“I know what you mean,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s obvious—and I’ve finally figured out why.” He chuckled and glanced at the Muskie people again. “You know what it is?” he said. “It’s because these people act like goddamn Republicans! That’s the problem. It took me awhile, but I finally figured it out.”
On Monday morning, the day before the Florida primary, I flew down to Miami with Frank Mankiewicz, who runs the McGovern campaign.
We hit the runway in Key Biscayne at just over two hundred miles an hour in a strong crosswind, bouncing first on the left wheel and then—about one hundred yards down the runway—on the right wheel . . . then another long bounce, and finally straightening out just in front of the main terminal at Miami’s International Airport.
Nothing serious. But my Bloody Mary was spilled all over Monday’s Washington Post on the armrest. I tried to ignore it and looked over at Frank Mankiewicz (who was sitting next to me) . . . but he was still snoring peacefully.
I poked him. “Here we are,” I said. “Down home in Fat City again. What’s the schedule?”
Now he was wide awake, checking his watch. “I think I have to make a speech somewhere,” he said. “I also have to meet Shirley MacLaine somewhere. Where’s a telephone? I have to make some calls.”
Soon we were shuffling down the corridor toward the big baggage-claim merry-go-round. Mankiewicz had nothing to claim. He has learned to travel light. His “baggage,” as it were, consisted of one small canvas bag that looked like an oversize shaving kit.
My own bundle—two massive leather bags and a Xerox telecopier strapped into a fiberglass Samsonite suitcase—would be coming down the baggage-claim chute any moment now. I tend to travel heavy; not for any good reason, but mainly because I haven’t learned the tricks of the trade.
“I have a car waiting,” I said. “A fine bronze-gold convertible. Why? Do you need a ride?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I have to make some calls first. You go ahead, get your car and all that goddamn baggage, and I’ll meet you down by the main door.”
I nodded and hurried off. The Avis counter was only about fifty yards away from the wall-phone where Mankiewicz was setting up shop with a handful of dimes and a small notebook. He made at least six calls and a page of notes before my bags arrived . . . and by the time I began arguing with the car rental woman the expression on Mankiewicz’s face indicated that he had everything under control.
I was impressed by this show of efficiency. Here was the one-man organizing vortex, main theorist and central intelligence behind the McGovern for President campaign—a small, rumpled little man who looked like an out-of-work “Pre-owned Car” salesman—putting McGovern’s Florida Primary action together from a public wall-phone in the Miami airport.
Mankiewicz—a forty-seven-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who was director of the Peace Corps before he became Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary in 1968—has held various job-titles since the McGovern campaign got underway last year. For a while he was the “Press Secretary,” then he was called the “Campaign Manager”—but now he appears to feel comfortable with the title of “Political Director.” Which hardly matters, because he has become George McGovern’s alter ego. There are people filling all the conventional job-slots, but they are essentially front-men. Frank Mankiewicz is to McGovern what John Mitchell is to Nixon—the Man behind the Man.
Two weeks before voting day in New Hampshire, Mankiewicz was telling his friends that he expected McGovern to get 38 percent of the vote. This was long before Ed Muskie’s infamous “breakdown scene” on that flatbed truck in front of the Manchester Union Leader.
When Frank laid his prediction on his friends in the Washington Journalism Establishment, they figured he was merely doing his job—trying to con the press and hopefully drum up a last-minute surge for McGovern, the only candidate in the ’72 presidential race who had any real claim on the residual loyalties of the so-called Kennedy Machine.
Beyond that, Mankiewicz was a political columnist for the Washington Post before he quit to run McGovern’s campaign—and his former colleagues were not inclined to embarrass him by publicizing such a claim. Journalists, like The Rich, are inclined to protect Their Own . . . even those who go off on hopeless tangents.
So Frank Mankiewicz ascended to the Instant-Guru level on the morning of March 8, when the final New Hampshire tally showed McGovern with 37 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and “front-runner” Ed Muskie with only 46 percent.
New Hampshire in ’72 jolted Muskie just as brutally as New Hampshire in ’68 jolted LBJ. He cursed the press and hurried down to Florida, still talking like “the champ,” and reminding everybody within reach that he had, after all, Won in New Hampshire.
Just like LBJ, who beat McCarthy by almost 20 points and then quit before the next primary four weeks later in Wisconsin.
But Muskie had only one week before the deal would go down in Florida, and he was already in . . . he came down and hit the streets with what his handlers called a “last-minute blitz” . . . shaking many hands and flooding the state with buttons, flyers & handbills saying “Trust Muskie” and “Believe Muskie” and “Muskie Talks Straight” . . .
When Muskie arrived in Florida for The Blitz, he looked and acted like a man who’d been cracked. Watching him in action, I remembered the nervous sense of impending doom in the face of Floyd Patterson when he weighed in for his championship re-match with Sonny Liston in Las Vegas. Patterson was so obviously crippled, in his head, that I couldn’t raise a bet on him among the hundred or so veteran sportswriters in the ringside seats on fight night.
I was sitting next to Rocky Marciano in the first row, and just before the fight began I bought two tall paper cups full of beer, because I didn’t want to have to fuck around with drink-vendors after the fight got underway.
“Two?” Marciano asked with a grin.
I shrugged, and drank one off very quickly as Floyd came out of his corner and turned to wax the first time Liston hit him. Then, with a minute still to go in the first round, Liston bashed him again and Patterson went down for the count. The fight was over before I touched my second beer.
Muskie went the same way to Florida—just as Mankiewicz had predicted, forty-eight hours earlier, in the living room of his suburban Washington home. “Muskie is already finished,” he said then. “He had no base. Nobody’s really for Muskie. They’re only for the front-runner, the man who says he’s the only one who can beat Nixon—but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore; he couldn’t even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, on his own turf.”
The Florida primary is over now. George Wallace stomped everybody, with 42 percent of the vote in a field of eleven. Ed Muskie, the erstwhile national front-runner, finished a sick fourth, with only 9 percent . . . and then he went on all the TV networks to snarl about how this horrible thing would never have happened except that Wallace is a Beast and a Bigot.
Which is at least half true, but it doesn’t have much to do with why Muskie got beaten like a gong in Florida. The real reason is that the Man from Maine, who got the nod many months ago as the choice of the Democratic Party’s ruling establishment, is running one of the stupidest and most incompetent political campaigns since Tom Dewey took his dive and elected Truman in 1948.
If I had any vested interest in the Democratic Party, I would do everything possible to have Muskie committed at once. Another disaster at the polls might put him around the bend. And unless all the other Democratic candidates are killed in a stone-blizzard between now and April 4, Muskie is going to absorb another serious beating in Wisconsin.
I am probably not the only person who has already decided to be almost anywhere except in Ed Muskie’s headquarters when the polls close on election night. The place will probably be dead empty, and all the windows taped . . . TV crews hunkered down behind overturned ping-pong tables, hoping to film the ex-front-runner from a safe distance when he comes
crashing into the place to blame his sixth-place finish on some kind of unholy alliance between Ti-Grace Atkinson and Judge Crater. Nor is there any reason to believe he will forbear physical violence at that time. With his dream finished and his nerves completely shot, he might start laying hands on people . . .
Hopefully, some of his friends will be there to restrain the wiggy bastard. All we can be sure of, however, is the list of those who will not be there, under any pretense at all . . . Senator Harold Hughes will not be there, for instance, and neither will Senator John Tunney . . . Nor will any of the other senators, governors, mayors, congressmen, labor leaders, liberal pundits, fascist lawyers, fixers from ITT, and extremely powerful Democratic National committeewomen who are already on the record as full-bore committed to stand behind Big Ed.
None of those people will be there when Muskie sees the first returns from Wisconsin and feels the first rush of pus into his brain. At that point he will have to depend on his friends, because that suitcase full of endorsements he’s been dragging around won’t be worth the price of checking it into a bus station locker.
Except perhaps for Birch Bayh. There is something that doesn’t quite meet the eye connected with this one. It makes no sense at all, on its face. Why would one of Ted Kennedy’s closest friends and allies in the Senate suddenly decide to jump on the Muskie bandwagon when everybody else is struggling to get off gracefully?
Maybe Birch is just basically a nice guy—one of those down-home, warm-hearted Hoosiers you hear so much about. Well . . . why not? Maybe he and Big Ed are lifelong buddies. But if that were so, you’d think Bayh might have offered to fix Muskie up with some high-life political talent back then when it might have made a difference.
But times are tricky now, and you never know when even one of your best friends might slap a ruinous lawsuit on you for some twisted reason that nobody understands. Almost everybody you meet these days is nervous about the nasty drift of things.
It is becoming increasingly possible, for instance, that Hubert Humphrey will be the Democratic presidential nominee this year—which would cause another Nixon-Humphrey campaign. And a thing like that would probably have a serious effect on my nerves. I’d prefer no election at all to another Humphrey nightmare. Six months ago it seemed out of the question. But no longer.
Frank Mankiewicz was right. For months he’s been telling anybody who asked him that the Democratic race would boil down, after the first few primaries, to a Humphrey-McGovern battle. But nobody took him seriously. We all assumed he was just talking up Humphrey’s chances in order to slow Muskie down and thus keep McGovern viable.
But apparently he was serious all along. Humphrey is the bookies’ choice in Wisconsin, which would finish Muskie and make Hubert the high rider all the way to the Oregon and California primaries in early June.
The “other race” in Wisconsin is between McGovern and Lindsay, which might strike a lot more sparks than it has so far if anybody really believed the boneheads who run the Democratic Party would conceivably nominate either one of them. But there is a definite possibility that the Democratic Convention this year might erupt into something beyond the control of anybody; the new delegate-selection rules make it virtually impossible for old-style bosses like Mayor Daley to treat delegates like sheep hauled in to be dipped.
A candidate like Lindsay or McGovern might be able to raise serious hell in a deadlocked convention, but the odds are better than even that Hubert will peddle his ass to almost anybody who wants a chunk of it, then arrive in Miami with the nomination sewed up and Nixon waiting to pounce on him the instant he comes out of his scumbag.
Another Nixon-Humphrey horror would almost certainly cause a “Fourth Party” uprising and guarantee Nixon’s reelection—which might bring the hounds of hell down on a lot of people for the next four very long years.
But personally I think I’d be inclined to take that risk. Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current. The idea of Humphrey running for president again makes a mockery of a lot of things that it would take me too long to explain or even list here. And Hubert Humphrey wouldn’t understand what I was talking about anyway. He was a swine in ’68 and he’s worse now. If the Democratic Party nominates Humphrey again in ’72, the party will get exactly what it deserves.
The Campaign Trail: Bad News from Bleak House: Total Failure in Milwaukee . . . with a Few Quick Thoughts on the Shocking Victory of Double-George . . .
April 27, 1972
Failure comes easy at a time like this. After eight days in this fantastic dungeon of a hotel, the idea of failing totally and miserably in my work seems absolutely logical. It is a fitting end to this gig—not only for me, but for everyone else who got trapped here, especially journalists.
The Wisconsin primary is over now. It came to a shocking climax a few hours ago when George McGovern and George Wallace ran a blitz on everybody.
The results were such a jolt to the Conventional Wisdom that now—with a cold gray dawn bloating up out of Lake Superior and Hubert Humphrey still howling in his sleep despite the sedatives in his room directly above us—there is nobody in Milwaukee this morning, including me, who can even pretend to explain what really went down last night. The McGovern brain trust will deny this, but the truth of the matter is that less than twenty-four hours ago it was impossible to get an even-money bet in McGovern headquarters that their man would finish first. Not even Warren Beatty, who is blossoming fast in his new role as one of McGovern’s most valuable and enthusiastic organizers, really believed that George would finish any better than a close second.
A week earlier it would have been considered a sign of madness, among those who knew the score, to bet McGovern any better than a respectable third—but toward the end of the final week the word went out that George had picked up a wave and was showing surprising strength in some of the blue-collar, hard-hat wards that had been more or less conceded to either Humphrey or Muskie. David Broder of the Washington Post is generally acknowledged to be the ranking wizard on the campaign trail this year, and five days before the election he caused serious shock waves by offering to bet—with me, at least—that McGovern would get more than 30 percent, and Wallace less than 10.
He lost both ends of that bet, as it turned out—and I mean to hunt the bastard down and rip his teeth out if he tries to welsh—but the simple fact that Broder had that kind of confidence in McGovern’s strength was seen as a main signal by the professional pols and newsmen who’d been saying all along that the Wisconsin primary was so hopelessly confused that nobody in his right mind would try to predict the outcome.
The lead article in Sunday’s Washington Post echoed the unanimous conviction of all the five or six hundred big-time press/politics wizards who were gathered here for what they all called “the crunch”—the showdown, the first of the national primaries that would finally separate the sheep from the goats, as it were.
After a month of intense research by some of the best political journalists in America, the Post had finally concluded that (1) “The Wisconsin primary election seems likely to make dramatic changes in the battle for the 1972 presidential nomination” . . . and (2), that “an unusually high degree of uncertainty remains as the contest nears its climax.”
In other words, nobody had the vaguest idea what would happen here, except that some people were going to get hurt—and the smart-money consensus had Muskie and Lindsay as the most likely losers. The fact that Lindsay was almost totally out of money made him a pretty safe bet to do badly in Wisconsin, but Muskie—coming off a convincing victory in Illinois that at least partially redeemed his disastrous failure in Florida—looked pretty good in Wisconsin, on paper, but there was still something weak and malignant in the spine of the Muskie campaign. There was a smell of death about it. He talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop.
Two weeks before the election the poll
s had Muskie running more or less even with Humphrey and well ahead of McGovern—but not even his staffers believed it; they kept smiling, but their morale had been cracked beyond repair in Florida, when Muskie called a meeting the day after the primary to announce that he was quitting the race. They had managed to talk him out of it, agreeing to work without pay until after Wisconsin, but when word of the candidate’s aborted withdrawal leaked out to the press . . . well, that was that. Nobody published it, nobody mentioned it on TV or radio—and, from that point on, the only thing that kept the Muskie campaign alive was a grim political version of the old vaudeville idea that “the show must go on.”
Midway in the final week of the campaign even Muskie himself began dropping hints that he knew he was doomed. At one point, during a whistlestop tour of small towns in the Fox River Valley near Green Bay, he fell into a public funk and began muttering about “needing a miracle” . . . and then, when the sense of depression began spreading like a piss-puddle on concrete, he invited the campaign-press regulars to help him celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday at a small hotel on a snowy night in Green Bay. But the party turned sour when his wife mashed a piece of the birthday cake in the face of a Newsweek reporter, saying, “One good turn deserves another, eh?”
The final straw, for Muskie, was the result of an unpublished but carefully leaked poll, taken by Oliver Quayle at the behest of Senator Jackson and the local AFL-CIO that showed Muskie losing 70 percent of his support in Wisconsin in a period of two weeks. According to the Quayle poll, the onetime front-runner slipped from 39 percent to 13 percent, while McGovern was virtually doubling his figure from 12 percent to 23 percent in the same period—which put McGovern ahead of Humphrey, who had dropped about 5 points to 19 percent.