Miami and the Siege of Chicago (26 page)

If these were the medical reveries of the reporter after the nomination, the counterpart was to be seen in the faces of the delegates who exhibited the depression people show on leaving a bad fight: basic emotion has been aroused for too little.

A company of delegates, several hundred in number from New York, California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and a few of the other delegations, were going to meet in one of the caucus rooms to discuss immediate strategy. They were obviously not a happy gang, but since the characteristic tone of McCarthy supporters predominated—academics with horn-rimmed glasses in seersucker suits or pale generally lean politicians with hard bitten integrity on their lips, and the women for the most part too wholesome, some looked as if they had not worn lipstick in years—the cynical wonder intruded itself how they would celebrate a victory. Defeat was built into the integrity of their characters. Vinegar was the aphrodisiac of their diet.

Paul O'Dwyer was talking to them now. Candidate for the Senate against Jacob Javits in the coming election, he would make a fine opponent for that most worthy Senator—O'Dwyer was a small man with white hair, black eyebrows, an honest well-cut Irish look, an accent still clear with the tone of County Mayo, and a working-class sense of humor. He was also a gentleman. He had a natural elegance. So he would make a fine candidate. He was talking to the caucus now about the bitterness of the defeat, working to take the sting out of it. A man who had obviously been in many political battles, some of which he had won and many lost, he had learned how to discover the balanced mixture between indignation and hope so necessary to getting up off the defeat and looking for a new contest. So he fed their losers' fury first by commenting on the convention—“an unbelievable stifling of the democratic process,” he said, and then proceeded to laud the group for their devotion, their hard work, their confidence, and the fact they could know that the voters out there were really with them, and that was a power which time would prove. He grinned. “If we keep working and do this for a few years, I think in the next convention it's the other side that will have its caucus here in Room 2.” They cheered him happily for this, almost a little hysterically, as if close to the recognition that their best happiness often came when they felt hope in the midst of defeat. It is an emotion shared by the noblest of meat-eaters and the most confirmed vegetarians.

O'Dwyer was the spirit of this caucus, and when he did not speak, gloom came in again. Congressman Bill Ryan of New York talked for five minutes about his meeting with Daley. He spun it out properly, telling how he went down the aisle to speak to the Mayor of Chicago, expecting an appropriate show of courtesy since they were both, after all, of the same party, and he was a Congressman (and they were both Irish—which Ryan didn't quite get to say, although he phumphered on the edge) and finally after five minutes of dramatic preparation for this incisive private piece of information about to be delivered of some new and intimate villainy by Richard J., Mayor Daley, the end of the story could be delayed no longer and Ryan confessed: Daley had looked at him and said, “Get back to your delegation.” An unbelievable stifling of the democratic process.

The reporter discovered an impulse in himself to get drunk. This caucus was composed of naught but honorable people, anxious now, even dedicated to the desire to find some way of protesting the nomination, the brutality of the police, the sheer disjointedness of the time—they were in politics because the philosophical anguish of brooding upon a problem which might not be soluble—exactly what gave unique dignity to McCarthy—was not near to them. They needed an action to fit every ill, they were the dearest descendants of Eleanor, the last of Roosevelt hygiene; now out of their passion to act, act even this night, act especially this night, they came up with a proposal to march in vigil from the Amphitheatre to the Conrad Hilton. It would be a way of expressing their concern for the victims of the police. They even had candles. Richard Goodwin, assistant to McCarthy, prepared for everything on this nominating night, had brought in a thousand tapers in case they wished to protest on the floor and the lights would be cut off. Now they could be used for the march through the dark lonely streets of Chicago.

O'Dwyer laughed unhappily. “How far is it?” he asked. “Some of us may not be so young as some of you. Isn't it eight miles?”

“No, four,” people cried out.

He asked for a vote. They were overwhelmingly in favor. “So be it,” he said, and sighed, and grinned.

Then they began to discuss singing all the way with Theo Bikel, one of the N.Y. delegates. But Bikel pointed out that he had sung sufficiently these few days, that his voice was not up to it—besides, they would be marching through streets where people were sleeping—that could only cause needless trouble. “Besides,” said Bikel, “a silent vigil of men and women marching with lit candles is most impressive. Let us sing our way out of here, and through the blocks immediately about the stockyards, but once we pass the barrier, let us be silent.” They agreed. He struck up a song immediately on his guitar, and they moved out.

The reporter did not join them. He had felt an unmistakable pang of fear at the thought of marching with these people through the Black Belt of Chicago or even the Polish neighborhoods in the immediate surroundings. He could see them attacked by gangs, and the thought of taking a terrible beating in this company of non-violent McCarthyites and McGovernites, shoulder to shoulder with Arthur Miller, Jules Feiffer, Theo Bikel and Jeremy Larner, no, if he was going to take a beating, it was best to take it alone or with people he felt close to, people who were not so comparatively innocent of how to fight.

In consequence, as they left the Amphitheatre, he went off by a different route to his car, agitated, ashamed, overcome with the curiosity that these liberals whom he had always scorned had the simple dedication tonight to walk through strange streets, unarmed, and with candles. Was it remotely possible that they possessed more courage than himself?

He drove from the stockyards in a hurry, went up to Lincoln Park to look it over, but the area was dead. Here the war had ended. So he drove back to the Hilton, found a bar in a little hotel called the Essex on Michigan Avenue and had a couple of drinks. He did not know that the march was already finished. The leaders accompanied by a most respectful group of police—he should have anticipated that!—had decided it was too long a walk after all, so they had been driven in buses to a rallying point not far from the Hilton, and then had walked up Michigan Avenue with their lighted candles, joined soon by the Hippies and the young McCarthy workers in Grant Park, and were now almost directly across the street in the park listening to speeches. He did not know that. He was drinking and contemplating his fear. It seemed to him that he had been afraid all his life, but in recent years, or so it seemed, he had learned how to take a step into his fear, how to take the action which frightened him most (and so could free him the most). He did not do it always, who could? but he had come to think that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that, indeed why should life not be just so simple that the unlettered and untrained might also have their natural chance? It was a working philosophy and he had tried to follow it, but it seemed to him that he was deserting his own knowledge in these hours. Had his courage eroded more than his knowledge of fear the last few days? He continued to drink.

The focus of his fear had begun for him on Tuesday, no, put it back to Monday night in Lincoln Park when he had left as Ginsberg and Burroughs and Genet and Terry Southern were going in—up to the front. Of course, he could even put the fear back to Sunday afternoon, when he had heard the music, seen the children on the grass and the police on the walks and felt a sensation in his stomach not different from the dread in the bottom of the lungs one knows after hours of driving on ice. But then he had been afraid of Chicago ever since he had word in December of a Youth Festival which might attempt to make the Democrats nominate Lyndon Johnson under armed guard. So, in fact, this had been a fear he had been living with for a long time—like many another. It was as if different fears found different abodes in the body and dwelled in their place for years.

But yesterday, Tuesday, the fear had grown dimensions, forced consciousness to surface. Usually he did whatever he would do—be it courageous or evasive—without living too intimately with his anxiety. But, this time, it revealed itself. He had a particular reluctance to go to the meeting at the bandshell in Grant Park on Wednesday afternoon, then on the march to the Amphitheatre which would follow. This march would never be allowed to approach the Amphitheatre—one had not felt Mayor Daley's presence in Chicago these days for nothing!

There was much structure to the fear, much reasoned argument in its support. He had an enormous amount of work before him if he was going to describe this convention, and only two weeks in which to do it if his article were to appear before election. A bad beating might lose him days, or a week; each day of writing would be irreplaceable to him. Besides, a variety of militant choices would now be present for years. One simply could not accept the dangerous alternative every time; he would never do any other work. And then with another fear, conservative was this fear, he looked into his reluctance to lose even the America he had had, that insane warmongering technology land with its smog, its superhighways, its experts and its profound dishonesty. Yet, it had allowed him to write—it had even not deprived him entirely of honors, certainly not of an income. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine. A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke; he belonged in England where one's radicalism might never be tested; no, truth, he was still enough of a novelist to have the roots of future work in every vein and stratum he had encountered, and a profound part of him (exactly that enormous literary bottom of the mature novelist's property!) detested the thought of seeing his American society—evil, absurd, touching, pathetic, sickening, comic, full of novelistic marrow—disappear now in the nihilistic maw of a national disorder. The Yippies might yet disrupt the land—or worse, since they would not really have the power to do that, might serve as a pretext to bring in totalitarian phalanxes of law and order. Of course that was why he was getting tired of hearing of Negro rights and Black Power—every Black riot was washing him loose with the rest, pushing him to that point where he would have to throw his vote in with revolution—what a tedious perspective of prisons and law courts and worse; or stand by and watch as the best Americans white and Black would be picked off, expended, busted, burned and finally lost. No, exile would be better. Yet he loathed the thought of living anywhere but in America—he was too American by now: he did not wish to walk down foreign streets and think with imperfect nostalgia of dirty grease on groovy hamburgers, not when he didn't even eat them here. And then there might not be any foreign lands, not for long. The plague he had written about for years seemed to be coming in—he would understand its social phenomena more quickly than the rest. Or would, if he did not lose his detachment and have to purchase cheap hope. Drinking across the street from Grant Park, the possibility of succumbing to fears larger than himself appeared, if no more than a spot on the horizon, still possible to him. No more than a spot on the horizon had seemed Humphrey's candidacy when first it was bruited. Was that why delegates were marching now with candles? So that they would not succumb to fears larger than themselves?

It was as if the historical temperature in America went up every month. At different heats, the oils of separate psyches were loosened—different good Americans began to fry. Of course their first impulse was to hope the temperature would be quickly reduced. Perhaps they could go back to the larder again. But if it continued, then the particular solution which had provided him with a modicum at least of worldly happiness—the fine balance he might have achieved between the satisfaction of idealism and the satisfaction of need (call it greed) would be disrupted altogether, and then his life could not go on as it had. In the size of his fear, he was discovering how large a loss that would be. He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on—not as it was going, not Vietnam—but what price was he really willing to pay? Was he ready to give up the pleasures of making his movies, writing his books? They were pleasures finally he did not want to lose.

Yet if he indulged his fear, found all the ways to avoid the oncoming ugly encounters, then his life was equally spoiled, and on the poorer side. He was simply not accustomed to living with a conscience as impure as the one with which he had watched from the nineteenth floor. Or had it really been impure? Where was his true engagement? To be forty-five years old, and have lost a sense of where his loyalties belonged—to the revolution or to the stability of the country (at some painful personal price it could be suggested) was to bring upon himself the anguish of the European intellectual in the Thirties. And the most powerful irony for himself is that he had lived for a dozen empty hopeless years after the second world war with the bitterness, rage, and potential militancy of a real revolutionary, he had had some influence perhaps upon this generation of Yippies now in the street, but no revolution had arisen in the years when he was ready—the timing of his soul was apocalyptically maladroit.

These are large thoughts for a reporter to have. Reporters live happily removed from themselves. They have eyes to see, ears to hear, and fingers for the note in their report. It was as if the drink he took in now moved him millimeter by millimeter out from one hat into another. He would be driven yet to participate or keep the shame in his liver—the last place to store such emotion! Liver disease is the warehousing of daily shame—they will trace the chemistry yet!