Miami and the Siege of Chicago (16 page)

“What was Hubert able to keep?”

“Well, he was able to keep Muriel.”

His dangers were absurdly small. McCarthy, three times unpopular with the delegates, for being right, for being proud that he was right, and for dealing only in moral property, had no chance whatsoever. Moreover, he was disliked intensely by the Kennedyites. If Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy had been in the Sinn Fein together they would have carried their guns in holsters under opposite shoulders—they embodied the ultimate war of the Irish. McCarthy was reputed to carry volumes of Augustine and Aquinas in his suitcase; it is possible Bobby Kennedy thought one of the penalties of being Irish is that you could get lost in the
Summa Theologica
.

But Hubert Humphrey carried no gun and no tome. Finally he was a hawk not a dove for the most visceral of reasons—his viscera were not firm enough to face the collective wrath of that military-industrial establishment he knew so well in Washington, that rifleman's schizophrenia one could see in the eyes of the clerks at the Pentagon, yes, his fear went beyond political common sense and a real chance to win, it went even beyond slavery to LBJ (because LBJ finally had also been afraid of the Pentagon) it came down to the simple fear that he was not ready to tell the generals that they were wrong. Peace they might yet accept, but not the recognition that they were somewhat insane—as quickly tell dragons to shift their nest.

It was a curious convention, all but settled before it began, except for the bile-bubbling fear of the nominee that he would lose; it was locked, yet extraordinarily unsettled, even if totally dominated by Lyndon Johnson. He had his men everywhere—Hale Boggs, Majority Whip of the House on the Platform Committee; Carl Albert, Majority Leader of the House as Chairman of the convention; John B. Connally, Governor of Texas, and Mayor Daley, Governor of Chicago, in front of the rostrum with their Texas and Illinois delegations, the rostrum indeed so layered about with Humphrey delegations that if one took a swing in semicircle through the states nearest to the podium, Minnesota, Utah, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Rhode Island, the Virgin Islands, Illinois, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and Florida, the final returns for Johnson's candidate were 730 votes out of a possible 834, and in none of those states did he have less than two-thirds of the delegates. To the rear of the Amphitheatre, in a semicircle through the seats farthest removed from the podium, Vermont, Puerto Rico, New York, California, Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Oregon, Missouri, Mississippi, and New Hampshire, the vote for Humphrey was only 297 out of 720.

It could be asked to what end go such picayune preparations, and the answer is politics is property. A good seat at a convention, strong, central and down front, is as important as a good seat at a show. Politicians do not have egos which sleep far from their property; since they are all a hint psychopathic (their sense of the present being vastly more intense than their sense of the past) a poor seat depresses their view of themselves. This might have an effect of no more than one percent on the stout-hearted, but Lyndon Johnson, like the Mafia, worked on point spread and picked up nickels and dimes in every percentage.

The man who made the arrangements was John Criswell, Treasurer of the Democratic National Convention, an unknown until installed by the President; such a Johnson man, he even gave the Humphrey people a difficult time on small matters, which was precisely the way to remind a man like the Vice President that he was yet politically landless. Nonetheless, Humphrey contingents had front seats—they could boo the speaker or cheer him, threaten his delivery with the imminence of their presence, not insignificant when one had to look at Illinois goons humphing in concert with Daley. Some of them had eyes like drills; others, noses like plows; jaws like amputated knees; they combed their hair straight with a part to the side in imitation of the Mayor who from up close had a red skin with many veins and hair which looked like dirty gray silk combed out straight—at his worst, Daley looked in fact like a vastly robust old peasant woman with a dirty gray silk wig. (At his best, he looked respectable enough to be coach of the Chicago Bears.) At any rate, no small matter to have the Illinois delegation under your nose at the podium, all those hecklers, fixers, flunkies, and musclemen scanning the audience as if to freeze certain obstreperous faces, make them candidates for a contract and a hit. The guys with eyes like drills always acted this way, it was their purchase on stagecraft, but the difference in this convention were the riots outside, and the roughing of the delegates in the hall, the generator trucks on the perimeter of the stockyards ready to send voltage down the line of barbed wire, the police and Canine Corps in the marshes west of the Amphitheatre. Politics is property. Rush forward with your standard. Push and push. When you get near the podium, there is nothing to see but Daley and Connally. Take a look at Connally, Governor of Texas, who once sat across from John F. Kennedy in the Presidential limousine passing the Elm Street Book Depository. Connally is a handsome man, mean, mean right to the gum, he has wavy silver hair, is cocky as a dude, sports a sharp nose, a thin-lipped Texas grin, a confident grin—it spoke of teeth which knew how far they could bite into every bone, pie, nipple or tit. Connally belonged to the Texas pure-property school of politics: there were the Ins and the Outs, and the Outs had one philosophy. Get where the Ins are. The Ins had one philosophy. Keep the Outs out. That was politics. Your seat was very important.

It was also important because the microphones for the delegates were varied in their volume. The Illinois, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and other Humphrey microphones were very clear. The New York, Wisconsin, and California microphones were weak in volume. In an emergency, in any attempt to gain the attention of the Chair, how much more difficult to yell from the rear, how much more futile to wave the standard. In any total emergency when all the mikes were dead—one hand on one switch could accomplish that—who would ever be heard in the rear if the front was demanding the floor? Yes, it was Lyndon's convention, and he controlled it with Criswell and Daley and the Andy Frain ushers, controlled it with plastic passes to enter the Amphitheatre—so specially magnetized, it was advertised in advance, that you had not only to insert them in a box when you went in, but were obliged to insert them again when you went out so that they might be demagnetized. What fury and ushers' fists fell on a delegate from New Hampshire who used a credit card to go in and out, and was detected the second time when he had a reporter to accompany him. But checks by every member of the Press who held a card in the Diners' Club revealed that they were precisely, micrometrically equal in size to the admission passes—what a preparation had obviously been made to load the galleries or floor if the need came. What an absence of real security! And in the interim, how difficult to get to the floor. Television, press, radio and periodicals were drastically restricted in the number of their passes. Whenever the convention came alive, it was next to impossible to reach the floor, so the amount of damage which could be done by keen press coverage was limited. It was not a practical objective, so much as the air of oppression of the convention itself. LBJ hated the Press by now, hated them for the freedom they took to criticize his heart, his good intentions, and his purchase on the truth. He hated them for showing the scar of his gall bladder operation on every front page, hated them for revealing the emptiness of his war in Vietnam, must have blamed them secretly for losing the war—it was no mystery that the Pentagon detested the Press by now, they were some curious fourth dimension in the solid three dimensions of old-fashioned politics-is-property, they opened the door to mockery of high office, gave eminence to Hippies, broadcast criticism of the war, and purveyed some indefinable nihilism. They sped the wrong things up. So Lyndon closed the convention down for them so far as he could; Daley was his arm.

Yet for all the power of his command on that convention floor, Johnson never appeared in person to speak, was rarely mentioned, and the convention sat without a photograph of him anywhere in sight. In Atlantic City in '64 there had been two photos four stories high from floor to upmost balcony. Whereas Lyndon's presence at this convention was felt more as a brain the size of a dirigible floating above the delegates in the smoke-filled air.

Yet for all that he controlled it, the convention was the wildest Democratic convention in decades, perhaps in more than forty years, and the bitterest, the most violent, the most disorderly, most painful, and in certain ways the most uncontrolled—so it was like his Administration: utterly controlled down to the last echo of his voice, and beyond was absolute chaos. At one end was Carl Albert, Chairman, taking his cue on what to do next by nods, fingers, and other signs from Daley's henchmen, transparent in their signification—“Let the boss speak” or “Shut that guy up”—to thirty million TV viewers. At the other end was the chaos of Michigan Avenue when the police fulfilled their Yippie christening and flailed at the forage like wild pigs. With it all was the comedy, sad, dim and sorrowful as a tender laugh, when Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, a Johnson man, the keynoter, spent ten pages of his thirteen-page speech in describing the ills of the country. He was not supposed to do that. The keynote speech extols the glories of the party and the iniquities of the opposition. The keynote speech is pure and automatic dividend from collective holdings. It is like passing Go in Monopoly, $200 bucks, but the country was in straits so poor that even with a Johnson man on the podium, the keynoter was obliged to dwell on America's crisis and deliver a troubled and most literate speech.

There was the unit rule fight which had Connally sufficiently furious to be ready to nominate Johnson. There were the credentials fights which reached such a peak of fury at two-thirty of Tuesday morning with the first Monday night session not yet done, that the Chair was booed for many minutes. Tuesday evening when the Georgia delegation by voice acclamation was seated in a great hurry to establish a split, half to Maddox, half to Julian Bond, broader comedy was played. “I had my seat taken away from me,” complained a thin boyish white delegate from Georgia, “without their even asking me, notifying me, or the Chair even deigning or condescending to have a vote. That was the way they took my seat away from me. Very high-handed, I call it,” said the Georgia delegate in a whining voice like a car singing through the gears. “That was my seat, and they never had no right to it. I feel kind of funny now not having my seat.” Yes, politics went right back through the multiplicities of its negotiation and barter to the primal seat in the family ring around the kitchen table and if Older Brother or Sis has taken your seat, then cause for complaint. But when Mom is gone, or any authority to whom you can appeal, well, politics has ceased to exist, Southern politics at any rate.

“Yes sir,” said the delegate from Georgia, “I'm going back home to think for awhile, and then I might just decide to work for Mr. Wallace.”

“Then, sir,” said the interviewer, “you do not plan to work for the Democratic nominee?”

“How can I, sir? They took my seat.”

Tuesday morning, the California delegation met in the Grand Ballroom of the LaSalle to hear an impromptu debate between Senator McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, and Senator McGovern. There had been another debate planned for television between Humphrey and McCarthy, but it had never taken place. When McGovern and Lester Maddox announced their candidacies, they insisted at the same time on joining the debate. In the confusion, Humphrey had withdrawn.

Now he was back, however. The onus of refusing to debate McCarthy would no longer be his—besides it was too late to gain or lose more than a few votes by this kind of activity, and indeed, McGovern who was to do very well this particular morning, probably did not gain a total of twenty extra delegates from his efforts. Politics is property, and to fall in love with a man's voice sufficiently to vote for him next day is not to get much return for your holding—besides, the votes McGovern stole were in the main from McCarthy, who was not going to give much return either.

The Grand Ballroom of the LaSalle was on the nineteenth floor, and a noble room, perhaps fifty feet wide, three times as long, with an arched ceiling thirty feet high. Nearly a thousand delegates, guests and newspapermen were to crowd into its space, a hunger for confrontation feeding not only the crowds of students and Yippies in the streets below, but the delegates and the Press themselves, as if the frustration of listening to Johnson and Humphrey defend the war for more than four years had begun unconscious dialogues in many a man and woman not accustomed to muttering to themselves on the street—indeed with proper warning twenty thousand tickets could have been sold in a day for this meeting of the three men.

Yet, it proved curiously anti-climactic. If the atmosphere of the Ballroom was tense, theatrical, even
historical
, no great debate ensued. The technologies of television and convention politics were often curious, they seemed calculated to work to the deterrence of dramatic possibility, and nowhere was this more evident than in the format arrived at (perhaps hammered out by Humphreyites, for it benefited no one else) since it left each man to make a ten-minute opening statement, then threw the meeting open to questions from the delegates. Each candidate who was asked a question could reply for three minutes, his opponents could comment for two minutes. At the end a short summation was in order for each. It was a decorous format, designed precisely to inhibit the likelihood of a continuing confrontation between the principals, since any quarrel which started could hardly continue beyond the time allotted to each question. Politics is property, and Humphrey's property here was twenty years of service in the Senate and the Administration—he wasn't about to limit debate to a slug-fest on Vietnam, no, he would sit on his seat and let the format cover other subjects as well, legislative service, the Supreme Court, willingness to support Democratic candidates; they got to talk about Vietnam for a few minutes. That was later, however. The beginnings were not altogether congenial. Scheduled to begin at 10:00
A.M.
, McGovern came in at 10:05, McCarthy at 10:13. Humphrey, following the logic of championship fights which keeps the contender waiting in the ring, did not appear in any hurry. At 10:26, McCarthy left the platform and moved slowly toward the door, shaking hands with friends and talking. He looked about ready to leave.