewildered. Only one of them, in their caucus, spoke against the new demands. “I know it’s all irrelevant and meaningless,” David Simpson, of the University of Georgia SDS, said. “I’m just not going to vote for it, because it’s such a sick thing. I just don’t want to be part of such a sick thing.”

In the California group, Simon Casady said to Warren Hinckle, executive editor of
Ramparts
, “I guess what they’re asking is to let them hold our wallet, and we might as well let them.”

“Especially since there’s nothing in it,” Hinckle said.

At the Third Party Caucus, rhetoric had lapsed into the style of another age. “We have preserved the unity of this convention,” a delegate of the Socialist Workers Party was saying, “to present an alternative to the American people.” “Hear! Hear!” the delegates replied.

At that evening’s plenary, where the Black Caucus demand for half the convention’s vote was introduced, Communist Party and Du Bois Club members rose one after another to endorse “our black brothers’ ” position. What had happened, it turned out, was that while the white radicals were planning their local-organizing coup, and then settling for the California Compromise, the Communist Party and the Du Bois Clubs had temporarily, for whatever it might be worth to them, taken over the Black Caucus, and, through it, the entire convention—an achievement roughly comparable to embezzling a sieveful of smog. By inducing the Black Caucus to make the demand at all, the Communists had turned blacks against whites: if the white radicals voted for it, they lost their power over any further decisions of the New Politics (including the power to paralyze a third ticket); if against, they lost black cooperation. “Radicalized,” they voted for. (“Masochistic fascists,” the Reverend James Bevel, a black veteran of innumerable civil-rights campaigns, called them later on.) In the plenary, any black who walked up to a microphone to speak—even
for
the new demand—was approached by two tall young members of the Black Caucus and persuaded to sit down again. The demand was accepted, and a pink card representing half the convention’s votes was given to Carlos Russell, a poverty worker from Brooklyn, who was now the Black Caucus chairman.

From this moment on, the Black Caucus showed itself to be more intelligent, more sensible, and more independent than any other group at the convention, and than the convention as a whole. To begin with, after a unity speech by Russell, the Black Caucus adjourned the plenary. Then, as white petitioners from the White Radical Caucus, the Third Ticket Caucus, the newly formed Israel Caucus, and even the pre-convention Resolutions Committee and the Progressive Labor Party cooled their heels in an anteroom, and delegates from SANE and Women Strike for Peace (who had either abstained or voted for) wandered about in the ranks of the “radicalized,” the Black Caucus—in a surge of good feeling—let any black in who cared to come. As a result, the Black Caucus may have had the first genuine discussion of the entire convention. When William Higgs, a white associate of the radical National Lawyers Guild, who was out in the corridor, cast about in his mind for the name of some black he might know inside the caucus, and finally succeeded in summoning one—a woman delegate from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—he failed to persuade her that a national third ticket would really help her much in Mississippi. (“I see what you mean, Bill,” she said when she came out into the hall, “but I can’t help thinking I need all the energy I got for the local issues.”) And Steve Newman, of the Progressive Labor Party, who now threw in his lot with the local organizers, and against the conservative, third-ticket-strategy Communists (since Maoists believe in revolution by non-electoral means), never got a chance to talk to anyone at all. By the time the plenary reconvened, at midnight, the Black Caucus had endorsed a proposal by the Communist Party’s Claude Lightfoot: local organizing, with a third-ticket decision to be deferred. But, in another surge of fellow-feeling, the spokesman for the Black Caucus—having heard the White Radical Caucus’s point of view through an intermediary, Ivanhoe Donaldson—phrased his proposal as though it were the California Compromise. No one protested. Everyone was baffled. And it passed.

Monday morning, Arthur Waskow, of the Institute for Policy Studies and of the Steering Committee, tried to dissuade a woman from the Women’s Rights Caucus from introducing a proposal that women be granted fifty-one per cent of the vote at the plenary. “You’re not thinking politically,” he said. “It will sound like a joke. A parody. I think you’re completely insensitive to the politics of this convention.” The White Radical Caucus was in session once again. Eric Mann said he thought that they would have to reckon with the possibility that most of the money except the Communist Party money would now withdraw from the Conference but that there was no point in being too fussy about where money for local organizing was coming from. In the two half-black, half-white committees—one for organizing, one for the third ticket—that would be set up in that afternoon’s plenary, he went on, Scheer’s people could be counted on to see to it that the Communist Party did not run away with the third ticket. And the white half of the local organizers could be turned into a white SNCC.

Then the plotting began again, in the intimate, nearly inaudible voices that are part of the white-radical mystique: “people already in motion,” “implement specific programs at the local level,” “relate,” “in that bag,” “where they’re at,” “doing their thing,” “power structure,” “coalesce with,” “crystal-clear,” “relevant,” “beautiful.” It seemed that some awful rhetorical cycle was coming to a close. A radical movement born out of a corruption of the vocabulary of civil rights—preempting the terms that belonged to a truly oppressed minority and applying them to the situation of some bored children committed to choosing what intellectual morsels they liked from the buffet of life at a middle-class educational institution in California—now luxuriated in the cool political vocabulary, while the urban civil-rights movement, having nearly abandoned its access to the power structure, thrashed about in local paroxysms of self-destruction. Both had become so simplistically opposed to order of any kind that society may become simplistic and repressive in dealing with them. There just may be no romance in moving forward at the pace that keeping two ideas in one’s head at the same time implies; at least, there have been no heroes of the radical center yet. But the New Politics, black and white, seems to have turned from a political or moral force into an incendiary spectacle, a sterile, mindless, violence-enamored form of play. In the final plenary, the Black Caucus, in addition to reversing its Israel resolution, managed to pass a few resolutions opposing Vietnam and the draft, and to appoint the two committees to recommend things for the New Politics—if there should be any—to do in the future.

The New Yorker
September 23, 1967

“HIS EYES. They’re so cold,” one woman said to another, on the sidewalk outside a radio station in Portland, Oregon. “I’ve never seen such flat, cold eyes. He looks just like a reptile. A
reptile
.”

When Frances Purcell Liddy heard, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, that Robert Conrad, an actor, might buy the screen rights to her husband’s autobiography,
Will
, she was pleased. She had seen Conrad on television, in
A Man Called Sloan
, and noticed what she called a twinkle in his eyes. She thought photographs somehow never managed to convey the twinkle in the eyes of her husband, G. Gordon Liddy.

Liddy himself had overheard the comment of the lady in Oregon; he knew, as was evident from the lady’s tone, that she intended to express intense admiration. At the same time, since the comment was accompanied and followed by a hopeful glance at him, he thought politeness obliged him to reply. “I didn’t know what to say,” he said, regretfully, some moments later. “I just didn’t feel I could say thank you.” So he said nothing.

Will
, by G. Gordon Liddy, was published in late April by St. Martin’s Press.
Time
, in its issue of April 21, 1980 (cover story, “Is Capitalism Working?”), had run excerpts from the book, under the heading “Exclusive: Watergate Sphinx Finally Talks.” The excerpts contained five pieces of information which seemed to determine all subsequent coverage of the book, in reviews and by the press: that Liddy, as a small boy in the care of a German maid, had been impressed by prewar Nazi radio broadcasts and even, until his father explained to him what Naziism was, inspired by them; that, as a fearful and neurasthenic child, and later, as a man, in times of stress, he had tested his courage by subjecting himself to physical ordeals, most disturbingly the holding of flames to his arms and hands; that, being less tall and less good at mathematics than he would have liked, he hoped to, and in fact did, marry a tall blond woman who was good at math, a choice which, he wrote, was influenced by considerations of his “gene pool”; that he had apparently been prepared, as a civil servant, if ordered to and for reasons of “national security,” to kill the columnist Jack Anderson; and that he had later been prepared, in prison and for reasons that seemed unclear even to him, to kill his fellow prisoner, former friend, and co-conspirator in the break-in at the Watergate, E. Howard Hunt.