Miami and the Siege of Chicago (29 page)

They got nowhere. Kennedy's mind was altogether political on this afternoon. It did not deal with ideas except insofar as ideas were attached to the name of bills, or speeches, or platforms, or specific debates in specific places, and the reporter, always hard put to remember such details, was forced therefore to hammer harder and harder on the virtues of McCarthy's gamble in entering the New Hampshire primary until Kennedy said, “I wonder why you don't support Senator McCarthy. He seems more like your sort of guy, Mr. Mailer,” and in answer, oddly moved, he had said in a husky voice, “No, I'm supporting you. I know it wasn't easy for you to go in.” And even began to mutter a few remarks about how he understood that powerful politicians would not have trusted Kennedy if he had moved too quickly, for his holding was large, and men with large holdings were not supportable if they leaped too soon. “I know that,” he said looking into the Senator's mild and magnificent eye, and Kennedy nodded, and in return a little later Kennedy sighed, and exhaled his breath, looked sad for an instant, and said, “Who knows? Who knows? Perhaps I should have gone in earlier.” A few minutes later they said goodbye, not unpleasantly. That was the last he saw of him.

The closest he was to come again was to stand in vigil for fifteen minutes as a member of the honor guard about his coffin in St. Patrick's. Lines filed by. People had waited in line for hours, five hours, six hours, more, inching forward through the day and through the police lines on the street in order to take one last look at the closed coffin.

The poorest part of the working-class of New York had turned out, poor Negro men and women, Puerto Ricans, Irish washerwomen, old Jewish ladies who looked like they ran grubby little newsstands, children, adolescents, families, men with hands thick and lined and horny as oyster shells, calluses like barnacles, came filing by to bob a look at that coffin covered by a flag. Some women walked by praying, and knelt and touched the coffin with their fingertips as they passed, and after a time the flag would slip from the pressure of their fingers and an usher detailed for the purpose would readjust it. The straightest line between two points is the truth of an event, no matter how long it takes or far it winds, and if it had taken these poor people six hours of waiting in line to reach that coffin, then the truth was in the hours. A river of working-class people came down to march past Kennedy's coffin, and this endless line of people had really loved him, loved Bobby Kennedy like no political figure in years had been loved.

The organ played somewhere in the nave and the line moved forward under the vast—this day—tragic vaults of the cathedral so high overhead and he felt love for the figure in the coffin and tragedy for the nation in the years ahead, the future of the nation seemed as dark and tortured, as wrenched out of shape, as the contorted blood-spattered painted sculpture of that garish Christ one could find in every dark little Mexican church. The horror of dried blood was now part of the air, and became part of the air of the funeral next day. That funeral was not nearly so beautiful; the poor people who had waited on line on Friday were now gone, and the mighty were in their place, the President and members of the Congress, and the Establishment, and the Secret Service, and the power of Wall Street; the inside of St. Patrick's for the length of the service was dank with the breath of the over-ambitious offering reverence—there is no gloom so deep unless it is the scent of the upholstery in a mortician's limousine, or the smell of morning in a closed Pullman after executives have talked through the night.

The movie came to an end: Even dead, and on film, he was better and more moving than anything which had happened in their convention, and people were crying. An ovation began. Delegates came to their feet, and applauded an empty screen—it was as if the center of American life was now passing the age where it could still look forward; now people looked back into memory, into the past of the nation—was that possible? They applauded the presence of a memory. Bobby Kennedy had now become a beloved property of the party.

Minutes went by and the ovation continued. People stood on their chairs and clapped their hands. Cries broke out. Signs were lifted. Small hand-lettered signs which said, “Bobby, Be With Us,” and one enormous sign eight feet high, sorrowful as rue in the throat—“Bobby, We Miss You,” it said.

Now the ovation had gone on long enough—for certain people. So signals went back and forth between floor and podium and phone, and Carl Albert stepped forward and banged the gavel for the ovation to end, and asked for order. The party which had come together for five minutes, after five days and five months and five years of festering discord, was now immediately divided again. The New York and California delegations began to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the floor heard, and delegations everywhere began to sing, Humphrey delegations as quick as the rest. In every convention there is a steamroller, and a moment when the flattened exhale their steam, and “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” was the cry of the oppressed at this convention, even those unwittingly oppressed in their mind, and not even knowing it in their heart until this instant, now they were defying the Chair, clapping their hands, singing, stamping their feet to mock the chairman's gavel.

Carl Albert brought up Dorothy Bush to read an appreciation the convention would offer for the work of certain delegates. The convention did not wish to hear. Mrs. Bush began to read in a thin mean voice, quivering with the hatreds of an occasion like this, and the crowd sang on, “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, his truth goes marching on,” and they stamped their feet and clapped their hands, and were loose finally and having their day as they sang the song which once, originally, had commemorated a man who preached civil disorder, then mutiny, and attacked a for in his madness and was executed, John Brown was also being celebrated here, and the Texas and Illinois delegations were now silent, clapping no longer, sitting on their seats, looking bored. Every delegate on the floor who had hated the Kennedys was now looking bored, and the ones who had loved them were now noisier than ever. Once again the party was polarized. Signs waved all over the floor, “Bobby, We'll Remember You,” “Bobby, We'll Seek Your Newer World,” and the ever-present, “Bobby, We Miss You.” Yes they did, missed him as the loving spirit, the tender
germ
in the living plasma of the party. Nothing was going to make them stop: this offering of applause was more valuable to them than any nutrients to be found in the oratorical vitamin pills Hubert would yet be there to offer. The demonstration went on for twenty minutes and gave no sign of stopping at all. Dorothy Bush had long ago given up. Carl Albert, even smaller than Georgie Wallace, was now as furious as only a tiny man can be when his hard-earned authority has turned to wax—he glared across the floor at the New York delegation like a little boy who smells something bad.

However did they stop the demonstration? Well, convention mechanics can be as perfect as the muscle in a good play when professionals have worked their football for a season. Mayor Daley, old lover of the Kennedys, and politically enough of an enigma six months ago for Bobby to have said in his bloodwise political wisdom, “Daley is the ballgame,” Mayor Daley, still flirting with the Kennedys these last three days in his desire for Teddy as Vice President, now had come to the end of this political string, and like a good politician he pulled it. He gave the signal. The gallery began to chant, “We love Daley.” All his goons and clerks and beef-eaters and healthy parochial school students began to yell and scream and clap, “We love Daley,” and the power of their lungs, the power of the freshest and the largest force in this Amphitheatre soon drowned out the Kennedy demonstrators, stuffed their larynxes with larger sound. The Daley demonstration was bona fide too—his people had suffered with their Mayor, so they screamed for him now and clapped their hands, and Mayor Daley clapped his hands too for he also loved Mayor Daley. Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

At the height of the Daley demonstration, it was abruptly cut off. By a signal. “Shut your yaps” was an old button, no matter how the signal came. In the momentary silence, Carl Albert got his tongue in, and put Ralph Metcalfe (Daley's Black Man) who was up on the podium already, into voice on the mike, and Metcalfe announced a minute of silence for the memory of Martin Luther King. So New York and California were naturally obliged to be silent with the rest, the floor was silent, the gallery was silent, and before the minute was up, Carl Albert had slipped Dorothy Bush in again, and she was reading the appreciation of the convention for certain delegates. Business had been resumed. The last night proceeded.

Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine was nominated for Vice President. He was a pleasant fellow with a craggy face, a craggy smile on top of a big and modest jaw, and he had a gift for putting together phrases which would have stood him well if he had been stacking boxes of breakfast food on a grocery shelf. “Freedom does not work unless we work at it,” he said, “and that I believe to be part of the reason for the spirit and determination of so many of the young people.” Of course, it took a brave man to mention the young on the floor of this convention—Dump the Hump!—but Muskie's rhetoric owed more to supermarket than any Maine country store. Washington, D.C., is a national town!

The balloting for Muskie's candidacy had been void of incident but for the nomination of Julian Bond who was also put up for Vice President as a symbolic gesture to protest police brutality in Chicago. Bond was extraordinarily—no other adjective—popular in this convention, his name alone possessed an instant charisma for the rear of the floor—people cheered hysterically whenever it was mentioned on the podium, and the sound, “Julian Bond,” became a chant. He was, of course, at twenty-eight, already an oncoming legend for his skill in gaining and then regaining a seat in the Georgia legislature, for his courage on discovering himself the only man in that legislature to speak out openly against the war in Vietnam, a Negro! and he was adored for his magically good looks. He was handsome not like a movie star, but like a highly touted juvenile, good looking as actors like John Derek, even Freddie Bartholomew, had been when they came along. Bond stood up when his state delegation was called, and gracefully withdrew himself from the nomination because—his direct legal explanation—he was too young (the required age was 35) but he had done this, as he did everything else at the convention, with the sort of fine-humored presence which speaks of future victories of no mean stature. Talking to a few people about his race for Congress, he assured them it was secure. “I don't have any opposition,” he said, “just like Daley,” and he winked, looked wicked, and was off.

At length, the moment came for Humphrey's acceptance speech. Tonight, he looked good—which is to say he looked good for Humphrey. Indeed if a man could not look good on the night he accepted the nomination of his party for President, then his prospects of longevity must certainly be odd. Humphrey, of course, had been looking terrible for years. His defeat in West Virginia in 1960 by Jack Kennedy seemed to have done something of a permanent nature, perhaps had dissolved some last core of idealism—it was a cruel campaign: if one would dislike the Kennedys, West Virginia was the place to look. Since then, Humphrey had had a face which was as dependent upon cosmetics as the protagonist of a coffin. The results were about as dynamic. Make-up on Hubert's face somehow suggested that the flesh beneath was the color of putty—it gave him the shaky put-together look of a sales manager in a small corporation who takes a drink to get up in the morning, and another drink after he has made his intercom calls: the sort of man who is not proud of drinking; and so in the coffee break, he goes to the john and throws a sen-sen down his throat. All day he exudes odors all over; sen-sen, limewater, pomade, bay rum, deodorant, talcum, garlic, a whiff of the medicinal, the odor of Scotch on a nervous tum, rubbing alcohol! This resemblance Hubert had to a sales manager probably appeared most on those average days when he was making political commercials to be run as spots all over the land—in such hours he must have felt like a pure case of the hollows, a disease reserved usually for semi-retired leading men. They have been actors so long they must be filled with something—lines of a script, a surprise bouquet of attention, a recitation of Shakespeare, a bottle of booze, an interview. Something! Don't leave them alone. They're hollow. That was how Humphrey must have looked on average days, if his commercials were evidence.

Tonight, however, he was not hollow but full. He had a large audience, and his actor's gifts for believing a role. Tonight he was the bachelor uncle who would take over a family (left him by Great-Uncle Baines) and through kindness, simple courtesy, funds of true emotional compassion, and stimulating sternness upon occasion of the sort only a bachelor uncle could comprehend—“... rioting, burning, sniping, mugging, traffic in narcotics, and disregard for law are the advance guard of anarchy, and they must and they will be stopped ...” he would bring back that old-fashioned harmony to his ravaged folks. Since he was now up on the podium, the crowd was cheering, and the gallery on signal from Daley roared like a touchdown just scored. Hubert Humphrey was warm; he could believe in victory in the fall. He smiled and waved his hands and beamed, and the delegates, loosened by the film on Bobby Kennedy (their treachery spent in revolt against the Chair) demonstrated for Humphrey. The twenty years in Washington had become this night property to harvest; politicians who didn't even like him, could think fondly of Hubert at this instant, he was part of their memory of genteel glamour at Washington parties, part of the dividend of having done their exercise in politics with him for twenty years, for having talked to him ten times, shaken his hand forty, corresponded personally twice, got drunk with him once—small property glows in memory, our burning glass! These Humphrey politicians and delegates, two-thirds of all this convention, had lived their lives in the shadow of Washington's Establishment, that eminence of Perle Mesta parties and Democratic high science, they had lived with nibbles of society, and gossip about it, clumps of grass from Hubert's own grounds; but it was their life, or a big part of it, and it was leaving now—they all sensed that. The grand Establishment of the Democratic Party and its society life in Washington would soon be shattered—the world was shattering it. So they rose to cheer Humphrey. He was the end of the line, a sweet guy in personal relations so far as he was able—and besides the acceptance speech at a convention was pure rite. In such ceremonies you were required to feel love even if you didn't like him. Politicians, being property holders, could feel requisite emotions at proper ceremonies. Now they gave proper love to Humphrey, two-thirds of them did. They would only have to give it for an hour. Everybody knew he would lose. The poor abstract bugger.