Miami and the Siege of Chicago (25 page)

What staggered the delegates who witnessed the attack—more accurate to call it the massacre, since it was sudden, unprovoked and total—on Michigan Avenue, was that it opened the specter of what it might mean for the police to take over society. They might comport themselves in such a case not as a force of law and order, not even as a force of repression upon civil disorder, but as a true criminal force, chaotic, improvisational, undisciplined, and finally—sufficiently aroused—uncontrollable.

Society was held together by bonds no more powerful proportionately than spider's silk; no one knew this better than the men who administered a society. So images of the massacre opened a nightmare. The more there was disorder in the future, the more there would be need for larger numbers of police and more the need to indulge them. Once indulged, however, it might not take long for their own criminality to dominate their relation to society. Which spoke then of martial law to replace them. But if the Army became the punitive force of society, then the Pentagon would become the only meaningful authority in the land.

So an air of outrage, hysteria, panic, wild rumor, unruly outburst, fury, madness, gallows humor, and gloom hung over nominating night at the convention.

The Amphitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention. Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club. The entrances to the gallery were narrow as hallway tunnels, and the balcony seemed to hang over each speaker. The colors were black and gray and red and white and blue, bright powerful colors in support of a ruddy beef-eating Democratic sea of faces. The standards in these cramped quarters were numerous enough to look like lances. The aisles were jammed. The carpets were red. The crowd had a blood in their vote which had traveled in unbroken line from the throng who cheered the blood of brave Christians and ferocious lions. It could have been a great convention, stench and all—politics in an abattoir was as appropriate as license in a boudoir. There was
bottom
to this convention: some of the finest and some of the most corrupt faces in America were on the floor. Cancer jostled elbows with acromegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcoholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis players communicated with the estate holders, the Mob talked bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.

Yet the night was in trouble and there was dread in the blood, the air of circus was also the air of the slaughter-house. Word ripped through delegations of monstrosities unknown. Before the roll call was even begun, Peterson of Wisconsin, Donald Peterson, McCarthy man from the winning primary in Wisconsin, was on his feet, successful in obtaining the floor. (Since he was surrounded by TV, radio, and complements of the Press, the Chair knew it would be easier to accede than to ignore his demand for a voice.) Peterson wanted ... Peterson wanted to have the convention postponed for two weeks and moved to another hall in some city far away, because of the “surrounding violence” and the “pandemonium in the hall.” Before a mighty roar could even get off the ground, the Chair had passed to other business, and nominations were in order and so declared to a round of boos heavy as a swell of filthy oil. The sense of riot would not calm. Delegates kept leaving the floor to watch films on TV of the violence, McCarthy was reported to have witnessed the scene from his window and called it “very bad.” McGovern described the fighting he saw as a “blood bath” which “made me sick to my stomach.” He had “seen nothing like it since the films of Nazi Germany.”

But that was the mood which hung over the hall, a revel of banquetry, huzzah and horror, a breath of gluttony, a smell of blood. The party had always been established in the mansions and slaughterhouses of society; Hyde Park and the take from policy, social legislation and the lubricating jelly of whores had been at the respective ends of its Democratic consensus, the dreams and the nose for power of aristocrat and gentry were mixed with beatings in the alley, burials at sea in concrete boots, and the poll tax with the old poll-tax rhetoric. The most honorable and the most debauched had sat down at table for Democratic luncheons. Now, the party was losing its better half, and the gang in the gashouse couldn't care less. They were about to roll up their sleeves and divide the pie, the local pie—who cared that the big election was dead? They had been pallbearers to moral idealism for too many years. Now they would shove it in the ground. The country was off its moorings and that was all right with them—let the ship of state drift into its own true berth: let patriotism and the fix cohabit in the comfort for which they were designed and stop these impossible collaborations.

So episodes popped up all over the place. The police dragged a delegate from the floor when a sergeant-at-arms told him to return to his seat and the delegate refused and exchanged words. Paul O'Dwyer, candidate for the Senate from New York, was pulled from the hall as he hung onto him. Mike Wallace of CBS was punched on the jaw when he asked some questions—they went out in a flurry of cops quickly summoned, and rumors raced into every corner. Clear confidence in the location of the seat of power was gone. A delegate had now to face the chimera of arrest by the police, then incarceration. Who would get him out? Did Daley have the power or Johnson? Would Humphrey ever be of use? Should one look for the U.S. Marines? A discomfiture of the fundamental cardinal points of all location was in the rumblings of the gut. A political man could get killed in this town by a cop, was the general sentiment, and who would dare to look the Mayor in the eye? If politics was property, somebody had tipped the plot: West was now up in the North! To the most liberal of the legislators and delegates on the floor must have come the real panic of wondering: was this how it felt with the Nazis when first they came in, the fat grin on the face of that cigar who had hitherto been odious but loyal? Hard suppressed guffaws of revelry rumbled among the delegates with the deepest greed and the most steaming bile. There was the sense of all centers relocated, of authority on a ride.

The nominations took place in muted form. The Democrats had declared there would be no demonstrations at their convention. The Democrats! Famous for their demonstrations. But they were afraid of maniacal outbursts for McCarthy, fist fights on the floor, whole platoons of political warriors grappling rivals by the neck. So each candidate would merely be put in nomination, his name then cheered, seconding speeches would follow, the roll would be called, the next nominated.

McCarthy was put in by Governor Harold Hughes of Iowa, Humphrey by Mayor Alioto of San Francisco. Let us listen to a little of each—they are not uncharacteristic of their men. Hughes said:

Mayor Alioto said:

McGovern was nominated by Ribicoff, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, formerly Governor, a Kennedy man for many years—his career had prospered with the Kennedys. He was not a powerful looking man. He had wings of silver gray hair, dark eyebrows, a weak mouth which spoke of the kind of calculation which does not take large chances. He had a slim frame with a hint of paunch. He was no heavyweight. He had gotten along by getting along, making the right friends. He was never famous as a speaker, but he began by saying, “Mr. Chairman ... as I look at the confusion in this hall and watch on television the turmoil and violence that is competing with this great convention for the attention of the American people, there is something else in my heart tonight, and not the speech that I am prepared to give.”

It was a curious beginning, but as he went on, the speech became boring despite the force of a few of the phrases: “500,000 Americans in the swamps of Vietnam.” Ribicoff droned, he had no flair, he was indeed about as boring as a Republican speaker. There were yawns as he said:

Seconds had elapsed. People turned to each other. Did he say,
“Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago”?
But he had. His voice had quavered a hint with indignation and with fear, but he had said it, and Daley was on his feet, Daley was shaking his fist at the podium, Daley was mouthing words. One could not hear the words, but his lips were clear. Daley seemed to be telling Ribicoff to go have carnal relations with himself.

There was a roundhouse of roars from the floor, a buzz from the gallery. Daley glowered at Ribicoff and Ribicoff stared back, his ordinary face now handsome, dignified with some possession above itself. Ribicoff leaned down from the podium, and said in a good patrician voice, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”

Perhaps it was Ribicoff's finest moment. Later, backstage, in McGovern Headquarters, he looked less happy, and considerably less in possession of himself as people came up to congratulate him for his speech. Indeed, Ribicoff had the winded worried heart-fatigued expression of a lightweight fighter who had just dared five minutes ago in the gym to break off a jab which broke the nose of a middleweight champ who had been working out with him. Now the lightweight would wake up in the middle of the night, wondering how they were going to pay him in return. Let us think of the man rather in his glory.

The balloting was finally begun. There were no surprises expected and none arrived. North Dakota actually said, “North Dakota which modestly admits to being cleaner and greener in the summer and brighter and whiter in the winter, casts 25 votes, 18 for Hubert Humphrey, 7 for Gene McCarthy.” Then Ohio gave 94, Oklahoma was 37½, the floor began to shout. Pennsylvania offered up 103¾ of 130 and Humphrey was in. It was the state where McCarthy had gotten 90% of the primary vote. The deed was completed. The future storefront of the Mafia was now nominated to run against the probable prince of the corporation. In his hotel suite at the Hilton, Humphrey kissed Mrs. Fred R. Harris, wife of the Oklahoma Senator and co-chairman of his campaign; then as if to forestall all rumors, and reimpose propriety in its place, he rushed to the television screen and kissed the image of his own wife, which was then appearing on the tube. He was a politician; he could kiss babies, rouge, rubber, velvet, blubber and glass. God had not given him oral excellence for nothing.

Then the phone calls came. President Johnson, to whom Humphrey said with Southern grace, “Bless your heart,” Mrs. Johnson, Lynda Bird and Luci; then Dick Nixon who congratulated him for winning the nomination earlier on the roll call than himself. Nixon was reported to have said that he enjoyed watching Mrs. Humphrey and the Humphrey family on television.

The vote when tabulated went like this: Humphrey, 1,761¾; McCarthy 601; McGovern 146½; Channing Philips (first Negro to be nominated for the Presidency) 67½; Dan Moore 17½; Edward Kennedy (without nomination) 12¾; James H. Gray ½ Paul E. “Bear” Bryant, coach of Alabama, 1½; and George C. Wallace, ½. George C. Wallace would do a lot better in November.

The disease was beneath the skin, the century was malignant with an illness so intricate that the Yippies, the Muslims, and the rednecks of George Wallace were all in attack upon it. They might eat each other first, but that was merely another facet of the plague—cannibalism was still the best cure for cancer.