CHAPTER 17

Realignment 1968

TEDIUM GRIPPED THE convention from the clack of the opening gavel,” Theodore H. White wrote of the Miami Beach Republican convention in The Making of the President 1968. He continued: “No convention in history had been as dull as this except, perhaps, Eisenhower’s renomination in San Francisco in 1956.”

He was wrong. The fight for the nomination at Miami Beach in 1968 was one of the most fascinating, closely contested convention struggles I ever covered. White’s chapter on Miami Beach was subtitled: “Rockefeller Versus Nixon.” But Rockefeller never had a chance. The real struggle was between Reagan and Nixon.

After Rockefeller announced on March 21 that he was not running, his aides told me the governor had concluded that if the Republican Party felt it needed him to save its soul, it would come to him without him being required to enter the primaries. By the time Rockefeller bowed to the entreaties of the eastern Republican establishment and belatedly announced his candidacy on April 30, it was too late. Rockefeller could not come within 200 delegates of the 660 needed to be nominated. Rockefeller’s rationale for contesting the nomination at Miami Beach was based on the eleventh-hour candidacy of Ronald Reagan creating a convention deadlock.

I had first met Reagan the year after the Goldwater debacle on June 9, 1965, when he addressed a Republican fund-raiser at the Cincinnati Gardens. The Evans & Novak column of June 14, datelined Cincinnati, dubbed Reagan “the new messiah of the Goldwater movement.” I wrote that “his carefully polished basic speech” had followed “the JFK system of spewing out a profusion of statistics, wit and literary allusions (including one quote from Hilaire Belloc).” (Washington Evening Star columnist Mary McGrory, who revered Jack Kennedy’s memory, called me that morning to assail me for daring to compare a great president with a washed-up B-movie actor.)

F. Clifton White saw Reagan as the candidate he had hoped Goldwater would become but never did. He was ready to reassemble his nationwide team that had won the nomination for Goldwater. As Clif related it to me, however, he had a major problem: Californians did not like their governors running for president while still in office. If Reagan openly sought the presidential nomination soon after arriving in Sacramento in 1967, his governorship would be dead on arrival. His California supporters, who had worked hard to get him into office, told Reagan he could not let that happen.

White detailed for me an intricate minuet. A few emissaries under cover would try prying delegates from Nixon even though Reagan was not a candidate. A few weeks before the convention, according to White’s plan, Reagan would declare himself “California’s favorite son” candidate and make trips in search of delegates even though he would swear he was not an active candidate. When his name was placed in nomination on the convention floor at Miami Beach by the California delegation, he then would become an active—though theoretically reluctant—candidate. That’s almost exactly how it worked out.

Late in July 1968, Clif White called me to report that Reagan, who had announced as a favorite son, finally was going on the road. The big event would be in Birmingham, Alabama, with ninety delegates and alternates from all over the Deep South flown in by private plane. The date was Wednesday, July 23, with the convention just ten days away. These southerners had been quietly wooed by Bob Walker, Nixon’s former deputy campaign chairman who was hired by the California convention delegation under the guise of arranging its physical arrangements at Miami Beach. But when the southerners entered the ballroom at Birmingham’s Tutwiler Hotel to meet Reagan, I heard Walker announced as “Governor Reagan’s southern campaign chairman.” Clif White, also hired by the California delegation and not the noncandidate, was at Reagan’s side throughout the talks with delegates. Ronald Reagan was a candidate in everything but name.

At Birmingham, I was told by some southern delegates that they so distrusted Nixon that they were desperate for any alternative. But many others complained it was too late. If Reagan had come to them earlier, they said, they would have endorsed him but now they had an unbreakable commitment to Nixon. Several added to me, however, that if there were a second ballot, they would bolt to Reagan.

When I arrived in Miami Beach, I found Clif White had reassembled his 1964 Goldwater team (including his lieutenant, Frank Whetstone of Cut Bank, Montana) at the Deauville Hotel.

Clif White talked Reagan into going on a Sunday interview program on August 4, the day before the convention opened, to show delegates that he really was a candidate now. It was CBS’s Face the Nation, and I was on the three-man panel as the non-CBS journalist. His answer to my first question passed Reagan over his Rubicon.

Novak: Governor Reagan, how do you square the fact that you have not and say you’re not going to announce for President, and yet you have a highly competent, highly professional staff working out of your hotel here in Miami Beach on a full-scale delegate basis?

Reagan: Well, you say that I have a staff of that kind. This has been, I’ll admit, a very unusual situation. I didn’t set out to be a favorite son. I was asked to be by the party. There were people throughout the country that started these movements in my behalf, and some in California. I was aware of them. I couldn’t help but be aware of them. I told these people in advance they were doing this with no help from me. I also, however, told them that I would be entered into nomination—placed in nomination by the California delegation at the convention. Now, these people have continued to work, and are working, and there is no question about it. Once I’m placed in nomination, I am a candidate, if the delegates choose to consider me along with those who have been campaigning, this they are free to do. And so this effort now has reached the convention stage, when these people—there’s no question about it—are openly and actively working, because of their belief that I should be the nominee of the party.

Ronald Reagan had just become a candidate for president, employing the tortuous formula laid out for me by Clif White.

Nixon’s southern flank was about to come unhinged. Rowly and I both had excellent sources throughout the southern delegations that Teddy White lacked. I had a permanent floor pass and roamed the southern delegations every night. There was no question that rank-and-file delegates wanted to bolt to Reagan, depriving Nixon of a nomination he thought was wrapped up.

One man saved Nixon: Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a hoary veteran of southern politics still fighting a rearguard action against ending racial segregation. Clif White told me that former Democrat Thurmond confessed to him he would have preferred Reagan over Nixon, but did not want to be marginalized in his new party as he had in the old one as an undependable bolter. He almost single-handedly put down the southern rebellion after the New York Times reported that Nixon was considering the liberal Republicans Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, and Charles Percy to be his running mate.

I did not help Nixon’s cause on Wednesday, the day of balloting for the nomination. An Evans & Novak column reported that Nixon had requested and received the previous week a report that there was no constitutional impediment to Mayor Lindsay as a vice presidential nominee even though at that time both he and Nixon were residents of New York City. “Nixon Appears to Be Reaching Toward the Left For Running Mate Despite Southern Hostility,” said the Washington Post headline on the column, which the Reagan campaign distributed to southern delegates. This story contributed to a crisis in the Florida delegation that almost changed the course of American history by flipping it to Reagan under the winner-take-all unit rule. “The Reagan delegate hunters, led by F. Clifton White, were simply out-gunned in a majority of Southern states by Thurmond’s massive authority,” I wrote in Friday’s Evans & Novak column. The spectacle of StromThurmond determining the nominee of the Republican Party showed how far political realignment in America had progressed.

Save for Thurmond, I believe Reagan would have been nominated and would have been elected, by a bigger margin than Nixon. I also reject the Republican cliché that it was fortunate Reagan was not elected for another twelve years, by which time his ideological framework was better refined. While Reagan had not yet embraced supply-side tax cuts in 1968, his election that year would have averted Watergate and its dreadful consequences for the Republican Party, for conservatism, and for America.

         

THE WAY RICHARD Nixon won his second nomination for president left him with an incalculable debt to Strom Thurmond, carrying consequences—beginning with the selection of a vice-presidential running mate. Thurmond ruled out as too liberal John Lindsay (who was being supported by Charlie McWhorter). He also blackballed Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon (who was backed in a memo prepared for Nixon by conservative advisers Dick Whalen and Martin Anderson and signed by several other aides).

Still, plenty of progressive young Republicans passed the Thurmond test—including Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee and Congressman George Bush of Texas. The selection instead of Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew represented the folly of picking a vice president at the convention under deadline pressure in the dead of night.

It also signified the dark side of Richard M. Nixon. What appealed most to Nixon was Agnew at his public worst—administering a demagogic public tongue-lashing to black leaders in Baltimore after the riots following the death of Martin Luther King. In the absence of any vetting process, nobody suspected that Agnew was one of the most crooked politicians in America.

The Nixon campaign staff moved across the continent from Miami Beach’s Hilton-Plaza to the Mission Bay Inn, a California resort outside San Diego. My friend, the young conservative journalist Richard J. Whalen, who had been working for Nixon, had been downgraded along with other young campaign staffers—forbidden even to leave the premises without permission. It was too much for Whalen. He left Mission Bay to return home to Fort Sumner, Maryland, near Washington, without making a public fuss. He was accidentally discovered by me, as he reported in his 1972 book, Catch the Falling Flag.

By chance, I threw a scare into the high command, for I picked up the telephone at home and Bob Novak, who was making a social call to a campaign widow, showed his keen reporter’s instinct. “What the hell are you doing there, Dick?” he asked. I explained that my daughter was ill and that I had taken a furlough from the campaign. Novak laughed. The next day, the Evans-Novak column bore the headline: NIXON WHIZ KID WALKS OUT.

I reported in the column: “Whalen was not alone. Most of Nixon’s younger aides left Miami Beach in a blue funk over the Agnew selection.”

         

I HAD LEFT our home in Rockville, Maryland, on Sunday, July 28, for two weeks in Miami Beach, expecting Geraldine would give birth to our second child any day. I called daily from Florida, but the summons to return home never came. Our baby son was born at the most convenient time for me—on August 14 during the single week’s interval in 1968 between my coming home from the Republican convention and leaving for the Democratic convention.

I wanted to name him Alexander Augustus Williams Novak, and Geraldine agreed. Alexander was the greatest conqueror and Augustus the greatest ruler of the ancient world (Williams was Geraldine’s maiden name). It was pretentious, and so was my mailing Alexander’s birth announcement to politicians around the country who were news sources rather than personal friends.

Most responded with polite acknowledgments, but the irrepressible Governor Roger Branigin of Indiana went further. He named Alexander a Sagamore of the Wabash, the Indiana equivalent of a Kentucky colonel, and sent us a fancy certificate of his rank. This was an honor accorded only to the most prestigious Hoosiers, and bestowing it on a non-Hoosier infant typified Roger Branigin’s sense of humor.

(Twenty years later, when my daughter Zelda was working in the political office of Vice President Dan Quayle, one senior aide—like Quayle, a Hoosier—had just been named a Sagamore of the Wabash and proudly brandished his certificate. “Oh,” Zelda said in fake innocence, “my brother got one of those when he was a baby. We kept it on his dresser.”)

         

EVEN BEFORE THE first gavel in Chicago, I was writing that 1968 promised to be the Democrats’ worst convention since the 102-ballot New York City disaster of 1924. It was an extraordinary event that a journalist could cover as a police reporter from the riot-torn streets or as a political reporter from the chaotic convention.

Antiwar demonstrators, a rough lot who looked nothing like the young “Clean for Gene” McCarthy idealists, poured into town the weekend before the convention. I knew the Chicago cops well enough to be sure some skulls would be cracked. The demonstrators came looking for trouble and got what they wanted.

Rowly and I concentrated on Hubert Humphrey’s Vietnam dilemma. While desperate to soften his stand on the war, the vice president could not move without President Johnson’s approval. LBJ controlled enough delegates—including the Texas delegation headed by Governor John B. Connally—to deny Humphrey the nomination.

On the Sunday afternoon before the convention, I was hanging around the Chicago Sun-Times workspace at the Conrad Hilton when I was approached by an extremely well dressed couple. The man asked (in a Texas accent) if I knew the whereabouts of Rowland Evans. When I replied that I did not, he introduced himself and his wife as Bob and Helen Strauss of Dallas, Texas. He had met Evans, and he had a “big story” to give him. But since Rowly was not around, he would give it to me. Thus began my thirty-six-year relationship with Robert S. Strauss.

Strauss told me he was the Democratic National Committeeman from Texas and a close associate of Connally. Strauss tried to give the impression he was telling me his darkest secrets when, in truth, he was—to use a phrase of the future—spinning me. Strauss said he had been sent to Chicago early by Connally, because the governor worried that things were getting out of control. Specifically, Humphrey was “fishtailing” (a phrase I used in our column) on the Vietnam plank in the party platform. If Humphrey dared retreat on Vietnam, said Strauss, Johnson would fly to Chicago to announce his candidacy and end Humphrey’s chances to be president.

(In 2004, over lunch in his Washington law office in the DuPont Plaza building that bears his name, I asked Strauss whether he had been in direct contact with Johnson. He replied his information came from Marvin Watson, a right-wing Texas steel executive who had become LBJ’s chief political henchman. Strauss said he thought Johnson really wanted to be nominated and elected to a second term. I still think he was trying to control Humphrey by frightening him.)

         

NIXON’S CAMPAIGN GOT going Labor Day weekend. I caught up with him in San Francisco, where the Republican candidate’s strategy became obvious: Sit on your huge lead and do nothing to jeopardize it. Rowly and I dropped into the Nixon road show occasionally that autumn, but he was running out the clock until the very end. In contrast, there was plenty of news to report traveling with Humphrey—all of it bad.

After the disastrous Chicago convention, Humphrey was exhausted, his campaign treasury depleted, and the whole operation unready for a general election campaign. The traditional starting date of Labor Day could not be met and slipped to a week later on Monday, September 9.

I joined Humphrey on September 12 as he left Washington in a motorcade heading north. The first stop was the dedication of a new span of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, connecting the states of Delaware and New Jersey. The crowd was pathetically small, and the candidate’s political speech inappropriate for a bridge dedication.

From the Delaware Bridge, the motorcade went to Sea Girt, New Jersey, where Humphrey was to address a state Democratic fund-raising dinner. In the pressroom with tongues loosened by an open bar, my liberal Democratic media colleagues expressed contempt for Humphrey’s toadying to LBJ at Chicago and vowed they never would vote for him.

When I entered the huge tent where the dinner would be held, I immediately feared the worst for Hubert. The assembled Democrats were party hacks with flashy ties and pinkie rings. Each table was loaded down with booze, and the boys were there for a good time. Humphrey was preceded by a long program of corny vaudeville acts highlighted by a fire-eater who evoked thunderous cheers from the well-oiled audience.

It was after ten o’clock before a beaming presidential candidate arrived. I think Hubert always imagined freshly scrubbed liberal activists from Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor Party seated before him, eager to share his wisdom. Facing drunken hacks who wanted no more than fifteen minutes of shouted party slogans, Hubert waded into forty-five minutes of programmatic liberalism. The table talk rose in volume, until halfway through his talk, Humphrey could hardly be heard. He seemed oblivious.

Humphrey’s next scheduled event was a speech to party workers in Pittsburgh’s William Penn Hotel on Friday night. He appealed to party loyalty and trashed Nixon in his law-and-order mode as “Fearless Fosdick,” the comic strip detective. Humphrey’s audience was left cold. Hubert did not finish speaking until after eleven o’clock, after which he went up to his hotel suite to meet local Democratic personages. On hand was a longtime Humphrey ally in western Pennsylvania, Meyer Berger, the national treasurer of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). I knew Berger slightly, and ran into him Saturday. Berger obviously wanted to tell somebody how he had complained to his old friend that he had said nothing about Vietnam in his speech that night. For Hubert to have any chance to carry Pennsylvania, Berger went on, he must publicly split with LBJ on the war. What came next I wrote in an Evans & Novak column, datelined Pittsburgh.

Humphrey glumly replied he simply could not in good conscience break with the Administration….

Revealing that in Administration councils he had opposed every Vietnamese troop buildup, Humphrey complained he could not now move a step leftward without being stymied by the President. “You know,” he confessed, “I have about as much power as you in the White House.”

He next exhibited an uncharacteristic fatalism, musing that perhaps the American electorate “has to learn a lesson” every so often. He wondered, however, why antiwar protesters ignored Richard M. Nixon while they hounded him by chanting—and Humphrey here imitated that chant—“Dump the Hump. Dump the Hump. Dump the Hump.” And there was, he added, non-support from the ranks of organized labor who were forsaking the Democratic Party now that their “bellies were full.”…

…[T]he Vice President has begun his campaign not only far behind but with two crushing liabilities: no strategy for regaining dissidents and an irrational schedule which wears him out without accomplishing anything. Understandably, even Humphrey the congenital optimist must confess a note of cold depression, as in those mournful early morning hours in Pittsburgh.

Actually Humphrey had two hopes. One was that Lyndon Johnson would sue for peace in Vietnam before the election. The other was that George Corley Wallace would siphon off sufficient votes from Nixon to elect Humphrey.

         

THE HOPE THAT George Wallace would save Hubert Humphrey collapsed three weeks later in Pittsburgh. On Thursday, October 3, the great bomber commander General Curtis E. LeMay was unveiled as Wallace’s vice presidential running mate on the ticket of the American Independence Party. On that morning, the Gallup Poll showed Nixon at 43 percent, Humphrey 30 percent, Wallace 24 percent.

Curt LeMay, standing behind Wallace in a ballroom at the Pittsburgh Hilton, looked ponderous and older than his sixty-two years. A brilliant air war tactician, he was named U.S. Air Force chief of staff by the newly elected President Kennedy in 1961 to begin an unhappy relationship marked by constant disagreement. LeMay was reputedly the model for General Jack D. Ripper in the 1964 antiwar movie, Dr. Strangelove.

What transpired in Pittsburgh after the LeMay announcement produced one of the most bizarre moments in my half century of covering politics. When the general was asked about “your policy in the employment of nuclear weapons,” he was off and running.

Now, nuclear war would be horrible. To me any war is horrible. It doesn’t make much difference to me if I have to go to war and get killed in the jungles of Vietnam with a Russian knife or get killed with a nuclear weapon. As a matter of fact if I had the choice, I’d lean towards the nuclear weapon.

That was incredible, but LeMay was not finished. He launched into discussing what he purported to be a government study of animal life on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific after extensive testing of nuclear weapons there, with the good news that “the rats out there are bigger, fatter and healthier than they were ever before.”

It really did sound like General Jack D. Ripper. I had my eyes fixed on Wallace, his expression betraying astonishment and despair. Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson, a relentless critic of Wallace, asked LeMay about the nuclear bomb: “If you found it necessary to end the [Vietnam] war, you’d use it, wouldn’t you?” LeMay replied: “If I found it necessary, I would use anything that we could dream up, including nuclear weapons.”

That was enough for Wallace, who interrupted his running mate. LeMay, said Wallace, “prefers to negotiate” rather than use any weapon and “hasn’t said anything about the use of nuclear weapons.”

Reporters did not disguise their appetite for feasting on LeMay over the coming month. That night at a Wallace rally in Toledo, LeMay was silent. When reporters approached him for questions, they were kept far away by Secret Service agents who surrounded the vice presidential candidate.

I wanted to talk to Wallace, but it was not easy to even make contact with him. Disgusted with hostile reporters, Wallace had abolished the office of campaign press secretary. At the Toledo rally, I managed to get to Wallace political aide Bill Jones and asked to see the governor for a few minutes to talk about LeMay.

At about eight o’clock the next morning in Toledo, I got a phone call in my hotel room from Jones telling me that if I wanted a word with Wallace I better hustle to his suite. Since the campaign motorcade was supposed to leave for the airport at eight thirty, I figured it would be few words indeed. When I arrived, I found Wallace—still in his bathrobe—seated at a table with a bacon-and-eggs breakfast for two. He invited me to join him for the meal, with this admonition: “Now, Mister Novak, this is strictly off-the-record. I mean strictly. Got that?”

Wallace told me he had wanted as his running mate Albert B. (Happy) Chandler—former governor of Kentucky, former U.S. senator, former commissioner of baseball. Chandler was seventy years old and eager to get back into politics on the Wallace ticket. “But mah’ money men”—he didn’t name them—“vetoed Happy.” Chandler was too liberal on economics and race. He had not been forgiven for his role in breaking baseball’s color bar with Jackie Robinson.

The “money men” were intent on LeMay, Wallace went on. “I said yes against my better judgment, and I never should have. He’s an absolute disaster. Did you hear him yesterday? But that’s the last you will ever hear from him. Nothing more! Not a word!”

Wallace felt he was just starting to break into the northern white workingman’s vote. “When’s the last time you heard me say conservative?” He was praising Bobby Kennedy, opposing “right to work” laws, taking Alabama labor union leaders with him on his trips north, opposing tax exemptions for giant foundations, urging tax cuts for the workingman, and promising to get out of Vietnam if the war could not be won with conventional weapons.

It was now well past the scheduled departure time of eight thirty, and I nervously glanced at my wristwatch. “Now, Novak,” Wallace scolded, “don’t you worry ’bout that. Ah’m the candidate, and we ain’t goin’ nowhere ’til Ah’m good and ready.”

Wallace resumed the monologue. He still felt he could get enough votes in the Electoral College to keep Nixon from a majority. If Nixon would not deal with him for electors (as Nixon said he would not), so much the better. He would deal in the House of Representatives with one vote per state. By that time, Wallace figured, Nixon would be ready to give him concessions. Maybe it would be cabinet posts, maybe policy positions. That’s as definite as Wallace would be with me.

After the LeMay meltdown, electoral votes in the South and voters all over the country that were lost to Humphrey now were lost to Wallace and went to Nixon. Curtis LeMay for the remaining twenty-two years of his long life must have pondered his performance during his fifteen minutes of fame in Pittsburgh.

         

THE YEAR THE DREAM DIED was the title of an account of the 1968 campaign by Jules Witcover published in 1997. It was a terrible time for liberals like Witcover and a pretty bad year for a lot of nonliberals as well, but it was a terrific year for Evans and Novak. We had perfected our reportorial nonideological style. We were at the peak of our game and the apex of our prestige.

Our status was reflected in the cover article (“The Evans and Novak Story” by Julius Duscha) on October 6 in Potomac, the Sunday magazine of the Washington Post. The cover by caricaturist David Levine showed Rowly and me smirking while eating slices out of the capitol building. Washington was one big piece of cake for us.

Duscha, a former Washington Post political reporter, played on the usual physical contrasts between Rowly and me. Evans: “suave, sandy-haired, handsome, trim.” Novak: “dark, brooding, unkempt, overweight.” Julius took at face value our ideological self-descriptions—Novak as a “moderate conservative and registered Republican” and Rowly as a “moderate liberal and independent politically.”

In researching his long article, Duscha found no ideological or political bias in the column. On the contrary, we were depicted as giving everybody a hard time. “Evans and Novak would make conflict in heaven,” Hubert Humphrey was quoted as saying.

Duscha described our many activities and put a price tag on some: a syndicated column purchased by 179 newspapers at from $5 to $200 a week, regular commentaries for Channel 5 WTTG in Washington and other Metromedia stations, lectures at $1,000 per columnist, the Evans-Novak Political Report at $50 a year, a newly published paperback version of Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power. While dropping hints about how all this had “paid off handsomely” for us, Julius did not attempt to estimate our income.

All this put together meant less money than many people guessed. My income for 1968 at age thirty-seven was just short of $70,000 (around $407,000 in 2007 dollars). With big mortgages on our Maryland home and our Delaware beach house, I was not saving a dime. At age thirty-seven, I had become famous but not rich.

         

THE EVANS & Novak column of Monday, October 28, reported that Congressman Mel Laird, a great Evans & Novak source who had entered Nixon’s inner circle, was pushing the candidate away from John Mitchell’s super-cautious, stay-off-TV counsel. On Laird’s advice, Nixon agreed to go on nationally televised interviews the last two Sundays of the campaign—including Meet the Press on November 3, two days before the election. Laird knew more about politics than Mitchell ever imagined and saw the peace liberals returning home to Humphrey after a highly publicized Salt Lake City speech in which the Democratic nominee made a special appeal to antiwar voters.

On Thursday, October 31, Johnson called a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and announced “prompt, productive, serious and intensive negotiations” in Paris. The return of peace Democrats to Humphrey was accelerated. The euphoria experienced by peace advocates and by Humphrey diminished sharply the next day when General Nguyen Van Thieu, the South Vietnamese president, announced that his government would not attend the Paris talks. The rumor immediately spread that Nixon was keeping Thieu away from Paris.

Nixon’s Meet the Press appearance took on special importance, and I felt responsibility as a panel member. Why then, did I not ask Nixon straight out whether he had interfered with Saigon to derail the peace plan? Perhaps I should have, but I had only rumors on which to base any questions. There was so much going on that the reporters sitting opposite Richard Nixon in Los Angeles did not know.

Anna Chan Chennault was a Chinese beauty who was the widow of a celebrated World War II hero, Brigadier General Claire Chennault, commander of the Flying Tigers in China. Now a naturalized American, she was a strong Nixon supporter with ties to the Thieu regime. Wiretaps ordered by the FBI and passed on to President Johnson overheard her pleading for Saigon’s boycott of the Paris talks. There is no question she was manipulated by John Mitchell and Spiro Agnew. Nixon had deniability, but I hardly think it conceivable that Mitchell and Agnew would have acted without Nixon’s knowledge.

To this day, I suspect that Dick Nixon got away with the most successful dirty trick of his career. It hardened the mind-set that led to the many-sided catastrophe of Watergate.

Dick Whalen had it right in Catch the Falling Flag published four years later: “[T]he politicians continued to the very end to deal with the overriding issue of Vietnam on the same petty level as they had throughout the campaign.”

         

DURING THE LAST week of the 1968 campaign, I went out to dinner in Washington with Ann Dowling. I had dated Ann when she was a secretary at the National Observer, sister publication of the Wall Street Journal. She had remained a friend and become a source as a political operative, now employed by the Democratic National Committee.

DNC headquarters were located at the Watergate, a new building on the Potomac River. Ann suggested we end the evening with drinks at the Watergate cocktail lounge. Seated near us was Robert C. McCandless, a twenty-nine-year-old Washington lawyer who ran Humphrey’s national campaign for president, drinking with several young aides.

“So you’re the famous Bob McCandless!” I said when Ann introduced me. That sarcastic greeting triggered a debate over the outcome of the election less than a week away. We all had ingested a lot of alcohol, and I challenged McCandless with a bet: ten dollars for each electoral vote. It was a sucker bet. Even if the popular vote was close; Nixon threatened to win in an electoral vote landslide. The best Humphrey could do in a stunning upset was a narrow electoral vote margin. McCandless knew as well how lousy that bet was, but he later told me he could not let me show him up in front of his young staffers.

I next brought up the U.S. Senate race in McCandless’s home state of Oklahoma. Veteran Democratic senator Mike Monroney had a formidable Republican challenger in Henry Bellmon, a former governor. I offered to bet a case of Chivas Regal Scotch whiskey (my brand was Cutty Sark, but Chivas was more expensive) that Bellmon would win. McCandless agreed, but he clearly was not happy with me.

         

ALL MY LIFE I had heard tales about the Chicago Democratic machine’s skullduggery in the city’s African-American precincts. In 1968, with Illinois a closely contested state, I wanted to observe firsthand whether these reports were exaggerated. The result was one of my favorite Evans & Novak columns.

I contacted Operation Eagle Eye, an organization of Illinois Republican activists looking for vote theft and asked for Republican poll watcher’s credentials for election day, November 5. I was told the Democratic machine would permit only one outside Republican in one voting place at any time. I would be on my own.

Two men from Operation Eagle Eye picked me up at dawn at the Drake Hotel and drove me to the West Side, where my father had been a teenager when it was a Jewish ghetto. Now it was poorer than ever and totally black. The car dropped me at the James Johnson School, polling place for the 45th precinct in the 24th ward. No reporter was permitted in such a polling place, but I gained admission on my poll watcher’s credential. I was the only white person I saw there, or at any other precinct I visited.

In an Evans & Novak column, I wrote that “lurid Republican charges leveled for years have not been exaggerated.”

[V]oter registration was meaningless. A nod from the Democratic precinct captain allowed an unregistered voter to vote by merely signing an affidavit. Whether he might vote in another precinct as well would be impossible to determine….

Without asking whether the voter wanted help, the election judge…entered the booth with every voter and instructed him to pull the Democratic straight-party lever, breaking the state law.

Once the curtain had closed and the voter was alone inside the booth, the judge would hover just outside so that the vote was anything but secret.

Voters were supposed to be given up to four minutes inside the booth. If a voter in the 45th precinct stayed inside for more than thirty seconds and consequently appeared to be splitting his vote, the Democratic precinct captain would tap him on the shoulder or even enter the voting booth. When one woman persisted by refusing to get out of the booth after a full minute, I heard the captain say: “Come on, get her out of there.”

Time magazine’s issue of November 22 carried a flattering account of my reporting, concluding: “This was the kind of performance that has come to be expected of the Evans-Novak team, which avoids pontificating and concentrates [on] examining the inner machinery of politics.” Nobody accused me of carrying water for the Republican Party or trying to intimidate African-Americans. We were indeed at the peak of our prestige.

         

WHEN I RETURNED late in the afternoon on election day from my clandestine poll watching in Chicago, I voted in Montgomery County, Maryland, for the first time. I had not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Eisenhower in 1956 even though I had grown ideologically much closer to the Republicans than the Democrats. I had decided some time ago to vote for Nixon, but not with pleasure. I thought both Humphrey and Nixon were weak leaders but that Nixon was better able to deal with the Soviet Union—in retrospect, probably misplaced confidence.

         

BOB MCCANDLESS HAD lost his sucker bet with me. Nixon beat Humphrey by 110 electoral votes. At $10 a vote that added up to $1,100 (a considerable sum then, $6,395 in 2007 dollars). I was accustomed to getting stiffed on political bets and had never collected on one that size. McCandless, though his financial condition was now reduced by being shown the way out by both his law firm and his heiress wife after the election, immediately mailed me a check for $1,100.

As for the Oklahoma Senate race where Republican Bellmon defeated Democrat Monroney, McCandless dropped me a note saying the case of Chivas Regal constituted one bet too many. He could not cough up the money immediately, he said, but would send by messenger a fifth of Chivas at the first of every month for the next twelve months. Geraldine really missed it after twelve months when the monthly bottle of Chivas did not arrive, but she retained a warm feeling about McCandless.