Miami and the Siege of Chicago (17 page)

But a winner cannot have bad timing. Humphrey came into the room at 10:30, and the debate, half an hour late, was on. McCarthy was the first to speak, and something of the testiness of defeat had gotten into his presentation. He spoke in his cool, offhand style, now famous for its lack of emphasis, lack of power, lack of dramatic concentration, as if the first desire of all men must be not the Presidency, but the necessity to avoid any forcing of one's own person (as if the first desire of the Devil might be to make you the instrument of your own will). He had insisted over all these months of campaigning that he must remain himself, and never rise to meet any ocasion, never put force into his presentation because external events seemed to demand that a show of force or oratorical power would here be most useful. No, McCarthy was proceeding on the logic of the saint, which is not to say that he necessarily saw himself as a saint (although there must have been moments!) but that his psychology was kin: God would judge the importance of the event, not man, and God would give the tongue to speak, if tongue was the organ to be manifested. He would be good when the Lord chose him to be good, powerful when the Lord needed power, dominating when that was God's decision. To attempt to carry the day by the energy of his own means would be vanity, an exercise for the devil in oneself, perhaps an offering to the Devil. Everything in McCarthy's manner, his quiet voice, his resolute refusal to etch his wit with any hint of emphasis, his offhand delivery which would insist that remarks about the future of the world were best delivered in the tone you might employ for buying a bottle of aspirin, gave hint of his profound conservatism. He was probably, left to his own inclinations, the most serious conservative to run for nomination since Robert Taft—yes, everything in McCarthy's manner spoke out in profound detestation of the Romantic impulse. Man was not his own project, not his own creation to be flung across the void in the hope that a thread of gray matter he might be carrying would end as a bridge right over the abyss, no, man was probably damned and where not damned, a damn fool, and so must always distrust the boldest and most adventurous of his own impulses. That McCarthy was also a Romantic could hardly be denied—only a Romantic would have dared the incalculable wrath aroused in Lyndon Johnson by the disruption of his volcanic properties, but McCarthy reaching out with his left hand for the taboo would restrain himself by the right. It was one thing to run, another to betray one's principles by running. The central requirement was to remember that all the filth and all the mess of all the world had come from men extending themselves further than their means, marshalling emotions they did not quite feel, pushing the stuff of the heart into theatrical patterns which sought to manipulate others—
there
was the very TNT of spiritual damnation. So McCarthy was damned if he would move a phony finger for any occasion.

The occasion today in the Grand Ballroom called for an heroic historic set of speeches which would demolish Humphrey, smelt him down to the suet at the center of his seat, but there were no false moves for the Senator. The fire to kill, the fire to condemn, the fury to wield the saint's own sword was nowhere in him today. Defeat hung over his cause. Teddy Kennedy would not be nominated, nor any favorite sons from the South. The months of campaigning were all but over. The Romantic in his own heart, which must have hoped against all gray irons of restraint in his intelligence that somehow, somewhere, the politics of the party would prove not property but spirit, was as dead as the taste of death today—he spoke with the quiet controlled bitterness of a man whose greatest vice was bitterness. If there was a grave flaw in McCarthy, it came out of some penury of his own spirit: too bitter even to express his bitterness, it leaked out of the edges of his wit, turned as punishment upon his own people in the determined bland tone of his presentation in a dramatic hour, and leaking, seemed to get into the very yellow of his skin, his single most unattractive feature.

He was not furious so much at losing as at the lack of recognition given by his party for the isolation and stamina of his performance; he was furious at the indifference, even antipathy, of the bulk of the Kennedy cadres; he was hurt probably more than he could admit even to himself at the entrance of Senator George McGovern, now running on a set of issues almost identical to his own, but softer, more compromising. He had to be icy with wrath at McGovern's comments in the Nebraska caucus yesterday. McGovern had said of McCarthy that he “has taken the view that a passive and inactive Presidency is in order, and that disturbs me. Solving our domestic problems will be much more difficult and that will require an active and compassionate President.”

So McCarthy now in his opening remarks to the California delegation spent but a word on Vietnam, even emphasizing that he did not wish to restate his case, and then—no man a match for the glide and slash of McCarthy's wit, the shark in the man could best show here—he said in speaking of criticism of him, “... Most recently the suggestion that I would be a passive President. Well, I think a little passivity in that office is all right, a kind of balance, I think. I have never quite known what active compassion is. Actually, compassion, in my mind, is to suffer with someone, not in advance of him.” He paused, “Or not in public necessarily.” He paused again. Here came the teeth. The voice never altered. “But I have been, whether I have been passive or not, the most active candidate in the party this year.”

He had been a baseball pitcher once for a minor league team—he had learned presumably to throw two or three kinds of pitch off the same delivery; some of his pitches could take a man's head off. He went on to talk of New Hampshire in the cold and snow, Wisconsin in the ice, “raising issues all the way”—there was ice enough in his soul now—“They say I was impersonal, I want you to know I am the only candidate who said he would get rid of J. Edgar Hoover and that is a person.”

McGovern was next. McGovern was friendly. McGovern was the friendliest man in Chicago. He was a reasonably tall, neatly built man, with an honest Midwestern face, a sobriety of manner, a sincerity of presentation, a youthfulness of intent, no matter his age, which was reminiscent of Henry Fonda. Now, he was making his amends to McCarthy. “I will say to my friend and colleague, Gene McCarthy, that I appreciate what he has done in moving out first in this Presidential race to help turn the course of American policy in Southeast Asia.” But he was friends with everyone, “and I don't have a short memory. I remember Vice President Humphrey as one who for twenty years has carried the standard of civil and human justice in our own country.” McGovern gave his sweet smile. “What I am trying to say here this morning is that I am no fan of Richard Nixon.” He was to win the audience over both hours in just such a way. Now he ended his opening remarks by suggesting that we “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.” A Christian sweetness came off him like a psychic aroma—he was a fine and pleasant candidate but for that sweetness. It was excessive. Not artificial, but excessive, as the smell of honeysuckle can be excessive.

He had spoken one-and-a-half times as long as McCarthy. Humphrey spoke three times as long, trudging through an imprecision of language, a formal slovenliness of syntax which enabled him to shunt phrases back and forth like a switchman who locates a freight car by moving everything in the yard.

“I happen to believe that one of the unique qualities of the Democratic Party is its leadership over the years—recognizing its fallibility, recognizing its inadequacies, because it is a human instrument—is the capacity of this country to come to this party and its leadership, to come to grips with change, and to be responsive to the future.” Where Lyndon Johnson spoke and wrote in phrases which could be hyphenated like Mayor Daley's temporary fences on the way to the Amphitheatre, making you keep your eye off the weeds in the vacant lot, and on the dual highway ahead, so Hubert Humphrey's phrases were like building plots in sub-developments, each little phrase was a sub-property—the only trouble was that the plots were all in different towns, little clichés from separate speeches made on unrelated topics in distinctly different years were now plumped down next to each other in the rag-bag map of his mind. He went on for many minutes planting shrubs in each separate little plot, saying sweet things about his opponents, talking of the difficulties of the twentieth century, and the honor of his own record, the unflagging fight he had made, the need for unity. His voice had a piping cheerfulness which seemed to come from the very act of exercising the faculty of speech; once the current of air started to move out from his lungs, he was as vibrant as a set of organ pipes—the thing for him to do was keep striking notes off those pipes, it did not matter which precise music came out. So he went on and on, and by the time he was done, close to half the debate was gone.

Finally the question of Vietnam came up. A delegate got the floor—doubtless he had it arranged with Jesse Unruh in advance, why not?

Delegate: “Mr. Vice President, specifically, in what ways, if at all, do you disagree with President Johnson's position with reference to Vietnam?”

Humphrey took his time going to the podium. It was a question he had obviously been ready to expect, and yet he seemed agitated. It is one thing to know that some day we will die, it is another to wake in the middle of the night and hear your heart. Humphrey tried to be grand in his reply; but the organ pipes had a mote—he was a crack squeaky. “Would you mind,” he asked, “if I just stated my position on Vietnam?”

“No,” the crowd shouted. “No! No!”

“Because,” he went on in his little determined voice, “the President of the United States is not a candidate and I did not come here to repudiate the President of the United States. I want that made quite clear.”

They shouted no, there were hints of boos, cries of muted disgust. A professional round of applause from his supporters in the audience came to back him up, a sort of peremptory we-run-the-meeting-and-we-salute-the-flag was in the sound. Actually, his supporters did not run this meeting. It was the California delegation, led by Jesse Unruh, pledged once to Bobby Kennedy, now more or less split between McCarthy and McGovern, which held the power here, but there was enough authority in the heavy medicine-ball palms of the Humphrey hand-beaters to remind the crowd of other meetings the hand-beaters had run, and meetings they would yet run again. The sound of the Machine was in the percussion-effects of their skin.

So Humphrey was delivered of any need to delineate separation of Lyndon Johnson's position on Vietnam from his own. And proceeded to give his characteristic little talk—the one which had been losing him the love of the liberal Left for the last three years. They had, of course, never had much taste, or they would never have admired him so much in the first place, but then they had never had an opportunity before to recognize in intimate continuing detail that Hubert Humphrey simply could not attach the language of his rhetoric to any reality; on the contrary, he was perfectly capable of using the same word, “Freedom” let us say, to describe a ward fix in Minneapolis and a gathering of Quakers. So he still spoke of our presence in Vietnam as “there to prevent the success of an aggression.” It would do no good to tell him that one million American and South Vietnamese troops were fighting the aggression of 200,000 or 250,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese. If he said there was aggression, then aggression became his reality—the figures had nothing to do with it. So “Democracy in South Vietnam” was established because the use of the word by Lyndon Johnson and himself had established it. The radiance of the sensation of democracy came from the word itself, “Democracy!” Halos in his eyes. “When you look over the world scene, those elections [in South Vietnam] stand up pretty well and the basis of the Government today is a broader-based Government.” Earlier he had actually said, “We have not sought to impose a military solution. Regrettably, wars have their built-in escalation.” One would have to be a great novelist to dare to put this last remark in the mouth of a character so valuable as Humphrey. “The roadblock to peace, my dear friends, is not in Washington, D.C. It is in Hanoi, and we ought to recognize it as such.”

The medicine-balls gave him a good hand, and he was pleased with himself when he stepped down. He had given a warm sincere little speech which he obviously believed, or rather, had actually experienced. While he spoke, the sensation of truth quivered about him like a nimbus. He must have felt bathed in light. He had the same kind of truth that an actor has while playing Napoleon—with the lights on him, he
is
Napoleon. So with the lights on Hubert, democracy did exist in South Vietnam, and our inability to end the war was indeed Hanoi's fault (even though we had never declared war on North Vietnam and were still bombing half of everything which moved). Hubert Humphrey loved America. So the madness of America had become his own madness. He was a lover after all.

It was McCarthy's turn to speak. Everyone leaned forward. The confrontation was at hand. But McCarthy, receiving no inner voice, drinking some bitter cup of rejection or despair, a simple distaste for the whole human race backing up in him, contented himself with remarking in his most penurious tones, “The people know my position.” Perhaps his silence was meant to convey some absolute contempt for Humphrey's remarks, or some absolute statement of his political belief that one must not move without an inner sanction no matter what the occasion; it was still an extraordinary abstention.

Dull anger passed through the audience—but, of course! This was exactly why McCarthy had not been able to win the candidacy. Indeed had he ever wanted to win it, or had he moved like some sinister stalking-horse over the paths of new possibility? Or was he just in a thoroughgoing Irish miff because McGovern was obviously everyone's pet? Once again, the gulf between the answer on one side of the question and the other was greater than the question itself. If Nixon had been an enigma, McCarthy was a larger one.