Miami and the Siege of Chicago (15 page)

“Politics is property,” said Murray Kempton, delegate from New York, over the epiphanies of a drink, and never was a new science comprehended better by a young delegate. Lyndon Johnson was first preceptor of the key that politics-is-property so you never give something away for nothing. Convention politics is therefore not the art of the possible so much as the art of what is possible when you are dealing with property holders. A delegate's vote is his holding—he will give it up without return no more than a man will sign over his house entire to a worthy cause.

The true property-holder is never ambivalent about his land, he does not mock it, or see adjacent estates as more deserving than his own—so a professional in politics without pride in his holding is a defector. The meanest ward-heeler in the cheapest block of Chicago has his piece—he cannot be dislodged without leaving his curse nor the knotty untangling of his relations with a hundred job-holders in the area; he gives up tithes in the umbilical act of loyalty to his boss, he receives protection for his holding in return.

Such property relations are to be witnessed for every political sinecure in the land—judgeships, jobs, contracts, promises—it comes down to chairs in offices, and words negotiable like bonds: all of that is politics as simple property. Everybody in the game has a piece, and that piece is workable, it is equivalent to capital, it can be used to accrue interest by being invested in such sound conservative enterprises as decades of loyalty to the same Machine. So long as the system progresses, so will one's property be blessed with dividends. But such property can also be used as outright risk capital—one can support an insurgent movement in one's party, even risk the loss of one's primary holding in return for the possibility of acquiring much more.

This, of course, is still politics at city hall, county or state house, this is the politics of the party regular, politics as simple property, which is to say politics as concrete negotiable power—the value of their engagement in politics is at any moment just about directly convertible to cash.

Politics at national level can still be comprehended by politics-as-property provided one remembers that moral integrity (or the public impression of such) in a high politician is also property, since it brings power and/or emoluments to him. Indeed a very high politician—which is to say a statesman or leader—has no political substance unless he is the servant of ideological institutions or interests and the available moral passions of the electorate, so serving, he is the agent of the political power they bestow on him, which power is certainly a property. Being a leading anti-Communist used to be an invaluable property for which there was much competition—Richard Nixon had once gotten in early on the equivalent of an Oklahoma landgrab by staking out whole territories of that property. “End the war in Vietnam,” is a property to some, “Let no American blood be shed in vain,” is obviously another. A politician picks and chooses among moral properties. If he is quick-witted, unscrupulous, and does not mind a life of constant anxiety, he will hasten—there is a great competition for things valuable in politics—to pick up properties wherever he can, even if they are rival holdings. To the extent a politician is his own man, attached to his own search for his own spiritual truth—which is to say willing to end in any unpalatable position to which the character of his truth could lead him—then he is ill-equipped for the game of politics. Politics is property. You pick up as much as you can, pay the minimum for the holding, extract the maximum, and combine where you may—small geniuses like Humphrey saw, for example, that devout trade-unionism and devout anti-Communism might once have faced each other across no-man's-land but right after the second world war were ready to enrich each other into the tenfold of national respectability.

There is no need to underline Lyndon Johnson's ability to comprehend these matters. (For the higher game of international politics-is-property he was about as well-equipped as William F. Buckley, Eleanor Roosevelt, Barry Gold-water, George Patton, J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and Averill Harriman, but that is another matter.) Johnson understood that so far as a man was a political animal (and therefore not searching for some private truth which might be independent of politics) he was then, if deprived of his properties, close to being a dead man. So the true political animal is cautious—he never, except in the most revolutionary times, permits himself to get into a position where he will have to dare his political stake on one issue, one bet, no, to avoid that, he will even give up small pieces of his stuff for nothing, he will pay tribute, which is how raids are sometimes made, and how Barry Goldwater won his nomination. (For his followers promised political extermination with all dispatch to those marginal delegates not quite ready to come along.)

The pearl in the oyster of this proposition is that there is only one political job in America which has no real property attached to it, except for the fantastical property of promotion by tragedy, and that, of course, is the Vice Presidency. It is the only high office to which all the secondary characteristics of political property may adhere—comprehensive public awareness of the name, attention in the press to one's speeches, honory emoluments in the Senate, intimacy (of varying degree) with the President, junkets abroad. If you are very active as Vice President, everyone in America knows your name. But that is your only property. It is not the same thing as real power—more like being a movie star. Taken in proportion to the size of the office, the Vice President has less real holding than the ward-heeler in his anteroom chair. The Vice President can promise many things, but can be certain of delivering on nothing. So he can never be certain of getting anything back. It is not a job for a politician but a philosopher.

It is the thesis of this argument that Lyndon Johnson, having recognized that he could not win the election in 1968 (and could win the nomination for a candidate of his choice only by exploding his own party into two or more fragments) nonetheless set out to make the party vindicate him. The last property of political property is ego, ego intact, ego burnished by institutional and reverential flame. Not all men wish statues of themselves on their tomb, but it is hard to think of LBJ with a plain stone—“Here lies a simple fellow with many victories and one catastrophic mistake”—Lyndon would carry his emoluments into the debating chambers of Hell. He had had to live after all through March and April and May with the possibility of Bobby Kennedy winning the nomination, winning the election, the laughter of the Kennedys playing echoes off the walls of his own bad dreams; Lyndon had learned during the propertyless period of his own Vice Presidential days how rapid could be the slide of your holdings, how soluble the proud salts of your ego. How quickly might come his deterioration if a Kennedy were again in office—his own bleak death in such a case may have spoken to him already. Men whose lives are built on ego can die of any painful disease but one—they cannot endure the dissolution of their own ego, for then nothing is left with which to face emotion, nothing but the urge to grovel at the enemy's feet. It is the primitive price one pays for holding onto property which possesses no moral value. How much Johnson must have been ready to offer in March and April and May in order that Bobby Kennedy be stopped. Perhaps even his own vindication might have been sacrificed.

After the Senator's assassination, however, nomination for Humphrey was empty for Johnson. If Humphrey wished to win the election, his interest was to separate himself from the President. Since this was counter to Johnson's interest, the torture of Hubert Humphrey began.

Mark it: politics is the hard dealing of hard men over properties; their strength is in dealing and their virility. Back of each negotiator is the magic of his collected properties—the real contention of the negotiation is: whose properties possess the more potent magic? A good politician then can deal with every kind of property-holder but a fanatic, because the fanatic is disembodied from his property. He conceives of his property—his noble ideal!—as existing just as well without him. His magic partakes of the surreal. That is why Lyndon Johnson could never deal with Ho Chi Minh, and why he could manipulate Hubert Humphrey with absolute confidence. Humphrey had had to live for four years with no basic property, and nobody knew better than the President what that could do to an animal as drenched in politics as Hubert. Humphrey could never make his move. Deprived for four years of his seat as Senator, deprived of constituency, and the power to trade votes, the small intricate nourishing marrow of being able to measure the profit or loss of concrete favors traded for concrete favors, the exchange of political affections based on solid property-giving, property-acquiring negotiations, forced to offer influence he now might or might not possess, Humphrey never knew where to locate himself in negotiations spoken or unspoken with Lyndon Johnson. So his feet kept slipping. Against the crusades of law and order building on the Right, his hope was to build a crusade on the Left, not to divide the Left. But to do that, he would have had to dare the enmity of Lyndon Johnson, have had to dare the real chance that he might lose the nomination, and that was the one chance he could not take for that would be the hollowest death of them all. He would be lost in retirement, his idle flesh would witness with horror the decomposition of his ego. A politician in such trouble can give away the last of his soul in order not to be forced to witness how much he has given away already.

Hubert Humphrey was the small genius of American politics—his horror was that he was wed to Lyndon Johnson, the domestic genius of us all. Humphrey could not find sufficient pride in his liver to ask for divorce. His liver turned to dread. He came to Chicago with nobody to greet him at the airport except a handful of the faithful—the Vice President's own poor property—those men whose salary he paid, and they were not many. Later, a group of a few hundred met him at the Sherman House, the boys and the Humphrey girls were out. In 1964 some of the Goldwater girls had looked like hookers on horses, now in '68, some of the women for Humphrey looked like hookers. The Mafia loved Humphrey; they always loved a political leader who kept a well-oiled pair of peanuts in his pants, and there was big money behind Humphrey, $800,000 had been raised for him in one night in New York; he would be the perfect President—for a time—for every speculator who liked a government contract to anchor his line while he got off that touchdown pass. So Humphrey money was there in Chicago for convention frolics, and a special nightclub or cabaret in the Hilton called the Hubaret where you needed a scorecard to separate the trade-union leaders from the Maf, and the women—let us not insult women. Suffice it that the beehives were out, and every girl named Marie had a coif like Marie Antoinette. Every Negro on the take was there as well—some of the slickest, roundest, blackest swingers ever to have contacts in with everyone from Mayor Daley to the Blackstone Rangers. There was action at the Hubaret, and cheer for every late-night drinker. If Hubie got in, the after-hours joints would prosper; the politics of joy would never demand that all the bars be dead by four—who could argue with that?

Negroes in general had never been charmed with McCarthy. If he was the epitome of Whitey at his best, that meant Whitey at ten removes, dry wit, stiff back, two-and-a-half centuries of Augustan culture and their distillate—the ironic manners of the tightest country gentry; the Blacks did not want Whitey at his best and boniest in a year when they were out to find every justification (they were not hard to find) to hate the Honkie. But if the Black militant and the Black workingman would find no comfort or attraction in McCarthy, think then of how the Black mixer-dixer was going to look on Clean Gene. He wasn't about to make a pilgrimage up to some Catholic rectory in the Minnesota North woods where they passed one bean through the hot water for bean soup, no, he wanted some fatback in his hands. You couldn't take the kind of hard and sanctified little goat turds McCarthy was passing out for political marbles back to the Black homefolk when they were looking for you to spread the gravy around. So Hubie Humphrey came into Chicago with nine-tenths of the organized Democratic Party—Black support, labor support, Mafia support, Southern delegates support, and you could find it all at the Hubaret if you were looking, as well as a wet wash of delegates with buttons for Humphrey, the big bold HH with its unwitting—though who knew these days what was unwitting?—reference to barbed-wire tences, concentration camps, gas chambers. The letter H went marching to the horizon.

There were 1,400–1,500 delegates secured for Hubert Humphrey on the day he came to town—such was the hard estimate of the hardest heads on his staff, Larry O'Brien, Norman Sherman, Bill Connell; the figure was low, they were not counting on the favorite sons of the South, nor on the small reserve of uncommitted delegates. Still there were rumors up of gale warnings, and much anxiety—Mayor Daley had led the Illinois delegation into caucus on Sunday, and led them out again without committing a single one of the state's 118 votes to a single delegate and there were stories Daley wanted Teddy Kennedy. John Connally of Texas, furious that the unit rule was about to be abolished in this convention, gave threats on Sunday of nominating Lyndon Johnson.

Either the convention was sewed up for Humphrey or the convention was soft. No one really knew. Usually it was enough to come to conventions with less than a first ballot victory, even two hundred votes less, and you were certain of winning. The panic among delegates to get on the winning side at the last minute is always a stampede. It is as though your land will double in value. Humphrey came in with one hundred to two hundred votes more than he needed, yet he was not without his own panic; he took care to announce on “Meet the Press” before taking the plane to Chicago that he supported President Johnson's Vietnam policies because they were “basically sound.” For two months he had been vacillating, giving hints one day that he was not far from the doves, rushing back the next to be close in tone to the Administration. It could be said, of course, that it was part of his political skill to keep the McCarthyites uncertain of his position; once convinced that he would take a line close to Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam, they might look—McCarthy included—to induce Teddy Kennedy to run. So Humphrey played at being a dove as a way of holding the youngest Kennedy in Hyannis. But what was he to gain besides the approval of Lyndon Johnson? A liaison with McCarthy could even give him a chance for victory in November. Yet Humphrey engaged in massive safe play after massive safe play, paying court to the South, paying court to LBJ, to Daley, to Meany, to Connally; even then, he came to Chicago with his nomination insecure. He had 1,500 votes, but if something went wrong he did not know if he could count on a single one of them—they could all wash away in the night. Humphrey was staying at the Conrad Hilton, but his first act after landing at O'Hare was to proceed to the Sherman House to visit the Illinois delegation. Daley was working to induce Teddy Kennedy to run—once Teddy Kennedy ran and lost, he might have to accept a draft as Vice President. At the same time, once running, he might show huge strength—Daley would then be able to claim he stole the nomination from Humphrey and got it over to Kennedy. Daley could not lose. All the while he was encouraging Kennedy to run, Humphrey was promising Daley more and more treasures, obliged—since he had no political property of his own just yet—to mortgage future property. He was assigning future and double substance to Daley, to the unions, to the South, to business interests. His holding operations, his safe plays to guarantee the nomination once the nomination was already secure, became exorbitantly expensive. A joke made the rounds of the convention: