His staff people, both in Washington and South Dakota, began to speak more freely about the “disaster” confronting them and even the inevitability of Eagleton withdrawing. McGovern issued an order telling the staff people to keep mum.
At that point, the presidential nominee might have been content to keep quiet and let opinions develop naturally over the weekend. Except Eagleton was picking up signals too. As McGovern’s staff began raising the possibility of changing horses, Eagleton kept charging forward. He would never step down he said on Friday afternoon.
Never? That is a strong word to use in politics and obviously it needed strong corrective action from McGovern’s end of the see-saw. What McGoven did was either very slick or very clumsy. The people who watched still are not quite sure which.
First, his press staff distributed the text of a speech which McGovern would deliver Saturday night before the South Dakota state convention of Democrats. It contained one lukewarm paragraph about Eagleton, revealing that McGovern was now “deliberating” on what he had previously considered a closed question. That would tell the press not to take Eagleton’s declarations at face value, but the speech wasn’t for release until Saturday evening.
McGovern apparently decided to send a stronger message to his running mate, via the media. It was the last night of the senator’s two-week vacation in the Black Hills and, though he had been dining privately with his family, McGovern decided to eat that night at the Sylvan Lake Lodge.
He told his press secretary, Dick Dougherty, to pass the word discreetly to reporters who were staying in Custer, S.D., eight miles away.
Most of the reporters did not get the word, but a lot of them figured on their own it was prudent to dine at the lodge on the last night, just in case he broke his two-day silence. So, with a few tourists thrown in, this group sat in the Dakota Room, eating buffalo steaks and watching one another. Indian pictographs depicting “The Legend of the White Buffalo,” surrounded them on the walls.
McGovern ate enthusiastically, as he always does. Then, rather casually, he was standing at the table where the Washington Post, the Chicago Daily News, and United Press International were eating.
“Are you fellas glad to be getting home?” he asked, then sat down for social chit-chat about the Black Hills. The reporters were wondering in their own minds whether it would be offensive to probe the Eagleton thing when McGovern settled it for them. He brought it up.
It had been a terrible business, he said, ruined his vacation, upset the campaign planning. How was he to know the Missouri senator had been in the hospital three times?
McGovern went on to explain that a decision would have to be made and it would mostly be up to Eagleton to withdraw if he realized that public opinion was against him. The tone was more precise than the words—implying that McGovern fully expected Eagleton to withdraw gracefully, rather than imperil the campaign.
He was gone in a few moments. The reporters discussed briefly among themselves the question of whether it was proper to quote a casual dinner conversation. Very briefly. Then they took out notepads and began trying to reconstruct what McGovern had said. Ever so casually, they slipped off to the lobby telephones, no point arousing all those other reporters.
Meanwhile McGovern sat down with CBS and his family and repeated much the same conversation, elaborating on a few points.
At another table, Time magazine was dining with Newsweek, watching one another on the night before their magazines close for publication. McGovern came over to join them.
Knight Newspapers and the Wall Street Journal were sitting at another table, but they decided to join the circle. So did the New York Times who was eating with McGovern’s staff, the one table which McGovern did not visit. Newsweek had a tape recorder hidden on his lap under the table, but when he replayed it later all that could be heard was organ music and the clatter of dishes.
The candidate expanded further on the same theme, adding some negative remarks which made the signal even stronger. When he departed, the reporters at first eyed other newsmen with suspicion, eager to protect what they thought was exclusive. In a moment, they got the picture. It was McGovern who was using the social chatter, not them.
There were only two telephones in the lobby. The New York Times had to race down the mountain eight miles to phone in the story. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun was dining in Custer, heard about the table-hopping and raced up the mountain. The Associated Press was with his children at Mt. Rushmore, but another AP man caught up with the story.
All of them filed stories stating with varying degrees of emphasis that McGovern had changed his position and might now abandon Eagleton as a running mate. Only the Los Angeles Times had a stronger story. The L.A. Times had been invited to McGovern’s cabin before dinner and emerged with a story which said flatly “it was learned” that McGovern had decided to dump Eagleton.
The next day, McGovern tacked again, though still headed in the same general direction. The question of Eagleton’s future, he said in a press statement, needed “a proper period of evaluation.
“Rumors and reports of any decisions having been reached on this question are misleading,” he said.
August
Down & Out in the Fontainebleau… Nixon Sells Out the Party… Goldwater on the Comeback Trail; Agnew in ’76… Mankiewicz Amok; Midnight Violence at The Wayfarer… The Origins of Eagleton; Death Rattle for the New Politics… Can a Bull Elk in the Rut Pass through the Eye of a Camel?… A Vicious Attack on the Demonstrators: “These People Should Go Back Where They Belong”…
Earlier tonight I drove down the beach to a place called Dixie’s Doll House for two six-packs of Ballantine ale. The place was full of old winos, middle-aged hookers, and aging young hustlers who looked like either junkies or Merchant Marine rejects; bearded geeks in grey T-Shirts staggering back and forth along the bar, six nasty-looking pimps around a blue-lit pool table in the rear, and right next to me at the bar a ruined platinum-blonde Cuban dazzler snarling drunkenly at her nervous escort for the night: “Don’t gimme that horseshit, baby! I don’t want a goddamn ONE DOLLAR dinner! I want a TEN DOLLAR dinner!”
Life gets heavy here on the Beach from time to time. So I paid $2.70 each for my six-packs and then wheeled my big red Chevy Impala convertible back home to the Fontainebleau, about forty blocks north through the balmy southern night to the edge of the fashionable section.
“Bobo,” the master pimp and carmeister who runs what they call “the front door” here in these showplace beachfront hotels, eyed me curiously as I got out of the car and started dragging wet brown bags full of beer bottles out of the back seat. “Your gonna need the car again tonight?” he asked.
“Probably,” I said, “But not for a while. I’ll be up in the room until about midnight.” I looked at my watch. “The Rams-Kansas City game is on in three minutes. After that, I’ll work for a while and then go out for something to eat.”
He jerked the car door open, sliding fast behind the wheel to take it down to the underground garage. With his hand on the shift lever he looked up at me: “You in the mood for some company?”
“No,” I said. “I’m way behind. I’ll be up all night with that goddamn typewriter. I shouldn’t even take time to watch the game on TV.”
He rolled his eyes and looked up at what should have been the sky, but which was actually the gold-glazed portico roof above the entrance driveway: “Jesus, what kind of work do you do? Hump typewriters for a living? I thought the convention was over!”
I paused, tucking the wet beer bags under the arm of my crusty brown leather jacket. Inside the lobby door about twenty feet away I could see what looked like a huge movie-set cocktail party for rich Venezuelans and high-style middle-aged Jews: my fellow guests in the Fontainebleau. I was not dressed properly to mingle with them, so my plan was to stride swiftly through the lobby to the elevators and then up to my hide-out in the room.
The Nixon convention had finished on Thursday morning, and by Satur
day the hundreds of national press/media people who had swarmed into this pompous monstrosity of a hotel for Convention Week were long gone. A few dozen stragglers had stayed on through Friday, but by Saturday afternoon the style and tone of the place had changed drastically, and on Sunday I felt like the only nigger in the Governor’s Box on Kentucky Derby Day.
Bobo had not paid much attention to me during the convention, but now he seemed interested. “I know you’re a reporter,” he said. “They put ‘press’ on your house-car tag. But all the rest of those guys took off yesterday. What keeps you here?”
I smiled. “Christ, am I the only one left?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, there’s you and two others. One guy had that white Lincoln Continental—”
“He’s not press,” I said quickly. “Probably one of the GOP advance men, getting things settled with the hotel.”
He nodded. “Yeah, he acted like he was part of the show. Not like a reporter.” He laughed. “You guys are pretty easy to spot, you know that?”
“Balls,” I said. “Not me. Everybody else says I look like a cop.”
He looked at me for a moment, tapping his foot on the accelerator to keep the engine up. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. You could pass for a cop as long as you kept your mouth shut.”
“I’m usually pretty discreet,” I said.
He smiled. “Sure you are. We’ve all noticed it. That other press guy that’s still here asked me who you were the other day, when you were bad-mouthing Nixon…”
“What’s his name?” I was curious to know who else in the press corps would endure this kind of shame and isolation.
“I can’t remember now,” Bobo said. “He’s a tall guy with grey hair and glasses. He drives a blue Ford station wagon.”
I wondered who it could be. It would have to be somebody with a very compelling reason to stay on, in this place. Everybody with good sense or a reasonable excuse had left as soon as possible. Some of the TV network technicians had stayed until Saturday, dismantling the maze of wires and cable they’d set up in the Fontainebleau before the convention started. They were easy to spot because they wore things like Levis and sweatshirts—but by Sunday I was the only guest in the hotel not dressed like a PR man for Hialeah Racetrack on a Saturday night in mid-season.
It is not enough, in the Fontainebleau, to look like some kind of a weird and sinister cop; to fit in here, you want to look like somebody who just paid a scalper $200 for a front row seat at the Johnny Carson show.
Bobo put the car in gear, but kept his foot on the brake pedal and asked: “What are you writing? What did all that bullshit come down to?”
“Jesus,” I said, “That’s just what I’ve been trying to put together upstairs. You’re asking me to compress about two hundred hours of work into sixty seconds.”
He grinned. “You’re on my time now. Give it a try. Tell me what happened.”
I paused in the driveway, shifting the beer bags to my other arm, and thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Nixon sold the party for the next twenty years by setting up an Agnew/Kennedy race in ’76, but he knew exactly what he was doing and he did it for the same reason he’s done everything else since he first got into politics—to make sure he gets elected.”
He stared at me, not grasping it.
I hesitated, trying to put it all in a quick little capsule. “Okay,” I said finally, “the reason Nixon put Agnew and the Goldwater freaks in charge of the party this year is that he knows they can’t win in ’76—but it was a good short-term trade; they have to stay with him this year, which will probably be worth a point or two in November—and that’s important to Nixon, because he thinks it’s going to be close: Fuck the polls. They always follow reality instead of predicting it…. But the real reason he turned the party over to the Agnew/Goldwater wing is that he knows most of the old-line Democrats who just got stomped by McGovern for the nomination wouldn’t mind seeing George get taken out in ’72 if they know they can get back in the saddle if they’re willing to wait four years.”
Bobo laughed, understanding it instantly. Pimps and hustlers have a fine instinct for politics. “What you’re saying is that Nixon just cashed his whole check,” he said. “He doesn’t give a flying fuck what happens once he gets re-elected—because once he wins, it’s all over for him anyway, right? He can’t run again…”
“Yeah,” I said, pausing to twist the top off one of the ale bottles I’d been pulling out of the bag. “But the thing you want to understand is that Nixon has such a fine understanding of the way politicians think that he knew people like Daley and Meany and Ted Kennedy would go along with him—because it’s in their interest now to have Nixon get his second term, in exchange for a guaranteed Democratic victory in 1976.”
“God damn!” he said. “That’s beautiful! They’re gonna trade him four years now for eight later, right? Give Nixon his last trip in ’72, then Kennedy moves in for eight years in ’76…. Jesus that’s so rotten I really have to admire it.” He chuckled. “Boy, I thought I was cynical!”
“That’s not cynical,” I said. “That’s pure, nut-cutting politics…. And I advise you to stay out of it; you’re too sensitive.”
He laughed and hit the accelerator, leaping away with a sharp screech of rubber and just barely missing the tail-light of a long gold Cadillac as he turned down the ramp.
I pushed through the revolving door and crossed the vast lobby to the elevators, still sipping my ale as I thought about what I’d just said. Had Nixon really sold the party down the river? Was it a conscious act, or pure instinct? Had he made a deal with Meany during one of their golf games? Was Daley in on it? Ted Kennedy? Who else?
I finished the ale and dropped the empty bottle into a huge spittoon full of blue gravel. Two elderly women standing next to me looked disgusted, but I ignored them and wandered over to the door of the world-renowned Poodle bar and cocktail lounge. It was almost empty. An imitation Glenn Miler band was playing the Tennessee Waltz, but nobody was dancing. Three nights ago the Poodle had been so crowded that it was difficult to get through the door. Every high-powered, hot-rod journalist in the western world had made the scene here last week. At least that’s what Sally Quinn told me, and she knows about things like that.
MARK DIAMOND
I went back to the elevators and found one ready to go. The sight of my ale bottle in the spittoon reminded me of Nixon again… Who else might be in on that deal? I picked a Miami Herald off a stack in the rear of the elevator, then handed the matron a dollar.
“Twenty-five cents,” she said briskly, bringing the car to a stop at my floor… but before she could hand me the change I stepped out and waved back at her. “Never mind,” I said. “I’m rich.” Then I hurried down the hall to my room and bolted the door.
The game had already started, but there was no score. I dumped my ale bottles in the styrofoam cooler, then opened one and sat down to watch the action and brood on Nixon’s treachery. But first I concentrated on the game for a while. It is hard to understand how somebody else thinks unless you can get on their wavelength: get in tune with their patterns, their pace, their connections… and since Nixon is a known football addict, I decided to get my head totally into the rhythm of this exhibition game between the Rams and Kansas City before attempting the jump into politics.
Very few people understand this kind of logic. I learned it from a Brazilian psychiatrist in the Matto Grosso back in 1963. He called it “Rhythm Logic,” in English, because he said I would never be able to pronounce it in the original Jibaro. I tried it once or twice, but the Jibaro language was too much for me—and it didn’t make much difference anyway. I seemed to have an instinct for Rhythm Logic, because I picked it up very quickly. But I have never been able to explain it, except in terms of music, and typewriters are totally useless when it comes to that kind of translation.
In any case, by the end of the first quarter I felt ready. By means of intense concentration on e
very detail of the football game, I was able to “derail” my own inner brain waves and re-pattern them temporarily to the inner brain wave rhythms of a serious football fanatic. The next step, then, was to bring my “borrowed” rhythms into focus on a subject quite different from football—such as presidential politics.
In the third and final step, I merely concentrated on a pre-selected problem involving presidential politics, and attempted to solve it subjectively… although the word “subjectively,” at this point, had a very different true meaning. Because I was no longer reasoning in the rhythms of my own inner brain waves, but in the rhythms of a football addict.
At that point, it became almost unbearably clear to me that Richard Nixon had in fact sold the Republican Party down the tube in Miami. Consciously, perhaps, but never quite verbally. Because the rhythms of his own inner brain waves had convinced his conscious mind that in fact he had no choice. Given the safe assumption that the most important objective in Richard Nixon’s life today is minimizing the risk of losing the 1972 election to George McGovern, simple logic decreed that he should bend all his energies to that end, at all costs. All other objectives would have to be subjugated to Number One.
By half time, with the Rams trailing by six, I had established a firm scientific basis for the paranoid gibberish I had uttered, an hour or so earlier, while standing in the hotel driveway and talking with Bobo the night-pimp. At the time, not wanting to seem ignorant or confused, I had answered his question with the first wisdom capsule that popped into my mind…. But now it made perfect sense, thanks to Rhythm Logic, and all that remained were two or three secondary questions, none of them serious.
To say that Nixon “sold the Republican Party down the river” in order to minimize his chances of losing this election is probably a bit harsh. Most of the GOP delegates in Miami were eager to make that trip, anyway. All Nixon did was make sure they got safely aboard the raft and into the current. It was no accident that the Nixon convention in Miami looked and sounded like a replay of the Goldwater convention in San Francisco eight years ago. They even brought Goldwater back and treated him like a hero. His opening-night speech was a classic of vengeful ignorance, but the delegates loved it. He was scheduled to speak for ten minutes, but he worked himself into such a fever that it took him half an hour to make sure everybody in the hall—and the TV audience, too—understood what he’d come there to say: That he’d been eight years ahead of his time in ’64, by God! But now the party had finally caught up with him! At last, they were cheering him again, instead of laughing at him… and just in case anybody doubted it, he was here to tell them that the whole country was finally catching up with him, too.