In the McGovern press suite the big-time reporters were playing stud poker—six or eight of them, hunkered down in their shirtsleeves and loose ties around a long white-cloth-covered table with a pile of dollar bills in the middle and the bar about three feet behind Tom Wicker’s chair at the far end. At the other end of the room, to Wicker’s left, there were three more long white tables, with four identical big typewriters on each one and a pile of white legal-size paper stacked neatly beside each typewriter. At the other end of the room, to Wicker’s right, was a comfortable couch and a giant floor-model 24-inch Motorola color TV set… the screen was so large that Dick Cavett’s head looked almost as big as Wicker’s, but the sound was turned off and nobody at the poker table was watching the TV set anyway. Mort Sahl was dominating the screen with a seemingly endless, borderline-hysteria monologue about a bunch of politicians he didn’t have much use for—(Muskie, Humphrey, McGovern)—and two others (Shirley Chisholm and former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison) that he liked.
I knew this, because I had just come up the outside stairway from my room one floor below to get some typing paper, and I’d been watching the Cavett show on my own 21-inch Motorola color TV.
I paused at the door for a moment, then edged around to the poker table towards the nearest stack of paper. “Ah, decadence decadence…” I muttered. “Sooner or later it was bound to come to this.”
Kirby Jones looked up and grinned. “What are you bitching about this time, Hunter? Why are you always bitching?”
“Never mind that,” I said. “You owe me $20 & I want it now.”
“What?” he looked shocked. “Twenty dollars for what?”
I nodded solemnly. “I knew you’d try to welsh. Don’t tell me you don’t remember that bet.”
“What bet?”
“The one we made on the train in Nebraska,” I said. “You said Wallace wouldn’t get more than 300 delegates… But he already had 317, and I want that $20.”
He shook his head. “Who says he has that many? You’ve been reading the New York Times again.” He chuckled and glanced at Wicker, who was dealing. “Let’s wait until the convention, Hunter, things might be different then.”
“You pig,” I muttered, easing toward the door with my paper. “I’ve been hearing a lot about how the McGovern campaign is finally turning dishonest, but I didn’t believe it until now.”
He laughed and turned his attention back to the game. “All bets are payable in Miami, Hunter. That’s when we’ll count the marbles.”
I shook my head sadly and left the room. Jesus, I thought, these bastards are getting out of hand. Here we were still a week away from D-day in California, and the McGovern press suite was already beginning to look like some kind of Jefferson-Jackson Day stag dinner. I glanced back at the crowd around the table and realized that not one of them had been in New Hampshire. This was a totally different crowd, for good or ill. Looking back on the first few weeks of the New Hampshire campaign, it seemed so different from what was happening in California that it was hard to adjust to the idea that it was still the same campaign. The difference between a sleek front-runner’s act in Los Angeles and the spartan, almost skeletal machinery of an underdog operation in Manchester was almost more than the mind could deal with all at once.4
National press wizards covering McGovern in Los Angeles. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
Four months ago on a frozen grey afternoon in New Hampshire the McGovern “press bus” rolled into the empty parking lot of a motel on the outskirts of Portsmouth. It was 3:30 or so, and we had an hour or so to kill before the Senator would arrive by air from Washington and lead us downtown for a hand-shaking gig at the Booth fishworks.
The bar was closed, but one of McGovern’s advance men had arranged a sort of beer/booze and sandwich meat smorgasbord for the press in a lounge just off the lobby… so all six of us climbed out of the bus, which was actually an old three-seater airport limousine, and I went inside to kill time.
Of the six passengers in the “press bus,” three were local McGovern volunteers. The other three were Ham Davis from the Providence Journal, Tim Crouse from the Rolling Stone Boston Bureau, and me. Two more media/press people were already inside: Don Bruckner from the Los Angeles Times, and Michelle Clark from CBS.5
There was also Dick Dougherty, who had just quit his job as chief of the L.A. Times New York bureau to become George McGovern’s press secretary, speechwriter, main fixer, advance man, and all-purpose traveling wizard. Dougherty and Bruckner were sitting off by themselves at a corner table when the rest of us straggled into the lounge and filled our plates at the smorgasbord table: olives, carrots, celery stalks, salami, deviled eggs… but when I asked for beer, the middle-aged waitress who was also the desk clerk said beer “wasn’t included” in “the arrangements,” and that if I wanted any I would have to pay cash for it.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Bring me three Budweisers.”
She nodded. “With three glasses?”
“No. One glass.”
She hesitated, then wrote the order down and lumbered off toward wherever she kept the beer. I carried my plate over to an empty table and sat down to eat and read the local paper… but there was no salt and pepper on the table, so I went back up to the smorgasbord to look for it & bumped into somebody in a tan gabardine suit who was quietly loading his plate with carrots & salami.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Pardon me,” he replied.
I shrugged and went back to my table with the salt and pepper. The only noise in the room was coming from the L.A. Times corner. Everybody else was either reading or eating, or both. The only person in the room not sitting down was the man in the tan suit at the smorgasbord table. He was still fumbling with the food, keeping his back to the room….
There was something familiar about him. Nothing special—but enough to make me glance up again from my newspaper; a subliminal recognition-flash of some kind, or maybe just the idle journalistic curiosity that gets to be a habit after a while when you find yourself drifting around in the nervous murk of some story with no apparent meaning or spine to it. I had come up to New Hampshire to write a long thing on the McGovern campaign—but after twelve hours in Manchester I hadn’t seen much to indicate that it actually existed, and I was beginning to wonder what the fuck I was going to write about for that issue.
There was no sign of communication in the room. The press people, as usual, were going out of their way to ignore each other’s existence. Ham Davis was brooding over the New York Times, Crouse was re-arranging the contents of his knapsack, Michelle Clark was staring at her fingernails, Bruckner and Dougherty were trading Sam Yorty jokes… and the man in the tan suit was still shuffling back and forth at the smorgasbord table—totally absorbed in it, studying the carrots….
Jesus Christ! I thought. The Candidate! That crouching figure up there at the food table is George McGovern.
But where was his entourage? And why hadn’t anybody else noticed him? Was he actually alone?
No, that was impossible. I had never seen a presidential candidate moving around in public without at least ten speedy “aides” surrounding him at all times. So I watched him for a while, expecting to see his aides flocking in from the lobby at any moment… but it slowly dawned on me that The Candidate was by himself: there were no aides, no entourage, and nobody else in the room had even noticed his arrival.
This made me very nervous. McGovern was obviously waiting for somebody to greet him, keeping his back to the room, not even looking around—so there was no way for him to know that nobody in the room even knew he was there.
Finally I got up and walked across to the food table, watching McGovern out of the corner of one eye while I picked up some olives, fetched another beer out of the ice bucket… and finally reached over to tap The Candidate on the arm and introduce myself:
“Hello, Senator. We met a few weeks ago at Tom Braden’s house in Washington.”
He smiled and reached out to shake hand
s. “Of course, of course,” he said. “What are you doing up here?”
“Not much, so far,” I said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
He nodded, still poking around with the cold cuts. I felt very uneasy. Our last encounter had been somewhat jangled. He had just come back from New Hampshire, very tired and depressed, and when he arrived at Braden’s house we had already finished dinner and I was getting heavily into drink. My memory of that evening is somewhat dim, but even in dimness I recall beating my gums at top speed for about two hours about how he was doing everything wrong and how helpless it was for him to think he could ever accomplish anything with that goddamn albatross of a Democratic Party on his neck, and that if he had any real sense he would make drastic alterations in the whole style & tone of his campaign and re-model it along the lines of the Aspen Freak Power Uprising, specifically, along the lines of my own extremely weird and nerve-rattling campaign for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado.
McGovern had listened politely, but two weeks later in New Hampshire there was no evidence to suggest that he had taken my advice very seriously. He was still plodding along in the passive/underdog role, still driving back & forth across the state in his lonely one-car motorcade to talk with small groups of people in rural living rooms. Nothing heavy, nothing wild or electric. All he was offering, he said, was a rare and admittedly longshot opportunity to vote for an honest and intelligent presidential candidate.
A very strange option, in any year—but in mid-February of 1972 there were no visible signs, in New Hampshire, that the citizenry was about to rise up and drive the swine out of the temple. Beyond that, it was absolutely clear—according to the Wizards, Gurus, and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington—that Big Ed Muskie, the Man from Maine, had the Democratic nomination so deep in the bag that it was hardly worth arguing about.
Nobody argued with the things McGovern said. He was right, of course—but nobody took him very seriously, either…
7:45 A.M…. The sun is fighting through the smog now, a hot grey glow on the street below my window. Friday morning business-worker traffic is beginning to clog Wilshire Boulevard and the Glendale Federal Savings parking lot across the street is filling up with cars. Slump-shouldered girls are scurrying into the big Title Insurance & Trust Company and Crocker National Bank buildings, rushing to punch in on the time clock before 8:00.
I can look down from my window and see the two McGovern press buses loading. Kirby Jones, the press secretary, is standing by the door of the No. 1 bus and herding two groggy CBS cameramen aboard like some kind of latter-day Noah getting goats aboard the ark. Kirby is responsible for keeping the McGovern press/media crowd happy—or at least happy enough to make sure they have the time and facilities to report whatever McGovern, Mankiewicz, and the other Main Boys want to see and read on tonight’s TV news and in tomorrow’s newspapers. Like any other good press secretary, Kirby doesn’t mind admitting—off the record—that his love of Pure Truth is often tempered by circumstance. His job is to convince the press that everything The Candidate says is even now being carved on stone tablets.
The Truth is whatever George says; this is all ye know and all ye need to know. If McGovern says today that the most important issue in the California primary is abolition of the sodomy statutes, Kirby will do everything in his power to convince everybody on the press bus that the sodomy statutes must be abolished… and if George decides tomorrow that his pro-sodomy gig isn’t making it with voters, Kirby will get behind a quick press release to the effect that “new evidence from previously obscure sources” had convinced the Senator that what he really meant to say was that sodomy itself should be abolished.
This kind of fancy footwork was executed a lot easier back there in the early primaries than it is now. Since Wisconsin, McGovern’s words have been watched very carefully. Both his mushrooming media entourage and his dwindling number of opponents have pounced on anything even vaguely controversial or potentially damaging in his speeches, press conferences, position papers, or even idle comments.
McGovern is very sensitive about this sort of thing, and for excellent reason. In three of the last four big primaries (Ohio, Nebraska & California) he has spent an alarmingly big chunk of his campaign time denying that behind his calm and decent facade he is really a sort of Trojan Horse candidate—coming on in public as a bucolic Jeffersonian Democrat while secretly plotting to seize the reins of power and turn them over at midnight on Inauguration Day to a Red-bent hellbroth of Radicals, Dopers, Traitors, Sex Fiends, Anarchists, Winos, and “extremists” of every description.
The assault began in Ohio, when the Senator from Boeing (Henry Jackson, D-Wash.) began telling everybody his advance man could round up to listen to him that McGovern was not only a Marijuana Sympathizer, but also a Fellow Traveler…. Not exactly a dope-sucker and a card-carrying Red, but almost.
In Nebraska it was Humphrey, and although he dropped the Fellow Traveler slur, he added Amnesty and Abortion to the Marijuana charge and caused McGovern considerable grief. By election day the situation was so grim in traditionally conservative, Catholic Omaha that it looked like McGovern might actually lose the Nerbraska primary, one of the kingpins in his overall strategy. Several hours after the polls closed the mood in the Omaha Hilton Situation Room was extremely glum. The first returns showed Humphrey well ahead, and just before I was thrown out I heard Bill Dougherty—Lt. Gov. of South Dakota and one of McGovern’s close friends and personal advisors—saying: “We’re gonna get zinged tonight, folks.”
It was almost midnight before the out-state returns began off-setting Hubert’s big lead in Omaha, and by 2:00 A.M. on Wednesday it was clear that McGovern would win—although the final 6 percent margin was about half of what had been expected ten days earlier, before Humphrey’s local allies had fouled the air with alarums about Amnesty, Abortion, and Marijuana.
Sometime around 11:30 I was readmitted to the Situation Room—because they wanted to use my portable radio to get the final results—and I remember seeing Gene Pokorny slumped in a chair with his shoes off and a look of great relief on his face. Pokorny, the architect of McGovern’s breakthrough victory in Wisconsin, was also the campaign manager of Nebraska, his home state, and a loss there would have badly affected his future. Earlier that day in the hotel coffee shop I’d heard him asking Gary Hart which state he would be assigned to after Nebraska.
“Well, Gene,” Hart replied with a thin smile. “That depends on what happens tonight, doesn’t it?” Pokorny stared at him, but said nothing. Like almost all the other key people on the staff, he was eager to move on to California.
“Yeah,” Hart continued. “We were planning on sending you out to California from here, but recently I’ve been thinking more and more about that slot we have open in the Butte, Montana office.”
Again, Pokorny said nothing… but two weeks later, with Nebraska safely in the bag, he turned up in Fresno and hammered out another McGovern victory in the critically important Central Valley. And that slot in Butte is still open…
Which is getting a bit off the point here. Indeed. We are drifting badly—from motorcycles to Mankiewicz to Omaha, Butte, Fresno… where will it end?
The point, I think, was that in both the Ohio and Nebraska primaries, back to back, McGovern was confronted for the first time with the politics of the rabbit-punch and the groin shot, and in both states he found himself dangerously vulnerable to this kind of thing. Dirty politics confused him. He was not ready for it—and especially not from his fine old friend and neighbor, Hubert Humphrey. Toward the end of the Nebraska campaign he was spending most of his public time explaining that he was Not for abortion on demand, Not for legalized Marijuana, Not for unconditional amnesty… and his staff was becoming more and more concerned that their man had been put completely on the defensive.
This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of polit
ical mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
McGovern has not learned to cope with this tactic yet. Humphrey used it again in California, with different issues, and once again George found himself working overtime to deny wild, baseless charges that he was: (1) Planning to scuttle both the Navy and the Air Force, along with the whole Aerospace industry, and (2) He was a sworn foe of all Jews, and if he ever got to the White House he would immediately cut off all military aid to Israel and sit on his hands while Russian-equipped Arab legions drove the Jews into the sea.
McGovern scoffed at these charges, dismissing them as “ridiculous lies,” and repeatedly explained his positions on both issues—but when they counted the votes on election night it was obvious that both the Jews and the Aerospace workers in Southern California had taken Humphrey’s bait. All that saved McGovern in California was a long-overdue success among black voters, strong support from Chicanos, and a massive pro-McGovern Youth Vote.
This is a very healthy power base, if he can keep it together—but it is not enough to beat Nixon in November unless McGovern can figure out some way to articulate his tax and welfare positions a hell of a lot more effectively than he did in California. Even Hubert Humphrey managed to get McGovern tangled up in his own economic proposals from time to time during their TV debates in California—despite the fact that toward the end of that campaign Humphrey’s senile condition was so obvious that even I began feeling sorry for him.