Oates ran the Washington office, did all the hiring, and watched my back for the next three months. But that was the least of it. She had been associated for years as a campus activist with the National Student Association, a confederation of college and university governments whose members totaled in the millions, and she understood the potential and the necessity for organizing students across America to canvass for McCarthy to end the war. She introduced me to Sam Brown and David Mixner, who would mobilize a massive “Get clean for Gene” campaign—a slogan Oates thought up—that put many thousands of college students, with beards shaved off and ponytails gone, at work knocking on doors across America. Mixner and Brown would go on in subsequent years to organize massive antiwar campaigns that attracted hundreds of thousands to Washington.
The campaign had an excellent speechwriter, Peter Barnes, who later went to work for Newsweek, and I and a few of the volunteers whom Oates had recruited would add our thoughts to Peter’s drafts and get them to McCarthy in the hope that he would be interested enough to make them better. It was an imperfect system because the senator was brilliant at speaking on the fly, with no text, and he was also brilliant when he took time to review a draft, which he always improved. On those few occasions when he did so, we would have an advance text of speeches for distribution to the press, and better media coverage.
I knew my place and understood that McCarthy was a terrific second-guesser. I was constantly drafting short statements for the media about issues in the news, many of them about the Vietnam War, and they were invariably critical of the President. I was careful to get his approval in advance. Most were ignored, but there were occasions when McCarthy would be accused of going too far in his criticism of a president in wartime. The underlying inference was that he was aiding and abetting the enemy. On such occasions, especially in the presence of others, he would tear into me and ask how I could write such thoughtless tripe. I would just take it. I was sure McCarthy liked me—that is, my willingness to work hard and keep him up to date on important new books and magazine articles, along with what was in the newspapers. I also realized how taxing it was to make six, seven, or more speeches a day and constantly be on guard against a gaffe that could damage the campaign and even knock him out of the race. I understood why he was so disdainful of the media, which initially treated his campaign as one of whimsy, but I couldn’t fathom why, when there was an important speech to be made, he did not always insist on finding time to sit down with a speechwriter and outside experts to actually discuss what he wanted to say, or in other ways be proactive in terms of making public statements or giving interviews to those reporters he trusted. Did he really want to be President?
Early in the campaign, after a long, exhausting week of McCarthy shaking hands and making the same talk over and over again, I was called on a quiet Saturday afternoon in Manchester, New Hampshire, by a producer for Meet the Press, the most popular Sunday morning television interview show, and told there had been a last-minute cancellation. Would McCarthy fly to Washington and be the guest? He resisted, insisting he was just too tired. Of course he had to go. So I assured him I would cancel everything we had scheduled for the day afterward if he did the show. He had to know I was lying, but off we went. I did not cancel, and there was hell to pay. The ultimate truth, which he knew, was that Marylouise Oates and I and the thousands of college students ringing doorbells were not essentially working for him but rather to end the war. He had won us over with his brilliant speeches and the courage to do what Bobby Kennedy was too fearful to do. The senator, however, viewed our respect and admiration for him as an unwanted obligation. I had to beg him to spend time with the volunteers, and he often failed to do so.
On the other hand, there was a night in San Francisco early in the campaign when Jerry Brown, the son of former California governor Pat Brown, came for a visit. Young Brown was a devout Catholic who had studied in a Jesuit cloister, as did McCarthy, a Benedictine (who insisted that his religious views be separate from the campaign), and the two of them began talking about marijuana. Neither had ever smoked a joint, and there was no secret that some of the college-age volunteers who worked for me in the press operation were tokers. What was it all about? they asked. It took me only a few moments to produce a few joints, and the two of them got high, or tried to, for the first time. The stuff did little for McCarthy, so he said, but it did much more for Brown. On another night in San Francisco, after a long round of speeches and meetings, I watched as an exhausted McCarthy revived over drinks with one of his pals from his religious study days in Minnesota, an up-and-coming priest who would eventually become a bishop. I was sent out at some point to the City Lights bookstore in North Beach for a book of poetry, and another bottle of scotch, and as the night wore on, the talk turned from poetry to the Old Testament. The two of them began reading portions of the ancient text aloud to each other, amid much laughter and comments like “Would you believe this one, Gene?” It was fun to watch, and learn, as the two Bible experts went at it.
The nation’s first presidential primary, in New Hampshire, was approaching. McCarthy was running there as a write-in candidate against the President, and McCarthy’s fate, and perhaps the fate of the antiwar movement, would be decided on March 12, election day. The senator worked a hell of a lot harder than even his good friends thought he would. A typical campaign day would begin in Washington before five o’clock in the morning. McCarthy, who lived near our home, would drive over to fetch me, sometimes dashing in for scrambled eggs and a chat with my wife (he was always more interested in women), and we’d fly off to campaign, hoping to shake the hands of factory workers in Manchester as they began their morning shift.
It was very slow going at first. McCarthy had little visibility, as the polls throughout January and early February made clear. But we picked up support from Paul Newman and Robert Ryan, two movie stars who shared our worries about the war and who were willing to do anything they could, no matter how taxing, to help our fledgling campaign. Newman’s commitment was immense: He spent day after day making speeches at odd places throughout New Hampshire and afterward would meet with me or Marylouise Oates, who had moved there with our media staff, to discuss questions to which he thought he did not have a good enough answer. He wanted to learn. Ryan was full of surprising information. Over lunch one day, he watched me slather ketchup on a rushed hamburger and fries and asked me where in Chicago I had grown up. How did he know? He told me his father had been a union organizer in that union-dominated city and my use of ketchup made the guess a good bet. Robert Lowell, America’s most brilliant poet, also joined the campaign. His affinity with the candidate was obvious: Not only was McCarthy attacking the Vietnam War, which Lowell hated, but he was a poet at heart. McCarthy would bemuse and frustrate me by reading poems by intellectuals such as George Seferis, among others, instead of the briefing books on local issues I and my staff were constantly shoving at him.
The senator was doing six or more campaign speeches and appearances a day, at high schools, at colleges, and in front of church groups, and he enjoyed Lowell’s company in between. So did I. The three of us, with a driver, would flow from event to event sipping chilled vodka or some other alcohol from a thermos, and the candidate and the poet would happily trade joyous barbs and insights as I vainly tried to get McCarthy to focus on the next event. At one point, a highway billboard popped up with a photo of Nixon—then a candidate for the Republican nomination—and a slogan saying, “Nixon’s the one.” McCarthy insisted that the two of them could do better, and within three or four seconds, so it seemed, Cal, as Lowell asked to be called, said, “Nixon’s at ease with efficiency.”
Writing about it now, I’m not sure why the phrase seemed so impressive, but at the time it hit like a first-round knockout, and McCarthy spent a good hour sulking. Lowell had beaten him to the punch. Cal and I and the volunteer driver (what a story he could share later) dared not glance at each other for fear of laughing. I l
iked Cal and I’m sure he liked the fact that I knew nothing about poetry and never asked about his chaotic personal life. He spent hours yakking with me about my life—never his—during the seemingly unending McCarthy campaign events, where we sat out of sight. He wanted to know what I learned covering the Pentagon, and at one point he happily informed me, after a call from his then wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, an editor at The New York Review of Books, that the magazine had bought the serialization rights to my CBW book and would imminently publish two long excerpts from it.
McCarthy was a man of constant mood swings, best understood by his daughter Mary, the one member of the family who openly supported the campaign and endorsed its antiwar purpose. She was a student at Radcliffe and traveled with us on weekends. I would try hard to find her before presenting her father with a speech draft or a list of journalists who sought interviews. One morning, when my requests were especially fractious, I asked Mary how her father was feeling. Her answer still makes me laugh: “Alienated, as usual.”
McCarthy, when irritated, often took off on me, telling me again and again that my job was not “to get the press to like you, but to like me. Everybody thinks you’re great. You’ve got reporters sleeping in my bed, and riding in the back of my car.” He seemed to save his harshest indictments until he had an audience that included stars like Lowell or some of his big campaign contributors. I remember one night in which he learned at the end of a long day that I had issued a statement in his name—he had approved the gist of it—in which I quoted him as saying, “I believe.” He repeated the phrase again and again, adding, “Everyone knows I don’t say those words.” Of course he did, but at such moments I was glad for the tough love my father had put me through. I was certainly intimidated by McCarthy and eager to please, but not as much as others were.
There was an occasion, late in the campaign, when I was sure I had crossed a threshold and would be thrown out of work. We were flying on a commercial flight from Washington to Manchester when the pilot approached me to say that George Romney, the moderate Republican governor of Michigan, had just announced he was withdrawing as a presidential candidate. The pilot added that a pressroom had been set aside because there was a huge crowd of journalists waiting at the airport for us. Romney had been mocked incessantly by the media after a visit to South Vietnam when he claimed that he had been “brainwashed” by the briefings he’d received. His withdrawal was a huge break for us; primary rules in New Hampshire permitted independents and unregistered voters to vote for any candidate they chose, regardless of party affiliation, and our polling showed that we were certain to pick up many Romney votes. I told the senator about the withdrawal and wrote him a memo, with statistics from our polling, about the Republican votes that suddenly were there for the taking. I urged him to praise Romney for his great effort and talk about his love of public service. It was complete boilerplate and for sure was unnecessary—McCarthy did not need me to tell him how to win votes. But so what? This was a big deal. The senator read the few pages I wrote and then—as I watched in horror—slowly began tearing them up, with one long strip following another. Trouble was coming; I had told him what to think.
We landed and found a horde of reporters who, ignoring the pressroom, rushed instead to meet our plane on the tarmac. Aircraft in those days landed in front of the terminal, and passengers walked inside. McCarthy was the first off, with me following. Television network correspondents were there, along with more members of the national press corps than we had ever seen. What came next was utter perversion. When all quieted down, he opened his comments by saying—this was in front of a flood of cameras and microphones—that when it came to a question of the brainwashing of Romney, “just a light rinse would do.” It took a moment or two for some in the crowd to get it and as laughter was breaking out, I jumped in front of McCarthy waving my arms and said something like “C’mon, guys, we’re not having a press conference here.” I may have added a line about passengers waiting to get off the plane, but whatever I said worked. The network crews broke down their equipment, and we were all moved to a room inside the terminal. I could not believe the tough national press corps would let a punk like me push them around, but they did.
That night, as I watched in panic, none of the networks used the line about Romney. The one major newspaper that used the quote, and had fun with it, as far as I could tell, was London’s Sunday Times, whose first-rate Insight investigative team was in America to cover the primary. I was amazed and felt as if I’d protected McCarthy from his own peevishness. He said nothing to me about the event, but he knew I had protected him—from himself. I had a lousy job, so I thought, because I had loved the brilliance of the line—the man was very funny—but his job at that moment was to do everything possible to win the votes of those in New Hampshire who were supporting Romney. The senator had to know that there was no halfway when it came to running for the presidency, and ending a war.
A few days later, during yet another plane ride in which he began gossiping about the Senate, I got the courage to ask about some of his pals who were hanging around the campaign. I knew by sheer coincidence that one of them, Tom McCoy, had been the CIA chief of station in Laos; a neighbor of ours, a local artist, had served under him there. It was hard to dislike McCoy; he was rarely serious and loved playing word games about who he was and where he had worked. He was a devout Catholic, as was McCarthy, and I thought their ties came through the church.
I told McCarthy I knew McCoy had been in the CIA, and the senator said, more or less, so what? Lots of good people had joined the Agency after World War II in hopes of turning back communism and making the world a safer place. I had read enough to know that McCarthy’s political party, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, was socially liberal—in favor of unions and state support of railroads and utilities—as well as being hostile to international communism. The senator then volunteered—I did not ask—that he had done favors involving the CIA for President Kennedy. McCarthy had said little to me about Jack Kennedy, but he could be vicious in private about Bobby, telling me and others that he was brighter and a better Catholic than Bobby and then adding that his dog was a lot brighter than Bruno, the high-profile Kennedy family dog. McCarthy went on: He had done some secret missions for President Kennedy, including making visits to Catholic leaders in Latin America—he specifically mentioned Chile—that included the delivery to a prominent anticommunist political leader there of a briefcase filled with fifty thousand dollars in CIA funds. The money, and its delivery, were handled by Jerry Eller. Afterward, McCarthy said, with what I took to be pride, that he would never visit the President in the White House to debrief him, but would meet anywhere else.
I was more than a little troubled by all of this: He had abetted Jack Kennedy in an abuse of presidential power whose continuing abuse in Vietnam, half a decade later, was a major element of his campaign against Lyndon Johnson. I guess, flattered as I was by his trust in me, I applauded him for his change of heart and did not think then and do not believe today that the CIA was in any way running his campaign, nor did it have anything to do with his decision to challenge Lyndon Johnson. But I knew that the CIA was deeply immersed in the killing and maiming that was going on in Vietnam, and thought that there was a hell of a lot about the Agency that needed to be made public—just not during the campaign. (I had already met, through McCarthy, a few other insiders who would be of enormous help to my reporting on the CIA in future years.) I never told McCarthy what I thought of the CIA; in fact, we did not discuss the CIA again.
Our goal was to get rid of Johnson and end the Vietnam War, and we were still floundering by the end of January. We got a huge boost one night in remote Berlin, New Hampshire, after a long day, when I answered the door of my motel room and found Richard Goodwin standing in the cold. There had been rumors in the press that Goodwin, a veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who was famed for speeches on civil rights he had written for both presidents, h
ad been disappointed by Bobby Kennedy’s refusal to run for the presidency and was thinking of joining our campaign. And here he was, in a run-down motel at a pretty much useless campaign stop. Dick later would tell a different version of our first chat, but I remember his words as well as any I heard from Arnold Dornfeld at the City News Bureau. He walked into my room carrying an electric typewriter, dramatically dropped it on a bed, and said, “You and me and this typewriter, kid, are going to overthrow a president.” Goodwin, a Jack Kennedy whiz kid, a guy who finished at the top of his Harvard Law School class and edited the law review there, was volunteering his services to our ragtag campaign. Dick and I bickered a lot; I was jealous of him because McCarthy delighted in talking to someone who was a grown-up and knew the score. How tiresome it had to be for McCarthy to put up with political novices like me whose sole purpose for being in the campaign and working as hard as we were was not, at the core, as I said earlier, about him, or his political success, but to stop a war. That was also Dick’s motive. I liked and admired Dick—we eventually shared a suite in the Manchester hotel that was the New Hampshire campaign headquarters—but I quickly tired of picking up the private telephone we both used and hearing Teddy Kennedy ask to speak to Dick. Kennedy called so often he eventually began calling me Sy. It was obvious that if McCarthy did well as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire, Bobby would enter the race, and it would be bye-bye McCarthy. Goodwin knew everything there was to know about our poll numbers and the campaign funds we did or did not have, and I was convinced he was sharing that information. So one anxious morning I woke up McCarthy earlier than he wanted—not a good idea—and told him what I thought Goodwin was up to. McCarthy, ever droll, even in pajamas, gave me a sly look and said, “Well, I don’t know, Sy. It’s kind of good to have a traitor around. Keeps you on your toes.” That was that. I was again nonplussed. Did the guy want to be president? If not, what was I doing?
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