Miami and the Siege of Chicago (18 page)

McGovern picked up all the chips. “Coming in as late as I did,” he said in reference to his candidacy, “I can't afford to give up any free time.” And he gave an angelic grin. The crowd roared. They were his. They were waiting for an answer to Humphrey.

If a casting director in Hollywood had to find a Boy Scout leader who could play Romantic lead in a ten-million-dollar movie, McGovern would be his find. There was nobody nicer or cleaner than George McGovern in the city of Chicago. And he made all the points in his sweet troubled vibrant honest good guy Good Christian missionary voice. “I think we Democrats bear a special burden before the American people in 1968 in that four years ago we sought their votes, we sought their confidence on a rallying cry of ‘No wider war.' ” The house broke down. Wild cheers. Hints of an impromptu demonstration. “It is all very well and good,” said McGovern, riding the energy of this enthusiasm, “to talk about the recent election in Vietnam, but let's remember that one of the most honorable candidates in that election, Presidential candidate Chu, was recently sent to jail for five years at hard labor for the single crime of advocating what Senator McCarthy and George McGovern and others have advocated, and that is a ‘negotiated end of this war.' Thank you very much.”

They gave him a standing ovation. They were delighted. They loved him. He was not really a big enough man to think of him seriously as President, he had more than a hint of that same ubiquitous sweetness which had finally melted away Humphrey's connection between the simplest fact and his own dear brain, but McGovern had years to go before he would sing
castrat
'. He would even—if he had entered earlier, but of course he had not, no accident he had not—have done modestly well in taking delegates from McCarthy, he offered everything McCarthy did not, including the pleasure of watching Hubert Humphrey smile like a roasted cherub at the standing ovation given the speaker who had just demolished his speech. What a passion was in the air to tell Humphrey of the fury of the doves.

They had been squeezed, squashed, gunned down, out-maneuvered, driven in rout from the summits of power at this convention, had seen their party escape from them and race to the abyss with the Fool for their unwanted candidate—so it was their one opportunity to shout into his face, and they took it. Fool!

When this ovation was done, the debate went on, anticlimactic but for a later speech by McCarthy, a speech in which he as much as said farewell to those who had hopes for him in this room, and in that land of suburbs and television sets where his crusade had first been cheered. Asked if he would throw his support “to another person who has similar views,” he began quietly, proceeded quietly, but his metaphor on this occasion was equal to his bitterness, his pride, and his high sense of the standards. He brought the curtain down with that dignity which was his most unique political possession. “... many stood on the sidelines, as I said earlier, on the hilltops, dancing around the bonfires. Few came down into the valley where the action was. And I said then that if one challenged the President he had to be prepared to be President. It is like striking at the King—it is a dangerous thing.” How dangerous only he could know. Only he could know how far a pressure could push a terror, and how many mutations might a nightmare produce, yes, he had had to face Lyndon Johnson at eight in the morning and three in the morning, in the fatigue of five o'clock on a hard-working afternoon and after midnight in the effulgence of a full moon—only he had had to face Lyndon Johnson with such thoughts after Bobby Kennedy was dead. Perhaps there was bitterness so justifiable a man's mouth could pucker at the invitation to speak. “I said early in New Hampshire, during the New Hampshire primary—I was asked whether I could support Senator Robert Kennedy if he should become the nominee and his views were the same as my views. I said I could. ... I have been waiting for them to say the same thing about me.” He turned, started to go away, then came back. “One other thing. I said that I could not support a Democratic candidate whose views did not come close to what mine are.”

Now he was gone, now back in his seat, the hand of applause started slowly, continued, built in volume. It grew for a surprising time, never wild in its force nor released in its enthusiasm, but it went on. The force of respect was also source for a modest ovation.

Later that day, early in the evening, McCarthy went into a meeting with Steve Smith, Teddy Kennedy's brother-in-law, and told him that he was willing to withdraw from the race if Kennedy would enter, and that he would instruct his delegates that they were free; further, he would suggest that they give their support to Kennedy.

Would there be anything he desired in return?

No, he was not asking for anything in victory or defeat. (McCarthy was obviously a fanatic—he was seeking to destroy politics-is-property.)

Smith thanked him, told him he would relay his message to Teddy Kennedy, made some comment on the munificence of the offer, perhaps thinking to himself that it came a little late, and left.

Perhaps two hours after this, the reporter encountered McCarthy by chance in a Chicago restaurant on the North Side.

The Senator, sitting at a long table in the corner of the main dining room, a modest room (for the restaurant was situated in a brownstone) had his back comfortably to the wall, and was chatting over the coffee with his guests. The atmosphere was sufficiently relaxed for the reporter and his friend, another reporter who had been doing a story on McCarthy for
Look
, to come up past the Secret Service without great strain and greet the Senator. Neither of the reporters was to know anything about the meeting with Steve Smith until some days later, but it was likely McCarthy had come to some decision—at the least, he was more relaxed than at any time the reporter had seen him in Chicago. Perhaps it was the friends he was with, big Irishmen like himself for the most part, a couple of them present with their wives, or at least such was the reporter's impression, for he was introduced to more than a half-dozen people in the aftermath of meeting the Senator and some were big genial Irishmen with horn-rimmed glasses and some were lean Irishmen with craggy faces, and one was an Irishman from Limerick with a Dublin face, one-third poet, one-third warrior, one-third clerk. Perhaps it was the company, but the reporter had never seen McCarthy in such a mood. The benign personality of the public meetings, agreeable but never compelling, was gone—the personality which suggested that serious activity had something absurd about it—gone. The manner which declared, “I'm a nice guy, and look what I got into”—gone!

Speaking with the license a man has when his dinner is interrupted, McCarthy struck back to the conversation twelve weeks earlier in a living room in Cambridge, “Still waiting for me to repeat that 1960 speech?”

“Well, Senator,” said the reporter—he was trying to become sufficiently presumptuous to say, “if you could make a speech like that on the war in Vietnam tonight when the peace plank is debated ...”

But McCarthy cut him off. “That was then. We don't retain all our abilities necessarily. Once the ability leaves you, how do you regain it?” It was impossible to tell if he was mocking the reporter or mocking himself. “I used to be angry then,” he said across the table with an evil look of amusement, as if recording these remarks for posterity as well, his yellow eyes gleaming in the light, “but I can't seem to get angry again. It's a gift to get angry when you wish to get angry, Mailer.”

“A grace I would say, sir.”

If the table had been laughing at McCarthy's sallies, they chuckled now with his. The Senator's friends looked tough and were tough-minded, but they were obviously open to wit from any corner.

“Then you also want to ask yourself if you should get people angry.” McCarthy went on in a voice of the hardest-tempered irony. “Once you get them angry, you've got to get them quieted down. That's not so easy. Lyndon, for instance, has never understood the problem. He thinks politicians are cattle, whereas in fact most politicians are pigs. Now, Norman, there's a little difference between cattle and pigs which most people don't know. Lyndon doesn't know it. You see, to get cattle started, you make just a little noise, and then when they begin to run, you have to make more noise, and then you keep driving them with more and more noise. But pigs are different. You have to start pigs running with a great deal of noise, in fact the best way to start them is by reciting Latin, very loudly, that'll get them running—then you have to quiet your voice bit by bit and they'll keep moving. Lyndon has never understood this.”

These gnomic remarks now concluded, the reporter had no idea precisely what the Senator was talking about. He had been expanding a metaphor, and images of the stock-yards, the convention, the war on the streets, the expression on the face of Humphrey delegates and McCarthy delegates, and some tidal wave of contempt at the filthy polluted plumbing of things was in the remark. In the laughter which followed, the reporter was silent.

“It's a funny thing about pigs,” McCarthy went on. “They have an odd way of keeping warm in winter if they find themselves outside. You see, pigs don't know if they're cold, provided their nose is warm. So they stand around in a circle with their nose between the hind legs of the pig in front of them. Wouldn't you call that a curious relationship?”

“Oh, Senator, I would call that a Satanic relationship.”

McCarthy joined in the laughter. Hard was his face, hard as the bones and scourged flesh of incorruptibility, hard as the cold stone floor of a monastery in the North Woods at five in the morning. The reporter leaned forward to talk into his ear.

“You see, sir,” he said, “the tragedy of the whole business is that you should never have had to run for President. You would have been perfect for the Cabinet.” A keen look back from McCarthy's eye gave the sanction to continue. “Yessir,” said the reporter, “you'd have made a perfect chief for the F.B.I!” and they looked at each other and McCarthy smiled and said, “Of course, you're absolutely right.”

The reporter looked across the table into one of the hardest, cleanest expressions he had ever seen, all the subtle hints of puffiness and doubt sometimes visible in the Senator's expression now gone, no, the face that looked back belonged to a tough man, tough as the harder alloys of steel, a merciless face and very just, the sort of black Irish face which could have belonged to one of the hanging judges in a true court of Heaven, or to the proper commissioner of a police force too honest ever to have existed.

The reporter left. But the memory of McCarthy at this table persisted. And the memory of his presence, harder than the hardest alloys of steel. But not unjust. What iron it must have taken to be annealed in Lyndon's volcanic breath. Yes, the reporter had met many candidates, but McCarthy was the first who felt like a President, or at least felt like a President in that hard hour after he had relinquished the very last of his hopes, and so was enjoying his dinner.

We have been present until now at an account of the Democratic Convention of 1968. It has not, however, been a description of the event. The event was a convention which took place during a continuing five-day battle in the streets and parks of Chicago between some of the minions of the high established, and some of the nihilistic of the young. But if we had begun with a description of this superb battle, it might not have been automatic to transfer interest to the convention, since the greatest excitement in the Amphitheatre was often a reflection of the war without.

Yet, let us hesitate for one last patriot's cry before slogging to the front. It is from the speech of Governor Lester G. Maddox of Georgia which announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination on August 17, 1968. Since we will see the Governor but once again, and he is a fellow of pithy comment, let us describe him pithily: Governor Maddox has the face of a three-month-old infant who is mean and bald and wears eyeglasses.

From our Governor's speech:

Politics is property; property relations are law-abiding. Even seizure of property can be accomplished legally. So the history of a convention must concern itself with law-abiding citizens; conversely, a study of law-defying citizens who protested the deliberations of this convention in the street ought to find them propertyless, therefore not in politics. In fact, it does not. Not quite. There were two groups to the army of young people who assembled in Chicago; one could divide them conveniently as socialists and existentialists. The socialists, you can be certain, believed in every variety of social and revolutionary idea but membership in the Socialist Party, which of course, being young people, they detested; for the most part they were students of the New Left who belonged to SDS, the Resistance (a movement of confirmed draft resisters) and a dozen or more peace organizations. While their holdings were almost entirely in moral property, it would take a strong country mind to claim that socialists have no property relations in their own politics, since indeed there are ideologies among these sissies, Governor Maddox, which have passed down like a family trust through the generations, and the war for control of a radical committee will often revolve around the established seat of the Chairman.

Emphasis, however, on the New Left is directed away from power struggles; the old Marxist splinter groups reduced all too many old radical admirals to command of leaking rowboats, or, to maintain our corporate metaphor of property, squires in command of chicken coops. The New Left was interested for the most part in altering society (and being conceivably altered themselves—they were nothing if not Romantic) by the activity of working for a new kind of life out in the ghettoes, the campuses, and the anti-war movement. If one would still refer to them generically as socialists, it is because the product of their labor was finally, one must fear, ideological: their experience would shape their ideas, and ideally these ideas would serve to clarify the experience of others and so bring them closer to the radical movement. While they detested almost to a man the repressive, obsessive and finally—they were modern minds—the anally compulsive oppressions of Russian Communism (as much as they detested the anally retentive ideologies of the corporation) there were many among them who were all for the Czechoslovakian Communists, for Che Guevara, for Castro, for Tito up to a point, for Rumania, and for the North Vietnamese. Some of them even made a point of carrying the flags of the NLF in meetings and marches. A number, devoted to the memory of Che, were elevated as well to militant ideals of revolution. A few had come to Chicago ready to fight the police. (We can be certain that their counterparts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet were being attacked and imprisoned by all the Russian bureaucrats who look like Spiro Agnew, Dick Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey.)