The outcome of the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus was a shock to almost everybody except the busloads of McGovern supporters who had come there to flex their muscle in public for the first time. McCarthy—who had left early to fly back to Washington for an appearance the next day on Meet the Press—was seriously jolted by the loss. He showed it the next morning on TV when he looked like a ball of bad nerves caught in a cross fire of hostile questions from Roger Mudd and George Herman. He was clearly off-balance; a nervous shadow of the rising-tide, hammerhead spoiler he had been on Friday night for the rally at Holy Cross.
To make things worse, one of the main organizers of the Rad/Lib Caucus was Jerry Grossman, a wealthy envelope manufacturer from Newton, in the Boston suburbs, and a key McCarthy fund-raiser in the ’68 campaign… but after the Rad/Lib Caucus, Grossman went far out of his way, along with Mudd & Herman, to make sure McCarthy was done for.
He immediately endorsed McGovern, saying it was clear that “Massachusetts liberals no longer believe in McCarthy’s leadership quotient.” What this meant, according to the unanimous translation by political pros and press wizards, was, “McCarthy won’t get any more of Grossman’s money.”
Grossman ignored the obvious fact that he and other pro-McCarthy heavies had been beaten stupid, on the grass-roots organizing level, by an unheralded “McGovern machine” put together in Massachusetts by John Reuther—a nephew of Walter, late president of the UAW. I spent most of that afternoon wandering around the gym, listening to people talk and watching the action, and it was absolutely clear—once the voting started—that Reuther had everything wired.
Everywhere I went there was a local McGovern floor manager keeping people in line, telling them exactly what was happening and what would probably happen next… while the McCarthy forces—led by veteran Kennedy/Camelot field marshal Richard Goodwin—became more and more demoralized, caught in a fast-rising pincers movement between a surprisingly organized McGovern block on their Right, and a wild-eyed Chisholm uprising on the Left.
The Chisholm strength shocked everybody. She was one of twelve names on the ballot—which included almost every conceivable Democratic candidate from Hubert Humphrey to Patsy Mink, Wilbur Mills, and Sam Yorty—but after Muskie and Lindsay dropped out, the Caucus was billed far and wide as a test between McGovern and McCarthy. There was no mention in the press or anywhere else that some unknown black woman from Brooklyn might seriously challenge these famous liberal heavies on their own turf… but when the final vote came in, Shirley Chisholm had actually beaten Gene McCarthy, who finished a close third.
The Chisholm challenge was a last-minute idea and only half-organized, on the morning of the Caucus, by a handful of speedy young black politicos and Women’s Lib types—but by 6:00 that evening it had developed from a noisy idea into a solid power bloc. What began as a symbolic kind of challenge became a serious position after the first ballot—among this overwhelmingly white, liberal, affluent, well-educated, and over-thirty audience—when almost half of them refused to vote for George McGovern because he seemed “too conventional,” as one long-haired kid in a ski parka told me.
They had nothing against McGovern; they agreed with almost everything he said—but they wanted more; and it is interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the same people who showed up at McCarthy’s Holy Cross rally on Friday night had come out to Assumption on Sunday.
There were not many Youth/Freak vote types at the Rad/Lib Caucus; perhaps one out of five, and probably not even that. The bulk of the crowd looked like professors and their wives from Amherst. One of the problems, according to a bushy young radical-talking non-student from Boston, was that you had to pay a “registration fee” of two dollars before you got a vote.
Shirley Chisholm STUART BRATESMAN
“Shit,” he said. “I wouldn’t pay it myself, so I can’t vote.” He shrugged. “But this Caucus doesn’t mean anything, anyway. This is just a bunch of old liberals getting their rocks off.”
Manchester, New Hampshire, is a broken down mill town on the Merrimack River with an aggressive Chamber of Commerce and America’s worst newspaper. There is not much else to say for it, except that Manchester is a welcome change from Washington, D.C.
I checked into the Wayfarer just before dawn and tried to get some music on my high-powered waterproof Sony, but there was nothing worth listening to. Not even out of Boston or Cambridge. So I slept a few hours and then joined the McGovern caravan for a tour of the Booth Fisheries, in Portsmouth.
It was a wonderful experience. We stood near the time clock as the shifts changed & McGovern did his hand-grabbing thing. There was no way to avoid him, so the workers shuffled by and tried to be polite. McGovern was blocking the approach to the drinking fountain, above which hung a sign saying “Dip Hands in Hand Solution Before Returning to Work.”
The place was like a big aircraft hangar full of fish, with a strange cold gaseous haze hanging over everything—and a lot of hissing & humming from the fish-packing machines on the assembly line. I have always liked seafood, but after thirty minutes in that place I lost my appetite for it.
The next drill was the official opening of the new McGovern headquarters in Dover, where a large crowd of teenagers and middle-class liberals were gathered to meet the candidate. This age pattern seemed to prevail at every one of McGovern’s public appearances: The crowds were always a mix of people either under twenty or over forty. The meaning of this age gap didn’t hit me until I looked back on my notes and saw how consistent it was… even at the Massachusetts Ras/Lib Caucus, where I guessed the median age to be thirty-three, that figure was a rough mathematical compromise, rather than a physical description. In both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the McGovern/McCarthy crowds were noticeably barren of people between twenty-five & thirty-five.
After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Exeter Academy for Boys, an exclusive prep school about twenty-five miles up the road. The schedule showed a two-hour break for dinner at the Exeter Inn, where the McGovern press party took over about half the dining room.
I can’t recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn’t let me eat. The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the Rolling Stone bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said—no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets—so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick, the famous crypto-nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender “Jim,” which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as “Mr. Reynolds.”
Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. “My name’s not Reynolds, goddamnit! I’m James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Evening Star.” Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.
The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his “political director” in Washington, that McGovern’s old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa—Senator Harold Hughes—had just announced he was endorsing Ed Muskie.
This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung-bomb. Hughes had been one of the few Senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough. The Hughes/McGovern/Fred Harris (D-Okla.) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist Power bloc for the past two years. Even the Muskie endorsement-hustlers who were criss-crossing the nation putting pressure on local politicians to come out for Big Ed hadn’t bothered with Hughes, because they considered him “un-touchable.” If anything, he was thought to be more radical and intransigent than McGovern himself.
Hughes had grown a beard; he didn’t mind admitting that he talked to trees now and then—and a few months earlier had challenged the party hierarchy by forcing a public showdown between himself and Larry O’Brien’s personal choice for the chairmanship of the all-important Credentials Committee at the na
tional convention.
Dick Dougherty, a former Los Angeles Times newsman who is handling McGovern’s national press action in New Hampshire, was so shaken by the news of Hughes’ defection that he didn’t even try to explain it when reporters began asking Why? Dougherty had just gotten the word when the crowded press limo left Dover for Exeter, and he did his best to fend off our questions until he could talk to the candidate and agree on what to say. But in terms of campaign morale, it was as if somebody had slashed all the tires on every car in the caravan, including the candidate’s. When we got to the Exeter Inn I half expected to see a filthy bearded raven perched over the entrance, croaking “Nevermore….”
By chance, I found George downstairs in the Men’s Room, hovering into a urinal and staring straight ahead at the grey marble tiles.
“Say… ah… I hate to mention this,” I said. “But what about this thing with Hughes?”
He flinched and quickly zipped his pants up, shaking his hand and mumbling something about “a deal for the vice-presidency.” I could see that he didn’t want to talk about it, but I wanted to get his reaction before he and Dougherty could put a story together.
“Why do you think he did it?” I said.
He was washing his hands, staring down at the sink. “Well…,” he said finally. “I guess I shouldn’t say this, Hunter, but I honestly don’t know. I’m surprised; we’re all surprised.”
He looked very tired, and I didn’t see much point in prodding him to say anything else about what was clearly a painful subject. We walked upstairs together, but I stopped at the desk to get a newspaper while he went into the dining room.
This proved to be my un-doing, because the doorkeeper would no doubt have welcomed me very politely if I’d entered with The Senator… but as it happened, I was shunted off to the bar with Crouse & James J. Kilpatrick, who was wearing a vest & a blue pin-stripe suit.
A lot has been written about McGovern’s difficulties on the campaign trail, but most of it is far off the point. The career pols and press wizards say he simply lacks “charisma,” but that’s a cheap and simplistic idea that is more an insult to the electorate than to McGovern. The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator—or even a President—is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.
McGovern, they say, doesn’t make it on this level. Which is probably true. But McCarthy was worse. His ’68 campaign had none of the surface necessities. He had no money, no press, no endorsements, no camera-presence… his only asset was a good eye for the opening, and a good enough ear to pick up the distant rumble of a groundswell with nobody riding it.
There is nothing in McGovern’s campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naive enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent—with a good voting record on “the issues”—is a natural man for the White House.
But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon)… and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.
McGovern’s failure to understand this is what brought people like Lindsay and McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm into the campaign. They all sense an untouched constituency. Chisholm’s campaign manager, a sleek young pol from Kansas named Jerry Robinson, calls it the “Sleeping Giant vote.”
“Nobody’s reaching them,” he said. “We got a lot of people out there with nobody they think they can vote for.”
Ron Dellums, the black Congressman from Berkeley, called it “the Nigger vote.” But he wasn’t talking about skin pigment.
“It’s time for somebody to lead all of America’s Niggers,” he said at the Capitol Hill press conference when Shirley Chisholm announced she was running for President. “And by this I mean the Young, the Black, the Brown, the Women, the Poor—all the people who feel left out of the political process. If we can put the Nigger Vote together, we can bring about some real change in this country.”
Dellums is probably the only elected official in America who feels politically free enough to stare at the cameras and make a straight-faced pitch to the “Nigger Vote.” But he is also enough of a politician to know it’s out there… maybe not in the Exeter Inn, but the hills north and west of Manchester are teeming with Niggers. They didn’t turn out for the speech-making, and they probably won’t vote in the primary—but they are there, and there are a hell of a lot of them.
Looking back on that week in New Hampshire, it was mainly a matter of following George McGovern around and watching him do his thing—which was pleasant, or at least vaguely uplifting, but not what you’d call a real jerk-around.
McGovern is not one of your classic fireballs on the stump. His campaign workers in New Hampshire seem vaguely afflicted by a sense of uncertainty about what it all means. They are very decent people. They are working hard, they are very sincere, and most of them are young volunteers who get their pay in room & board… but they lack something crucial, and that lack is painfully obvious to anybody who remembers the mood of the McCarthy volunteers in 1968.
Those people were angry. The other side of that “Clean for Gene” coin was a nervous sense of truce that hung over the New Hampshire campaign. In backroom late night talks at the Wayfarer there was no shortage of McCarthy staffers who said this would probably be their final trip “within the system.” There were some who didn’t mind admitting that, personally, they’d rather throw firebombs or get heavy into dope—but they were attracted by the drama, the sheer balls, of McCarthy’s “hopeless challenge.”
McCarthy’s national press man at the time was Seymour Hersh, who quit the campaign in Wisconsin and called Gene a closet racist.1 Two years later, Sy Hersh was back in the public ear with a story about a place called My Lai, in South Vietnam. He was the one who dragged it out in the open.
McCarthy’s state-level press man that year was a hair-freak named Bill Gallagher, who kept his room in the Wayfarer open from midnight to dawn as a sort of all-night refuge for weed fanciers. A year later, when I returned to New Hampshire to write a piece on ski racer Jean-Claude Killy, I got off the cocktail circuit long enough to locate Gallagher in a small Vermont hamlet where he was living as the de facto head of a mini-commune. He had dropped out of politics with a vengeance; his beard was down to his belt and his head was far out of politics. “The McCarthy thing” had been “a bad trip,” he explained. He no longer cared who was President.
You don’t find people like Hersh and Gallagher around McGovern’s headquarters in Manchester this year. They would frighten the staff. McGovern’s main man in New Hampshire is a fat young pol named Joe Granmaison, whose personal style hovers somewhere between that of a state trooper and a used-car salesman.
Granmaison was eager to nail Muskie: “If we elect a President who three years ago said, ‘Gee, I made a mistake’… well, I think it’s about time these people were held accountable for those mistakes.”
Indeed. But Granmaison backed away from me like he’d stepped on a rattlesnake when I asked him if it were true that he’d been a Johnson delegate to the Chicago convention in ’68.
We met at a McGovern cocktail party in a downstate hamlet called Keene. “Let’s talk about this word ‘accountable,’ I said. I get the feeling you stepped in shit on that one…”
“What do you mean?” he snapped. “Just because I was a Johnson delegate doesn’t mean anything. I’m not running for office.”
“Good,” I said. We were
standing in a short hallway between the kitchen and the living room, where McGovern was saying, “The thing the political bosses want most is for young people to drop out… because they know the young people can change the system, and the bosses don’t want any change.”
True enough, I thought. But how do you “change the system” by hiring a young fogey like Granmaison to wire up your act in New Hampshire? With a veteran Judas Goat like that in charge of the operation, it’s no wonder that McGovern’s Manchester headquarters is full of people who talk like nervous PoliSci students on job-leave.
Joe didn’t feel like discussing his gig at the ’68 Convention. Which is understandable. If I had done a thing like that, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either. I tried to change the subject, but he crammed a handful of potato chips into his mouth and walked away.
Later that night, after the cocktail party, we drove out to the Student Union hall at Keene State College, where McGovern addressed a big and genuinely friendly crowd of almost 3000, jammed into a hall meant for 2000 tops. The advance man had done his work well.
The big question tonight was “Amnesty,” and when McGovern said he was for it, the crowd came alive. This was, after all, the first time any active candidate for the presidency had said “Yes” on the Amnesty question—which is beginning to look like a time-bomb with almost as much Spoiler Potential as the busing issue.
They both have long and tangled roots, but it is hard to imagine any question in American politics today that could have more long-range impact than the argument over “Amnesty,”—which is nothing more or less than a proposal to grant presidential pardon to all draft dodgers and U.S. military deserters, on the grounds that history has absolved them. Because if the Vietnam War was wrong from the start—as even Nixon has tacitly admitted—then it is hard to avoid the logic of the argument that says the Anti-War Exiles were right for refusing to fight it.