The occasion today in the Grand Ballroom called for an heroic historic set of speeches which would demolish Humphrey, smelt him down to the suet at the center of his seat, but there were no false moves for the Senator. The fire to kill, the fire to condemn, the fury to wield the saint’s own sword was nowhere in him today. Defeat hung over his cause. Teddy Kennedy would not be nominated, nor any favorite sons from the South. The months of campaigning were all but over. The Romantic in his own heart, which must have hoped against all gray irons of restraint in his intelligence that somehow, somewhere, the politics of the party would prove not property but spirit, was as dead as the taste of death today—he spoke with the quiet controlled bitterness of a man whose greatest vice was bitterness. If there was a grave flaw in McCarthy, it came out of some penury of his own spirit: too bitter even to express his bitterness, it leaked out of the edges of his wit, turned as punishment upon his own people in the determined bland tone of his presentation in a dramatic hour, and leaking, seemed to get into the very yellow of his skin, his single most unattractive feature.
He was not furious so much at losing as at the lack of recognition given by his party for the isolation and stamina of his performance; he was furious at the indifference, even antipathy, of the bulk of the Kennedy cadres; he was hurt probably more than he could admit even to himself at the entrance of Senator George McGovern, now running on a set of issues almost identical to his own, but softer, more compromising. He had to be icy with wrath at McGovern’s comments in the Nebraska caucus yesterday. McGovern had said of McCarthy that he “has taken the view that a passive and inactive Presidency is in order, and that disturbs me. Solving our domestic problems will be much more difficult and that will require an active and compassionate President.”
So McCarthy now in his opening remarks to the California delegation spent but a word on Vietnam, even emphasizing that he did not wish to restate his case, and then—no man a match for the glide and slash of McCarthy’s wit, the shark in the man could best show here—he said in speaking of criticism of him, “... Most recently the suggestion that I would be a passive President. Well, I think a little passivity in that office is all right, a kind of balance, I think. I have never quite known what active compassion is. Actually, compassion, in my mind, is to suffer with someone, not in advance of him.” He paused, “Or not in public necessarily.” He paused again. Here came the teeth. The voice never altered. “But I have been, whether I have been passive or not, the most active candidate in the party this year.”
He had been a baseball pitcher once for a minor league team—he had learned presumably to throw two or three kinds of pitch off the same delivery; some of his pitches could take a man’s head off. He went on to talk of New Hampshire in the cold and snow, Wisconsin in the ice, “raising issues all the way”—there was ice enough in his soul now—“They say I was impersonal, I want you to know I am the only candidate who said he would get rid of J. Edgar Hoover and that is a person.”
McGovern was next. McGovern was friendly. McGovern was the friendliest man in Chicago. He was a reasonably tall, neatly built man, with an honest Midwestern face, a sobriety of manner, a sincerity of presentation, a youthfulness of intent, no matter his age, which was reminiscent of Henry Fonda. Now, he was making his amends to McCarthy. “I will say to my friend and colleague, Gene McCarthy, that I appreciate what he has done in moving out first in this Presidential race to help turn the course of American policy in Southeast Asia.” But he was friends with everyone, “and I don’t have a short memory. I remember Vice President Humphrey as one who for twenty years has carried the standard of civil and human justice in our own country.” McGovern gave his sweet smile. “What I am trying to say here this morning is that I am no fan of Richard Nixon.” He was to win the audience over both hours in just such a way. Now he ended his opening remarks by suggesting that we “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.” A Christian sweetness came off him like a psychic aroma—he was a fine and pleasant candidate but for that sweetness. It was excessive. Not artificial, but excessive, as the smell of honeysuckle can be excessive.
He had spoken one-and-a-half times as long as McCarthy. Humphrey spoke three times as long, trudging through an imprecision of language, a formal slovenliness of syntax which enabled him to shunt phrases back and forth like a switchman who locates a freight car by moving everything in the yard.
“I happen to believe that one of the unique qualities of the Democratic Party is its leadership over the years—recognizing its fallibility, recognizing its inadequacies, because it is a human instrument—is the capacity of this country to come to this party and its leadership, to come to grips with change, and to be responsive to the future.” Where Lyndon Johnson spoke and wrote in phrases which could be hyphenated like Mayor Daley’s temporary fences on the way to the Amphitheatre, making you keep your eye off the weeds in the vacant lot, and on the dual highway ahead, so Hubert Humphrey’s phrases were like building plots in sub-developments, each little phrase was a sub-property—the only trouble was that the plots were all in different towns, little clichés from separate speeches made on unrelated topics in distinctly different years were now plumped down next to each other in the rag-bag map of his mind. He went on for many minutes planting shrubs in each separate little plot, saying sweet things about his opponents, talking of the difficulties of the twentieth century, and the honor of his own record, the unflagging fight he had made, the need for unity. His voice had a piping cheerfulness which seemed to come from the very act of exercising the faculty of speech; once the current of air started to move out from his lungs, he was as vibrant as a set of organ pipes—the thing for him to do was keep striking notes off those pipes, it did not matter which precise music came out. So he went on and on, and by the time he was done, close to half the debate was gone.
Finally the question of Vietnam came up. A delegate got the floor—doubtless he had it arranged with Jesse Unruh in advance, why not?
Delegate: “Mr. Vice President, specifically, in what ways, if at all, do you disagree with President Johnson’s position with reference to Vietnam?”
Humphrey took his time going to the podium. It was a question he had obviously been ready to expect, and yet he seemed agitated. It is one thing to know that some day we will die, it is another to wake in the middle of the night and hear your heart. Humphrey tried to be grand in his reply; but the organ pipes had a mote—he was a crack squeaky. “Would you mind,” he asked, “if I just stated my position on Vietnam?”
“No,” the crowd shouted. “No! No!”
“Because,” he went on in his little determined voice, “the President of the United States is not a candidate and I did not come here to repudiate the President of the United States. I want that made quite clear.”
They shouted no, there were hints of boos, cries of muted disgust. A professional round of applause from his supporters in the audience came to back him up, a sort of peremptory we-run-the-meeting-and-we-salute-the-flag was in the sound. Actually, his supporters did not run this meeting. It was the California delegation, led by Jesse Unruh, pledged once to Bobby Kennedy, now more or less split between McCarthy and McGovern, which held the power here, but there was enough authority in the heavy medicine-ball palms of the Humphrey hand-beaters to remind the crowd of other meetings the hand-beaters had run, and meetings they would yet run again. The sound of the Machine was in the percussion-effects of their skin.
So Humphrey was delivered of any need to delineate separation of Lyndon Johnson’s position on Vietnam from his own. And proceeded to give his characteristic little talk—the one which had been losing him the love of the liberal Left for the last three years. They had, of course, never had much taste, or they would never have admired him so much in the first place, but then they had never had an opportunity before to recognize in intimate continuing detail that Hubert Humphrey simply could not attach the language of his rhetoric to any reality; on the contrary, he was perfect
ly capable of using the same word, “Freedom” let us say, to describe a ward fix in Minneapolis and a gathering of Quakers. So he still spoke of our presence in Vietnam as “there to prevent the success of an aggression.” It would do no good to tell him that one million American and South Vietnamese troops were fighting the aggression of 200,000 or 250,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese. If he said there was aggression, then aggression became his reality—the figures had nothing to do with it. So “Democracy in South Vietnam” was established because the use of the word by Lyndon Johnson and himself had established it. The radiance of the sensation of democracy came from the word itself, “Democracy!” Halos in his eyes. “When you look over the world scene, those elections [in South Vietnam] stand up pretty well and the basis of the Government today is a broader-based Government.” Earlier he had actually said, “We have not sought to impose a military solution. Regrettably, wars have their built-in escalation.” One would have to be a great novelist to dare to put this last remark in the mouth of a character so valuable as Humphrey. “The roadblock to peace, my dear friends, is not in Washington, D.C. It is in Hanoi, and we ought to recognize it as such.”
The medicine-balls gave him a good hand, and he was pleased with himself when he stepped down. He had given a warm sincere little speech which he obviously believed, or rather, had actually experienced. While he spoke, the sensation of truth quivered about him like a nimbus. He must have felt bathed in light. He had the same kind of truth that an actor has while playing Napoleon—with the lights on him, he is Napoleon. So with the lights on Hubert, democracy did exist in South Vietnam, and our inability to end the war was indeed Hanoi’s fault (even though we had never declared war on North Vietnam and were still bombing half of everything which moved). Hubert Humphrey loved America. So the madness of America had become his own madness. He was a lover after all.
It was McCarthy’s turn to speak. Everyone leaned forward. The confrontation was at hand. But McCarthy, receiving no inner voice, drinking some bitter cup of rejection or despair, a simple distaste for the whole human race backing up in him, contented himself with remarking in his most penurious tones, “The people know my position.” Perhaps his silence was meant to convey some absolute contempt for Humphrey’s remarks, or some absolute statement of his political belief that one must not move without an inner sanction no matter what the occasion; it was still an extraordinary abstention.
Dull anger passed through the audience—but, of course! This was exactly why McCarthy had not been able to win the candidacy. Indeed had he ever wanted to win it, or had he moved like some sinister stalking-horse over the paths of new possibility? Or was he just in a thoroughgoing Irish miff because McGovern was obviously everyone’s pet? Once again, the gulf between the answer on one side of the question and the other was greater than the question itself. If Nixon had been an enigma, McCarthy was a larger one.
McGovern picked up all the chips. “Coming in as late as I did,” he said in reference to his candidacy, “I can’t afford to give up any free time.” And he gave an angelic grin. The crowd roared. They were his. They were waiting for an answer to Humphrey.
If a casting director in Hollywood had to find a Boy Scout leader who could play Romantic lead in a ten-million-dollar movie, McGovern would be his find. There was nobody nicer or cleaner than George McGovern in the city of Chicago. And he made all the points in his sweet troubled vibrant honest good guy Good Christian missionary voice. “I think we Democrats bear a special burden before the American people in 1968 in that four years ago we sought their votes, we sought their confidence on a rallying cry of ‘No wider war.’ ” The house broke down. Wild cheers. Hints of an impromptu demonstration. “It is all very well and good,” said McGovern, riding the energy of this enthusiasm, “to talk about the recent election in Vietnam, but let’s remember that one of the most honorable candidates in that election, Presidential candidate Chu, was recently sent to jail for five years at hard labor for the single crime of advocating what Senator McCarthy and George McGovern and others have advocated, and that is a ‘negotiated end of this war.’ Thank you very much.”
They gave him a standing ovation. They were delighted. They loved him. He was not really a big enough man to think of him seriously as President, he had more than a hint of that same ubiquitous sweetness which had finally melted away Humphrey’s connection between the simplest fact and his own dear brain, but McGovern had years to go before he would sing castrat’. He would even—if he had entered earlier, but of course he had not, no accident he had not—have done modestly well in taking delegates from McCarthy, he offered everything McCarthy did not, including the pleasure of watching Hubert Humphrey smile like a roasted cherub at the standing ovation given the speaker who had just demolished his speech. What a passion was in the air to tell Humphrey of the fury of the doves.
They had been squeezed, squashed, gunned down, out-maneuvered, driven in rout from the summits of power at this convention, had seen their party escape from them and race to the abyss with the Fool for their unwanted candidate—so it was their one opportunity to shout into his face, and they took it. Fool!
When this ovation was done, the debate went on, anticlimactic but for a later speech by McCarthy, a speech in which he as much as said farewell to those who had hopes for him in this room, and in that land of suburbs and television sets where his crusade had first been cheered. Asked if he would throw his support “to another person who has similar views,” he began quietly, proceeded quietly, but his metaphor on this occasion was equal to his bitterness, his pride, and his high sense of the standards. He brought the curtain down with that dignity which was his most unique political possession. “... many stood on the sidelines, as I said earlier, on the hilltops, dancing around the bonfires. Few came down into the valley where the action was. And I said then that if one challenged the President he had to be prepared to be President. It is like striking at the King—it is a dangerous thing.” How dangerous only he could know. Only he could know how far a pressure could push a terror, and how many mutations might a nightmare produce, yes, he had had to face Lyndon Johnson at eight in the morning and three in the morning, in the fatigue of five o’clock on a hard-working afternoon and after midnight in the effulgence of a full moon—only he had had to face Lyndon Johnson with such thoughts after Bobby Kennedy was dead. Perhaps there was bitterness so justifiable a man’s mouth could pucker at the invitation to speak. “I said early in New Hampshire, during the New Hampshire primary—I was asked whether I could support Senator Robert Kennedy if he should become the nominee and his views were the same as my views. I said I could. ... I have been waiting for them to say the same thing about me.” He turned, started to go away, then came back. “One other thing. I said that I could not support a Democratic candidate whose views did not come close to what mine are.”
Now he was gone, now back in his seat, the hand of applause started slowly, continued, built in volume. It grew for a surprising time, never wild in its force nor released in its enthusiasm, but it went on. The force of respect was also source for a modest ovation.
9
Later that day, early in the evening, McCarthy went into a meeting with Steve Smith, Teddy Kennedy’s brother-in-law, and told him that he was willing to withdraw from the race if Kennedy would enter, and that he would instruct his delegates that they were free; further, he would suggest that they give their support to Kennedy.
Would there be anything he desired in return?
No, he was not asking for anything in victory or defeat. (McCarthy was obviously a fanatic—he was seeking to destroy politics-is-property.)
Smith thanked him, told him he would relay his message to Teddy Kennedy, made some comment on the munificence of the offer, perhaps thinking to himself that it came a little late, and left.
Perhaps two hours after this, the reporter encountered McCarthy by chance in a Chicago restaurant on the North Side.
The Senator, sitting at a long table in the corner of
the main dining room, a modest room (for the restaurant was situated in a brownstone) had his back comfortably to the wall, and was chatting over the coffee with his guests. The atmosphere was sufficiently relaxed for the reporter and his friend, another reporter who had been doing a story on McCarthy for Look, to come up past the Secret Service without great strain and greet the Senator. Neither of the reporters was to know anything about the meeting with Steve Smith until some days later, but it was likely McCarthy had come to some decision—at the least, he was more relaxed than at any time the reporter had seen him in Chicago. Perhaps it was the friends he was with, big Irishmen like himself for the most part, a couple of them present with their wives, or at least such was the reporter’s impression, for he was introduced to more than a half-dozen people in the aftermath of meeting the Senator and some were big genial Irishmen with horn-rimmed glasses and some were lean Irishmen with craggy faces, and one was an Irishman from Limerick with a Dublin face, one-third poet, one-third warrior, one-third clerk. Perhaps it was the company, but the reporter had never seen McCarthy in such a mood. The benign personality of the public meetings, agreeable but never compelling, was gone—the personality which suggested that serious activity had something absurd about it—gone. The manner which declared, “I’m a nice guy, and look what I got into”—gone!
Speaking with the license a man has when his dinner is interrupted, McCarthy struck back to the conversation twelve weeks earlier in a living room in Cambridge, “Still waiting for me to repeat that 1960 speech?”
Miami and the Siege of Chicago Page 14
