THE idea of Presidential primary elections is so naturally tailored to the American experience in democracy that no one can name its father or date its origins—except that it was born before the turn of this century somewhere “out west,” as a periodic wave of American restlessness came to crest in the Populist-Progressive movement. People, ordinary people—so ran the thought—should have the right to go into closed voting booths and there accept or repudiate the party bosses in naming the party’s candidates to govern them.
American Progressives had already beaten this idea into the public law of various states when, in the first ten years of this century, four states vied for the honor of translating the idea of citizen participation within their party to the higher level of Presidential politics. Florida in 1901, Wisconsin in 1905, Pennsylvania in 1906, Oregon in 1910 were the first—and with the clash of Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican stalwarts in 1912, nine more states added the device of a Presidential primary to party politics.1 But the device seemed little more than that, as local and ideological insurrectionaries for a generation thereafter explored the primaries as corridors to national power, and failed. The politics of Presidential power in both parties remained in the hands of established leadership—men who commanded local power, cross-country connections, money and alliances; men who could influence the press to create a climate of opinion, or control structures that could deliver votes.
Until 1952. And then, in that year, the campaign leaders of Dwight D. Eisenhower finally managed to ignite the real explosive in the concept of popular party primaries. Winning the New Hampshire primary against the established leadership of Robert Taft’s conservatives, and then running second to Minnesota’s Harold Stassen, the favorite son, by an astonishing write-in of 108,692 votes in that state, Eisenhower achieved a political momentum that carried him to the Republican convention and nomination in July. Ever since then the primaries have been the great mano-a-mano tournaments of election year, creating heroes and Presidents, leaving behind as victims some of the most famous names of their times, signaling hitherto unperceived underswellings in American life. It was in the West Virginia primary of 1960 that John F. Kennedy made a bonfire of the totems of anti-Catholic prejudice. The primaries of 1964 destroyed Barry Goldwater, by the exposure of his ideas across the nation. The primaries of 1968 forced the wind-down of the Vietnam war as first Eugene McCarthy, then Robert Kennedy illuminated the disgust of Americans with the war in Asia.
Primaries had already thus become, by 1972, one of the great drive engines of American politics—for a primary is a deed. All else in politics, except money, is words—comment, rhetoric, analysis, polls. But a primary victory is a fact. There is a hardness to such a fact, especially if the victory is a contested one. With the lift of such an event, a candidate can compel attention, build votes, change minds. It is the underdog’s classic route to power in America.
In 1972, however, primaries were to be different—and more exciting than ever before. They were to stretch four months; they were to be crowded with some of the ablest fighters in party history; they were to unroll not as episodes, but as a continuum, punctuated by public tears, gunfire, triumphs and upheaval under new rules of power. At one time, no less than fifteen Democrats had announced their candidacies for the nomination of 1972, of whom at least twelve took themselves seriously. And of these, by the year’s opening, at least six had to be taken seriously by everyone—namely, Edmund Muskie of Maine, George McGovern of South Dakota, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, John Lindsay of New York, Henry Jackson of Washington, and George Wallace of Alabama. Moreover, in 1972 no less than twenty-two states and the District of Columbia announced Presidential primaries, a third more than in 1968; and from those states would come slightly more than 60 percent of the delegates to the convention of 1972 as against only 40 percent in 1968. The season would stretch from the opener in New Hampshire on March 7th, through to New York on June 20th. And what had been conceived of, at the turn of the century, as a simple device to let people have their say within their party would become a con tinental confusion that defied any reasonable attempt to summarize procedures.2
There was to be, and with solid cause, a year-long outcry of the concerned that the new system, pure as was its intent, was in practice a denial of Americans’ right of a clear choice between clear alternatives. Some advocated a single national primary; others advocated a series of regional primaries; others again advocated a series of primaries clustered not by regions, but by fixed monthly dates. The dominant opinion of most wise men agreed that the crazy, accidental, fragmented pattern of selecting candidates state by state, a different set of laws governing each state, could be made reasonable only by a single national law governing all primaries.
All such criticism was, of course, valid, and the need for a new national law inescapable. Yet when all was said, there remained in the bizarre primary process, as there remained in so many curious American institutions, a value which defied rigorous analysis. This value could be described most simply as the value of narrative instruction, which is the best kind of instruction. Primaries tell a story. They last for months, spotted with drama and clash, and as they move across the nation and the front pages, the story teaches the nation about the candidates. The physical-endurance contest strains them to the limit of their nerves and vitality, and the nation sees how they behave under stress. The candidates’ choice of staff is tested, and the staffs’ quality tested, too. Most of all, as the candidates prod and poke, seeking for nerve ends of response, the initial ping of applause from friendly audiences and the negative pong of derision from enemies tell them which issues touch nerves and what bothers people. Thus the nature of the Presidential contest slowly defines itself in the common talk of bars, shops, lunchrooms, breakfasts, parlors, cocktail parties, union meetings.
All this was to happen, as before, in the primary season of 1972, and the drama of individuals was to fascinate. Overriding even such individual dramas, however, was the towering drama of the Democratic Party itself, the nation’s oldest and most vigorous political institution, bewildered by the decade of the seventies and groping for a new identity.
To understand the drama of the Democrats, one must simplify the fundamental story of American political life in the twentieth century—the history that baldly reveals that throughout the twentieth century the Democratic Party has been the chief vehicle of American action.
Foreshortened, the history of American parties as it came down to Americans, whether by Schoolbook or by word of mouth, in the year 1972 read something like this: The century began with the last Republican President who believed in action—Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt believed in trust-busting, big navy, saving the land and the forests, winning wars. But after Teddy Roosevelt the spirit perished among Republicans; nothing happened again until Woodrow Wilson, Democrat, an action man—who broke up the money bosses, forced the big banks into a Federal Reserve System, put through railway retirement laws and a federal income tax, fought the Germans and won a war. Then followed three Republican Presidents—Harding, Coolidge and Hoover; again nothing happened. Then came Democrat Franklin Roosevelt—and Wall Street was tamed, unions were fostered, farms were saved, unemployed went back to work; Roosevelt fought the Germans, too, and he won. Action. Then came Harry Truman, Democrat; he moved on civil rights, launched the Marshall Plan and NATO, fought in Korea and all but won there. Action. Then came Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican—and nothing happened. Then came Kennedy and Johnson—elegance and gusto. Missile crisis and test-ban treaty. Urban renewal and civil rights, tax reductions and the Great Society. Action.
Except that a good deal of the action in the 1960’s had gone on in two places where the results had been disastrous—in Vietnam and the big cities of America.
Republicans, of course, would object to this description of American pohtics in the twentieth century. They would point out, first of all, that every one of the great action Presidents of the Democratic line—Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson—had plunged America into a war. They would point out, further, that Richard Nixon in the last six months of his third year had matched any of his predecessors in dramatic action and was accelerating his rhythm as the election approached.
Yet in the minds of Democratic leaders, and in the emotions of their constituency, their party remained the classic party of the people’s action. In a perfect world, the Democratic primaries of 1972 would, therefore, have defined the course of action that the party should take. Kennedy had made the party’s theme his personal call in the campaign of 1960, chanting, “I say this country must move again.” But that was long ago. Now, in 1972, all Democratic candidates still wanted the country to move again, away from the direction of Richard Nixon—except that, collectively, they could not identify an agreed way to move, nor agree on the shape the party would give the nation if brought back to power. Action had made the Democrats almost everywhere the local majority party; and since action and change are always good themes, most Americans still habitually voted Democratic locally, as they would again for Senate and Congress in November of the Presidential year.
But when one tried to add up all the local Democratic majorities into a national majority, a national program, a national leader—how would it go?
One name was, of course, the commanding name in the Democratic Party as 1972 opened—Kennedy.
The name of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, last of the great Kennedy brothers, imposed itself on all political conversation. He had been politically wounded in July of 1969 when, after a late-night party, he had taken the wrong turn on a dark road on the island of Chappaquiddick, plunged his automobile from a bridge, then left the scene of the accident; and the young lady he had been escorting had drowned. The incident scarred the Kennedy legend and his own career—but Teddy Kennedy remained one of the smartest politicians and, without challenge, the most romantic figure in his party. The nomination was his for the asking, at any time. Kennedy, however, was flatly honest about his intentions. Publicly and privately he told the same story: he was not about to run in 1972, he would not even attend the Democratic convention. He felt his education in foreign affairs, in domestic policy, was incomplete; he was content to remain in the Senate for four or eight more years, he said, “to get a handle on things.” Only once did he privately waver. I called on him in late April, in Boston, at a moment when the Wallace surge in the primaries was rising. It was faintly conceivable, he said, that if it looked, at the convention, as though George Wallace might get the nomination, he would have to go down to the floor to oppose him—Wallace stood for everything against which his two brothers had fought. But even at the peak of the Wallace surge, this thought seemed remote to Kennedy. He did not want to run, would not run, would support the party’s nominee whoever it was, except Wallace.
Only romantics and amateurs took a Kennedy candidacy in 1972 seriously. All realists, all practical politicians, almost all reporters and political writers agreed that, with Kennedy out of it, the leading Democratic candidate for the Presidency was Edmund Sixtus Muskie, junior Senator and ex-Governor of the State of Maine.
Everyone said so, and Muskie himself believed it. The polls showed it: In the Harris Poll, in January of 1972, Nixon ran 42, Muskie 42, Wallace 11. In the same poll, Nixon ran 46 against Humphrey’s 37. Even if one cast all the various Democratic candidates into a trial free-for-all, as did the Gallup Poll in January, 1972, it came out: Muskie 32, Kennedy 27, Humphrey 17 (and George McGovern 3). For journalists like this writer, there was only the annoying problem of how to make Edmund Muskie, that grave, Lincolnesque man of goodwill, interesting—how to spin excitement out of a nomination story which he apparently had foreclosed.
Muskie’s life was, of course, exciting if one examined it as American folklore. His father, a Polish immigrant named Stephen Marciszewski, had settled in Rumford, Maine, a paper-mill town of 7,000 people, before Ed Muskie was born. Ed Muskie remembered his father with that affection which comes later to sons when they begin to understand the sorrows and strivings of their parents. The elder Muskie had taught himself to read English; had been a good tailor; had never been on relief; he had held the family warm and sheltered together through the hard times with the help of his wife. But the Depression seared young Ed, and by the time he entered Bates College in Maine (the only one of the six Muskie children the family could afford to send to college) Ed was a Democrat, even before he could vote. In his senior year, at the graduation reception at Bates, as Senator Muskie recalled thirty years later, the college president, a pompous, old-style educator, singled out young Ed in the receiving line. His class had chosen Edmund Muskie class president—and the college president simply wanted to know whether it was true, as he had heard, that Ed Muskie was a Democrat. It was shocking. But it was true.
From Bates to Cornell Law School, on scholarship. From Cornell Law School, home to Maine to practice law for a year, then off to the Navy and war; and home again to hang out his shingle in Waterville, in a meager practice. So that when the local Democratic politicians came to ask him in 1946 to run for the legislature because they were looking for young war veterans, Muskie accepted, and won. And then on and up: to become a good Governor, with a balanced budget, a clean record. Then, to Washington as Senator, in the Democratic tidal wave of 1958.
Yet Muskie remained forever shaped by his Maine experience. If you ran as a Democrat in a Maine primary, you faced no serious opposition in your own party; you ran always so as not to scare the good Yankee Protestants on the Republican side. You ran as a middle-roader, as a responsible. The thing was to establish trust in you as a man, and then, in a good society, you won all your own Democrats, naturally, plus enough decent Republicans who trusted you to give you a majority. Muskie could say, out of his own life, “I have an ancestral belief in this system. I inherited it from my father. I’m a man of the center, but the center gradually moves left, and it’s the Democratic Party that does it.”
The political image of a moderate thus fitted naturally when Muskie was tailored for it as Hubert Humphrey’s Vice-Presidential running-mate in the campaign of 1968—and hardened into public style when he was catapulted into front-runner for 1972 by his Election Eve speech in the mid-term elections of 1970. Nixon and Agnew had campaigned that fall against violence, against demonstrators, against drugs, against college youth, and the Republicans had set the President up for an extraordinarily poor telecast on Election Eve, at his shrillest. Muskie directly followed Nixon on the air, quiet, self-possessed, and accused Nixon and the Republicans of name-calling, slander and the questioning of Democrats’ patriotism. “That is a lie,” he said, and continued, “… the American people know it is a lie…. There is not time tonight to analyze and expose the torrent of falsehood and insinuation which has flooded this unfortunate campaign…. They really believe that if they can make you afraid enough, or angry enough, you can be tricked into voting against yourself…. There are only two kinds of politics … the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says: you are encircled by monstrous dangers…. The other says: the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men…. Thus in voting for the Democratic Party tomorrow you cast your vote for trust … for trusting your fellow citizens … and most of all for trust in yourself.”
Underneath this image of the grave moderate were, however, two essential qualities not yet recognized by the public but more than casually troublesome to Muskie’s staff. He had a tendency to emotional outburst; and an even graver disability—a lawyer-like, ponderous way of dealing with all issues and even the most trivial decisions.
His staff recognized these qualities as hazards. They enjoyed telling stories about Muskie. He disliked the press and could be quoted vividly describing the press’s shortfalls. Muskie was a man of old moralities. Once when he was picketed at an early campaign meeting by a group of Gay Liberationists, he exploded to his staff: “Goddam it, if I’ve got to be nice to a bunch of sodomites to be elected President, then f—it.” At another time, the staff had supplied to him, unread in advance, a speech on Medicare to be delivered to a New York gathering of specialists in ileitis and gastritis. Muskie had struggled through the awful prose, making the worst of it, and then told his staff, “For God’s sake, let the newspapermen know that I don’t write that kind of stuff myself.” He had a fine sense of humor which would become evident only on the downside of the campaign later.
What bothered his staff more was his almost abnormal insistence on thinking things through, a habit of taking many too many matters seriously. He could impress his advisers by absorbing a four-hour briefing on the intricacies of the SALT negotiations before his trip to Moscow, along with the exotic thinking that goes into maintaining the balance of terror, and then summarizing it with exact precision. But in answering public questions, he could not bring himself to the hard one-sentence response, followed by the thinking. Instead, he insisted always on answering a question by starting with the thinking, the pros and the cons, the balance of judgment as a judge would give it, then, finally, his conclusions—and the long, conditioned, legalistic answers turned off press, TV and college audiences. Nothing in the campaign, he felt, must trap him with a phrase, or a commitment, or an inflammation of emotion that would hobble him in governing once he was elected.
This sense of responsibility, this semi-governmental quality of caution and double-talk, conditioned all thinking at the Muskie headquarters in Washington, at 1972 K Street. Indeed, to embittered field workers of the Muskie campaign, the headquarters—which they called the Taj Mahal—was the greatest burden the campaign bore. The Taj Mahal staff absorbed more money each month (some salaries running as high as $40,000 a year) than George McGovern was spending on his entire nationwide campaign. The staff sounded like a government; its routine of approvals, intelligence, layers and levels of responsibility were, in fact, almost a government, with all the slow, cumbersome initialing of documents and proposals before action; and, indeed, its constituency was government, those Democrats across the nation who actually governed.
Already by the fall of 1971, headquarters had an issues staff and a speechwriting staff; it had a full-blown media staff; it had a youth division, a women’s division, a black division. It had an organization staff headed by two of the best field operators in the business, John F. (Jack) English of New York and Mark Shields of Massachusetts. These two directors claimed personnel were already in place in each of the twenty-three primary states of the nation, and in most of the non-primary states, too. Superimposed on these staffs was a council of Democratic elder statesmen who advised the candidate on national policy at the highest level. The names of these statesmen glittered—Clark Clifford, adviser to Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson; James Rowe, adviser to all these Presidents and Franklin D. Roosevelt as well; Averell Har-riman, the country’s most celebrated living diplomat, onetime Governor of New York; and others. “Headquarters was our enemy,” said one of the field coordinators later; “no matter what proposal you sent in, the answer was always there’ll be time to make that decision later.”
Later, in the melancholy days of the Wisconson primary, Muskie on the stump would tell a Polish joke, without realizing how tightly it fitted his campaign. Two Polish workingmen, so the story ran, were working on a house. Says Mike to Joe, “Joe, listen, if you were going to build a house, would you start from the roof or the foundation?” Then Joe, after a moment’s pause, says, “I think I’d start with the foundation.” “If that’s so,” replies Mike, “then come down from the roof and let’s start digging a foundation.” The Muskie campaign was 90 percent up on the roof, while George McGovern was digging foundations.
The strategy of the campaign, as it had been conceived in the summer of 1971, in a working paper approved by Muskie just before Labor Day of that year, was called the “high-risk” strategy. Muskie would spend most of the fall of 1971 as a low-visibility candidate perfecting organization and raising money. Then, starting in 1972, he would enter not one, or several, or a half-dozen symbolic primaries—he would go for broke, entering them all, North, South and West. Admittedly, this was high-risk—high-risk in money; high-risk in candidate’s time and physical strain; above all, the risk of spreading personnel and energy so thin across the country that none of the states along the long corridor could be adequately dealt with. Yet the rationale was simple: Muskie was a national candidate, a government candidate, a centrist—not an ideologue. He was a man for all people.
The operational tactics of the campaign fitted this strategy, and the name of the tactical game was “endorsements.” All across the country the Democrats as a national party were a governing party; they controlled the state legislatures in California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Texas, Florida, the South; they held 29 of the 50 Governorships; they controlled all the big-city Mayoralties except Cleveland and Indianapolis. To line up such governing Democrats, with all their power, behind the moderate ex-Governor of Maine seemed the course of wisdom; and with enormous diligence and shrewdness, Muskie and staff went about their job.
By January of 1972, the parade of endorsements from the established leadership of the party had become so crowded that one of the chief problems was sequencing their dates with enough separation to get maximum press impact. In Missouri, a feud-ridden Democratic party had been so deftly courted that all three rival Democratic leaders, Senators Symington and Eagleton and Governor Warren Hearnes, had jointly agreed to support Muskie. “Neutrality is my enemy” was Muskie’s selling pitch, as he urged the power-brokers to declare themselves now, when it was useful to him, not later when he had the nomination locked up. And so they came: Senators Tunney of California and Stevenson of Illinois; then came Governors Gilligan (Ohio), Ford (Kentucky), Curtis (Maine), Scott (North Carolina), Andrus (Idaho), Shapp (Pennsylvania), Rampton (Utah) and others. Then, Senators Hughes, Mclntyre, Williams, Moss, Hart, Metealf, Burdick, Church.
So, too, did many of the liberals of the 1968 insurrection: Anne Wexler and Joseph Duffey of Connecticut, Jack English and Harold Ickes of New York, Donald Peterson of Wisconsin, Stephen Reinhardt and Martin Stone of California. These were the pragmatic liberals—they wanted a winner who could beat Nixon, and Muskie seemed likeliest to do so.
Superficially, in January of 1972, the firepower lined up behind Muskie’s candidacy seemed overwhelming. Labor, to be sure, was holding back—Humphrey and Jackson were clearly more to George Meany’s taste. But labor was anything but hostile; Leonard Woodcock of the automobile workers as well as Jerry Wurf of the government workers were openly backing Muskie, and even the governing autocrat of the AFL/CIO was prepared to live with Muskie if the party picked him.
There was Polish power, too. The Polish immigration at the turn of the century had settled mostly on the shores of the Great Lakes and along the tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Muskie was sensitive about using his Polish background; but his staff made full use of what they called “Polish charisma,” scheduling him into screaming audiences in Buffalo, Toledo, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Milwaukee. Of the first six primaries on the calendar, only one (Florida) failed to give him the edge either of Yankee regionalism (New Hampshire, Massachusetts) or a significant Polish element in the electorate (Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania).
So, as 1972 began and the battle lines hardened, Muskie’s campaign seemed irresistible. He had solid financial backing, a large and experienced staff, the endorsement of the party’s leading figures, the advice of the party sages, the affirmation of the nation’s pollsters. But if Muskie was long at the bank and on the letterhead, he was short, depressingly short, in ideas. “To this day,” said campaign coordinator Jack English after it was all over, “I don’t know what the campaign was all about. We never had a theme.” Berl Bernhard, staff director, explained it more precisely as 1972 began: “We aren’t going to hit the issues, that could hurt him organizationally; we aren’t going to reach for headlines.” Muskie would be all things to all men—until he became President.
The campaign flowed from the personality of Edmund Muskie and his perception of the Americans. In December of 1971, one morning in Boston we talked again. He was steadfast. The country was coming into a time of trouble; the country didn’t trust Nixon; the problems were immense. (“That busing problem, now,” he said, “there’s a son-of-a-bitch. I don’t know what the answer is.”) But he, Muskie, knew where he was going. “The next President has got to have the confidence of the people to permit him to pose the hard choices. My first task in these primaries is to establish my own credibility. Whether I can deepen or broaden it—that’s the real challenge. I’ve got primaries all over the nation, and our political strategy has got to be credibility. You can’t force hard choices on them before the nomination. Eisenhower had trust, he was a war hero; he could have asked the American people to do anything and they would have done it. After the nomination, after they trust me, that’s the time to make them bite on the bullet.”
The slogans everywhere read the same: “Trusty Muskie.” So did his primary speeches. There were hard times coming, he would say; we had to live together; Nixon had promised to bring us together, but we were still divided. Let us live together. “I remember when I was a Polish boy living on the other side of the railway tracks…. Today other people live on the other side of the railway tracks…. We are all Americans….” And: “Hope … for two centuries America has represented hope…. It’s hope that brought other people here.” People would listen to a Muskie speech attentively as he began; then rustle and shuffle their feet; and their attention would wane. Trust, without substance, was difficult to sell.
And always, as Muskie campaigned through January and February, raising money at dinners, soliciting donations privately, stumping from coast to coast, editing and sifting the papers of his staff which poured on him in Presidential torrent—always there he was, trapped on the one hand by Richard Nixon, who was about to fly to China and then dominate the airwaves with that story, and on the other hand by George McGovern, who was plodding through the snows of New Hampshire, sniffing the aromas of shoe factories, shaking hands with the clerks in the stores, encouraging his volunteers. George McGovern would spend twenty-four days in New Hampshire before the primary; Muskie could give it only thirteen—for his was an all-state, all-risk campaign. Absence, thought Muskie, might cost him three or four percentile points in the New Hampshire primary—but what he lost there he would gain in Florida, where already he had twenty-six offices and had invested $375,000; or in Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, or California.
Muskie had entered the year bolstered by local polls which set his mark at 65 percent of the New Hampshire vote, yet confronted by newspapermen who, accepting the victory as he did, were now off on the clinical questioning that so annoyed him. Would a vote of under 65 percent be a defeat? What did he set as his private victory mark? If he did under 60 percent, what would he do next?
Such questions were difficult to answer, for New Hampshire was changing as the nation changed and becoming unpredictable. There were three New Hampshires, really. New Hampshire north of the Merrimack and reaching to the Canadian border was still Yankee-Protestant-Republican, with pockets of Democratic votes only in university towns like Hanover, or French-Canadian mill-working towns like Berlin—that remained unchanged. Then there was Manchester and its suburbs, the industrial center of the state, where Democrats were Irish or French Catholics who worked hard, for low wages, in the mills and shoe and electronic factories. The blue-collar vote was unstable in 1972, but Manchester should be Muskie country. Then, finally, there was New Hampshire south of Manchester, reaching to the Massachusetts border—suburban country whose citizens, mostly educated middle-class, were newcomers from the Boston metropolis, tuned in to the Boston media and the national concern. If Muskie were to do well, he must do it in the north country and industrial Manchester; in changing suburbia George McGovern’s volunteers were at their strongest.
The slippage of the Muskie lead in New Hampshire was first noticed in February. A virtuoso piece of one-man front-porch doorbell-ringing reporting by the Washington Posfs national correspondent David Broder was followed by a major poll of the Boston Globe—and both reported the same thing. People were willing to trust Muskie, but were asking, again and again, trust Muskie for what? What did he mean? What was he all about? And they were wavering. The slippage was thus already quite visible when an episode speeded it up. The Manchester Union Leader, practitioner of a style of knife-and-kill journalism that went out of fashion half a century ago in the rest of the country, is the primary daily paper of 40 percent of New Hampshire’s population; it had been savaging Muskie for months before, in late February, it began on Muskie’s outspoken wife, Jane, and followed with the publication of a spurious letter purportedly describing Muskie as laughing at a description of French Canadians (“Canucks”) as New Hampshire blacks.
“That previous week,” said Muskie after his campaign was all over, “I’d been down to Florida, then I flew to Idaho, then I flew to California, then I flew back to Washington to vote in the Senate, and I flew back to California, and then I flew into Manchester and I was hit with this ‘Canuck’ story. I’m tough physically, but no one could do that—it was a bitch of a day. The staff thought I should go down to the Union Leader to reply to that story. If I were going to do it again, I’d look for a campaign manager, a genius, a schedule-maker who has veto power over a candidate’s own decisions. You got to have a czar. For Christ’s sake, you got to pace yourself. I was just goddamned mad and choked up over my anger.”
Whether it was a choke, or a cry, or a sobbing—there was Edmund Muskie, a week before the primary, front page on the nation’s newspapers and carried on television, with snow falling on his curly hair as he stood on a flatbed truck outside the Manchester Union Leader offices, his voice breaking, emotion sweeping him, crying.3 “It changed people’s minds about me, of what kind of a guy I was,” said Muskie later. “They were looking for a strong, steady man, and here I was weak. I doubt whether I’m a candidate who could ever have won in this country this year. I’m a man for a country looking for a healer, not a country in protest. I wasn’t a protest candidate.”
On March 7th, 1972, with the weather sub-zero along the Canadian border, cloudy and frigid down to the Boston border, New Hampshire voted. The vote was heavy, high and full of portent. The Republicans had risen in number by 10,000 voters from 1968 to 1972, casting about 118,000 votes, of which 67.9 percent were for Richard Nixon, the rest split between liberal (Paul N. McCloskey, Jr.) and conservative (John M. Ashbrook) splinter Republican rivals. But the Democratic vote had jumped by 35,000 to a total close to 95,000—and of these, Edmund Muskie had won only 46.4 percent and George McGovern 37.2 percent.
Neither candidate paused long enough to examine the voting breakdown, for the next day George McGovern was off by plane to Florida, and Edmund Muskie to a fund-raising gathering in New York to refuel his faltering campaign.
But analysis was instructive. In the white-collar suburban wards, in the small academic towns, McGovern had led Muskie by 48 percent to 37 percent. In the blue-collar wards, Edmund Muskie had balanced that figure with 48 percent to McGovern’s 33 percent; in the smaller working-class factory towns—Nashua, Berlin, Dover, Rochester, Claremont —Muskie had scored margins rising to 60 and 70 percent. It was in the largest mill city of all, Manchester and its circumference, that the Muskie campaign had collapsed—under the pounding of the Manchester Union Leader, his expected vote had eroded to a slim margin of 600 city-wide. On his home turf, in New England, in his first round in the open, Muskie had stumbled; nor did he know how to recover.
All candidates were bitter at the press in 1972, but few more so than Muskie. The press had proclaimed him the front-runner for months; they had given him New Hampshire by a two-to-one margin in advance. Now that he had carried the state by only 46 to 37 percent, he seemed to have let them down, and he was angry at their judgment. Having pegged him as the administered managerial candidate, newsmen pressed him with clinical political questions, which increasingly embittered him. “I never could find a way,” he said, “to turn them off with a humorous answer. The day after Wisconsin, the first question CBS asked me was, ‘Mr. Muskie, do you think you’re through?’ How do you answer that?”
There might have been in the next six weeks a moment of decision to bring about a sharper tactical focus to the campaign, a choice of which primaries to contest, which to abandon. But the campaign planning was too elaborate, too well publicized to permit a basic switch. Most of all, the zest had oozed out of the campaign, the exhilarating sense of the sure thing. Starved increasingly for money; harassed by Mc-Govern’s shrewd insistence on open disclosure of funds, which Muskie could not answer since he had raised so much of his money secretly from Republicans who despised Nixon and feared reprisal; unable to change posture except by a thematic jog to the left, and the coining of the inhouse phrase “No More Mr. Nice Guy”—burdened with all these considerations, the Muskie campaign slowly wandered off to an aimless end. Muskie was to finish fourth in Florida; win in Illinois, without much credit from the press; finish fourth again in Wisconsin; and reach the end of the trail in Pennsylvania on April 25th. It was a week before his final withdrawal that he summed up his campaign in one of his better rueful jokes. Asked whether he thought he was in trouble, he said it reminded him of an old New England story: There was this fellow, stuck in the mud with his auto, who was asked by a wayfarer whether he was really stuck. “Well, you could say I was stuck,” said the fellow, “if I was going anywhere.”
Muskie was going nowhere. He had run as a man of the center, candidate of a party out of power, condemned by definition to attack in a year when targets of attack were obscure. “You have to appeal to people,” he said once privately, expressing the inner conviction of a decent politician, “above their own private interests, with an overriding imperative that seems good for the whole country.” But he could not give that imperative any romance, or pump into the center the vitality which had once moved the Democratic Party, and with it the nation, to a unity of high purpose.
Muskie’s next immediate move after New Hampshire was to be Florida. But in Florida the disorientation of the Democratic Party was at its most vivid. Of all the states on the primary route, Florida was the least likely to give the old party a clear new identity of purpose—or a plurality to a candidate whose message was union and brotherhood.
Florida, like New Hampshire, was rushing through a change of its communities; and the twin demographic and political revolutions in that state told as much about the politics of America as the speeches or strategies of the candidates in the primary of March, 1972.
Thirty years before, Florida had counted less than two million people and ranked twenty-seventh on the roster of the Union in population; by 1970 it had grown to 6,789,443 people and ranked ninth. The South and the sunlands had been drawing migrants from the North and Midwest for years, but no state—not California, not Arizona, not Nevada—could match the explosion of newcomers that had changed the old Southern politics of Florida beyond containment. Superimposed on this population explosion, moreover, had come one of the genuine triumphs of the Liberal Idea of the thirties—the application to Florida’s in-state politics of the Supreme Court’s one-man-one-vote ruling which required state legislatures reasonably to represent districts in proportion to population. The ruling had transformed the character of Florida’s backward legislature, and the spirit of change had been capped, in the mid-term elections of 1970, by the election of two authentically liberal and outstandingly intelligent young men as Governor (Reubin Askew) and Senator (Lawton Chiles).
Askew, in his first year in office, had reorganized the legislature; lobbied through an act requiring that banks and corporations pay an income tax; begun to appoint black people to the bench, to school commissions, to draft boards; and was launching a serious program to give the people of Florida control over their environment. Flat, palm-hum-mocked, low-lying, thoroughly polluted from north to south, sewage pouring from its swollen coastal cities unfiltered into the waters off its coast, Florida as much as any state in the Union required the protection of wise government. Even the most conservative Floridians who had grown rich on the land boom were frightened. “If we could build a wall around Florida,” said a banker from Jacksonville, “and keep out any more people who want to move here, I’d vote for it.” Supported by what is, with few exceptions, an excellent state press, the state was moving to become a national leader in environment control.
But the sun and the palms, the languor and the entrancement of its once turquoise-green waters generated the only political emotions that bound Floridians together.
Beyond that, Florida was split in a way that tempted every one of the eleven Democratic candidates in the primary race to split it further by the narrowest political appeals. North Florida, the panhandle, was Deep Southern by accent, tradition and landscape—an extension of Georgia and Alabama. Central Florida was transplanted Midwest. From Daytona Beach and Orlando across the waist of the peninsula to St. Petersburg and Sarasota was another culture, where conservative Republicans had established themselves as a political force a decade before. And from Palm Beach south to Key West was a civilization of transplants. To the Miami area had come Cubans who had fled Castro, and Puerto Ricans seeking work; Italians were present in substantial numbers in Miami; more important even than Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Italians were the Jews, both the very rich and the inexpressibly poor, who had fled New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Add a statewide demographic component of the aging (Florida had the highest proportion of aged to its population—14.5 percent over sixty-five—of any state in the Union), a large component of blacks (15.5 percent of the population), a defense and space industry which stretched from Key West to Cape Kennedy and Pensacola, a speculative construction boom—and one had a panorama of groups and blocs which teased the calculations of each of the eleven Democratic candidates who proposed to split the primary vote—and make it meaningless.
There could be in a state so diverse and with so many candidates no overwhelming winner; thus, logic read that each candidate should seek his plurality by picking out his own slice in the political spectrum, hoping he could fatten it into the thickest.
Hubert Humphrey was entered here as a candidate for the first time in 1972. His target constituency was labor, blacks and Jews. He would go for them. Henry Jackson was making his first try here—he would fight to split the labor and Jewish vote with Humphrey, and then shoot also for the middle-class whites and the defense vote. McGovern was entered in what seemed a perfunctory and useless try for the youth and black vote. Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York was trying to split the black vote with Messrs. Humphrey, Lindsay, McGovern, and add a handful of women’s-rights votes to her total. The Muskie vote had no strategy—it was a high-cost, head-of-the-table, white-middle-class vote, dependent entirely on his image of front-runner, the safe man. Muskie had been wounded by the press reporting of New Hampshire, and even more by the crying episode. (“We pleaded with the Washington office,” said one of his Florida campaign managers, “to humanize the guy. We were running a campaign based on credibility and strength, but we wanted him to be human. And then, for Christ’s sakes, you talk about making him human, but not this crying jag.”)
Then, beyond these, were John Vliet Lindsay, Mayor of New York, and George Corley Wallace, Governor of Alabama—rival silhouettes of indignation. Together, they helped print the word “alienation” both on the Florida campaign and on every fashionable analysis of spring politics. They were polar extremes—and were in full revolt against the course of American civilization as they saw it moving. Lindsay understood what the word “alienation” meant. His responsibility for the world’s greatest city had rubbed his nerve ends raw; he was running for President because the Federal government had alienated not only millions of the citizens of his city, but his conscience as Mayor, too. George Wallace could not express alienation as well as Lindsay—but he had a simple word for it. He called it “busing.”
If there was any issue that disturbed Floridians beyond the sacred issue of environment, it was busing; and in January of 1972 they had been sharply stirred. In that month a Federal court decision had jabbed busing as an issue onto the national consciousness as dramatically as the Tet offensive had jabbed the Vietnam war into the campaign of 1968. The jabbing had not only pricked Floridians from the barrios of Cubans in Miami to the small towns of the piney-woods panhandle in the north. It had touched all Americans nationwide, wherever the race confrontation abraded nerves—from Pontiac, Michigan, to Canarsie, New York, to Compton, California. Nixon had recognized this concern even before he left for Peking to make peace and was planning to speak to the nation on this second most important issue as soon as he returned. (See Chapter Nine.)
The jab of busing had come, to be precise, early in January, 1972, in a decision handed down by Federal Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr., of the Federal District Court in Richmond, Virginia, 1,000 miles away from Miami.
One must linger over Judge Merhige’s decision, for it affected the entire nation and the delicate, complicated civilization of all its cities. Though it was grotesque that the issue of busing and big cities, so intimately connected with the future of America’s city culture, should prove the mainspring of the Florida primary, it was in Florida that its impact was first felt.
Judge Merhige had presided over a complaint brought to him by the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People against the School Board of Richmond, Virginia. In Richmond, the school population in 1950 had been approximately 60 percent white, 40 percent black. By 1972 the school population had shifted to approximately 70 percent black, 30 percent white. Parents of white children were sending their youngsters to private schools or suburban schools. Mathematically, it was impossible to distribute schoolchildren within the Richmond public schools in such a way that some schools would not be left with a majority of black children. In consequence thereof, ruled Judge Merhige, the two counties adjacent to Richmond must be compelled to ship their white pupils into central Richmond City until the racial mixture was correct. A superior governing morality infused his opinion—a “burden is upon the school board to erase the racial identity of schools, and this the [previous] plan has failed to do,” he said. Children going to public schools must be moved or “bused,” no matter where their residence or what their parents desired, until racial proportions were considered right. Judge Merhige, himself comfortably provided for by a Federal salary, sent his children to a private school not affected by his decision. But others must abide by it, not only in Richmond but in the two contiguous counties, Henrico and Chesterfield.
The Merhige decision, seen against the larger backdrop of the underlying campaign, was relevant, if questionable—but Judge Merhige was approaching the problem of the American city with a meat ax. A city is a corporation in the eyes of the law, an instrument of the state; if it does not do what the law interprets as correct, it may be compelled to do so; if municipal or county jurisdictions are obstacles to what courts consider progress, they may be overruled; and with them the autonomy or self-government of the communities in which people have gathered to live because they sought kinship or protection under the shelter of neighborhoods they chose. The Merhige decision ordained, in effect, that no city or county could plan the education of its own children in its own schools if the racial mixture of its pupils was challenged and sustained—its children might be used to adjust the racial composition of nearby communities.
The Merhige decision was another of those traumatic events, like the quota decision of the Reform Commission, which fix a landmark in the change of the Liberal Idea to the Liberal Theology. The Liberal Idea had, in the 1950’s, broken the old system of Southern segregation; the Liberal Idea held the clean thought that no child should be excluded from a school system which he was otherwise entitled to enter simply because his skin was black. Separate racial school systems were wrong because they closed children off from each other by the difference of their races; they were lock-ups. The Liberal Idea had been sustained by the Supreme Court’s watershed decision of 1954 (Brown vs. the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas), which outlawed segregation by color. Almost twenty years had gone by since then, and the Idea had become Theology, coming full circle. By the Merhige decision, a child, if he were white, might be excluded from a neighborhood school in his community—as black children had once been excluded because they were black —simply because his white skin was needed for a color composition in some distant school. Color was again the touchstone of exclusion or admittance. Left to stand, the Merhige decision might have affected local governments everywhere, as well as in Florida. At least four major cities in the decade of the 1960’s had become majoritarian black—Gary (Indiana), Washington (D.C.), Newark (New Jersey), Atlanta (Georgia). But, according to the U.S. Office of Education, at least fifteen of the fifty-one largest cities in the United States had a majority of non-white pupils in their public elementary schools—not only Washington (93 percent black pupils), but also Chicago (56 percent), Detroit (64 percent), Philadelphia (61 percent), Baltimore (67 percent), Cleveland (57 percent), St. Louis (65 percent), Newark (72 percent), Oakland (57 percent). Such cities, by the Merhige decision, would have the right to reach out over municipal, county or community lines and conscript white children of the suburbs to be bused into central-city black areas because the arithmetic of color required it.
The Merhige decision of January was to be reversed on June 6th of 1972, thus effectively removing it as the possible Dred Scott decision of the fall campaign of 1972. But in Florida, as the candidates arrived in February and March, no one could tell whether the Merhige decision would become the law of the land or not. Parents, both black and white, were agitated by the problem, the issue of the month; and all previously planned strategies of the Presidential candidates had to adjust to the magnetic field of new emotions.
Already, ten days before the primary, there had been a school strike in liberal Dade County: not in the city of Miami itself but in the enclave of Auburndale, close by; and not by racist whites against blacks, but by Cubans against a new local busing ruling. Cuban parents, by community custom, do not like their teen-age girls to travel by public transportation to school, and had struck. In Palm Beach, local busing had resulted in a spurt of violence at schools. Discontent among both whites and blacks reflected itself in a sharp rise in high-school dropouts; white parents no longer insisted that their sons and daughters finish their courses in dangerous distant schools to which they were bused. Even the liberals of Palm Beach felt long-distance busing a mistake. In Jacksonville, where long-distance busing had come to an absurdity which moved some little children twenty-five miles in the morning and twenty-five miles back in the afternoon from school to home or home to school, race tensions had reached the point of explosion.
Against this scenery, there thus unfolded the carnival of the Florida primary—and in the noise, the confusion of voices, the crisscrossing of the state by the candidates’ buses and planes, the drenching of the state in television and money, it gradually became apparent that the outcome of this campaign, for all the effort spent here, would be meaningless in settling either the nomination or the course of the party. Only much later was the last wild touch of irrelevance added to the Florida story. It was in Florida that the dirty-tricks team of the Nixon campaign apparently took to the field for the first time.4 According to a Federal indictment of May, 1973, as far back as December 1, 1971, one Donald H. Segretti had paid $50 to twenty-five-year-old Robert Benz, president of the Tampa Young Republicans Club, to plan disruption of the Florida campaigns of Senators Muskie and Jackson. All that had come of that investment was several thousand letters on stationery simulating Senator Muskie’s, mailed out three days before the Florida primaries. The fake letters accused Senators Jackson and Humphrey of assorted, and totally untrue, misdemeanors—running from homosexuality through bastardy to drunken driving with call girls. The stupidity that was later to climax in the Watergate affair showed here for the first time. How, in a state where the Democratic candidates were spending, collectively, close to $2,500,000 to reach the voters, could a few thousand letters have been, expected to affect the outcome? Along with the stupidity went a characteristic chiseler’s cupidity. The mailing could have cost no more than a few hundred dollars—of the thousands of dollars paid to Segretti from secret cash campaign funds, how much must have been pocketed on the way?
Only the two symbolic candidates, Lindsay and Wallace, were worth following or reporting because they alone had messages that transcended the limits of Florida’s primary.
Of John Lindsay’s campaign, it may be said that rarely has so eloquent a spokesman for so profoundly important a cause presided over so blundering a political campaign.
Lindsay’s cause was the case of the city in America. But those who pleaded John Lindsay’s cause in Florida were not simply city people, they were Manhattan city people; and New York City Hall, under John Lindsay, had turned over its political operations to some of the most parochial pavement politicians of the time. Their planning, to be sure, was cursed by bad luck; their decision to begin their national campaign in Florida had been made before either the Merhige decision or George Wallace’s entry into the race was announced; now they would have to face the busing issue in Florida with one eye on Florida emotions and another eye on the racial politics of New York, their home base. The Lindsay campaign as it took off seemed to be going several ways at once. Television experts, spending some $180,000 in what they considered, naïvely, to be a “media state,” were presenting an open-shirted, whitecollared, handsome man called John Lindsay as a fighter—but a fighter with the style and language of the middle class. His schedulers booked him for “visuals” along Florida’s polluted bays and shores, which always brought him his best headlines—but seemed slightly embarrassed at exploiting what they considered a “soft” issue, a middle-class issue. The organization men of the campaign brought with them a style and technique developed in the crowded blocks and apartment houses of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Green grass was a novelty to most of them. “Did you ever try to deal with Florida people?” asked Sid Davidoff, the Marshal Ludendorff of Lindsay’s storefront operations in the politics of concrete and tenement houses. “In New York a volunteer wheels her baby carriage into the club, brings her two kids and spends a couple of hours at the telephone for you. Here they play tennis in the afternoon! They have lawns they want to mow! They like to sit in the sun! They come by automobile and they need parking places! Have you ever tried to motivate them? They go swimming in the afternoon!” Storefront clubs would not work in Florida; and finally the Davidoff organizational effort became little more than an attempt to court, cozen or buy up the black vote, which, no matter what Lindsay’s position on busing, he would have to split with Humphrey, McGovern and Chis-holm.
And Lindsay himself, the most important element of the campaign, addressed himself chiefly to conscience.
One should speak generously of John Lindsay. To Florida he brought the inner torment of six years as Mayor of New York, as well as the exaggerated reputation of the city’s breakdown that the national media had hung on him. John Lindsay had lived with street killings, and knew the statistics of what loose guns and Saturday-night specials were doing to his town. He had learned what sorrow, sadness and tragedy were milled through the abortion walk-ups of his city. He knew the havoc of drugs, the pestilence of mugging, the crackle of race tension; and the institutional poverty of a great city starved of money, reckoning that each raid on Hanoi cost as much as might renew a slum block in the South Bronx. Above all, he was convinced of his historic duty to bring an end to the exclusion of blacks in a white society. Out of it all, he had distilled an indignation of conscience and a ferocity of expression which overwhelmed good judgment. Compared to John Lindsay, even George McGovern was a man of compromise. McGovern favored abortion—but thought it was a matter to be left to state laws. Lindsay thought it was a matter of national policy—how could a national leader be neutral about abortion in Florida when each year 5,000 Florida women came to New York City for the abortions they could not legally seek at home? McGovern had gone along with the Scott-Mansfield com promise on busing now up before the Senate. John Lindsay was against the amendment—he was for busing, period! And so on.5
Of the brief Lindsay fling, I remember best an afternoon visit to Orlando, in Orange County, Florida, one of the most conservative counties in America. Some awful miscarriage of judgment by Manhattan advance men had provided Lindsay, who spoke against the band shell of Aeola Lake, with an entertainment come-on by the troupe of Hair, a rock musical then fading from its peak in New York. After the music and support of the cast of Hair, John Lindsay proceeded to deliver one of the finest speeches of his stump career. He was trying to explain to the people of Orange County, Florida, what the other life was like—the life of drugs, of crime, of the unhappy and unfortunate squeezed into their slums and tenements, their evening stroll in the moonlight a tempting of muggers, their sleep disturbed by sirens or by television blaring against adjacent walls, horizons limited to welfare or dishwashing. He told them one of the stories that haunt him, of how it is to be a mayor on the frontier of violence and trying to comfort in a hospital the widow of a policeman who has just been killed, shot by a black man. He had spent years in the “marble halls of Washington” as a Congressman, he said, but “any single night on the streets of New York teaches you what works and what doesn’t work more than ten years in Congress.” Only a mayor understands what it is to choose between building a library and a drug center. He was for busing. Wallacism had to be confronted. “What’s dividing this country is fear, the legacy of race and poverty, the refusal of big government to make big institutions be accountable to the public for what they do.” And “Governor Wallace is running around frightening people on the question of busing, on the question of fairness and Tightness.”
His blond hair, now on the verge of silvering, blew in the wind, and his long forelocks slipped over his brow as he spoke. The cast of Hair liked his speech, and one of them said to him when the speech was over, in awe and admiration, “Mayor, you’ve been radicalized!” Lindsay appreciated the comment, for, he acknowledged, no man could govern a big city in America today without being radicalized.
But the audience before him was unstirred. Apart from the students who applauded, the audience were family people of Orlando. And most family people had fled here from the North to escape just the scene that John Lindsay was describing. If there was any fight left in them, it was to defend the sun and the quiet to which they had come to doze and dream far from sirens in the night. And here was Lindsay with his furious eloquence, bringing to these green lawns and tranquil places the nightmares of the shrill nights they had fled—and insisting that even the other liberals, McGovern, Humphrey, Jackson, who had voted for the Scott-Mansfield busing compromise in the Senate, were little different from George Wallace, who had turned his back on the blacks.
George Wallace would have been a national influence anyway in 1972, for he had a master grip on an issue; but the Florida campaign and John Lindsay made him larger than he had ever been before.
The little Governor of Alabama had been running for a long time and, like Hubert Humphrey and Richard M. Nixon, his successive national races and experience had both educated and changed him. The round, beetle-browed, dark face that used to poke up from behind the lectern was now mellowed, the lines were easier. The hair that used to curl out in a ducktail slicked back with brilliantine, like the cartoons of Senator Claghorn, was now neatly cut, if somewhat sprayed. Under the influence of his attractive new wife, Cornelia, he had shed the old undertaker’s uniform—dark suit, narrow black necktie—of Southern courthouse politicians, and was garbed now in bright shirts, fashionable double-knit suits, broad colorful ties.
It was always amusing, in following George Wallace, to try to distinguish the old from the new. His rally style, for example, was old—the tub-thumping country music, this year led by Billy Grammer, star of the Grand Ole Opry; the guitar-playing; the flags on either side of him as he spoke; the glowering state troopers watching the crowd for violence; the singing; the pails which were passed around among the audience and which returned full of coins and bills. But the crowds were different—no longer overwhelmingly made up of the shirt-sleeved, blue-collared, surly men in whose midst one used to feel frequently on the threshold of violence. In 1972 the gas-station men in blue coveralls were still there, the workers with muscular biceps growling or grinning approval. But among them were men in neckties and white shirts, with the sour breath of office workers; women in housedresses with their babies; more young girls than ever; old ladies with their gray hair sprayed into a blueish set; and a mood as much of joviality as of anger. Other candidates labored over their advance work and prepared for rallies with skill, art and delegated manpower. George Wallace simply announced a rally—and the crowds turned up to hear the talking.
“Send Them a Message” was George Wallace’s slogan in 1972, a more subtle slogan than that of 1968 (“Not a Dime’s Worth of Difference”) or his original message of 1962 (“Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever”). The message George Wallace was sending in 1972 was at last being heard against the experience of the 1960’s—by people who had come to question whether government really knew what was good for them either in daily life at home or in war abroad.
Wallace could state the message with precision when forced into the thoughtful mode. Invited to express himself on the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times, for example, he delivered the clearest analysis of his campaign early in March:
The American people are fed up with the interference of government. They want to be left alone. Once the Democratic party reflected true expressions of the rank-and-file citizens. They were its heart, the bulk of its strength and vitality. Long ago it became the party of the so-called intelligentsia. Where once it was the party of the people, along the way it lost contact with the working man and the businessman. It has been transformed into a party controlled by intellectual snobs….
Ordinary people, however, did not come to hear the Governor talk this kind of talk; they came to hear one of their own talk (“He says what’s on our minds,” was the way they phrased it), and he passed the message along in country-boy talk, with a homespun quality reached only by Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson at their best. The message came in interchangeable parts, the order of the peeves and jabs transposed from night to night, rally to rally, but always calculated to pluck emotions the way Billy Grammer plucked strings on his guitar.
Nixon? Nixon was a “double-dealer, a two-timer, and a man who tells folks one thing and does another.” The government in Washington was run by “bureaucrats, hypocrites, uninterested politicians,” men who couldn’t “even park their bicycles straight … briefcase-totin’ bureaucrats,” and “if you opened all their briefcases you’ll find nothing in them but a peanut-butter sandwich.” He was for patriotism and national defense, and called the Nixon trip to China one of the most disgraceful sellouts to Communism anyone’d ever seen. Wallace would rarely use the word “establishment,” but the crowd understood whom he was talking about. The correspondents of The New York Times, “the CBS,” “the NBC,” “the ABC,” when present in the audience, were friendly props off whom he could score. Above all, the courts: “… the judges … have just about ruined this country…. They don’t hang their britches on the wall and go jump in ‘em, they pull ‘em on one leg at a time just like regular folks. And the people didn’t elect them either, like they did me.” The Senators in the race, including Mr. McGovern, Mr. Muskie, Mr. Humphrey and most of their staffs, who sent their children to private schools in Washington but still advocated busing, were “hypocrites…. Washington is the hypocrite capital of the world…. They’re like a bunch of cats on a hot tin roof. They’re a-hemmin’ and a-hawin’ and they’re about to break out in St. Vitus Dance….”
He, George Wallace, was for the average man. The average man was being gutted by government. Taxes were important in George Wallace’s message. “The greatest thing that exists in the air today is the unfair tax structure and you had better give tax relief to the average man in this country and put it on the filthy rich in Wall Street, or you … might wind up short at the next election period in the United States.”
But, above all: busing. Busing was what really got to the average man. “This senseless business of trifling with the health and safety of your child, regardless of his color, by busing him across state lines, and city lines and … into kingdom come—has got to go.” (Cheers.) This was “social scheming” imposed by “anthropologists, zoologists and sociologists” (Wallace loved to draw out the word “sociologist”); “the common people” should come together and say, “Mr. Nixon, our children are precious to us, and we want a stop to this busing.” Or, in another speech, “… in China, the President asked Mousey Tongue for advice on busing and Mousey Tongue said, T can’t advise you on busing ‘cause when I take a notion to bus ‘em and they don’t like it, I just bus ‘em anyhow.’ And that’s just about the way they’re doing it here.” And, in peroration: “Busin’ … it’s the most atrocious, callous, cruel, asinine thing you can do for little children…. these pluperfect hypocrites who live over in Maryland or Virginia and they’ve got their children in a private school… tomorrow the chickens are coming home to roost. They gonna be sorry they bused your little children and had somethin’ to do with it. So, my friends, you give ‘em a good jolt tomorrow. You give ‘em the St. Vitus Dance.”
It was clear for the last three weeks before primary day that George Wallace would lead in the spread-eagle Florida primary. He had the north and panhandle country, the old Southern stock. But it might be close. Even so good a politician as Jon Moyle, Democratic State Chairman, had opined in January that “you’ll be able to cover the difference between Wallace, Humphrey and Muskie with a quarter.” But by afternoon of primary day it was obvious, from the voting turnout, that the north was voting heavily; and the north meant that George Wallace’s lead was now certified.
The national press sat by the swimming pools of Miami, talking with the national candidates and their staffs, and the betting was casual—Wallace would get a few points more or less than 30 percent. George McGovern that day thought there was even a chance for Hubert Humphrey to outrun Wallace. But the results came in otherwise, flooding to tide in efficient network gathering shortly after seven. Wallace was getting 50 percent in the first scattered returns; the lead shrank in the first half-hour to 47 percent, then to the low 40’s, and then stabilized at 42 percent. But the 42 percent had a profile—it was not simply the north and piney-woods rednecks that were voting for George Wallace. Wallace was winning statewide, even in liberal Dade County; in the precincts of the elderly Jews at the poorhouse of South Miami Beach he was running third after Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson; Wallace, it became obvious that night, was not just a Southern phenomenon—he was much more than a statewide Florida phenomenon. He was a national phenomenon and would remain so until shot, two months later, and removed by a would-be assassin’s bullet from national consideration.
All the other candidates lost, with one exception.
Hubert Humphrey lost—once Vice-President of the United States, once national candidate for President, once champion of all the good of the Liberal Idea, he could draw no more than 18.6 percent for second place. Henry Jackson, sober, decent, moderate, with a rational position on busing and defense, came in third with 13 percent. Edmund Muskie, fourth, with 8.9 percent, was finished—in a divided state, cross-section of so many conflicts, he could find no echo either for trust or for unity. John Lindsay, having spent more than $400,000 and his heart and his reputation, was the biggest loser, with 7 percent.
Curiously enough, George McGovern, who had won only 6.2 percent of the vote, was, after Wallace, the biggest winner.
The McGovern men had planned with precision, and the foresight of their early months achieved exactly what they had planned: to split the far-left vote with John Lindsay. To have abandoned the Florida primary to Lindsay would have given Lindsay all the left, all the youth vote, much of the black vote—and have made Lindsay either number two or number three in the voting, and thus poised on a springboard to go on to Wisconsin and the later primaries as a substantial vote-getter in hostile country. By reducing Lindsay to fifth place, while content with sixth place for themselves, the McGovern planners were now in position to pull the set-piece breakthrough which they had planned for Wisconsin. Let Muskie go on to Illinois (where he would win); let Humphrey and Jackson go on to Wisconsin (where they would split the moderate vote). The McGovern planners were now ready to leapfrog Illinois and roll up the party from the left, in a progressive state where history and tradition moved in their favor.
1 See James W. Davis, Presidential Primaries: Road to the White House (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967), an excellent account of primaries and their history.
2 There were almost as many kinds of primary as there were primaries in 1972. Some (called “delegate primaries”) actually elected the delegates. Some (called “preferential primaries”) allowed the voters to indicate whom they would like their delegates to support at the convention. Some preferential primaries (called “binding”) went further and obliged the delegates—however chosen—to support the specific candidates favored in the primary. Many states had both a delegate and a preferential primary.
In 1972 twenty-two states held primaries, and the variety of ways in which they did so was one of the more breathtaking displays of the ingenuity of political man. In South Dakota and California you voted all or nothing for a complete slate of delegates pledged to a single candidate. You could not tell from the ballot who the delegates were, only whom they would—en bloc—vote for at the convention. In New York, on the other hand, you voted by name for anywhere from four to eight individual delegates, with no clue on the ballot as to whom they would vote for.
In Oregon, candidates for delegate ran in one primary committed, it said on the ballot, to one or another of the Presidential candidates. But at the convention they would be obliged to vote, not for the candidate to whom they were committed, but to the winner of the separate preferential primary. In Rhode Island 143 candidates ran in a delegate primary committed mostly to Muskie, Humphrey and Jackson. None was committed to McGovern. But because McGovern won the preferential primary, he got to choose the entire delegation.
It was, ironically, the gymnastics of the Democratic New Mexico legislature, trying to design a primary to satisfy the Democratic guidelines, which deprived Richard Nixon of a unanimous vote for renomination in Miami Beach. By getting 6 percent of the New Mexico Republican primary vote, California Congressman Paul McCloskey earned one of the states’ fourteen votes at the Republican convention. It was the only vote there which could not be cast for the President.
3 Rarely has the instrument of television been able, without any preconceived political intent, to frame perspectives more strikingly than on Saturday night, February 26th, 1972. CBS Evening News opened with a brief report on a flood in West Virginia, and then shifted to some magnificent color camera work in China, where President Richard Nixon and Premier Chou En-lai were visiting fabled Hangchow. Dan Rather gave the hard news from China, Walter Cronkite gave the historic background all the way back to Marco Polo, and in this context of beauty and majesty there were Richard Nixon and Chou En-lai feeding goldfish from the moon bridge in smiles and amity. Then followed, after the commercial, Ed Muskie, as anchorman Roger Mudd in New York brought the audience back to the campaign trail at home. “… Senator Edmund Muskie,” said Mudd, “today denounced William Loeb, the conservative publisher of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader, as a ‘liar’ and a ‘gutless coward.’” After a few more words, the evening news cut to Ed Muskie on the flatbed truck crying, or choking up, but obviously in great distress as his voice broke in a denunciation cf the man who had attacked his wife. The contrast between the President’s management of great events in Asia and the Democratic candidate’s disturbance over an unexplained slander in Manchester, New Hampshire, was sharp.
4 See page 275.
5 The Scott-Mansfield Amendment, offered by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, was an effort to stem rising anti-busing sentiment in Congress by offering a moderate proposal to curb the use of Federal funds for busing unless requested by local authorities; it stipulated further that Federal authorities be restrained from ordering busing if it impaired the health of a child or carried him away to a school inferior to his neighborhood school.