AMONG the men who reported the revolution in China years ago, it was accepted that by the time guerrilla forces surfaced in any province, political infection had metastasized there too deeply to be stopped. By the time regular troops formed up to cope, the infected province was already lost.
As the Democratic primaries now, in the early spring of 1972, moved on from Florida to Wisconsin, the Democratic regulars discovered a similar guerrilla presence too late. No other metaphor but that of a guerrilla army on the move can describe the upheaval that was to shake and change the entire Democratic Party in the next ten weeks, for the march of George McGovern in those ten weeks would go down as a classic in American political history. Its only parallel, the strike of Barry Goldwater in 1964, had been an internal coup within a party; but the insurrection of George McGovern was a national mobilization of irregulars—a masterpiece of partisan warfare, its troops living off the land, tapping veins of frustration everywhere; raising money locally as they rolled; their captains and lieutenants, young men without commissions or epaulets, commanding and creating a net of cells in storefronts, cellars, campuses, kitchens; youth and women organized; all of them recruiting, preaching, persuading, stirring to action hearts hitherto unstirred by politics.
Had they studied the political terrain of America, Mao or Giap would have approved the tactics and strategy of McGovern’s army; and they would have understood more than most contemporary Americans what gave this army its hidden power. The army had an idea that could snare souls. The idea was that politics could bring peace and establish justice; and the soldiers of the idea were pure. Unlike most men in politics in the United States, whether labor or Chamber of Commerce leaders, whether black militants or real-estate magnates, whether farm spokesmen or city spokesmen, the new people of McGovern’s army sought no specific gain or advantage for any special bloc, or for themselves personally. Not until later, when the inhalation of power became intoxicating, would they begin to paw the ground and butt others around as all men do when power begins to stir them. In the beginning they seemed to conceal in themselves a secret rhythm which excited another hidden rhythm in American politics. Whether this rhythm was a major one that could sweep the country or a rhythm limited to the hearing of the audience they courted, neither they nor anyone else could judge. But they were ready to march and give the call.
Winter headquarters in Washington gave no sense of the formidable capacity of this army. On a slope just two blocks southeast of the nation’s Capitol in Washington, at 410 First Street, headquarters occupied a low-ceilinged back space between a liquor store and a takeout-sandwich grocery shop. Headquarters was open—it posted no guards and needed none, for the lights were on twenty-four hours a day as pony-tailed girls and blue-jeaned boys worked around the clock. Beaverboard partitions in the rear set off six cubicles where regional intelligence was coordinated; in the crowded back bullpen stretched long tables covered with mailings, pamphlets, stuffings, posters, cola cans, and the leavings of peanut-butter and tunafish sandwiches; and everywhere—files, lists, shoeboxes full of names. In the front, as one entered off an airless corridor, were the three offices of the high command—Gary Hart, campaign coordinator; Frank Mankiewicz, campaign director; and Richard Stearns, director of research and organizer of delegates in caucus states. No inter-office chain of memoranda or communications linked this command together as at Muskie or Humphrey headquarters. When Mankiewicz, Hart or Stearns wanted to talk with one another, they simply slid back a partition and called, or walked across the corridor and sat on the other’s desk. Messengers and volunteers, field commanders home to report, housewives with babies, students on vacation, all wandered through the offices, finding work, or inventing work to do as they chose. A bubble of mirth embraced the headquarters; comradeship seemed to hold them all together, as once long ago a similar fraternal goodwill had held together the men I first met in the caves of Yenan when the Chinese Communists were developing their leadership in brotherhood and spreading it across their ravaged land.
It was more difficult to pinpoint the strength in the field—and in the field, on the guerrilla fighting fronts, the joviality faded into a hard combat mode to create out of gentle people types like Eugene Pokorny.
And it would be well to weave the pattern of the McGovern insurrection by starting with the thread of a Pokorny, before describing what such young men and women did in Wisconsin, in Massachusetts, in California, in New York.
* * *
By the time I arrived in Milwaukee, following the trail up from Florida to the primary rendezvous in Wisconsin which the calendar set for April 4th, 1972, Eugene Pokorny had already been at work building his base for almost a year and a half.
Pokorny was all of twenty-five—lean, pale with overwork, immaculate in diction and phrase, sandy hair surmounting a choirboy’s face set off by an accountant’s steel-rimmed eyeglasses. Pokorny had the ability to stand off and look at himself as a stranger might, and called himself a “gunslinger grass-roots organizer.” He teased his own story as he told it—born a farm boy in Howells, Nebraska, where his father and the three boys farmed 600 acres of black bottomland. “You can put in that I walked to school every day carrying a lunch pail to a one-room country schoolhouse.” He considered himself an agrarian populist by heritage, and “if you don’t understand the agrarian populist tradition of Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, you aren’t going to understand George McGovern,” he added.
Pokorny had gone off to the University of Nebraska in 1964—the year campuses came apart with their first riots, the year of the Mississippi summer action, when civil rights made campus politics turn. Po-korny’s experience traced the thinking of a decade. If he were to be involved in student politics as he wanted to be, he had to be involved in civil rights, the hot issue. From which, the next step: anyone who was into civil rights had to be into the anti-war movement; and by 1967 Pokorny was into the Committee of Concerned Democrats, organizing for Eugene McCarthy; and then on to the Chicago convention. A whole generation of American youth leaders was moving at the same time in the same direction—from free speech to civil rights, to the peace movement, to McCarthy (or Kennedy) and thus into politics. The decade of the 1920’s had left its football heroes behind on the campus; but the decade of the sixties moved its campus political heroes on into national politics by the scores and the hundreds, where they proceeded to act.
When Pokorny left the violence of the Chicago convention of 1968 behind, he left behind Eugene McCarthy, too. Pokorny had no stomach for martyrdom. “I made a commitment to myself never again to make a commitment to liberal politics if they weren’t going to work. I didn’t want to remake the world—I wanted to make a contribution to it. McGovern’s not in it just to raise issues—McGovern’s in it to win.”
The card files in the Washington McGovern office had turned up Pokorny’s name as early as 1970. By July the organizational touch of Gary Hart had reached out to tap Pokorny on his farm. And by November of 1970, two years before the election, Pokorny was driving across the bridge over the Mississippi into La Crosse, Wisconsin, visiting the state for the first time—with a road map and fifty names from the Hart file as his only diagram of entry to a state of 4,500,000 citizens.
“Names, names, names,” said Pokorny in 1972. “I’m a fanatic on three-by-five cards.” Over the past six years Americans have been furrowed by a hundred causes dividing “progressives” from “non-progressives”—causes of peace, of civil rights, of women’s rights, of horror at nuclear menace, of conservation and environment, of political crusades. Such names exist on obscure lists everywhere—and the names do not fade away. The essence of Pokorny’s work—as of all McGovern field tactics—was to find and develop such lists, file the names on three-by-fives, then find the faces behind the names and energize them. The message was simple: peace.
Thus Gene Pokorny all through 1971, living in the home of a McGovern loyalist in Milwaukee, dining as a boarder with the family and three children, and traveling to organize names. “Our first task,” said Pokorny, “was to consolidate the left.” Which meant, specifically, to energize what was left of the McCarthy insurgency that had swept Wisconsin in 1968. It meant meetings in Wausau and La Crosse and Kenosha and Madison and all across the state, of six or eight or ten people at someone’s home, and committing them—”our people were committed in blood.” Not students, for, in Pokorny’s mind, students were ephemeral. Basically, he sought teachers, “peace freaks,” and then, above all, in Pokorny’s earnest words, intending no pun, “peace-minded, broad-based housewives.”
There was little innocence about Pokorny as an organizer, as there was little innocence about McGovern’s other Pokornys about the country. What innocence the McGovern guerrillas were to display would be political and historical, an ignorance about the outer world beyond the guerrilla theater in which they acted. When it came to organization, they were precise and masterful. To organize at the grass roots, doctrine had developed. In Pokorny’s mind, organization required two essentials: first, the creation of an identified volunteer group, committed to precise work-assignment schedules and bound to precise end-point targets; and, second, a positive reinforcement schedule which would energize these volunteers by the visits or inspirational activity of a national leader who would give their daily drudgery a larger visionary meaning. In this the national organization backed him up. As far back as 1970, Pokorny had insisted on, and Gary Hart had agreed to, at least one three-day tour of Wisconsin by McGovern, the candidate, every ninety days.
The work had thus been going on for a long time before the national candidates and the reporters, arriving in Wisconsin to examine the condition of the Presidential race among Democrats, discovered the McGovern cells in full metastasis. By the last week in March, 1972, every one of Wisconsin’s seventy-two counties had a McGovern volunteer nucleus; thirty-five to forty paid organizers (most of them paid $50 a week) had opened storefronts in some counties, housewives had opened their homes in others, to cover the state. Ten thousand unpaid volunteer workers were walking blocks and country roads, marking voters on precinct sheets in the familiar one-two-three-four patterns of preference indicating the degree of pressure to be exerted to bring them out on primary day. $232,000 had been spent in Wisconsin, the largest expenditure ($65,000) on an eight-page reprint in eighteen Wisconsin newspapers that reached 1,250,000 people in February.
By the end of March, Pokorny was cocked to go. For other candidates and their methods, Pokorny had scorn. Muskie had organized the state from the top down—a good half of all the state’s Democratic legislators, county chairmen and executive committeemen had endorsed him. But Muskie had no troops at grass roots. And the threat from the left? “We’ve locked up the left,” said Pokorny. McCarthy had nothing but two storefronts in Madison and Milwaukee. And Lindsay? Lindsay, thought Pokorny, had been trapped—he was being reported in his own “image” terms. The press was discussing not Lindsay’s issues, but his political skills and the technique of his advance man, Jerry Bruno. Lindsay was still “skiing down Publicity Mountain,” in Pokorny’s term. “His people underestimate the intelligence of American voters more than any other candidate’s. Can you imagine his going to sleep in a worker’s home in Milwaukee on a sofa? To see how ‘they’ live?!”
Pokorny was a star. But there were other stars all across the country—Grandmaison in New Hampshire, Himmelman in Ohio, McKean in Massachusetts, Swerdlow in Pennsylvania, Rogoff in New York, Segal in California. Together they were a brotherhood, intoxicated with the latent eloquence of their own action, convinced that they had found the secret of changing politics, loyal to each other, above all loyal to their field commander, Gary Hart.
The thread from all the Pokornys in the field led back to Gary Hart, thirty-four years old, born in Ottawa, Kansas, a lawyer on leave from his law firm in Denver, Colorado.
Hart was a loose-limbed, bushy-haired, blue-eyed six-footer, dressed always in open-neck shirts (he was excluded from one of Miami’s finest restaurants in July, during the Democratic convention, which he dominated, until he borrowed a necktie from management) and skin-fitting pants over slim cowboy thighs. Hart drew the eyes of every yearning maiden in the McGovern camp for two years—except that he was too busy with politics for romantic distraction. He walked with the ranging stride of an outdoorsman, the lope of a walker in the sun, and no crisis ever ruffled his good manners or caused any visible loss of temper.
Hart was the apotheosis of the professional amateur—the archetype of the new breed, and thus hero to all the field commanders. He had spent his undergraduate years at Bethany Nazarene College, in Oklahoma City, then gone on to Yale to work for his Ph.D. in philosophy, literature, religion, before shifting to Yale Law School. The Kennedy campaign of 1960 had first engaged his political attention as a student volunteer in New Haven; he graduated from law school in 1963, then found a job with Stewart Udall as a Department of Interior lawyer for two years. Thence, to open his own law practice in Denver, where he was practicing when the Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 swept him up. He was thus already a veteran of the grass roots when, in 1969, he offered his services to the Reform Commission and then, a year later, to the McGovern campaign, which he joined full-time by June of 1970.
Had emotion or inclination taken Gary Hart into the Army or General Motors or the church, he would long since have been recognized with a star, a vice-presidency or a bishopric—for he loved organization and, with his experience in political campaigns of the 1960’s, he had become a master. Hart had the critical knack of drawing the last ounce of exertion from staff without raising his voice, of recognizing an imaginative insight from below, of detecting talent and investing it with responsibility, then weaving it into a master plan. But his mildness was deceptive—he was a true believer. He was to develop, slowly, through 1972 into a shrewd and skillful infighter, as adept with the long knife, when necessary, as with the encouraging pat on the back. His chief weakness was one he shared with most of McGovern’s top commanders: For all of his skill and subtlety in the machinery of a campaign, he was a primitive on the issues. He hated the war; McGovern hated the war; his heart belonged to McGovern—beyond that, Hart’s attention was not distracted by any deeper contemplation of America and its problems. McGovern would think for the nation, once elected; his, Hart’s, task was to organize the election of George McGovern.
It was Hart, more than anyone else, who gave the guerrilla formulation to the McGovern strategy. Resistant to all pressures from the field and from McGovern’s friends and glamorous advisers, he thought of himself occasionally as the Kutuzov of War and Peace—McGovern’s Kutuzov. “Kutuzov was under the same pressure to attack and win, to attack anywhere,” said Hart in January of 1972, “but we’re an insurgency. I believe we should attack and retreat, attack and retreat.”
Hart’s campaign plan had, by early 1972, discarded McGovern’s own romantic notion that they should fight Edmund Muskie primary by primary, state after state, all across the nation. Hart had eliminated Florida, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Indiana, Michigan and a dozen other states from his resource-allocation plan. Hart’s plan—and Hart controlled all money, all the candidate’s time, all the field troops—was quite simple. The guerrillas would take on Muskie in distant New Hampshire first, to wound him. For this mountain campaign Hart had allocated in 1971 ten trips of the candidate’s time, plus twenty-two days of campaigning in the pre-primary weeks of 1972 and $160,000. Florida he would pass except to cut up Lindsay. Wisconsin would be highest priority, with Massachusetts held by a shadow operation for development if Wisconsin was a win. In Wisconsin the troops would have Pokorny as commander, $200,000 of money, and engage in their first set-piece battle. Once Wisconsin was won, they would move the troop commanders into Massachusetts for a breakthrough. Then, hopefully, having by then eliminated the entire left and much of the center in Phase One of the primaries, McGovern’s army could, by victory, acquire the money and momentum for Phase Two, of which California would be the climax. In that huge state the McGoverns would need perhaps $2,000,000; but that effort would transform the irregulars into line-of-battle frontal troops; and if they won in California, New York would fall by itself, as Shanghai fell of itself once Peking had been seized in 1949 in the revolution in Asia.
It was all organized in Hart’s head better than anywhere else: the lists, the computerization of names; the mailings out of which they must get their money; the unknown gunslinger organizers who might do well here, there or elsewhere across the country; the candidate’s precious time. But at the root lay organization. Personally gentle, organizationally Hart was inflexible. The campaign would move or falter on the loyalties he could count on from his field commanders, their willingness to perform the impossible if he said the impossible must be achieved. And to hold their loyalties, he must reciprocate with loyalty to them, however cruel his actions might seem later to Democratic leaders outside the magic circle of youth and insurrection. Hart loved his organization as a painter does his canvas—touching, retouching, refining, admiring his own art. And the organization loved Hart. Its leaders and troops were the campaign, they were the Coldstream Guards of the Movement. “Their trouble,” later said Hugh Sidey, Time’s Washington correspondent, “was that they were all in love with each other, with doing their own thing.”
If Hart was the inside man, Frank Mankiewicz was the outside man. Where Hart was earnest, Mankiewicz was merry. Where Hart was inflexible, Mankiewicz was elastic. Where Hart, to the press, was a freshman in politics, Mankiewicz was recognized varsity. In the McGovern campaign he was one of the few men who could not only laugh, but cause others to laugh. Mankiewicz was always a press favorite, even after many realized that Mankiewicz’s loyalties to McGovern were as perfect as Hart’s—and that, if necessary for McGovern’s interests, he would lead them astray, as he felt he had to in the dispute over the South Carolina delegation at the Democratic convention later.
Mankiewicz, at forty-seven, was the old man of the command force. Dark, with pouched eyes, roguishly attractive, he brought a saving dash of cynicism to the dedicated purpose of his companions. Mankiewicz had come by his politics quite naturally. His father, Herman Man-kiewicz, had been not only one of the great wits of Hollywood and a cinematic master (Citizen Kane was the elder Mankiewicz’s creation), but a man fascinated by politics, American history and its grotesqueries.
From his father Mankiewicz had inherited style, but his own politics was shaped by his time span. At nineteen, he had volunteered for World War II, won three battle stars in the infantry, and regretted forever that on the day his patrol was to reconnoiter the advance on the Elbe in May, 1945, his jeep had a flat tire and he missed making the link-up with the Russians at Torgau which marked the end of the war in Europe. From Europe, then, home to Hollywood, to study at the University of California at Los Angeles (where among his classmates were Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, later of Richard Nixon’s White House staff); then to law school and a successful law practice until, with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, he had volunteered for the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps was a radicalizing experience for many, aerating once more, as so often in the previous twenty years, the dilemma of American foreign policy: Is American aid to be given to governments who will use it for those below? Or given to those below who will use it to shape government to their needs? In Latin America, where Mankiewicz served, he, too, was radicalized, believing that aid should go to the destitute of the barrios rather than the governments which controlled them. His stand had brought him to the attention of Robert Kennedy; in 1966 he had become Kennedy’s press secretary; in 1968, after Kennedy’s assassination, he had served in George McGovern’s brief Presidential try; then become a Washington columnist, and his wit and charm had made him one of fashionable Washington’s favorite dinner guests.
“We Can’t Go On Like This” is the way Mankiewicz phrased his politics, for he had stopped trusting the purpose of American government, either Lyndon Johnson’s, which he had served, or Richard Nixon’s, which he reported, either in Latin America or in Vietnam. And thus, when George McGovern in the summer of 1971 asked him to come aboard, he was willing, even if it cost him money. He had been earning $60,000 a year as a columnist-commentator and accepted $40,000 a year from McGovern—the highest salary paid anyone in the campaign, and resented by others.
Mankiewicz loved McGovern, perhaps most because of the contrast in their backgrounds. McGovern had grown up in the land of silos, grain elevators and broad fields, Mankiewicz in a land of swimming pools, freeways and manicured green gardens. The sincerity of McGovern attracted Mankiewicz as the strength of unspoiled innocence. Where Hart was always obedient to what he thought McGovern wished, Mankiewicz was protective. Mankiewicz believed in the new politics and understood the movement (“Right from the Start” had been his formulation of McGovern’s position on the war). But he understood the old, too. In talking to older, regular Democrats, Mankiewicz could offer a conversational familiarity with the game as they played it—the names of the cards, and the bidding conventions in public or private deal. If Gary Hart’s field strategy worked and the big primary breakthrough came in Wisconsin, then all credit would have to go to Hart and Pokorny. But after the victory it would be Frank Mankiewicz who should know best how to use it.
Wisconsin was just as familiar a way-stop to the political tourist on the Presidential corridor as New Hampshire—but it, too, was changing. More than New Hamphire, not remotely as much as Florida, Wisconsin was undergoing the squeeze of the new seventies in all its stresses and strains. Wisconsin’s population had grown, of course—by 12 percent to 4,500,000 people in the last decade. It was still the foremost dairy state in the union, but of its seventy-two counties, nineteen in the countryside had lost population. Wisconsin’s postwar growth had come in the cities, and its industrial wealth had grown twice as fast as its farm income. In the cities one found the same changing phenomenon that spoke of the disease of urbanization—the desperate effort to save downtown Milwaukee with magnificent new speedways and cloverleafs, the same sparkling new center-city architecture which made downtown Milwaukee, like downtown Boston, almost unrecognizable to the returning visitor. But round and about center Milwaukee, the still-clean but shabby intermediate ring was dying; and beyond that, the suburbs with their magnificent supermarkets and shopping malls were sapping the center’s vitality.
There was much more of tradition in Wisconsin than in Florida, for Wisconsin is a state of proud history; and this tradition was being mercilessly squeezed by change. Wisconsin is not a rich state; its per-capita income of $3,720 is well below the national average of $3,910. Yet it prided itself for almost seventy years on one of the most advanced systems of social legislation in the Union. Under the La Follette Progressives, Wisconsin had pioneered workmen’s compensation, the regulation of railroads and utilities, a state income tax; it had endowed its people with an extraordinary educational system capped by a superb state university in Madison, as well as one of the finest health systems in the nation. This progressive tradition, in the age of inflation and rising expectations, ran, however, smack against another tradition: that of the homeowner. Settled by Yankee farmers in the south and German farmers in the north well before the Civil War, Wisconsin had absorbed Swedes, Danes, Norwegians and Poles by the scores of thousands, all of whom brought with them atavistic longings for homes and gardens of their own. Wisconsin was a homeowner’s state—69 percent of its citizens lived in their own homes; but in the decade of the sixties the cost of their progressive tradition and legislation, their schools, hospitals and fine roads had begun to squeeze the homeowners. Property taxes had been rising and grinding, from $400 a year for an average home to $600 a year, to $700 a year, to 10 percent annually, in some cases, of assessed valuation. “You take the average retired worker,” said Congressman Henry S. Reuss of Milwaukee’s 5th District, “who’s living on Social Security and a small pension. His total income is perhaps $4,000 a year. When you ask him for $600 a year annually in property tax on his home, you’re driving him to the wall.” The cost of conscience for Wisconsin’s advanced social legislation thus came high. Alone among the Governors of the Union, Wisconsin’s humanitarian Governor Patrick J. Lucey did not gag at the McGovern promise of $1,000 a year to every American. He had taken a pencil and figured out that welfare, Medicaid and other benefits to poor people already exceeded $ 1,000 a year for each of Wisconsin’s needy.
The $1,000-a-year debate was, however, several months in the future. In Wisconsin the arriving national candidates found their issue prefabricated: the property tax. In Florida all had been forced to debate busing, in a blur of denunciation, praise, support, alarm. In Wisconsin the hot issue created another blur—everyone, but everyone, was against property taxes. Wallace and McGovern, Jackson and Lindsay, Humphrey and Muskie all lifted their voices in chorus against corporations, giveaways, tax loopholes, the rich, the businessman, in that most ancient of Democratic anthems, “Soak the Rich.”
In such a blur, with no issue dividing the major candidates, each trying to scratch the others with slur and innuendo, victory would go to the candidate with the best organization—and that was without doubt McGovern’s. Of the Wisconsin campaign, beyond the organization of the McGovern troops by Eugene Pokorny, there remains little narrative: only vignettes of memory.
§ Of Hubert Humphrey, indefatigable, a political figure who had survived from the pre-television age, barnstorming from dawn to dusk, handing out recipes for Muriel Humphrey’s black bean soup (“Vim, Vigor, and Vitality,” read the recipes handed out at shopping malls and street corners); cuddling black youngsters in the ghetto, driving his campaign managers to speechless vexation by his delays, because he liked talking to the black children. And everywhere he went, he called on Wisconsin to remember the past—he, Humphrey, had pioneered the test-ban treaty, the rural-electrification authority, workmen’s compensation, Food for Peace, etc., etc. And none but the old remembering, while the young were already mobilized for McGovern.
§ Of the moment of recognition—a visit to Serb Hall on the south side of Milwaukee, an obligatory ethnic rendezvous for all candidates, where they must drink beer, bowl with the men, eat fish-fries and strange Slav foods and smile while doing so. All the major candidates were scheduled for a drop-by on Saturday before election, and, by accident, four of them arrived at once—Humphrey, Lindsay, Muskie and McGovern. One caught again that strange, impossible-to-describe political moment of mood and portent: John Lindsay, blond, tall, self-possessed, wandering the tables with no attention, interrupting the muscular workingmen and their wives in housedresses, as they ate, to shake hands and introduce himself. The Secret Service had already decided that Lindsay was not a serious candidate1 and so the six-foot-three Lindsay, stripped of the one dubious official badge of candidacy, must stroll the strange tables accompanied only by his devoted five-foot-eight New York police detective, Pat Vecchio. Then, Muskie, arriving late—his large frame stooped, his head down, swathed in a melancholy he could not shake, to be ignored. And Humphrey, at table with a posse of recognizable Wisconsin ethnics, munching away at his fish with gusto, attended by cameras, TV lights and newsmen—until the moment of McGovern’s arrival, when the magnetism passed, as if a conductor had pointed with his baton to the real candidate. Cameras, lights, newsmen had moved, click, by unspoken command, to bunch around the Senator from South Dakota, and fallen into the serpentine formation which, in any contemporary political jostle, marks the path that the star cuts through the crowd.
Here in Wisconsin the moving star was George McGovern.
§ And, finally, primary night—the snow falling in the streets of Milwaukee, turning to wet as it fell, and the evening news on every television set leading off not with the contest for the Presidency, but with the news from Vietnam. Everywhere, from Quangtri to Kontum to Anloc, the Viets were again on the offensive; the unending war was killing Americans again. How much or how little the coincidence of the new offensive affected Wisconson voting one cannot tell; perhaps very little, for the war had been going on for a long time and people had made up their minds about it. McGovern’s troops had been in Wisconsin long before the start of the campaign, and they had pressed “Right from the Start” into the subconscious.
The returns were easy to report, but surprising. The vote was smaller than anticipated—1,415,000 rather than the predicted 1,500,000. But of the 1,128,000 who voted in the Democratic primary, George McGovern carried off 30 percent of the state vote for a clean sweep of the eleven delegates-at-large. He carried seven of the nine Congressional districts, losing only the 5th in Milwaukee (largely labor and black) and the western 7th with strong ties to Minnesota. The surprise lay in the night-long seesaw of votes for second place between Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace—for here in Wisconsin, with almost no formal campaign or organization, George Wallace was to come in second with 22 percent, to Humphrey’s 21 percent. Fourth was Edmund Muskie, with 10 percent, harvesting not a single delegate in a state where in December he had led all polls—not even in the heavily Polish 4th Congressional could he outstrip McGovern. Fifth was Henry Jackson, and sixth was John Vliet Lindsay, who had come to the dusk end of the ski trail and withdrew that evening.
The Wisconsin campaign had been even duller and more confusing than the Florida primary—but now, at last, the polarizing process had begun to work. There were only three viable candidates left who might still identify what the Democratic Party meant in the election of 1972— Wallace, Humphrey and McGovern. Of these, clearly, George McGovern was the most important and one could now concentrate on his trail. This was not generally accepted yet. With Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Ohio the next big-state contests to come, and Humphrey strongly favored in two, McGovern was not yet the front-runner. McGovern had finished off Muskie and Lindsay and the left was now all his. But the elimination of Muskie helped Humphrey, as did the deflation of Henry Jackson. Wisconsin had been the prime national focus of the McGovern campaign. That he could produce in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey and other states remained to be seen.
There was a last image I carried away from Wisconsin, one that teased my mind for meaning, weeks and weeks thereafter, as I followed George McGovern.
It had been snowing on primary night in Milwaukee; and on the way back and forth to the candidates’ activity centers and the studios on the block of the Schroeder Hotel, I passed a dimly lit storefront. The sign read: “MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT.” Curiosity pushed me in, and there hung huge evocative portraits of a past Eugene McCarthy, the same dark, brooding face that had pushed the party to turmoil here in Wisconsin four years ago. But curiosity slipped into melancholy—on the tables were piles of unused literature and pamphlets and several silent phones. Two forlorn young girls stood by. Otherwise, empty. The two girls made a brave show of it—yes, they did have volunteers; yes, they believed Eugene McCarthy was the best man for President; well, they had been expecting Senator McCarthy to come himself this weekend, and people were willing to come to meetings, but Senator McCarthy had had another meeting in California and couldn’t come. It seemed cruel to press them with harder questions, for they were so downcast, and I went on to the live contestants. On my way back, shortly after eleven, I passed the storefront again: it was already closed and abandoned.
Four years earlier, at that hour on primary night all Milwaukee had been Eugene McCarthy’s stage. Pennants and street banners fluttered from buildings; thousands of students slept on bare floors all over town, or danced in jubilee, and the Movement was celebrating one of its greater triumphs. Eugene McCarthy, too, had been able to call up with his morality a new force in politics—and the energy that responded swept American foreign policy from its moorings. A political wave had carried McCarthy to Milwaukee and his high moment in 1968. In 1972 another wave generated by the same moralities was carrying George McGovern to national attention while Eugene McCarthy bobbed, unnoticed, like a cork left behind in the trough. McCarthy’s suite that night in 1968 had been a free and open place, with laughter and drinking, and later in the night the reading of much poetry, chiefly Yeats and McCarthy’s own, while the phones jangled with calls from across the nation. McGovern’s suite, in the crueler politics of 1972, was guarded by Secret Service, guests were checked off a list of invitees by stern scrutiny—but inside was the same gaiety, the same jangling of telephones as the political switchboards of the nation responded.
Retrospection posed the question clearly: Could George McGovern use his victory more shrewdly than Eugene McCarthy? More importantly—was George McGovern the creation of his movement, or its creator? Would he come finally to bob unnoticed in the trough when the wave passed—or could he master and harness the wave’s energies?
In Massachusetts, where I went next for the April 25th primary, the wave was overpowering, and the McGovern army was riding it.
A precision of movement and logistics had now begun to mark the operation of the guerrillas. Hart had learned much; he had sped twenty of his New Hampshire organizers after the March upset to Wisconsin, to reinforce Pokorny’s field organization. The day after the Wisconsin victory, his field organization had flown sixty-two veteran grass-roots organizers from Milwaukee to Boston. The day after the Wisconsin primary, said John McKean, the twenty-three-year-old campaign chairman in Massachusetts, “our switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree.” In the four weeks before the primary day, thirty-six field headquarters had been opened; and the students of Massachusetts, who by and large had sat on their hands until spring, were now turning up in hundreds to canvass. McGovern headquarters, overlooking Faneuil Hall in Boston’s market district, could spray facts and figures like an army briefing room: 3,000 student canvassers were in the streets ten days before the election; 8,000 volunteers would be ready to go across the state on primary day; Boston had been penetrated, each of its 256 precincts coded by priority numbers for voting-day volunteer get-out-the-vote drives in 80 percent of them; radio and television were functioning (of the campaign’s state budget of $150,000, two thirds was invested in these media); and McGovern’s army was deploying now not for the top place but for a clean majority.
There was, to be sure, no organized opposition. George Wallace was to appear in Massachusetts for a single day; Shirley Chisholm had a parochial presence in Boston’s black wards. Humphrey had no organization—he was fighting in Pennsylvania the same day, hoping to eliminate Muskie finally in the Keystone State. And the Muskie men—who had led in the Massachusetts polls by 46 percent to 15 percent (Humphrey) to 11 percent (McGovern) as late as February 13th—were in collapse. Bales of Muskie literature were still piled up at the entry of Muskie’s Boylston Street office on primary day, undelivered for lack of troops.
Massachusetts, of all the primary states, deserves a digression—for Massachusetts was, later in November, to be the sole state in the nation to resist the Nixon sweep. In Massachusetts the old politics of ward and patronage and the new ideological politics of the Movement had met and married.
Boston, Massachusetts’ capital, is, to begin with, the most Democratic big city in the nation. Over the last four national elections, it has given the Democrats their largest percentage margins, larger than those of New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit. With a larger proportion (15.3 percent) of its people on welfare than any other major city, it has an unshakably Democratic voting bloc of the destitute. To which must be added the loyalties of Irish-American and Italian-American voters who suck in ward politics with their mothers’ milk, and a sizable Jewish vote.
Beyond Boston ran other factors for McGovern—an unemployment rate (7.8 percent) consistently higher than the national average (5.9 percent); an industry extraordinarily sensitive to national policies whether in trade or in defense; and the influence of the Kennedy family and the Massachusetts education complex, which, between them, had changed Massachusetts in forty years from one of the most reactionary to one of the most radical states of the Union. The Massachusetts education complex was not only one of the cradles of the national Liberal Theology but also the host of the largest voting bloc in the state—its 300,000-member campus proletariat overwhelmingly devout in the faith of the new theology, as large in impact on state voting as the auto workers in Michigan (597,566) or the mine workers in West Virginia (62,500). To the influence of this bloc had been added the influence of the Kennedy family. The advocacy first of Robert Kennedy, then of Senator Edward Kennedy had given a social respectability to the peace cause—even among blue-collar workers, who in other states still react to their fathers’ stories of dash-and-do in World Wars I and II.
Add a final factor—the Boston Globe—and one has the Massachusetts story. The Globe is a regional newspaper that now dominates Massachusetts politics as the Chicago Tribune once dominated Illinois politics and the Dallas Morning News, Texas. Owned by an old Yankee family, the Taylors, managed for over forty years by another Yankee family, the Winships, it is heavily staffed by some of the most romantic Irish writers and reporters in the country. Together their skills and their management have backed against the wall or eliminated most of their onetime rivals. Combining the morality of the old Abolitionists with the eloquence of Celtic radicalism, the Globe rivals the Washington Post as the most anti-Nixon paper in the country. Its national political coverage is high-minded, literary, gay and unabashedly partisan. Its local excellences are outstanding: a sports page which grips Massachusetts proles, and a hard, sharp reporting of the nitty-gritty deals in the murk of Massachusetts ward politics, a subject of excitement in Boston eclipsed only by their hockey team, the Bruins, and their basketball team, the Celtics. The Globe, in short, is the indispensable paper in Boston, and if the Globe found McGovern the indispensable man to beat Nixon—which it did—so, too, would Boston.
For McGovern and his planners, Massachusetts was an opportunity to break through to the blue-collar votes in Massachusetts working wards and factory towns. The campus proletariat was, of course, all his. No bulletin board in any college, apparently, carried any other notices but those of McGovern volunteers or rallies. McGovern ignored the campuses here to concentrate on the working towns, and his message was simple: The war was bad. Young men shouldn’t have to fight wars that old men make; the money spent on war should be spent here at home to keep Massachusetts workers working. It wasn’t the names of middle-class people that labeled in gold those city crossings which Boston calls squares. The names of the honored dead of recent wars in Charleston, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester read more like O’Shaughnessy, Dolan, Santinelli, Kelly than the names like Otis, Butler, Wentworth on the markers that commemorate the Civil War. The Kennedys were against this war in Vietnam—so was McGovern. Nowhere else did he score with quite such power on blue-collar workers. This was a good guy, was the message of his volunteers; and “I guess we ought to give him a hand” came the response from working people.
On April 25th Massachusetts voted. And in the land of the Last Hurrah, it was McGovern all the way: McGovern—325,673 (52.7 percent); Muskie—131,709 (21.3 percent); Humphrey—48,929 (7.9 percent); Wallace—45,807 (7.4 percent). The Massachusetts ballot, printed in type as fine as the compact version of the Oxford English Dictionary, offered opportunity to vote in three places—statewide preference, local delegates, at-large delegates. All the forces of the Last Hurrah had been lined up for Muskie in midwinter and their names were the power of Massachusetts politics. On the ballot in the 8th Congressional District the name of Congressman Thomas (“Tip”) O’Neill, majority leader of the House of Representatives, an old Kennedy stalwart, led the list for Muskie delegates to the national convention. McGovern’s slate won by three to one. Late on voting night O’Neill called the Globe to find out how the balloting was going, and was told the running returns. “My God,” said O’Neill, “do you mean my own district is going against me three to one?”
The Movement was rolling now, the wave was sweeping, the strategy was working. It had all been obscure four weeks before. The magic figure of nomination was 1,509 delegates out of 3,016; and McGovern had stood at 3 percent in the public polls in January. Now, in the aftermath of Massachusetts, there he was—clearly front-runner. Massachusetts had brought a clean sweep of 102 delegates, which added onto the 54 from Wisconsin and others to bring him to an unchallengeable figure of 238½, as against 127½ for Muskie and 77 each for Humphrey and George Wallace. Muskie was now, however, the day after the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania primaries, through. McGovern’s rivals left in the field were only Humphrey and Wallace, and it was Humphrey he must bring low. Humphrey had won in Pennsylvania the same day McGovern had won in Massachusetts—but the headlines led with McGovern, and national attention was his.
Ohio’s primary, with its 153 delegates, was to follow the Massachusetts primary by only a week. By now the McGovern army had acquired a flexibility, a command of its own instruments that allowed it to amplify set strategy with targets of opportunity. Two weeks before the Massachusetts primary the leadership had met in Washington to consider a polling survey by Pat Caddell. Caddell, a twenty-two-year old Harvard senior, was still preparing for his final examinations there, but concentrating in real life on his responsibilities as chief pollster of the McGovern campaign. To the numbers his bell-ringers brought back he added scholarship. He had been right for so many months in describing the aimlessness and alienation of American voters that, in the shaping of McGovern’s strategy, he had reached a status just below that of Hart and Mankiewicz. Caddell had now just finished a survey of Ohio. The Muskie campaign, said the report, was collapsing; the support for Humphrey was “mushy.” If the money for a last-minute raid into Ohio could be mounted, the volunteers could be ready to go. McGovern had come late to that Sunday meeting, and agreed with his staff. Money had now been found (for Howard Metzenbaum had guaranteed it), and Hart had organized the volunteers.
Victory night in Massachusetts was jubilation. The ballroom of the Statler Hotel swarmed with students, sitting on the floor, hugging each other, yearning for the leader who came before them to quote Yeats and declare this “a victory for peace, not war.” The band of St. Theresa’s High School played standard melodies, but otherwise the scene was that of the Woodstock Festival, not politics as once practiced in the home of Big Jim Curley. From the ballroom, McGovern was off to a hangar at the East Boston airport which had been commandeered for a champagne breakfast to send off the striking force of roving guerrillas now grown to eighty-one strong, to repeat in Ohio what they had done in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Massachusetts. Next week in that state, so long conceded to Humphrey, they were to generate an astonishing 480,320 votes (39.3 percent) as against the former Vice-President’s 499,680 (41.4 percent), and claim 65 delegates out of Ohio’s total of 153.
George McGovern was at this moment, however, lifting on his primary cruising run to another level of altitude. He had run thus far as a man of peace and conscience; but now, as front-runner, as a serious candidate for the American Presidency, his mind, his thoughts, his perspectives must come under a new kind of public analysis. Much more now had to be told about the man.
I had lunched two days before the Massachusetts primary with Frank Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz said he had warned his comrades that up to now they had enjoyed a free ride from the press, which loves underdogs. Now, said Mankiewicz, they had to expect a different kind of treatment. Mankiewicz was bothered—the campaign had to get an issues team organized, a group that could meet the kind of questions and opposition now certain to develop. “I’m going to pay attention to issues, and getting them organized, right after Ohio,” he said.
But it was probably, by then, already too late.
The question occurred to all simultaneously after the Massachusetts primary—to press, to analysts, to Republicans, to other Democratic candidates: What did McGovern really think? How did he propose to govern America?
I had first met McGovern in the fall of 1964, when we were traveling on Hubert Humphrey’s Vice-Presidential campaign. As we looked out the windows on the rolling Plains states below, he had talked gently, insistently, with eloquence and grasp on his home country beneath, which so obviously he loved. I had met him again at the Chicago convention in 1968, as a candidate himself, and had found him, after the riots, in a state of fury at the bloodshed he had seen from his windows at the Blackstone Hotel. I had come to see much more of him in 1971 and the early months of 1972; and the more one saw of him, the more baffling he became.
His mind baffled the caller more than his personality. The mind was absorptive, not provocative. There are two kinds of American politicians. Most are talkers (like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson) who take over a conversation to frustrate the questioner with a protective screen of banter, anecdote and ramble; but there are also the listeners who force the questioner to do the talking. McGovern was definitely a listener—one of the great listeners of all time. He enjoyed hearing other people talk about America, he loved new facts, new figures, would pull out a scrap of paper to jot down anything that struck his scholar’s mind as interesting. Most who came away from a first talk with McGovern felt they had swayed him deeply. But talking to McGovern was all input on the visitor’s side. After a while, those who saw him frequently came away wondering what George McGovern thought himself. Eugene McCarthy made the crudest comment: “Talking with George McGovern,” said the insurgent candidate of ‘68 of his replacement in ‘72, “is like eating a Chinese meal. An hour after it’s over, you wonder whether you really ate anything.”
One came away, finally, with the sense that it was not what George McGovern said, or committed himself to, in private that was important—but what George McGovern said in public, what adhered to his mind from all the conversations, reading and experience he had lived through. The mind was like a gravitational field which attracted and rearranged scattered iron shavings of fact about a hidden magnetic polarity within. And in George McGovern’s mind the polarity was always that of Good and Evil. He was a virtuous man; he knew what was right and wrong. His mind, like Richard Nixon’s, had a pragmatic knack of political organization; but, unlike Richard Nixon’s, it accepted input only if it fitted the polarities of his previously fixed thinking.
The mind of George McGovern would make a fine subject of investigation someday for a historian trying to trace the forces of morality and piety which give American politics so much of its unique flavor. The moralists have been a central source of political energy in America from the dissenters who fled the Church of England for the colonies, through the Abolitionists whose conscience freed the slaves, to the Prohibitionists who forced the nation to give up drink because alcohol was the syrup of Satan. George McGovern, in tapping the moral energies of the Movement in 1972, traced back to these antecedents.
The rhetoric of morality and Scripture comes naturally to him. His father had been a coal miner before migrating to South Dakota to become a Methodist preacher and evangelist; and the evangelist lingered always in George McGovern, the son, born July 19th, 1922. George McGovern believed that all men were brothers. He had grown up in a state which still, in 1970, harbored only 1,600 black people (the smallest state percentage in the Union except for Vermont) and 760 Jews; in South Dakota, children played together, went to school together, celebrated Halloween and probably went to harvest dances together. Life in Mitchell, a small town of hard-working, friendly farmers and workers, gave no sense of the intricate life of the big cities, the inner kinship of neighborhoods and ethnic communities, the hard adjustments between groups that big-city politicians learn are the transactions necessary to make brotherhood work in a metropolis. And not until maturity would McGovern read a daily newspaper more sophisticated than the Sioux Falls Árgus-Leader. All men alike are children of God, George McGovern learned, in city or countryside alike, and politics must be at His service.
Educated at Dakota Wesleyan, McGovern was as fine and good a young man as went off to World War II against Nazism—and not simply to serve but to fly the truck horse of the big bombers, the clumsy, lumbering B-24, in which he wrote a hero’s record. It took not only courage but skill to fly that plane, in the best of circumstances. The pilot sat in a seat high up in a plane built to haul bombs and take punishment and be a target, with little ability to maneuver; the pilot could never see his bomb load of 12,000 pounds drop, and had to take his plane on through flak and enemy fighters on sheer guts alone. McGovern came away from the war with a Distinguished Service Flying Cross and a loathing of what he had had to do.
From the war—back to school, studying first to be a preacher, then a historian, at Northwestern University. His doctoral thesis was a study of the savagery of great corporations to their workers a generation before, and it deepened a mind-set that led him, at the same time, to consider engaging seriously in Henry Wallace’s Progressive candidacy of 1948. The thought mode was further deepened after his return to South Dakota to teach, when he joined in the Democratic Party’s efforts to build an organization in that then overwhelmingly Republican state. The South Dakota Republican party was, even by Republican standards, one of the most backward Republican parties in any state of the Union—and corrupt as well. It was in South Dakota that McGovern perfected his campaign style. Years later, in mid-1972, Owen Donley of his original South Dakota team remarked, “He hasn’t changed his style at allhe still runs as the only honest man in town.”
What McGovern brought away from it all was a simple view of the universe, and an American phrasing of one of the universal cries of twentieth-century revolutionary politics: “Comrades, we have been betrayed”—the call that broke the Czar’s army in 1917, the Weimar Republic in the thirties, the fabric of resistance of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in China. McGovern phrased the call in his own way, in spring, on the primary trail, with his denunciation of the establishment center: “… most Americans see the Establishment Center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love. It is the Establishment Center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation…. The Establishment Center has constructed a vast military colossus based on the paychecks of the American worker…. It is the Establishment Center that has erected an unjust tax burden on the backs of American workers while 40 percent of the corporations paid no Federal income tax at all last year. I say that is an outrage…. I want this nation we all love to turn away from cursing and hatred and war to the blessings of hope and brotherhood and love….” George McGovern believed, as simply as Barry Goldwater did before him, that the American government was the enemy of the American people.
The attack on the establishment—whatever it is—was the central cultural concept of the McGovern campaign. It came, however, with a corona of less important but more vivid cultural issues that made him one of the most luminous figures in the orthodoxy of the Movement. In part, the vivid quality of his lesser issues was forced on him by his enemies, in part by his own strategy. He had had to recruit his army and its troops from the most extreme of the peace groups and the young of the campus—and if their cultural values were not majority cultural values, nonetheless tactic demanded he pursue them. He had spoken at the Washington Moratorium in November, 1969, on a stand flanked nearby by the banners of the Viet Cong. He had pounded his way through a hundred campuses; student cheers and student applause gradually fashioned the style of his rhetoric. He was for amnesty—and on the campus, students shrilled with delight. He felt, and specifically stated, that abortion was a matter best left to state governments—but he left no doubt that he, personally, was for it. He was for black people, busing and integration—without qualification. He was for civilizing the extravagant penalties exacted in many states for the use of marijuana. The colleges took him to their hearts. To win the nomination at all, McGovern had to energize with his morality whatever clusters of women, students and cause people could be moved by morality to action in the primary states. With these, he might be able to seize control of the party; with control of the party he might win control of the government; and then morality could be imposed as national policy. Yet what he said and spoke in the spring months could not be limited to audiences of his choice. On the college campuses, within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar ringing high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past—more of the same, and frightening.
McGovern was thus already wrapped in an image of his own making by the time, in mid-passage of the primaries, the more serious writers of the press found it worthwhile to begin the definition of the hard, specific programs which the front-runner was offering to the nation as a would-be President.
And of these, it soon became clear, three were primordial.
His first issue was peace. On the issue of war and peace, McGovern did his own thinking and could explain it with easy clarity. “The war against Communism is over,” he said once to me, criticizing my story of 1968, “the challenge to the free world from Communism is no longer relevant. We’re entering a new era, and the Kennedy challenge of 1960 is pretty hollow now. Somehow we have to settle down and live with them … there has to be an easing off of our reliance on power; too much reliance on power weakens a society.” McGovern was for accords with China, with Russia, with the whole Communist world. But so, too, of course, was Nixon—and from February (when Nixon went to Peking just before the New Hampshire primary) until May (when the President went to Moscow just before the California primary), all the while that McGovern preached accommodation, live-and-let-live with Communism, there, on the tube of television, was the President of the United States practicing what McGovern preached.
This first issue, peace, hung on the Vietnam war. But the moralist in McGovern could describe the war only in terms of black and white. If Americans themselves were not criminals, then at least they supported a government run by criminals. America, he felt, sustained a corrupt clique in Saigon against a peace-loving regime in Hanoi; and McGovern’s terms for ending the war, however he put them, were simple: to surrender, to ask only the return of our prisoners, in return for which he would liquidate the government a Democratic President had established six years before in Saigon. McGovern’s phrases, pulsing with indignation, could reach pure demagoguery, as, for example, “Our government would rather burn down schoolhouses and schoolchildren in Asia than build schools for Americans at home,” or “The Nixon bombing policy on Indochina is the most barbaric action that any country has committed since Hitler’s effort to exterminate Jews in Germany in the 1930’s,” or “He’s playing politics with the lives of American soldiers and with American prisoners rotting in their cells in Hanoi. He’s putting his own political selfish interest ahead of the welfare of these young Americans….”
The anguish of Americans over the war in Vietnam, the shame of soul and impotence, was a nationwide political datum. It was heightened, further, by events which in 1972 visibly transformed the war into a macabre anachronism of the postwar era. The war had been accepted to prevent the thrust of Communist expansion, centered, as was believed then, in Peking, from sweeping all of Southeast Asia. But in February of 1972 Nixon had flown to Peking and made peace with the center of Asian Communism. Why, then, the continuing war? Or, rather: How to get out of it? It was a stupidity of colossal dimensions that American policy wrestled with. For McGovern, however, the root cause was not American stupidity, but American criminality.
From this advocacy of peace, his strongest issue, flowed McGovern’s Issue Number Two: the defense budget.
The McGovern defense paper, a fifty-six-page document, was the fall and winter homework of a young lawyer in McGovern’s office, thirty-one-year-old, South Dakota-trained John Holum, a prairie student of defense policy. The Pentagon had, to be sure, slipped into ponderous unmanageability; it was fighting a war, moreover, with one of the most stupid leaderships in American military history; and this leadership was accepted with docile servility by both House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Holum’s solution, an extraordinary flight of one man’s imagination, was, simply, to take the chopper to the Pentagon budget and slash its $87.3 billion total in fiscal ‘72 by 37 percent to $54.8 billion in 1975—the savings to go to social welfare at home. As the thesis of a young Ph.D. student it would have been outstanding. But Holum was tackling the most complicated problem of American survival, and his action recommendations as a package did not make sense: the United States Navy would be reduced to six carriers. Military manpower would be cut from 2,500,000 to 1,750,000, lower than the days preceding Pearl Harbor. America’s missile defenses would be unilaterally cut, without bargaining for balancing cuts with the Soviet Union. Politically, too, it was vulnerable to the attack of local politicians and union leaders from the aircraft industry of Long Island to the electronics industries of Los Angeles.
If the defense program of George McGovern had John Holum as its identifiable father, if it had the rational control of one mind exerting itself to bring order out of a stack of handouts and newspaper clippings, the same could not be said of the McGovern economics program.
The McGovern economics program was Great Issue Number Three. But the “thousand-dollar giveaway,” as it came to be known, which was to haunt McGovern all through the year, was an orphan. No one ever, throughout the campaign, wanted to acknowledge fatherhood.
It had come about gradually during the early days of guerrilla planning. In August of 1971 a group of seven distinguished professorial economists had met in the East Manhattan town house of Blair Clark, Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign manager. They gathered at three in the afternoon and the session ran for six hours as they discussed the inequity of the American tax system, the need to redistribute income and the problem of balance of payments. “McGovern,” said Clark, “behaved like a student at a seminar. He sat by the fireplace and took notes—they were bullshitting him so outrageously I was amazed. It wasn’t a dialogue. He was a sponge. He asked respectful questions—but he never challenged them.” McGovern could not stay to hear the end of the discussion, for he had to leave early that evening—his staff had arranged a meeting with Matthew J. Troy, Jr., the new leader of the Queens County Democrats of New York City, the first big-city political mechanic of note who had responded to the charisma of the Senator from South Dakota. But before he left, McGovern invited the eminent economists to send in more papers, more ideas, more data to his headquarters for some basic new policy on incomes.
Political tactic set the timetable of the issues. McGovern’s campaign drudged along with little press attention in 1971. In early January, 1972, his plan therefore called for headline-catching statements on issues to engage that press attention. The Holum paper on national defense was almost ready (to be released on January 19th). But first would come the major domestic statement on economics and social justice. Thus, the task fell to Gordon Weil, a personality who generated much rancor within the McGovern campaign, but a most serious and earnest man. It was up to Weil to paste up all the ideas of the academics into one major paper on how wealth might be redistributed in America, and have it ready in time for the “issues phase” of the early campaign. For two full evenings, after his other exhausting work was done, Weil labored, putting together the ideas that had come into McGovern headquarters; and what came out was the famous Ames, Iowa, speech of January 13th, 1972, delivered to a college audience, ignored by the national press—but a speech which was to acquire a survival quality easily equal to Barry Goldwater’s casual statement in January of 1964 that he could see no usefulness in Social Security.
The Ames, Iowa, speech was a long, loose ramble which McGovern and Weil presented not as a blueprint but rather as “suggestions” or “options” that, as President, McGovern might offer to Congress for debate. It was a collection of random thoughts on the fractured and deformed tax structure that has calcified in the postwar years about the interests of every special group of pleaders. It attacked the special treatment of capital gains; the oil depletion tax; the inheritance tax; the depreciation taxes. It proposed sweeping tax reforms that would close all loopholes, gut the rich, comfort the middle class and sustain the poor.
Of its specifics, two proposals achieved an exuberant vitality of their own. The first was a new taxation of inheritances—no individual in America would be allowed to receive, either in gifts from his family during their lifetimes or on their death, an inheritance larger than half a million dollars. Half a million dollars is about the value of a good family farm in the Midwest these days, and larger than a good many small businesses. In an age of inflation, half a million is one of the targets that hallucinate millions of ordinary people whose dreams toy with similar sums as they toss abed. (“Do you realize what this does to a life-insurance salesman?” cried John Bailey, Connecticut Democratic State Chairman. “We’ve got lots of life-insurance salesmen here in the party— it can cripple them.”) It was a truly revolutionary scheme. It would, said one academic economist, create an American capitalism without capitalists. More importantly, in the words of Richard Dougherty, McGovern’s press spokesman, “it would wipe out the dream factor—every slob in the street thinks that if he hits the lottery big, he may be able to leave half a million to his family; it wipes out dreams.”
More explosive even than the legacy stipulation of the Ames program was, however, the “demogrant” program. The demogrant program was McGovern’s approach in economics to the problem of good and evil, and it was the best Gordon Weil could make out of all the confusing suggestions he had received from the academics. Quite simply, the demogrant program promised $1,000 a year to every man, woman and child in America, from Henry Ford and Jean Paul Getty to each unwed mother with her out-of-wedlock children in the city slum.
In the higher arithmetic of American economic thinking, the $ 1,000-a-head demogrant program is not nearly as bizarre as it was later made to seem. Variously called incomes equalization, negative income tax, family assistance, it reflects a thinking that all civilized leaders, mayors of big cities, Congressmen of both houses have for years accepted: the fact that the poor are ever with us and, in a big-city civilization, must be taken care of.
The ways of taking care of the poor are infinite, but the tax laws and appropriations required are complicated; and for over a decade now the matter of income redistribution has been under debate in America. Indeed, at the moment of the launching of McGovern’s demogrant program, the Nixon administration had been fighting for almost three years for a minimum family grant of $1,600 a year (later raised to $2,400 a year); the Democrats on the Hill had been fighting for a minimum grant of $3,000 to $4,000 a year; and George McGovern himself had sponsored a bill, submitted by the National Welfare Rights Organization, to guarantee every family $6,500 a year. All these bills, however, were based on people’s need, as were all the other contraptions of thought that had grown up in the 1960’s to take care of the needy: food stamps, Medicare, scholarships, manpower training. The new McGovern demogrant program was, however, divorced from need. On the surface it appeared like the purest biblical utopianism. Everyone, but everyone, would get a minimum $1,000 a year from the Federal government—and then the government would tax back enough from the comfortable above a certain gross income to make up for what it paid to the poor.
So far, so good. But what kind of new taxes? On whom would they fall? How much would new taxes hurt you in excess of the $1,000 a year you would get in the mail from the Feds? Would it begin to hurt only those who made over $25,000 a year? Or would it hurt as far down as $12,000 a year, which is what a blue-collar worker with a working wife ordinarily takes in?
The trouble was that no one on McGovern’s staff knew—not McGovern himself, not his speechwriters, and certainly not the academics who had fed their thoughts into the campaign and now fled from any intellectual sponsorship of their godchild as presented by Gordon Weil. Later Maurice Stans, finance chairman of the Republican campaign, would find the McGovern proposals on inheritance, demogrants and income tax one of the finest devices available for raising money from the terrified rich. Stans would brandish before very rich contributors the embossed Senate bill S3378, the McGovern-sponsored $6,500-a-year family guarantee (which McGovern now repudiated), as if he were presenting a high explosive that would blow them, and their fortunes, to doom.
But long before Stans and the Republicans got to work on the $ 1,000-a-year “giveaway,” Hubert Humphrey had preceded them in the California primary, where he was about to make his last electoral stand in Presidential politics.
It was not so much that Hubert Humphrey was old at sixty-one—the vitality, the bounce, the lyric, copper-bell quality of his voice were still there.
But by 1972 Hubert Humphrey had been part of the scenery too long, as long as Richard M. Nixon—and he had become to the young and the press a political cartoon.
If Hubert were a woman, summed up an old friend, he would probably boast the largest pair of mammary glands in American motherhood. At his political bosom had suckled all the humanitarian causes of America for a third of a century. Friend of the workingman and his union leaders; of the farmer and the general storekeeper; of the soybean planter and the cotton chopper; of the sheepman and the cattle rancher; of the Masons and the Catholics; of the blacks and the Jews; of the aging and the students—Hubert Humphrey in the postwar world had attached his name to every cause labeled Progress in America. When he talked of his record—his sponsorship of civil rights, of Food for Peace, of nuclear disarmament, of student loans, of Medicare and Medicaid, of minimum wages, of Social Security, of rural electrification—one leaned forward, listening, half expecting Humphrey to tell how he had helped Ben Franklin invent electricity.
But the old record which Humphrey so often trumpeted was now advanced in a melancholy recall. Others had stolen his credit, he mourned; his children bore the name of false parents. With a receptive audience, like the aging Jews in the palm-fringed poorhouses of South Miami Beach during the Florida primary, Humphrey’s lamentation could become folk art. After a list of all his bills, proposals, innovations to help the aged, to fatten Social Security for working people, coupled with the attack on those rivals who now grabbed credit for what he had nursed into law, Humphrey would continue before such an audience of the forlorn and the abandoned: “You know what I mean. The children, they grow up and go away. Everyone says what fine children they are, everyone takes credit for them, the way they act, the way they talk. But they don’t remember their parents any more…. Only the parents remember how they stayed up late at night sewing the children’s clothes, getting them ready for school, how the children came in late for lunch, and always expected you to be there to feed them, or take care of them when they were hurt…. People forget their parents in politics, too.” And the aging Jews, like the aging blacks, and the aging everywhere, nodded their heads—they remembered, they understood.
Humphrey might some future day go down in American history as one of the greater Senators, like Clay or Webster or Norris, when his career was summed up. For the young of 1972, however, he was a man of the war, Lyndon Johnson’s Vice-President. For most of the middle-aged, he shimmered with schmaltz. But over the same years of American politics that had spanned the career of Richard M. Nixon, whenever dream and reality had confronted each other, Humphrey had embraced the dream, Nixon the reality. Now, by historic irony, in June of 1972 in the California primary, at the end of his twelve-year pursuit of the Presidency, it would be left to Humphrey, the dreamer, to shove the reality of American life and government as it really was against the new dreamer and preacher of 1972, George McGovern, and thereby begin McGovern’s destruction.
For Humphrey, the California primary was the end of the road on a last adventure which had somehow gone awry. It had begun in the fall of 1971 when a few political speculators had put up the money for an in-depth survey of voter opinion and had discovered how spongy was the support for Edmund Muskie. Obviously, the clash between the insurgency and the traditionalists which had broken out in Chicago in 1968 was about to repeat; and to many who feared the insurgency, if Muskie could not stop it, then the only alternative was Humphrey.
Early money was forthcoming from Humphrey’s old sources. Labor’s old alliance with Humphrey promised a working base; and there was all the past, the Humphrey record, the recognition value left from the 1968 campaign to buttress the try. Florida had been the first test—$550,000 had been spent there, a team of Florida “pros” hired to manage the campaign; but Humphrey had come in with only 18.6 percent of the vote. Wisconsin should have been Humphrey’s—a neighbor state of Minnesota, it was conceded to Humphrey by the press as casually as New Hampshire had been to its neighbor, Muskie of Maine. $89,900 was spent in Wisconsin, as well as enormous physical vitality—but Humphrey finished third, after George McGovern and George Wallace, succeeding only in finally destroying by his presence the candidacy of Edmund Muskie.
Phase Two of the primary campaign had gone better. Humphrey had won Pennsylvania, against major efforts by Muskie, Wallace and McGovern. With the aid of the steelworkers’ union in that state he had taken 35 percent of the vote, 57 of its 137 delegates chosen by districts. He had been hard pressed by McGovern in Ohio, but, with labor’s backing, had taken 79 delegates there and won the statewide plurality. He had run and won against George Wallace in head-on contests in both Indiana and West Virginia. But then he had performed dismally in Michigan, a labor state, where he had every reason to hope for better than the 16 percent of the vote he finally drew. And had fared poorly in Nebraska in a head-to-head contest with McGovern. A major effort of McGovern’s army had defeated him there, on May 9th, by 41 percent to 35 percent.
All in all, as Humphrey looked forward to California’s primary scheduled for June 6th, he and his staff knew they were in trouble. His popular-vote totals were substantial, to be sure. In the primaries up through May 16th counting popular votes, Humphrey had scored 2,606,186, McGovern 2,183,533, George Wallace 3,334,914. But the delegate count was discouraging: McGovern now, after Nebraska, led by 560 delegates; Wallace, though eliminated by a bullet, held 324; Humphrey himself had only 311. On Tuesday, June 6th, four states would select a total of 415 delegate votes—of which, beyond comparison, California with its 271 delegates was the most important. “California is the ballgame,” said Humphrey flatly, when asked what his chances were.
Looking forward into California was, for Humphrey, looking into the sunset. There he stood, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the last defender of the center tradition of the Democratic Party against the insurgency; derided by the press, which had grown tired of him; stripped of his personal role as the party’s dreamer by the preacher of 1972, George McGovern; and completely outgunned by the evangelist’s organization.
The contrast in organization—Humphrey’s and McGovern’s—told much about the new politics and the old politics.
Of McGovern’s army in California, one can almost say that it had reached that same perfect state of its art that the U.S. Bomber Command had achieved in 1945—and then gone on to overkill. One marveled: 283 storefront offices in place by election weekend; more than 500 out-of-state organizers dispatched to key localities; 10,000 volunteers walking precincts, ringing doorbells; precise polling was charting movements of voter sentiment; money and deployment followed the polling report of how the voters were moving. Two million homes would be visited by primary day, perhaps 2,300,000. Three-by-five cards had given way to print-out forms and computers. Electronic tapes of registered voters, purchased from the registration offices of each county, had been cross-coded with other tapes of telephone numbers; had then been sorted into print-outs of names (every individual name with its own number); been organized by print-out sheets in kits, on which volunteers coded questions and responses. Storefronts gathered print-outs from volunteer precinct walkers, then shipped them to regional headquarters; from regional headquarters two trucks carried bales of print-out sheets to computer centers; there the computer spat out and mailed a personalized form letter from George McGovern to each numbered respondent, addressed to that voter’s central concern as identified at the threshold by a precinct walker: education, social security, the war, Israel, busing—there were twelve letters in all. The guerrillas of New Hampshire and Wisconsin had, in three months, become the most efficient technical apparatus ever fielded by any candidate in a primary. “I don’t know,” said William Geberding, a political-science professor at UCLA. “I’ve been telephoned three times myself this week by McGovern volunteers, and a friend of mine has been telephoned four times. They may be doing too much.”
Humphrey’s organization reflected another era—for, in contemporary terms, he commanded nothing he could call his own. Humphrey had dealt always in the structured systems of power where friendly leaders could deliver what tradition or loyalty had long since packaged—unions, ethnic blocs, farm groups, big-city machines. In California, so large and so diffuse, Humphrey’s strength rested on what manpower labor could deliver, and how much money his friends could raise to reach the unorganized by the media. Both were difficult.
The commander of the AFL/CIO’s rescue squad in California was Robert J. Keefe, a rising political quantity in the national labor organization. Said Keefe, talking of his dealings with California’s labor leaders, “We’re doing all we can. But they’re tired of Humphrey, he’s been around too long. They say, ‘Oh, Goddamit, here he is broke again, we’ve been pulfing his chestnuts out of the fire for years.’ All he’s got going for him here is what we’re putting out for him—our mailings, our membership lists. But we have to piggyback him on local campaigns. Wherever we back a local candidate in the primary, we’ll pack Hubert in on top.” Keefe, like most labor leaders, likes to march in the front rank of a parade that includes other elements, too; union leaders become embarrassed, discouraged or surly when they find that the parade consists only of themselves. And Keefe was thoroughly discouraged. “What are you going to say about a campaign when you go into headquarters in the morning and the biggest question is how are we going to get $280 in cash, now, or else our staff gets tossed out of their motel rooms this afternoon?”
Keefe’s problem—money—written with several additional zeros at the end of the digits, was the desperate problem of the Humphrey campaign in California, and lay squarely on the desk of the late Eugene Wyman, the campaign treasurer.2 From Wyman’s desk the picture looked even bleaker than it did from Keefe’s. Wyman’s efforts around the country had raised, and seen spent, over $2,000,000 nationwide for the Humphrey campaign before California. The money had come in large chunks, and had gone—where, no one knew, for bookkeeping was never a strong element in a Humphrey campaign. Now the McGovern camp, riding the tide of victory, had $2,000,000 to spend in California alone, plus the organization that Gary Hart had seeded across the state as early as June of 1971. For the last effort of Humphrey in the climactic California primary Wyman had managed to hold on to $400,000. And then, about ten days before his final media push, he had been wakened one morning by a telephone call from Washington—Humphrey’s Washington headquarters was not only $1,000,000 in debt; it was all but in the sheriff’s hands. If, somehow, Wyman could not send $250,000 immediately to Washington, headquarters might be padlocked; and those who had been writing checks for campaign expenses against deficit balances might be carried off to jail—that day. There was no question about what must be done; and most of the money squirreled away for Humphrey’s California campaign, along with the vital television exposure it was to purchase, evaporated.
Without money, without organization, without press support, something else had to be added to the Humphrey campaign—an idea.
The idea, as it occurred to Wyman and William Connell, Humphrey’s long-time personal aide, was quite simple. Up to now, by the polling analyses, McGovern had been winning primaries simply on the message of decency, trust and peace. Yet the voters, it appeared, did not know what McGovern really stood for. McGovern should be made to explain himself. California was a polyglot state, its Democrats even more split than its Republicans. California Democrats are a West Coast melting pot: Mexican-Americans; blacks; Indians; Orientals; Italians; Jews who might be made to worry about McGovern’s obscure views on Israel; transplanted Southern Democrats, “ridge-runners” who might be made to worry about busing. And, above all, working people. Though in California working people wear sport shirts rather than blue collars, they worry about the same grocery and social issues that plague industrial workers everywhere—such as jobs and welfare. Defense is the state’s chief employer, and McGovern’s call for huge defense cuts sounded like less jobs for Californians on the line. McGovern wanted a more generous welfare system; most working people were suspicious about the sound of the proposal. Up to now McGovern had been winning primaries as Mr. Good Guy, the man who was “Right from the Start.” Humphrey—so Wyman and Connell decided—must destroy that image, and expose what exactly McGovern was. In short, Humphrey must stop competing in the role of Mr. Dreamer; he must become Mr. Practical.
The simple solution offered by Wyman and Connell was that Humphrey should challenge George McGovern to debate the issues. Before a free television audience which they lacked the money to buy, Humphrey might, in the give-and-take of debate, force McGovern to define his proposals sharply and thus show the audience where McGovern stood. Humphrey approved the Wyman-Connell plan in Washington; by May 18th McGovern accepted; on May 28th, nine days before the primary, would come the first of three debates.
As the debates began, it stood in the polls that McGovern would carry California. Pat Caddell’s private poll for McGovern, a serious study, indicated the margin might go as high as 15 points. The most respected California public poll, the Field Poll, held a week before election that the sweep would go as high as 20 points—McGovern 46, Humphrey 26, the rest scattered.
Sunday of the debate, Humphrey gathered his advisers at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Their course was clear, all agreed—Humphrey must go on the attack as soon as the screen lit up, and hit the McGovern slogan of “Right from the Start.” He must score immediately and throw McGovern off balance. McGovern had voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, as had everyone else. Humphrey must say we had all been wrong on Vietnam, McGovern included. And then he must attack again: on defense. And then attack again: on welfare. Attack—all the way.
McGovern’s briefing session was held at the Hyatt House, with eighteen people present to offer advice. McGovern, at ease on a chaise longue, his shoeless stockinged feet stretched out, entertained them first with an anecdote. Yesterday had been Hubert’s sixty-first birthday and he had called his old friend to wish him well. Hubert had told him he wasn’t feeling very well, he had a stomachache and a fever. “Maybe it’s all those mean things you’ve been saying about me, Hubert, that’s giving you the bellyache,” was McGovern’s amiable recall of the conversation. And Hubert had answered, “I really don’t like saying those mean things, they don’t go down very well.”
McGovern now invited discussion, and as his advisers talked, he listened, then would sum up. On defense policy it was quite clear that McGovern knew more than anyone on his staff—of the capability of nuclear submarines, of the situation in the Mediterranean, of the use of bombers. It came then to the welfare problem, and McGovern inquired, now in June, what kind of figure he ought to use in the debate. One was first impressed, then disconcerted, as the conversation went on:
How many people would benefit from the welfare scheme, asks McGovern—we used to say 80 percent, now we’re saying 50 percent, what figure should we use? A babble of response from his advisers, but no answer. Frank Mankiewicz breaks in, having read Humphrey’s speeches, “Humphrey’s going to say that everyone who gets under $12,000 a year in this country gets relief, and everyone over $12,000 a year pays for it.” McGovern: How many people in this country earn over $12,000 a year? Again a babble of answers … a hundred million? No one knows. Ted Van Dyk offers mildly the thought that a lot of people hope someday to make more than $12,000 a year. Well, says McGovern, maybe we ought to say that those who make between $12,000 and $25,000 a year will pay a “slightly higher tax.” Someone offers the figure of $21 a year more. The figure pleases McGovern. And the advisers and economists in the room break into discussion until McGovern says, “I like that figure. Twenty-one bucks a year more at $20,000 a year. I’ll stick to that.” Then, after that, “Just for my own peace of mind, what’s the estimated cost to the budget of my $1,000 proposal?” Someone offers the figure of $30 billion. Someone else challenges it. Someone else says it doesn’t cost anything because it’s simply a transfer of funds. No one knows. McGovern sums it up—he thinks he’ll say that it would be awfully hard to devise a welfare program worse than the one we have now. All nod in agreement, and Frank Mankiewicz, his square chin stuck out, slaps on a kicker: “If we get hit, let’s take it straight—let’s say, yes, the very rich and the powerful will have to pay more.”
On to other matters for the debate: politics, the power brokers, what about Wallace? George McGovern: “Oh, Wallace—if elected, I’ll name him Ambassador to South Africa.” (Laughter.) On to busing. McGovern is worried about busing. Frankly, he thinks he made a poor performance in Michigan on busing—he waffled. What’s our position on busing? Again—a conflict of figures. Someone says that Walter Mondale has stated that 43 percent of all American kids are already bused to school; and someone else says no, the figure is 65 percent. Busing trails off into no answer. Pat Caddell raises several points—Humphrey is perceived in California as too strident, he hurts himself with his stridency; McGovern must play it cool. His (McGovern’s) problem, according to Caddell, is that 20 percent of the pollees see him as a radical. McGovern mildly responds: “You mean the idea is they think I’m too radical?”
The California debates were watershed events in the campaign, for their impact on McGovern’s image. Three veteran correspondents—Messrs. David Schoumacher of CBS, David Broder of the Washington Post, and George Herman of CBS—had agreed they would keep this first debate off the clinical details of campaigning and focus their questions on the issues; thus they delivered television at its finest.
The debate opened with Humphrey glowering and McGovern glowing, and McGovern scored first with a poetic passage about when he “was a boy growing up in South Dakota … every person I know loved this country and was proud of it.” Then Humphrey, punching, moved in, as planned. “I believe that Senator McGovern, while having a very catchy phrase … ‘McGovern Right from the Start,’ that there are many times you will find that it was not right from the start, but wrong from the start. We were both wrong on Vietnam. Senator McGovern is wrong on Israel. Senator McGovern has been wrong on unemployment compensation … on labor law and on the two or three great issues here in California; on his massive unrealistic … welfare program. On taxation he is contradictory and inconsistent. He is wrong on defense cuts. I think they will cut into the muscle, into the very fiber of our national security.”
McGovern froze and pedaled water for a few minutes. (I dined with McGovern the next night and he explained himself. Hubert had been his friend; he had never expected such ferocity of attack from a friend. And Hubert, it had seemed, was crying. McGovern was unfamiliar with Humphrey’s vulnerability to the brilliant lights of television, and the watering of Humphrey’s eyes seemed to indicate some deep distress in an old friend who, though now a rival, was still cherished.)
On air, McGovern was the more attractive man, soothing as he went. But Humphrey, in a state where defense industries sustain life, was unrelenting: “Senator McGovern … says, halt the Minute Man procurement, halt the Poseidon procurement, halt the B-1 Prototype. Phase out 230 of our 530 strategic bombers. Reduce aircraft carrier force from 15 to 6. Reduce our naval air squadrons to 80 percent. Halt all naval surface shipbuilding. Reduce the number of cruisers from 230 to 130. Reduce the number of submarines by 11…. When you … reduce the total number of forces 66,000 below what we had pre-Pearl Harbor, you are not talking about just removing waste … you are cutting into the very fiber and the muscle of the defense establishment.”
From defense to welfare. Welfare had by now confused all reporters covering McGovern, and Schoumacher of CBS asked, “As you know, reporters covering you have been trying for quite some time to get a price tag on your welfare bill…. Can you tell us today how much it will cost?” McGovern: “There is no way, Mr. Schoumacher, that you can make an exact estimate on this proposal.” Schoumacher: “… you are asking us to accept a program that you can’t tell us how much it’s going to cost?” McGovern: “That is exactly right. There is no way to estimate the cost of this program other than to say there is no net cost to the Treasury at all…. Every American who is earning $12,000 a year or less would profit…. Above that figure, up to an income of $20,000, it might cost him another $21 a year in taxes to support this program.”
Mr. McGovern did not know what his welfare proposal would cost, and Mr. Humphrey bore in: “I took a look at it right here in California. A secretary working in San Francisco making $8,000, a single person, and there are thousands, millions of single people in this country, would have an increase in his or her taxes, under Senator McGovern’s welfare proposal, of $567.” McGovern: “That is simply not true.” Humphrey: “It is true. A family that makes $12,000, a family of four, would have a $409 increase.” And so on.
To those watching in the studio, Caddell’s analysis of the Humphrey personality seemed correct—Humphrey was strident, harsh, pushing. McGovern, so it seemed, was the nicer guy. To Humphrey’s old loyalists, the debate was upsetting—Humphrey, said some of his old supporters later, had seemed so “mean.” Humphrey was to change his style later, saying, “The first debate was rock and roll. The second debate we did a waltz. The third debate was free for all.” But at the hard level in the first debate, where people were trying to make up their minds, it was Humphrey who had scored, not McGovern. He had asked the hard questions; McGovern had given soft answers. And the echoing observation that lingers in this correspondent’s mind came from Ted Van Dyk, then high in McGovern’s councils, who had watched all three networks at once during the debate. It was CBS that had carried the debate—McGovern versus Humphrey. That same afternoon the other networks were carrying Mr. Nixon out of Moscow—Nixon versus Brezhnev. Van Dyk, comparing the two shows, had thought that the President had looked very impressive—more impressive than either Democratic candidate.
The debates on television, especially the first debate, had been seen by very few, for on Sunday of Memorial Day weekend California was playing at the beach. A quick UPI survey by telephone of 120 homes had found 70 people out; of those who replied, only 20 had watched the debate; and only 9 of these claimed to have been influenced. Yet time was about to go to work and catch up. The local press, then the national press would spread word of the debate the next morning; talk would begin; the substance of the debate would be translated down to a few simple phrases. Wherever it was that Californians gathered to talk politics, they would be talking the next week of what the candidates had said; and with the talk would come an erosion of the McGovern lead—first in California, then nationwide. He had stood in the first week of June closer to Nixon in the Gallup Poll than ever before. From California on, that margin would widen and never approach parity again.
The California vote was slow coming in on the night of June 6th. McGovern led in the early totals; but in the key-precinct analysis of CBS and NBC it was much closer—far closer than the Field Poll’s twenty points, even closer than Caddell’s fifteen points. In general, the army had performed magnificently. McGovern was strong in northern California, surprisingly strong in conservative San Diego County, running far ahead in the Central Valley, which had been Eugene Pokorny’s California field command. But the vote was breaking badly against McGovern in working-class areas—above all, in Los Angeles, where one third of California votes. Here in the Los Angeles metropolis Wyman had invested what little media money Humphrey had left to give McGovern his only opposition on air in the state. In the aerospace areas of Burbank and in blue-collar Huntington Park, Humphrey was running between two and three to one over McGovern in working-class precincts. He was splitting the black and Chicano vote in urban Los Angeles, despite McGovern’s enticing welfare proposal for the poor. And in the lower-middle-class Jewish precincts of the Fairfax district, Humphrey was running ahead by two and three to one.
It was not until three in the morning that the major networks decided McGovern had won, after all, by what turned out to be a five-point margin, 44.3 percent to 39.2 percent. And with this five-point margin, by the winner-take-all rules of the California primary, McGovern had won all 271 convention votes of the state. He had won in New Jersey that day, too—71 out of the 109 delegates available; he had won all of South Dakota’s 17 votes and 10 of New Mexico’s 18. The wound that Humphrey’s savage California attack had opened in McGovern’s campaign was not yet perceived as critical; and now, in the week after the California victory, McGovern could count 975 sure delegate votes out of the 1,509 necessary to nominate. There was only New York left to go, with its 278-person delegation, the largest in the nation; but in New York the old order had collapsed and the state waited for mop -up by McGovern’s army.
* * *
Had New York’s primary happened early, rather than last on the calendar of spring events, it would have become a political legend rather than what it remains now, a cameo of near-perfect performance in the cabinet of memories of McGovern’s army.
The McGovern campaign in New York provided all the local astonishments that the army had provided everywhere—and surpassed most. Its campaign coordinator, Edward Rogoff, a Columbia University undergraduate, was a full twenty years old. When one talked to him, a generation was swept away. He had been born during the Korean War. When he was eleven, his mother had kept him home from school with a cold one day and that Friday, November 22nd, 1963, he had been introduced to politics on television watching the story of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Politics, for him, began there. As a teen-age volunteer and canvasser, he said, he’d never been “in a campaign that wasn’t computerized.” And he knew his work—by primary day 215 McGovern Clubs had been opened across the Empire State, with 30,000 volunteers canvassing, and 12,000 manning each election-district poll.
The over-all Empire State campaign had been the responsibility of Professor Richard Wade, the American historian. His architecture, too, was near-perfect. A single advertisement in The New York Times in January of 1971 had begun it; Wade had rented a three-room suite in a hotel to receive the response mail—$9,000 and 2,500 names had come in reply. 1971 had been slow, but by the end of that year Wade, out of his name lists, had put together nuclear groups in the city suburbs where Eugene McCarthy had been strongest in 1968; had closed slowly on the city itself, to capture its Reform Democratic Clubs; had, all in all, spent only $112,000 by mid-April of 1972 when his net of alliances, volunteers and organizers had fielded full slates of delegates in 37 of 39 New York Congressional districts. And by then, in fact, two months before the primary day, the campaign for New York was over.
It is not demeaning to the work of an outstanding academic historian and an energetic boy, however, to say that theirs was not the story. The story in New York was much larger—it was that of collapse, the end of an era, the dissolution of what had once been the greatest state Democratic party in the Union. “Power was lying there in the streets,” said Edward Costikyan, the most thoughtful leader the New York County Democrats had ever had, “it was in fragments. All they had to do was to come in and pick it up.”
One had come into New York time and again during the long winter and spring campaign, marveling always at the city’s splendor, at the towers that rose through the haze on the drive in from the airport, at the arches of its bridges, above all, at the vitality which is its essence. But the vitality of New York City, so long the political capital of the Democratic Party, lay not in its politics—it lay in Wall Street; or in its midtown cultural center; or on the waterfront; or in the creative community of images, film, stage, fashion. Politically, however, New York City was a land of pavement peasants, with peasant leaders. Politicians from all over the nation passed through New York in a continual parade, raiding its rich liberals for money and courting its masters of national publicity for exposure. But New York City politicians were to be despised—they not only possessed no power, they did not understand it.
In New York State, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by four to three, with a margin of 1,000,000. But there was no Democratic party any longer. In the state that once boasted of Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman, the Democratic party has in twenty years managed to elect only two major statewide candidates—Averell Harriman in 1954 and Robert Kennedy in 1964—a record equaled by the Democrats of Republican Vermont. The Democrats in 1972 were not only split, but so split by race, greed, sectarianism, culture and ethnic heritage as to make definition impossible. Broadly, there were the regulars: pockets of fossil chieftains in a few counties—Buffalo, Albany, Brooklyn, Bronx—led in the largest cities by incompetent predators. In New York City the predators were no longer even able to collect their own graft; and the bureaucracy, despite all of John Lindsay’s efforts from above, looted on its own, not even sharing with the old regulars. Against them, broadly, there stood the reformers—the reformers had come into being in the 1950’s, inspired by Adlai Stevenson and the cause of peace; they had fought the old regulars with an unprecedented street gallantry, succeeded over the years in simplifying the mechanisms of party procedure, and begun slowly to purify New York’s backward, often corrupt courts. But as the reformers had triumphed in the districts, they had fallen into a schismatic, ideological sectarianism. With enormous vehemence they could debate in their clubs all the emotional causes of the day, civil rights, pollution, women’s rights, gay rights, above all, peace and the Vietnam War—all things except the cause and future of New York itself. Reformers and regulars alike were devoid of ideas or purpose, except those pumped into them from above or outside.
McGovern’s leaders—above all, Wade—had seen the power vacuum; they had moved first to field and file a delegate slate and control the reform wing; it was part of the grand strategy of rolling up the party from the left. The regulars had hung back, leaning toward Muskie but unwilling to make a commitment too early. “We’re scavengers,” said Meade Esposito, the regular leader of Brooklyn, to Lester Hyman, one of Muskie’s early recruiters. “We’ll take what we can get in patronage, but we’ve got to be with the strength.” New York’s regulars had waited for the outcome of the primaries to see who would emerge with the strength and then throw in their own supposed weight. What emerged, of course, was McGovern—but by then it was too late for the regulars to climb aboard. If McGovern had pre-empted the left, the left had also pre-empted McGovern.
The vote on June 20th, thus, was foreordained. One could only note anomalies; in the 26th Congressional District, where Averell Harriman was running, he was defeated by a nineteen-year-old sophomore from New Paltz College. Across the state, only one regular machine managed to elect a slate—in Albany, where eighty-seven-year-old Daniel P. O’Connell was still the boss; he had won with a slate whose top three members exceeded in combined age the total age of all eight McGovern rivals. All in all, McGovern won 230 of the 248 delegates contested at the polls in New York; 30 more would be chosen by the State Democratic Committee and he would be entitled to 91 percent of those, to give him a total which, at the convention, would come to 256 of the state’s 278 votes. The intricate, yet iron-clad reform rules governed the McGovern delegation. The delegation, after adjustments were made, would be 44 percent women (as against 9 percent in 1968); 23 percent young (as against 1 percent); 10 percent black (as against 8 percent); 6 percent Puerto Rican (as against 2 percent). Wrote Frank Lynn in The New York Times, “Four years ago, the roster of the New York delegation to the Democratic National Convention read like a ‘Who’s Who’ in the state party. This year the delegation that will leave for Miami Beach … might be more appropriately put in the ‘Who’s That’ category…. Some of the biggest names in the state Democratic party … will be watching the convention on television … State Controller Arthur Levitt, City Controller Abraham D. Bearne, the Democratic legislative leaders … James Farley … former Governor Averell Har-riman, former Mayor Robert F. Wagner … the Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan Democratic leaders …” The list might have gone on from there by listing a full score great statesmen, ambassadors, Cabinet members who had helped shape the postwar world for the Democratic Party, who lived now in New York and had been wrinkled off by their party—but the obvious absent names were enough to underscore the discontinuity, the rupture of past from present.
No more than 15 percent of New York’s Democrats had voted in the state’s Democratic primary. What the other 85 percent meant to do with their votes, no one could guess. Neither the regulars nor the reformers controlled these other votes; they were a state of mind, and could be gripped only by someone who understood that mind. From this point on, that state of mind, not the delegates, was the target.
Mr. McGovern appeared in the Windsor Room of the Hotel Bilt-more for forty-five minutes on the night of his last primary victory. A gold button was required for admittance, and the room was thronged with very rich contributors and the very celebrated in journalism and the arts. McGovern had been hard at work that day, flying to New Orleans to attend the conference of mayors and solicit support; Mayor Daley of Chicago had, that day, said about President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam, “I may be old-fashioned, but I’ll support the President; he knows more than we do.” Now, with his nomination locked up, with his army triumphant, McGovern would have to deal with this mentality not only in Chicago and New York, but in all the big cities across the country. As McGovern strolled out of his victory party after the last primary, he remarked, “I’ve been running for so long, I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow.” He would, he told his friends, sit still for three days and think about strategy.
Within the Democratic Party, no political strategy had been more astonishingly successful than his in recent times. He had raided it, now dominated it. The final seizure would come in Miami. At that point the strategy would have to be tested publicly beyond the house of the party in the broad nation outside. The nature of that changing nation and its problems had been freshly defined by the United States Census in 1970. The results of that census were just becoming available with a message that politicians could ignore only at their peril.
1 The Treasury Department had its own political formula for assigning Secret Service men to candidates. Announced candidates who drew at least 5 percent in the Harris or Gallup poll would be protected starting March 20th; so, too, would unannounced candidates drawing more than 20 percent. But not Lindsay. Lindsay declared that, in any event, he would reject such protection—it would spoil his New York style of campaigning.
2 Eugene Wyman, who died after the campaign was over, was not only an outstandingly pleasant and effective man, but, had he lived, would have been seen as a transitional figure in a large historic phenomenon. Wyman had come to prominence nationally because he was a natural expression of California’s rise to imperial status in the political community. In political terms, California had been a provincial state until the 1960’s—a capital-import state. Eastern politicians pumped money into California campaigns and did their best to manipulate them. By 1972, however, California had become a political capital-export state. Like New York, Texas and Illinois, California had become a state whose very rich invested in candidacies in every other state of the Union. In September, 1972, a lunch (in San Francisco) and a dinner (in Los Angeles) raised more than $2,000,000 from California Republicans in a single day—as against slightly more than $1,600,000 raised by Republicans in New York on the previous evening. On the Democratic side, the unchallenged champion money-raiser was Wyman, an outgoing, warmhearted Beverly Hills lawyer, known to Democrats from Maine to Alaska as a man who could always raise the extra $10,000 needed to keep the Liberal Idea well nourished.