The clearest over-all view of the campaign was at all times the President’s own.
I called on him in mid-September. I had seen him last in China—this was the first time since the campaign had begun. McGovern was in full swing across the country and the President was thought to be eluding battle.
He was tired at the end of the day, and came out from behind his desk to sit on the small chair beside the fireplace, offering a choice of drinks—milk, coffee or Coca-Cola. I said that the Oval Office was beautiful these days, that Mrs. Nixon’s taste for bright yellow seemed to light the room up. “We call it gold,” he corrected crisply. Then, as we began to talk, Ted Kennedy’s name came up, and the President volunteered that after the shooting of George Wallace he had provided Secret Service protection for Kennedy, although Kennedy was not a candidate. “His mother called me up,” explained the President, then added that he felt he should provide the guards—next to himself, Teddy Kennedy received more threatening mail than anyone in the country. “I felt I should,” he repeated several times. Then he turned directly to the campaign.
“The new majority,” he said, was what this election was all about. His speechwriters at the convention had wanted him to call it “the new coalition.” Others had argued for “the new Republican majority.” He insisted on “the new majority,” however, because he felt he wasn’t putting groups together in a coaliton the way Roosevelt had—he was trying to cut across groups, binding people in every group who had the same ideas. The Republicans, he said, had been the natural majority party from 1864 to 1928—Wilson had been a minority President in 1912, would have gone down in 1916 “except for the war.” Since 1932, however, it had been the other way around, the Democrats had been the natural majority party.
What, I asked, was he doing in September, 1972, to achieve another such reversal?
He fielded the question technically, with precision. “My role from the standpoint of operations is limited until the last two or three weeks, both by necessity and politics. There’ll be one event a week until the last three weeks, and then only the big states—New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, California, Texas.” And, “I’m not going into the states for the purpose of supporting Senate or House candidates, the way FDR did, or the way I did in 1970.”
Then, on his own, in the way in which he likes to wheel a conversation by his own logic, “Now let me give you the reasons back of that,” he said.
In his opinion, Congressional candidates went up or down in a Presidential year by the national sweep, and this business of a President going in, putting his arm around a local candidate was “at best a mixed bag.” He wanted the Republican candidates to do it on their own—to tie themselves to the President on foreign policy, particularly, and “on domestic policy as much as they can.” It was up to them to tie their local opponents to McGovern. Agnew was going to circulate, supporting Congressional candidates—”That’s his job, that’s a Vice-President’s job, I did it in 1956”—and the President’s family was campaigning for local candidates also.
Then, I asked, would there be no Truman-style “Give ‘em Hell” campaign against the Democratic Congress?
“No, sir,” he said vehemently.
The public polls, he explained, were giving him a 34-point lead, the greatest indicated margin in American history, but “I have no illusions about polls, and neither have you, Teddy. No President except Washington ever won by two to one. The best was 63/37 for Roosevelt. The optimum for a Republican, from a smaller base, was the Eisenhower landslide of 1956—that was 51½ to 42½. And unemployment in ‘56 was less than 5 percent, plus the 3-point bulge on Hungary and Suez that Ike picked up at the end. That campaign—the spread between Ike and Stevenson was never more than 10 points from September 1st on.”
He, Nixon, was working for this new majority, not a Republican majority, because, “Well,” he said, “I’m not stupid.” He was working to get the people he called Truman Democrats. Not only people like John Connally, but people like Eugene Klein and Eugene Wyman. They were calling him up. I appeared surprised that Wyman, Humphrey’s chief fund-raiser, was now helping Nixon. He chuckled. A lot more Democrats were coming over to him than met the eye, he said, but they couldn’t come out publicly for fear of hurting the Congressmen and Senators they supported.
At this point he was becoming very animated, his hands weaving, leaning forward, persuading. Democratic Presidential candidates usually ran behind their local Congressmen, he said, as Truman had in 1948. But Republicans like himself usually ran ahead of their local Congressmen. Everywhere this year, in his polls, there was at least a 10-point spread between what Richard Nixon was drawing and what the local Republican Congressmen were drawing. The moment he tied himself to the theme of a “new Republican majority,” well, “the moment I do that, I pull myself down to their level, and … part of our problem is that we have a lot of lousy candidates; the good ones will go up with me, the bad ones will go down.
“My view,” he said, “is to continue to go out and campaign for a ‘new majority.’ Suppose after the election we win by 55 over 45—the Ike majority over Stevenson. Then, after that, you still have the problem of governing the country. If I don’t succeed [in pulling a Republican Congressional majority in with him], I then have that problem.” He spoke about the need of being able to use his mandate, the effect of a landslide that didn’t pull along a Republican Congress, the need of holding Southern Democrats who would be willing to go along with him. And, summing it up, “I have to not have drawn the sword on the Congress I’ll be working with.”
It was a Presidential view of the campaign, and then he passed from his onetime favorite subject, the politics of politics, to his new view, the politics of state.
He needed this coming mandate for foreign affairs. His administration had been able to do more in foreign affairs than he had ever dreamed of when he came in—except for the hope of finding a more rational North Vietnam. China. Russia. Western Europe. Progress everywhere. The Middle East was still difficult, “but it’s a hell of a lot better for them not to be killing each other every day.” We were going to keep our commitments to Israel, but the job had to be finished there. Africa he regarded more as a European problem than as an American one; but Latin America was an American problem, we needed new initiatives there. “For twenty-five years we were frozen in ice, and now it’s thawing. But we can slip into the water and drown. When ice thaws, it’s the period of greatest danger as well as greatest hope.”
Thus, back to the politics of 1972, why he needed this mandate. “We come in with 43 percent of the vote, with the establishment giving us nothing but a kick in the butt, the press kicking the bejeezus out of us, the intellectuals against us.” He admitted they had given him a little credit for the opening with China and Russia. But he had operated from a position of weakness because foreign powers thought he had no support at all; they read Time Magazine and the Washington Post and The New York Times, and thought he had no support; so it all had to be done by personal diplomacy. And the May 8th decision—that was the biggest gamble of all.
Now, if he got this mandate, the expressed support of the people—”If we can win and win well, we can talk to China with great authority, to the Soviet Union, to Japan.” We, America, had to take the lead in reducing tensions, in reducing the burden of arms everywhere. SALT Talks I had been difficult, SALT Talks II would be even more difficult. He needed that personal mandate. He’d been reflecting—except for Chou En-lai, he now was the senior statesman in the world. The others were all gone, Adenauer, Churchill, Macmillan, De Gaulle. There were new faces in Russia, in Japan. A solid majority would give him the authority to speak and act.
He was not very worried about his ability to lead in foreign policy if he got the mandate he hoped for. In the foreign field, the President leads and Congress follows. Take the Truman 80th Congress (Republican-dominated), he said. They passed the Marshall Plan and the Greece-Turkey aid plan. “Truman led, and we followed. I voted for them.” It was George McGovern’s departure from bipartisan foreign policy that was “his major mistake—that was the real cruncher, that’s what got to men like George Meany; what makes a man leave his party is foreign policy and national defense.
“But in domestic policy,” said the President, “you can’t count on Congress following.” In the 80th Congress, he himself had split with Truman on the Taft-Hartley Act, civil rights, price controls. The most a President could expect even with a landslide, if the mandate was big enough, was that they’d follow him for the first year. He was going to say, in this instance, the country has spoken, and put out his own views on welfare, on a program of fiscal responsibility, on other matters.
I said that by the time he ended his second term it would be 1976, two hundred years since Independence, and suggested that perhaps now was the moment for the entire Constitution to be overhauled—how could you govern the cities under the old Constitution?
He shook his head decisively. He rejected the idea of a Constitutional revision. “When you talk of something as radical, as far-reaching as a Constitutional Convention or reorganizing the cities—the American people, they’re fed up with being used as an experiment. What you’re seeing now is a very pragmatic administration.”
Then he rose from his chair, went to his desk, pulled out a three-page paper and said, “Look at this—this is history in the making.”
The paper was a ribbon copy, with hand-scrawled corrections, of a memorandum that Nelson Rockefeller had just sent him. It had impressed the President, and as I tried to scan the memorandum while he talked, his conversation and the words of the memorandum blurred. The memorandum, as my eye tried to grab it, was a summation of what Nelson Rockefeller had learned in fourteen years of state and national politics. Rockefeller was writing about the different levels of government in America, how they denied people a “sense of control,” how all these levels of Federal, state, city, county government had to be separated out in the public mind, each with its own responsibilities, each with its own tax resources. All the while the President was continuing to talk, saying, “What Nelson feels is that we’ve got to get at what will work and what won’t work.”
The President rejected my approach to the Constitution and the cities as “revolutionary.” He was saying, “We know how things work here—Ehrlichman’s crowd, Kissinger’s crowd, they know how things work. Lou Harris used the phrase ‘change that works.’ We don’t want too violent a change. We know all the plays, we’re going to be in a position to present to the country changes in the system that will work.”
He went on to reflect on the first four years in domestic policy. “Let me say this—those first four years weren’t an easy period. When I came in, LBJ couldn’t even leave the White House—he was right, he shouldn’t have subjected himself to violence. But I can travel in all fifty states now. We started with the country in a hell of a shape. You’ve forgotten the days when 200,000 people marched on the White House. We’ve been fighting uphill on foreign policy. But domestic policy! It’s been uphill all the way; we didn’t have the mandate, we didn’t have the Congress. Now we’ve got an opportunity we couldn’t even dream of four years ago, but I don’t see it in terms of a revolutionary hundred days. We’ve got to look over our institutions and return them to old values….”
It was now well past my allotted hour with the President, but he seemed more cheerful and animated than when he had begun. He invited me to stroll with him from the White House over the street to the Executive Office Building, where people were waiting for him. The guards came to attention with a click as he passed; an umbrella mysteriously appeared in the hand of a guard to shelter him from the rain, and he was now making casual conversation. I was asking him about China and he was saying that it was too sensitive to talk about because both the Russians and the Chinese were so security-conscious. But as we walked he rambled about Chou En-lai—the charm of that man, how gay, how humorous Chou was. They said Chou was getting old, recalled the President, but he was tough. Chou En-lai could sit through a negotiating session of six or seven hours at a stretch; but he, Nixon, so much younger, couldn’t take more than four such hours. And how both Chou and Mao still liked to talk about their Long March. Then we were in his hideaway at the Executive Office Building, where he wanted to show me his Asian mementoes—vases, jars, lacquers. He was particularly fond of a Gandhara head someone had sent him—”That’s a Greek Buddha head from Afghanistan,” he said. It was a perfect piece.
It was time to go, and I noted that waiting for him were Senator Bill Brock of Tennessee and Ken Rietz, the youth coordinator of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, obviously there to talk the youth politics of the election campaign. The President gave them a brief session, then returned to the White House to dine alone. He had been up early that day—and, in campaign terms, had scored in the news by addressing the State Department’s international conference on narcotics control. Most of his day had been spent privately on foreign affairs and Vietnam, and three days later Bloody Thursday’s figures would come up with a historic marker. Bloody Thursday this week, on September 21st, 1972, would show zero Americans killed. In between, 46,000 had died in combat. The U.S. role in the war was winding down, and the President was thrusting his main campaign at the people as the politics of state. He would begin his personal campaign on Friday, when he would fly to Texas to stop overnight at the ranch of John Connally and apply himself, without much relish, to a re-election that was in the bag.
For George McGovern, the campaign was sadly different.
The drain on McGovern himself, up to early September, had already been exhaustive. There had been not only the spring march across the country and the excitement of Miami Beach; there had been a full year of campaigning before that, in 1971. This claim on his energy had been met by all the physical resources that years of clean living and a country-boy upbringing had stored up. He had begun to drain his last nervous and emotional energy during the six-week challenge on the California delegation; then, after the convention, when his schedulers had finally granted him a two-week respite for thought and rest in South Dakota, the Eagleton affair had piled up on him. August had been a month of disaster—not only the Eagleton affair, but the Salinger affair, and the futile courtship of the AFL/CIO, the wooing of Daley of Chicago and Lyndon Johnson in Texas. And on top of that, his headquarters in Washington dripped gossip and steamed with dissent, like a boiler leaking at every joint.
Thus, for months, when the real campaign began, he had been engaged in crisis. Yet the campaign required, above all, concept, theme and organization. The first of his final themes came almost by chance. He had been invited in late August, with several key members of his staff, to dinner at the Governor’s mansion in Minnesota, and the old champion of liberal democracy, Hubert Humphrey, had come bustling in late. Humphrey had been crisp and eloquent. The first job, he said, was to reunite the party; and the best way to reunite the party, old and new elements, was to remind all of them that it was still the party of “little guys against the big guys” and raise the question of who owned this government anyhow. Humphrey reflected that in 1968 he had wanted to talk about bread-and-butter issues, but had been harried to desperation by people who wanted him to talk about the war. Now the roles were reversed—George wanted to talk about the war, but people in 1972 wanted to hear about bread-and-butter.
George had agreed. George McGovern was a man of the Senate who liked to please his colleagues, and was eager to agree with any good-willed proposition brought to him by a friend. The inner compass of the man had been set on course long before, in his youth, and the grand strategy of the campaign had been set in his heart years ago. His theme, always, undeviatingly, was Good against Evil, Light against Darkness. But for now, the pragmatic campaign themes would be little guys against big guys, and bread-and-butter.
It was late to be selecting themes and concepts, but McGovern flew back to Washington and, on August 30th, summoned the squabbling chieftains of his staff to an evening at his home. There, in his mild way, he tried to crack heads together, assign responsibilities, insist on coordination of themes, statements, travel, research and schedules, and prepared to take off on Labor Day, with eight weeks left to go.
I joined the McGovern campaign Labor Day week seeking some coherence, mindful of how much all of us reporters had underrated George McGovern only eight months before in January. The planning as it had been explained to me now seemed clear—and I wanted to see it work. This week would be “tax week,” devoted to the inequities of the national tax structure; next week would be “inflation week,” on the “cost to you” of this unending war; then would come “corruption week,” on the scandals of the Republican Party; and other weeks would follow, each week geared to a single theme, a single message to be pounded home to Americans. As the candidate moved, so ran the plan, the television campaign would begin—on September 10th. On September 25th they would review the planning after having measured, via Pat Caddell’s polling, where the best chance for the 270 electoral votes bearing victory lay. By October 10th they would have chosen the targets of concentration for the last three-week drive; and thus, in a garrison finish, over the line to victory on November 7th, as McGovern finally made the people realize what Richard Nixon was doing to them.
The red-white-and-blue Dakota Queen II howled out of Washington Sunday night before Labor Day; and suddenly one was transported back to 1960, when Richard Nixon, too, thought he could swallow the continent in a gulp, coast to coast in a single day. McGovern was off: to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to meet with Southern Governors; to Barberton and Chippewa Lake, Ohio, to address union rallies; to Oakland, California, and then by helicopter to a labor rally at the Alameda County fairgrounds; and on to Seattle, for a late-night street rally. On the next day, beating down the West Coast—to a surplus-food distribution center for the unemployed in Seattle, to illustrate before the cameras his concern about people; to a senior citizens’ retirement center in Portland; and on to Los Angeles that night. The next day, starting in Los Angeles, even more strenuous: an address to the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, to shore up the shaky Jewish vote (“You’ve got to admit George McGovern’s got courage,” said one of his advisers, “he says the same thing all across the country, the same thing to the rabbis in Los Angeles as he says to the rabbis in New York”); a noon address to the quadrennial convention of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Los Angeles; a visit to a San Diego aerospace plant; and then, that afternoon, back across the Southwest to Dallas, Texas.
The Dallas rally was a first-class rally. In Dallas, liberal Democrats are still an underground, suppressed by the dominant ethic of the money men and the tyranny of the proprietary press, as hostile to McGovern as the liberal press was to Nixon. (The Dallas Morning News, for example, had announced McGovern’s arrival and rally on its eighth page, the front page being dominated by a local hotdog-eating contest.) Despite all, the McGovern loyalists turned out a night crowd of 3,000 enthusiasts, waving their blue banners, signs held high: “MAKE AMERICA HAPPEN AGAIN, MC GOVERN.” “MC GOVERN WE LOVE YOU.” “COME HOME AMERICA MC GOVERN.” “FOUR MORE YEARS NO THANKS.” Tired as he was, McGovern was buoyed by the crowd. No longer the Gentle George of his television commercials but George the Wrathful, he struck out on the week’s pre-planned theme, the inequity of the tax structure: “A businessman can deduct the price of his $20 martini lunch and you help pay for it, but a workingman can’t even deduct the price of his bologna sandwich.”
The crowd loved every word, cheering and rocking with excitement, at one with McGovern. But, watching the faces of the crowd, standing among them, slowly at that point I perceived a pattern in the threads of the week’s campaign. But not at all the pattern described to me a few days before in Washington. The problem in Texas, I had been told by the locals, was to “de-radicalize” George McGovern’s image. But the crowd gathered here was the same kind of crowd George McGovern’s volunteers had assembled for the primaries—young people, blond, handsome, loose-limbed in loose clothing, with the look, many of them, of students. They wanted the radical, crusading George McGovern—he was giving the audience what it wanted. But there were no blacks in this group, and there were few Latin-Americans. Moreover, on the terrace from which he spoke, another element was missing. The most prominent Democrat in Dallas, for example, Robert S. Strauss, was not there. Strauss, the Democratic Committee’s former National Treasurer, soon to be its new National Chairman, had found it necessary to be out of town the day his party’s candidate for President was scheduled to arrive. So, too, had Dolph Briscoe, the Democratic nominee for Governor. Two state commissioners, Democrats, were indeed on the platform. But no Congressmen, nor the Democratic County Chairman.
The next day reinforced the pattern, and the long day, typical, ran like this:
§ McGovern up early to wander through a Safeway supermarket, where he paused by the meat counter to look at ground beef and comment to the housewives (“The Nixon inflation is ground into every pound of hamburger that you buy”), then to examine prices of cornflakes, pears, bananas for the benefit of the cameras to score home the story of inflation for the evening news shows; off to Houston, where NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center had been scheduled as a “visual” stop for the television cameras; and after examining with the intelligent curiosity of a serious man the modules, space chambers and experiments in the garish-painted barn-like halls, he left in the rain. And as he left, he was told that back in Washington two other disputes had exploded in his headquarters, the resignation of his voter-registration chief, Congressman Frank Thompson, and the reported, but untrue, resignation of Gordon Weil. Momentarily depressed, he turned to his press secretary, Dick Dougherty, and said, “I feel like one of those guys up there in space, walking out of the space ship, and the guy down there below who should be pumping the oxygen, he’s walking out on you.”
§ From Houston up the valley of the Mississippi. Late-afternoon stop in Peoria, Illinois—the home of good whiskey and the giant Caterpillar Tractor plant. At the Caterpillar plant, skilled workers make $6 an hour, and with the plant working on overtime, wages in 1972 were running $180-$200 a week in central Illinois; the land around was green and the fall hunting was good. Here the United Automobile Workers had learned to live with management; the plant produced great earth-movers, exported them around the world; and the union squeezed the last dollar it could from the corporation. The United Automobile Workers was the main labor force going for McGovern in the industrial Midwest, and the union leaders had scheduled a visit to the Peoria plant because they controlled it right down to the sweepers. Supposedly, they controlled the 17,000 workers for McGovern, but there was no crowd at the airport, no reception. The Democratic Mayor of Peoria was absent; so, too, was the chief of the city council, Democrat.
One sits down with McGovern at a bench in the cafeteria where the night shift is beginning to eat before going to work. But, obviously, this is a television happening, set for the cameras and microphones to identify McGovern visually with traditional blue-collar men on the line. It is, of course, too late in the afternoon for this “visual” stop to reach any major national network, and probably it is useless in terms of Presidential campaigning. So I move down the row of benches, to escape the crowd cluster of reporters about the candidate, and fall in with three workers about to go on line. They are wearing their local union’s button, and are proud of it. But apparently, this year, they are not taking their pohtics from the union. All three are veterans, combat veterans, as are so many blue-collar workers. The youngest of them, a Democrat, declares that he was in the invasion of Cambodia in the 1970 strike at Parrot’s Peak. “Best thing Nixon ever did,” he says. “We cleaned them out. It was a good job.” The oldest says he was in the Marines when Ike sent them into Lebanon in 1958. He had landed on the beaches there, recalls it proudly—good job, too. All three are against amnesty—or what they’re told McGovern says about amnesty. Most of all, they don’t like this welfare thing, giving everyone $1,000 free. They work for a living. But no race prejudice among them. When I try to talk about busing, they say, “We’ve got twelve school districts and twelve high schools.” The blacks have their school district, they have theirs, and they get along.
§ From Peoria up to Rockford, Illinois (“the hardware capital of the world”), where, late at night, the local Democrats suddenly come together in a throb, recalling the party as it used to be. The old regular politicians, under Daley’s influence, have turned out their people to cheer; the United Auto Workers have turned out their blue-collars in Rockford; and the McGovern organizers, under Gene Pokorny’s first drive from Chicago, have turned out a young crowd. The rousing rally is the day’s high point and McGovern wallops the “special interests” with old eloquence; the dismal day ends on a bright note.
§ Next day: McGovern meets with the labor leaders in Rockford. Then visits an old folks’ high-rise apartment house to show concern for the aged. Then gears up for one of the major stories of the campaign—the grain scandal. He has learned, and his staff has researched the story, of how inside information was leaked to four big grain exporters, allowing them to mulct the United States government of $131,600,000 in export subsidies for wheat just sold to Russia. It is one of those transactions at the second level of the Nixon administration where the blurring of morality, though not illegal, is outrageous. This is the kind of story perfectly tailored for McGovern’s moral indignation, and he is about to make the most of it. All the way up the Mississippi Valley he flies, to Superior, Wisconsin, and there he stands before the cameras and thirty-five people in the hot sun. The visual shot is beautiful—McGovern in a yellow hard hat, his backdrop the towering gray cylinders of grain elevators rising against the sky like the columns of Karnak. And he scores—aesthetically, politically, morally, technically. It is well timed, shortly after the noon hour—every national network will have to use it.
Since the scorethrough is clean, the day should be over; were this the only visual McGovern story of the day, its impact would be sweeping. But the day goes on. From Duluth, Minnesota, down to Des Moines, Iowa, for another visual, a visit to farmer Philip E. Broderick’s 260 acres, twenty minutes’ drive from the airport.
Mr. Broderick’s home is a white frame house with a bricked-in, glass-paneled sun porch. Against this backdrop, forefront on the green lawn, is spread a little table on which are a pitcher of pink lemonade and a plate of brownies and chocolate-chip cookies. With microphones poking over the table, McGovern discusses the grain scandal with Farmer Broderick and his friends. At this point, McGovern seems relaxed—he really likes cookies and pink lemonade and is at home with dirt farmers.
But by now it is late afternoon; the national reporters, both of the press and of broadcasting, know that the day is over for them—their papers and networks can take no more for the day. This visual is for the benefit of the seven Iowa television stations that have sent crews to cover the event and may or may not show a snatch of it on their eleven-o’clock news. Thus, the entourage observes like drama critics how the local road performance is going. We look at the scenery, the petunias and the asters blooming now in late fall in the neat garden, the locust tree that arches over the fine lawn, a weathered pear tree, and move on from there to the performance. There is a large pigpen, full of sullen pink-and-brown hogs; the pigs charge forward, then rush away, reluctant to perform. McGovern stands there leaning over the staves of the fence, as flies and reporters buzz around him while beaters try to drive the pigs into camera view, but the pigs squeal and dart uncontrollably—they will not cooperate for the picture. So we move to the cattle lot, and the city correspondents of the national press debate: What do we call these cows? Since they are not black cows, they can’t be Black Angus. They can’t be Brahma cattle, they have no hump. As the cows are finally forced into the same camera span as the candidate, we all agree to call them Hereford cattle. But it is now late—back to Des Moines, an airport rally, and through the night to Albuquerque.
The mood of the press now, at the end of the first week of the revived McGovern campaign, is more clinical than ever. “Fuselage journalism” is what the newsmen call their assignment—what you observe or learn from inside the candidate’s plane. And the candidate’s campaign as seen from the plane is quite different from the one described in Washington headquarters. The traveling campaign is based on media markets—and the candidate’s imperative is to expose himself to television networks for three shots every day, plus a few more exposures aimed at local or regional evening news shows at eleven o’clock. All issues are blurred in this approach for the Presidency; it is concern for national defense in Seattle, concern for Israel in Los Angeles, concern for aerospace workers in San Diego, concern for the tax problem in Dallas, outrage against the war all through Illinois, indignation against the grain steal in Minnesota and Iowa—all of it illustrated by a jet that streaks from city to city, coast to coast, television market to television market, hopefully tracing across the evening news shows what George McGovern is all about with a camera pencil.
Richard Nixon has had no need to trace his politics across the country. With the power, facility and authority of the Presidency he has casually pin-pricked only three messages on the public mind all this week. From his San demente hideaway in California he has on Labor Day delivered a radio address to labor on the work ethic. En route back to Washington for work, Air Force One has stopped to let him off in San Francisco for a brief appearance before the Citizens Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality. The next weekend he will spend in Camp David, and lift off by helicopter for a quick afternoon view of the ravages of the 1972 Pennsylvania flood. He has thus, almost effortlessly, praised labor; shown concern for the environment; and will have expressed alarm for the desolated citizens in Pennsylvania’s coal valley.
The White House press grumbles about Nixon’s inaccessibility, but on the plane out of Des Moines to Albuquerque, at the close of McGovern’s first week of full-time campaigning, the traveling press is also in revolt. They have been reporting a series of dramatic presentations for television, but what they want to do is to give the McGovern story some coherence, some meaning, some shape in this early phase. Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been scheduled by the McGovern planners as a weekend of semi-rest, one more attempt to let the candidate catch his breath and think a bit. But the rising pressure from the press is too great, and he must rise early on Saturday morning to prepare for a press breakfast and press conference to appease the writing reporters. Thus, he must review once more, in complex detail, his version of the Salinger affair; must be available for several exclusive television interviews, including one with a Dutch television crew that has been following him for days because of someone’s promise that it would get a visual exclusive alone with him; must receive a deputation of twelve Pueblo Indian chiefs, who want to talk land and education policy with him, and who are received only because the New Mexico McGovern leaders insist the Indian vote is critical there.
So he was very, very tired, on this day that had been reserved for rest and thought, when he arrived at the poolside of the hotel, carrying blue folders of speech material with him, to be assailed once more by this writer. McGovern ordered a cheeseburger and coffee, for he had not eaten lunch yet, though it was 2:30, and rubbed himself with sun-tan oil.
He had changed in the long months I had been following the campaign. His chest hair was now frosty with white; his face had become seamed, craggy with weariness. And he had hardened in some way. The last time I had been able to spend a relaxed outdoor moment by a pool* side with him had been at a hotel in Miami, on Florida primary day in March. That day he had known he was to be crushed in the Rorida free-for-all, but his strategic objective then was to put Lindsay out of the race by splitting the liberal vote with his rival on the left. He was almost a detached observer that day in Florida and I remember him saying as he lay in the sun, “Sometimes I wonder—does it make any difference at all who gets elected President of the United States? The country goes on anyway.” He was still, in September, in Albuquerque, reflective and philosophic—but the philosophy had changed. He was bitter at Richard Nixon, with a bitterness of conviction. He believed in America as Isaiah had believed in Israel … and Israel had followed false gods.
I asked him flatly where he thought he stood now in the campaign.
He reflected wearily before speaking, and said that the others in his campaign had a scenario—”Frank and Gary have a scenario, but I don’t see it as a scenario. I have this feeling I’m working with a historical trend, history is going for me. This country is going to pieces, if you can make the people see what Richard Nixon is doing to them …” and he, McGovern, could make the people see, he would.
He was planning now on that assumption—and there unrolled yet another McGovern plan, to be filed with all the other campaign plans one had heard in the previous three weeks—only this one was the candidate’s own. Yes, next week was the Ted Kennedy week—Teddy was going to campaign with him from Minneapolis across the Great Lakes states eastward to New York. They would not be saying anything special, but the crowds, he was sure, would be great. Then they would come into Boston and he would begin, finally, on the grand themes of the campaign. The first would come on Thursday night next week, out of Faneuil Hall in Boston, the Cradle of Liberty. There, where the Sons of Liberty had planned the Boston Tea Party, McGovern would speak on the great Constitutional issues of our times—on the Nixon assault on freedom in America. He would ask what is a radical? What is a conservative? He would demonstrate that Nixon, with his assault on American freedoms, was the radical, and he, McGovern, defending them, was the conservative. It was the history professor in McGovern speaking, and speaking beautifully. He would go on to discuss this theme of what is radical, what is conservative, what is American, what is un-American, in other places. There would be a speech in Chicago on preserving American traditions—on how vital it was to preserve our country places, our villages, our small towns, our city neighborhoods. He, McGovern, wanted to preserve these values; what were Richard Nixon’s values? Somewhere in there, in this sequence of grand themes, would also be a major speech on the problem of the cities and their plight. And then there would be a climactic speech on Vietnam and peace—not about the bombing of North Vietnam, but about the ravage of our bombing in South Vietnam. “We’re ruining South Vietnam, we’re killing people, killing, we’re bringing that society to barbarism.”
And all of these things would be said by the end of September. Then the campaign would take off.
There was still in the weary talk an echo of the romance which had stirred the primary voters to see McGovern as a folk hero of the plains. He had grown up on the plains, and felt the wind blow down from Canada on the farm people of the North, and listened to church-singing on Sundays, and it was all in him; what he wanted to do, he said, was to reach the moral, the idealistic strains in American life.
We moved on again and I pressed on him that idea which has become obsessive with me after twenty years of American politics—of how the cities as they are cannot be saved, any more than the Vietnam war could be won. The cities need to be reorganized, depopulated—how would he get at that, I asked, could he get at that? And he said bluntly, almost as bluntly as Richard Nixon, “But how do you talk about that without talking about the race problem?” Without saying it, he gave the impression he could not talk about the race problem in the city. There had to be some way of reversing the trend, he said, of people moving from farms and small towns to the cities, but—”How do we reverse it?” He had no answers.
As for specific planning: He felt he was going to carry both California and New York. Then, the main fight would come in five states: Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania. He felt he would do well in Protestant suburbia, and he felt he might do especially well in Ohio, where there was a strong strain of country Protestant evangelism in the small towns. “Our main problem,” he said, “is the blue-collar Catholic worker.” His record in the primaries, he said, had been “erratic” in those factory towns—”You just didn’t know what would reach them.” His primary campaign had done well in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in some factory towns in Ohio, but they had broken through cleanly only in Massachusetts. Michigan was going to be very tough. So was New Jersey. Again and again he reverted to New Jersey. He had written off states like Indiana—one talk at the University of Notre Dame, and that was all the time he could give to Indiana.
It would be a close election, he summarized—like 1960, but in the end he would win. He knew he was way behind, acknowledged it, but he had been way behind in the primaries; somehow, history would start working for him again. “We’re trying to identify our themes,” he said, and if only he could get the message through about how Nixon was perverting the entire American tradition, “the corruption, the thievery, the combines behind this Nixon administration,” if the American people saw it—he would come out ahead.
He was fingering his blue folders of speech material at this point, so I left, recognizing that George McGovern, in mid-September, though troubled, was not a man in despair. He had not given up, as Barry Gold-water had given up by September of 1964. He could still see his way dimly forward to the Presidency, for this was his plan—to make the campaign, as the primaries had been, a struggle between the forces of light and darkness.
It was only later that I realized that his plan and the plans of his campaigners had almost nothing in common. There was to be no Faneuil Hall speech in Boston on Constitutional liberties next week; no following speech in Chicago on the preservation of the small towns and neighborhoods; the Vietnam speech would not come until October 10th. So it was back to Washington, to look at McGovern’s headquarters again, to define, if possible, what the McGovern campaign organizers were trying to do—how they proposed to mesh plans to persuade the American people that the national power should be passed to them.
Disorganization is characteristic of all Presidential campaign headquarters, because Presidential campaigns are always run by amateurs. But the McGovern campaign added a new variety of disorganization. There is no West Point for the doctrine of political war, and the officers of each Presidential army must win their commissions on the battlefield. Even for veterans of state and local politics the mechanics of a national campaign are bewildering. There are the claims for manpower, money and candidate’s time from across the continent, each community demanding its own unreasonable share. There are the instant and startling resentments that sprout from the bruised self-importance of famous men who consider themselves more useful than they really are. There are the sudden fights between old friends when the pressure grows; there are demands by equally persuasive advocates on the limited money—for television time, for travel funds, for mailings, for vote-buying, for literature. And, above all, there is that mysterious, complex American mood which must be reached by those clear, simple themes that only the candidate himself can define.
In the process of learning Presidential politics one lesson needs to be learned early—the candidate must have one manager whom he trusts entirely, who will make all the administrative decisions and free the candidate’s personality for the one thing he alone can do: communicate with the voters. The candidate cannot be both horse and jockey—he is the horse, he must choose his jockey. For John F. Kennedy it had been his brother Robert. For Richard Nixon, after the learning experience of 1960, it had become H. R. Haldeman. George S. McGovern had no one.
There was no place that fall to get an overview of the McGovern campaign—not from the desk of Frank Mankiewicz, or of Gary Hart, or of Larry O’Brien, each of whom had a title suggesting he might be the boss. One could get the picture of a creative new financial approach to politics from the desk of Henry Kimelman or Morris Dees. One could get a philosopher’s view of television in politics from producer Charles Guggenheim. One could hear the scheduling plans of the candidate from scheduling chieftain Steve Robbins, and the rationale for that scheduling, which was convincing. Or one could listen to Pat Caddell analyzing the ladders of preference and personality characteristics, the plateaus of cognition and resistance, and they were indelibly impressive. But each office had its own plan, its own approach. There were five, six, seven or more major plans for winning the election, which is natural in any national headquarters. Only no two of them fitted together.
The flaw fissured from the top down. “George McGovern,” said Gary Hart, “just doesn’t understand organization. He has an inordinate inclination to take every phone call. It flows from South Dakota politics.” In South Dakota, everyone can reach the candidate for a hearing. For Hart, preservation of the integrity of the organization, McGovern’s army, was the essential thing. Hart felt that old-timers like Larry O’Brien didn’t understand how the primaries had been won. The old-timers felt the campaign needed a manager with a blacksnake whip; Hart disagreed—that was old-fashioned hierarchical organization; Hart believed in a theory he called “the concentric matrix.” The “concentric matrix” theory of organization and decision required the confirmation of the initiative, responsibility, ability, equality of the enormously skilled, highly talented volunteers who had won the guerrilla war of the primaries. Hart insisted he was the campaign manager; George McGovern had said so. Hart liked O’Brien, whom McGovern had also told he was campaign director. O’Brien, in Hart’s eyes, was the spokesman dealing with the old regulars. But as one went on reporting, it all became confused. The regulars were a state of mind, not a managerial group. And no one was in charge of reaching the state of mind of confused Democrats around the country. Hart did, indeed, manage his volunteer storefront organizations; but no one coordinated the ideas of the campaign, the themes of the campaign, the television of the campaign, the travels of the campaign. The campaign had begun with a control group which met every morning for a fifteen-minute session—a stand-up huddle of quick-fire questions, quick-fire answers. When the stand-up sessions aroused irritation, top-level coordination was changed to a pattern of one-hour sit-down sessions, once a week on Wednesdays—but soon twenty people were participating and their influence quickly decayed.
Time spent exploring McGovern’s headquarters for ideas in late August, even into the first week of September, had been exhilarating. Time spent there in late September or October colored the day with melancholy.
In August, when one entered the headquarters, one immediately recognized that here were comrades who had slept on hard floors and in walk-ups across the country, and carried off the primary victory eating hamburgers and potato chips. No matter that it had taken them three weeks to get headquarters telephones working; the heart was still there. The sunflower motif in the posters carried the gaiety of springtime; the maps of the U.S.A., printed in psychedelic colors, jabbered, “LET THE SUN SHINE IN,” read one poster, “WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS.” “NIXON HAS A SECRET PLAN TO END THE WAR—HE’S VOTING FOR GEORGE MC GOVERN.” And the bronze-and-cop-per campaign portrait of George McGovern glowed.
By October, however, starting from the entrance hall and rising to the eighth floor, the scene, except for Lawrence O’Brien’s office, could only be described as filthy. Wastebaskets spilled over; cigarette butts littered the floor; paper cluttered offices; the corridors smelled; plates of stew and beans carried up in elevators fumed. Xerox machines, clogged with paper clips, might or might not work; mail might or might not get out that day, except for the always efficient finance mailing operation which sucked into its maw any incoming check, whether addressed to it or not. Children roamed the floors; volunteer mothers worked mimeograph machines, their toddlers by their sides; pre-adolescents earnestly lugged cartons and licked stamps. Volunteers as young as twelve or thirteen years old rode up and down on elevators, on some afternoons making headquarters seem like a playground as they pushed the buttons for fun, resentfully obeying when told to stop holding elevator doors open by force, or saying, “I hope you get stuck.” The language one overheard was the language of old Tammany or the new college campuses—but if one overheard a young man in jeans saying “F—you” over the phone, he might be saying it either to an old friend of the spring army or to a county chairman in Illinois, whose affront one would hear about later as one traveled.
The headquarters reflected the family struggle within the Democratic Party. There was no real reception room, no place where visiting dignitaries, or self-supposed dignitaries, could be given a pleasant seat and a perfunctory but courteous hearing so they might go back home, inflate the visit and say, “I was in headquarters the other day and saw …” One day one could see John F. Kennedy’s Postmaster General, J. Edward Day, wandering around as if in a daze, simply looking for campaign buttons—totally unrecognized except by one of the “old people,” a lady of forty. Tom Turner, the black president of the Wayne County AFL/CIO Council, the powerhouse of Detroit politics, visited the headquarters and later said, “I didn’t mind a bit that they didn’t know who I was. What bothered me is that even after they found out, they didn’t give a damn.” The men who controlled this headquarters had won the primaries; they had pulled off the largest coup in American party politics since the Goldwater people had seized the Republican nomination of 1964—and done it with lieutenants barely out of college. Among these lieutenants history ran shallow. Sargent Shriver, the Vice-Presidential candidate, was scheduled to visit Louisville, Kentucky, during mid-campaign. One old-timer inquired of a young scheduler whether anybody had bothered to call Barry Bingham, not only one of the great monuments of civilization in the Democratic Party but, as publisher of the Louisville Courier-J our nal and Times, also a political powerhouse. “Who’s he?” came the reply. When Bingham was described as not only the most important Democrat in Kentucky but also a Kennedy friend, the response was, “Oh, one of those 1960 freaks.”
The new people had in their minds their own structure of politics—their own activist cadres plus a national reserve of volunteers who would eventually carry the cause. Old-timers called it the politics of exclusion. It was not that at all; it was rather the politics of the faithful few. Said Lester Hyman, onetime Massachusetts State Democratic Chairman, after his post-convention offer of help had been ignored, “They felt that they owned George McGovern; they had him long before anybody else, and, by God, they weren’t going to share him.” And those who felt left out were not only the old politicians. Sargent Shriver was upset throughout the campaign by the absence of black faces at headquarters; headquarters was almost all white, except for the faithful few blacks who had been there early. Women were left out. The trio of women who could reach George McGovern were those who had given their personal loyalty to him in the spring campaign—Liz Stevens, Shirley MacLaine and Jean Westwood. Out there in such housecoat belts as Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, where women’s Democratic organizations had achieved over the years a singularly effective political weight, women were ignored. Many Midwestern lady Democrats enjoyed being women and the power they could swing as women. They could not speak in the idiom of Manhattan’s women’s-rights movement, but they could mobilize a different kind of woman power based on mothers and housewives who packed the man’s lunch box, got the kids off to school in the morning, kept a clean house and were proud of it. Such women were lineal descendants of Carry Nation and the prohibitionists. They knew their worth, were interested in politics, and could be ignored only at great risk. McGovern headquarters, in effect, ignored them.
As one prowled through headquarters, one was impressed not only by what was happening—the finance mailing operation, the storefronts sprouting like mushrooms in the spring, the Caddell polling analyses—but also by what was not happening. In every campaign, a campaign newspaper is required. A campaign newspaper is a boring, unglamorous, unromantic, bread-and-butter item which is designed to nourish local politicians with the current week’s clichés and table-thumping points for the precinct workers. Not until mid-October did McGovern headquarters produce its first issue of the McGovern-Shriver newsletter; and this first issue was the last. Headquarters should have a speakers’ bureau to deliver famous names or, at least, competent experts to satisfy the insatiable appetite of local groups for “events” that let them call people together for a meeting. The Republican Committee to Re-Elect had elevated its speakers’ bureau to a magnificence entitled “The Surrogate Operation,” to which $2,000,000 and much time of Robert Finch, Chuck Colson and Jeb Magruder were devoted. In both the 1964 and 1968 Democratic campaigns, Democratic headquarters had had twelve teams of two people each manning desks all around the clock to meet the demand. In 1972 the Democrats’ Big Four—George and Eleanor McGovern, Sargent and Eunice Shriver—had their own scheduling team. But as for the rest—one young lady and one assistant tried to handle all requests for speakers, their efficiency diminished by the fact that they scarcely recognized the names of the famous Democrats willing, available, but untapped to go out and spread the message.
One sought the standard center of ethnic operations. One found, finally, on the fourth floor of headquarters, in a shabby backroom, two young men, Kenneth Schlossberg and Gerald Cassidy—indignant. They had been pleading since early spring that “attention must be paid” to other minority groups besides blacks, Chícanos and youth. But the staff command had talked itself into believing, they said, that McGovern had the ethnics, that the primaries had shown his triumph with the blue-collars. “They never tried to understand the Wallace vote,” said Schlossberg. “Our people deluded themselves. They were angry when we pointed out that what the workingman resented was us.” Schlossberg and Cassidy had asked for a budget of $250,000 to reach the blue-collar ethnics; they felt they had won McGovern’s commitment to the program in August; were then cut to a budget of $50,000—and were finally given the sum of $12,000 to spend in reaching the multi-million ethnics. Their first literature was not printed until October 10th. Even then it was a mailing of only 1,000 sample copies to each of the large industrial states in the hope that local McGovern campaigners might reproduce the appeals. (Down the street, in addition to the passive mailings and special-interest committees [see pp. 320 ff.], the Committee to Re-Elect was budgeting and spending $2,000,000 to reach these same core groups of traditional Democratic loyalists.) “McGovern,” said Schlossberg, “doesn’t understand the East. He finally got to be able to deal with blacks in a meaningful way, though he never turned them on. He didn’t resent them the way he came to resent the ethnics. The ethnics were the opposition, and his people shared his resentment—it became a campaign which couldn’t understand its own vote.”
One could run on and on through the ingredients of classical campaigning and turn up blanks. Not until October 16th did a limited number of “issues” books arrive at headquarters, to make available a fundamental compendium of basic statements. Until then, one had to descend to the second floor, where friendly press personnel might or might not be able to produce a text of what George McGovern had or had not said on key issues. The most convenient source was the White House, which kept McGovern’s vulnerable statements in one easy-to-hand big black looseleaf binder. And if the Republicans did not have the record, then the Republican National Committee’s research arm had on computer tapes everything McGovern had ever said.
There were at least six plans for waging the uphill fight against Richard Nixon. There was the early thought, in August, that McGovern should base his campaign on “listening”—responding to a supposed feeling among Americans that their government was inattentive, that “nobody’s listening to us.” That idea was discarded when the candidate accepted Humphrey’s more activist notion of polarizing the little guys (Democrats) against the big guys (Republicans). The candidate was open to suggestion at all times. When Stewart Udall suggested he needed “authority” performances, not stump performances, serious statements before sit-down audiences on major issues of the day, the campaign plan tilted that way for a while. But nothing came of this plan.
By mid-September the opportunity issue was clearly corruption. No retrospective sadness about the McGovern campaign is more poignant than the failure of this issue to cut. In Washington, McGovern accused the Nixon administration of being “the most corrupt” in two centuries of American government, charging that the President “has no constant principle except opportunism and manipulation…. At no time have we witnessed official corruption as wide or as deep as the mess in Washington right now.” In Detroit, talking of Republicans’ espionage against the Democrats, he placed the “whole ugly mess of corruption, of sabotage, of wire-tapping right squarely in the lap of Richard Nixon,” whose administration had created “a moral and Constitutional crisis of unprecedented dimensions.” On this issue, McGovern was closer to the jugular of national concern than on any other, except peace, and did his best. Whatever he said, however, was discounted as hysterical moralizing. No fault could be ascribed either to him or to his staff in their attempt to maximize the issue. McGovern was simply ahead of his time—the charges, on his lips, seemed fashioned not by facts but by the hyperbole of his conscience. As a historian himself, McGovern could take consolation only from Lord Acton, who declared that it was the historian’s duty “to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.”
There followed then the fireside-chat period of the campaign on television, starting with the McGovern speech on the Vietnam War, delivered on October 10th. Then Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, who had narrowly lost a Senate race in 1970 to Robert Taft, persuaded McGovern that telethons could rescue the faltering campaign and there was a question-and-answer telethon phase of the campaign. But there was to be only one speech on the cities and the urban crisis. His major speech dealing with the race confrontation in the big cities was delivered in Detroit—McGovern assailed Nixon for using the “busing” issue for “cheap political purposes in the most cynical and demagogic way possible to divert attention from that record of indifference,” but advanced no philosophy of his own beyond supporting the courts. There was to be one major speech on the environment, and, finally, in the last two weeks, he reverted to being George McGovern, his prose becoming both lyrical and biblical, reaching for the scriptural allusions which would mobilize the angelic hosts against the legions of darkness.
McGovern’s shifting patterns tried the ingenuity of his scheduling team to its utmost. “We sit here,” said Steve Robbins, chief of McGovern scheduling operations, “and we get a phone call from the road, McGovern wants to do a moral, uplift, issues speech on the 15th. So we send a team up to Maine to shop around and we find a beautiful church to do it in; then four days later we hear he wants it to be an inflation speech, and we have to shift overnight to a hotel in Portland.” “It was bewildering,” said Frank Mankiewicz, “I’d go to sleep at three in the morning, knowing that we were going to Detroit to talk about the tax problem. And at six Tony Podestà would wake me up to tell me we weren’t, we were staying in Washington because McGovern wanted to work on a statement on Vietnam.” “It all reminds me of Groucho Marx’s story,” said one of the electronic chieftains whom George McGovern trusted. “Groucho said once that any club that would accept him as a member, he wouldn’t want to join. Any man who trusted my judgment so completely—I wouldn’t want him to be President.” Or another: “I’d vote for George McGovern for God, any time. He’d be great. But I don’t know whether I’d vote for him for President again.”
By mid-October the McGovern campaign was over; it had lost its own loyalties. Its base would remain solid—those Democrats who had been taught over a quarter-century to either distrust or despise Richard Nixon. But it would be unable in the age of ticket-splitters to reach out beyond that base to people whose votes were no longer swayed by party affiliation or loyalty. Pat Caddell would bring his polling results to headquarters and, as he said of himself, “I felt like the recreation director on the Titanic” But one day he had good news, from a telephone survey in Ohio. He rushed into headquarters to report the good news—here it is: we’re behind in the last survey in Ohio by only six percentage points! Pierre Salinger, who had just come back from stumping in Ohio, responded: “Yeah? Where did you take that poll—in McGovern’s headquarters?” In Delaware, a Democratic county committeewoman told her friends, “The only way to save this party is for us to lose big.”
“It’s like watching Mandrake the Magician trying to trap Donald Duck,” said Meg Greenfield, the Sappho of the Washington Post, as she watched McGovern’s reeling irregulars fall back before the hussars and fusiliers of Richard Nixon’s campaign organization. By midsummer the Committee for the Re-Election of the President had been dubbed with the acronym CREEP, first by the disgruntled old-line organization men of the Republican National Committee, then by the press and the Democrats. But whether it was called “The Committee,” as the White House preferred, or CREEP, as it usually was, it was important—it was the managerial revolution brought to politics.
When Democrats spoke of the New Politics, they meant the romantic insurgency of 1968 or the hope-filled ideologies of 1970–1972. But when Republicans spoke about the New Politics, they meant the specific technology which, at the Committee, was being perfected and mastered. At McGovern’s headquarters on 19th Street, as a matter of principle there were no charts or tables or organization. “We don’t fit people into boxes here,” they said. At the Committee, two blocks away, everyone fitted into a box on a table of organization which defined his function—or he left.
“Executive Row” of the Committee lay on the fourth floor of the First National Bank Building; the Committee also occupied the entire third floor, suites on the eighth, ninth and eleventh floors, several floors of a building across the street. The First National Bank Building also held the offices of John Mitchell and, on the second floor, the offices of Maurice Stans’s Finance Committee. But all authority lay on the fourth and second floors.
If you could suppress the nausea that still lingered and rose in your throat from the Watergate scandal; if you could wipe from memory the knowledge that someone on this fourth floor must have authorized the break-in at the Watergate; if you could do this, then you had to recognize that by late August the Committee had mounted one of the most spectacularly efficient exercises in political technology of the entire postwar era. At the level of their operations, they were pioneers. Now, in September, as the campaign moved into high, they were writing a new chapter of political history.
The Committee had begun as an idea in the minds of Nixon, Haldeman and Mitchell in the spring of 19711 with what was apparently a classically orthodox perception of the American political system—the Committee would be designed to go outside the Republican Party and deal with the Americans as discrete voter blocs. All American politicians have done this since the turn of the century; but the Committee, with the gush of funds that Maurice Stans was to tap, was to perform the classic turn better than anyone else had ever done before. There were to be separate operations for the aged, for the farmers, for the ethnics, for the Jews, for the women, and on down the line. And there would be an entirely separate Youth Committee. (“Nixon was uptight on the youth vote,” said one of the planners who met him in 1971, “that was his main concern then.”)2
The Committee had barely turned its wheels all through the spring of 1972, apart from the spectacular fund-raising of Maurice Stans. Its nominal acting chief, Jeb Magruder, was responsible to both Mitchell and Haldeman. Caught under the weight of two such personalities, he contented himself with design, planning and, as it turned out later, espionage. The designs, by the time of Watergate, were all there; and so were the shells of paper committees in every state in the union as well as a polling operation, a media operation on standby, and voter-bloc groups described and analyzed. But authority, decision-making, action were areas where Magruder had to tiptoe, for Mitchell neither delegated nor assumed control of policy. Mitchell had been trapped in controversy from the beginning of the year chiefly concerning his role in the ITT affair—an episode in which that rogue corporation had contributed $400,000 to help finance the Republican convention, and been accused of soliciting and receiving special favor from Mitchell’s Justice Department in return. “The ITT affair was a bastard,” said one of Mitchell’s friends. “John had very little time or emotional energy to spend on the Committee. John grew pale, he was wan, his hands were beginning to shake. And he had Martha on his back, because Martha was really stressed by the ITT thing and seeing John paraded back and forth on the front pages.” By the time the ITT affair had subsided in the prints and Mitchell had gone off on a Florida vacation, men at the White House were already debating whether Mitchell should or should not be brought back as head of the Committee. Then, with the Watergate affair, it was clear that Mitchell could not be brought back to direct publicly the President’s reelection campaign.
It was, thus, only on July 1st that the Committee began its real and extraordinary effort, for on that day the White House moved in a new chairman, Clark MacGregor, and a second deputy chairman, Frederic V. Malek—Mr. Smiles and Mr. Ice, as they came to be called.
Clark MacGregor was a large, burly, jovial man, a former Congressman from Minnesota, a defeated rival of Hubert Humphrey’s for the Senate in 1970, next a White House liaison with Congress, a man of the same family of civic Republicans that had bred such greater figures as Paul Hoffman, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney. MacGregor’s capacity for enthusiasm was igniting; one could imagine him in knee pants as Scoutmaster on weekends. But his honesty was self-evident; he winced over the Watergate affair as few other White House confidants except Robert Finch did; and his good mind and large energies were offended by what he found at the Committee when he took over.
“There was no sense of urgency,” said MacGregor later, recalling his arrival. “Everyone was a planner. Down to the third level—they were all planning, sitting around holding meetings. It was absurd—they were engaged in strategy planning. I canceled all those meetings.” In the key states, states like New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, no allocation had yet been made from the swollen central budget to the local budgets of operation.
MacGregor’s principle of operation was clear. “Our candidate is the President,” he said. “He decides the issues. Finances belong to Maurice Stans—he handles that. The job of this Committee is to get bodies to the polls. That’s page one of the Abraham Lincoln handbook of politics.” In the mythical Abraham Lincoln handbook which MacGregor was fond of citing, the job of politics was simple: Go out and find your friends. Identify your voters. Get them into the polls. Only now in 1972, with 210,000,000 Americans to court, this job had become administratively immense. MacGregor had been impressed, then astounded, by the spring march of the McGovern army climaxing in California. On his wall hung a large blow-up of a statement made by Gary Hart to the Washington Post early in June. In oversize print it read, “I hope the Nixon people do to George McGovern what the Democrats did—underestimate him. If they do, we’ll kill them.” MacGregor proposed not to underestimate what Gary Hart and the volunteer army could do; if the strength of the McGovern campaign had rested on the person-to-person, voice-to-voice contact with voters, the Republicans must match it. Budget planning was putting too much money into TV, unrealistically; he would move the money into “the people operation.” An initial transfer of $3,400,000 would begin the creation of a contact organization. (Later the sum would grow to $12,000,000, the largest single expenditure of the Committee’s $42,000,000 budget.)
Contact operation was the province of Fred Malek. Blue-eyed, tow-haired, muscular, Malek could by no means be described as jovial. His mind was tough and decisive. A West Point graduate, later a Green Beret in Vietnam, later yet a Harvard Business School graduate, Malek had distinguished himself in a management-consultant firm in Los Angeles; then, with two partners, bought into a business of his own and had already become a millionaire at the age of thirty-three when he had been invited to work with Finch at HEW in 1969. Malek was one of those Southern Californians who were admired by both Finch and Haldeman, and from HEW Malek had moved to the White House as a specialist in personnel management. From there he was sent by Haldeman to help MacGregor clean up the mess at the Committee.
Few at the Committee liked Malek, but all respected him. “This guy,” said one of the younger Committee men, “operates like a corporate raider taking over.” “There were a lot of people on that staff who had to be fired—so we needed a Fred Malek,” said another.
If, then, in MacGregor’s opinion, the person-to-person operation had to be energized by a nationwide storefront operation, the energizer was to be Malek. Malek confessed that he knew little or nothing about politics, or about what motivates political volunteers, but the process intrigued him. “Best job I ever had,” he later said, with the enthusiasm of an amateur discovering how simple politics apparently is. Storefronts cost approximately $1,000 to $1,200 a month, he estimated. (At McGovern headquarters the estimate was $600 to $800.) Storefronts were not there to show presence—they were there to canvass, to make the calls, to identify. On August 1st there had been fewer than 100 Republican volunteer storefronts; by September 1st, 800. By October 1st Malek’s planning target had been hit—2,000 Republican storefronts across the nation. Motivation or destiny concerned Malek little. Nixon and Haldeman decided what the country would do; they made policy as a general sets strategy; his job was to occupy and organize the emotions by grassroots reinforcement. “We don’t have any legitimate role in issues,” said Malek. “Our thrust is to identify our people and get them to the polls. We can’t let apathy keep them home. We’ve got 170 storefronts in California, 40 telephone centers, 30,000 precinct-walking volunteers. Every storefront calls in here on a WATS line every Monday, and we post the results at the end of the next day; every headquarters has to make 150 local calls a day; we measure production; it’s just like a profit-and-loss statement in business. We have more volunteers in the field today than McGovern has.”
The mind of Malek impressed a visitor—for it was, quintessentially, something as different from the mind of an old-breed Republican politician as it was from the mind of Gary Hart or Eli Segal or Gene Pokorny, with whom one might enjoy a drink after the day’s work was over. Malek’s mind was managerial, not political. The structure, not the purpose, held him in thrall. How things worked—whether in storefronts or in government—was the measure of achievement. Men lived in boxes; they performed or they disappeared. The men in the boxes might be warm, easy-going, enthusiastic or thoughtful. But the neat charts, the criss-crossed boxes pegged them all to their tasks.
Old people? The box led to robust young Webster B. (Dan) Todd, Jr., thirty-three years old, operating across the street from main headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Todd’s huge slice of the vote-getting operation was the 29,700,000 Americans over the age of sixty. Until 1971 Todd’s specialty in the Nixon administration had been aviation policy. Assigned to old folks, he had now generated not only an enthusiasm for his aging-voter target but a warmth that made him exceptional in any Committee office but MacGregor’s. “Any other society keeps its older people involved and active until they die; we don’t. They’re lonesome. The whole problem is to involve them, to make them feel wanted and useful.” Eighty-six percent of the aged were registered voters—and Todd by mid-October had 30,000 of the aged involving other aged, from suburbs to walk-up apartments, from nursing homes to hospitals. Todd did not like the cost-efficiency operators at main headquarters; he had been a liberal New Jersey state legislator; he was sensitive, ebullient, worried about what the Republican Party might become; but, dollar for dollar, his budget probably delivered more voters than any other division.
Young people? That box occupied a separate chart of its own. Kenneth Rietz, thirty, ran the youth operation. He had come up through Wisconsin and Tennessee politics. At main headquarters some of his more suspicious superiors thought it was unwise to let Rietz run this semi-autonomous operation—Rietz might be creating a skeleton youth corps of his own which could develop at some future date as Clif White’s young Republicans had once developed into the takeover group that staged the Goldwater coup of 1964. But Rietz had insisted on complete autonomy, on his own volunteer army. When challenged by MacGregor to show what he could do with all the money he had been spending, Rietz’s youth corps was able to field 25,000 volunteers on an August Saturday to deliver almost 300,000 new registrations by supermarket and precinct walking; he then went largely his own way.
In between age and youth were a dozen other boxes. For demographic theoretical analysis, there was young Arthur Finkelstein, who coined the mothering phrase of the campaign’s strategic target, the “peripheral urban ethnic.” For the farmers, Clayton Yeutter. For labor, another name; for each of six specific geographical regions, a specific responsible deputy; and each Monday all regional chieftains assembled in Malek’s office to report and be held to account.
Direct contact took the largest share of the funds Maurice Stans had raised—in all, finally, some $12,000,000. But following the line items of the Committee’s budget down the list, one could see the relative values that the managerial mind assigned to political priorities.
Direct-mail and telephone batteries, at costs of $5,000,000 and $3–000,000 respectively, washed each other’s hands, marrying their results with the storefront results, feeding names into computers. Magruder supervised these operations, and did it well. However much his private inner thought must have been haunted by the Watergate affair, he functioned with efficiency at the office. Computers sliced up the nation’s census tracts into patterns; the storefront operators in the counties that Malek had “prioritized” had identified independents, wavering Democrats and “don’t knows”; the 250 telephone batteries in ten key states had poured other names into the computer. And by the end of October the computer was taking over—there would be in the last week eight million “mailgrams” to the nine largest states, cut and coded by county, by age, by income, by Spanish-speaking, by black, by ethnic origin, plus 9,000,000 letters to Republicans. A computer software firm in Texas cut the tapes; mail-list houses around the country sorted names; the Donnelley plant in Chicago printed and mailed—17,000,000 pieces in all, in the largest single roundhouse swing by mail in American politics. As one leafed through the master samples on Magruder’s desk, the profile of the operation became very hard, “NEW JERSEY,” read one batch of coded letters, each master envelope with its prototype text labeled:
N.J.—Democrats for Nixon, Italian
N.J.—Democrats for Nixon, Veteran
N.J.—Democrats for Nixon, Middle Income
N.J.—Older Republican
N.J.—Democrats for Nixon, Older Peripheral Ethnic
N.J.—Democrats for Nixon, Peripheral Urban Ethnic
N.J.—Concerned Citizens
Then:
Pennsylvania—Democrats for Nixon, Irish
Democrats for Nixon, Polish
Pennsylvania—Democrats for Nixon, Italian
and on down the rest of the list, through California, Illinois, Ohio and others.
As one examined the operational clockwork of the Nixon organization, it grew more impressive; and, indeed, more impressive because of what it had learned from the past.
All advertising, for example, was concentrated not in Washington but in New York, at an inconspicuous office at 909 Third Avenue where the “November Group” met. There were to be no more books written, like The Selling of the President: 1968, from the unguarded conversations of advertising buccaneers to titillate readers with what went on in the backrooms of the studios. The November Group, which Haldeman, a former advertising executive himself, had conceived, was recruited from true-blue, sworn-true-to-Nixon advertising executives who volunteered to serve full-time for Nixon for one year—on leave of absence from their own firms, distracted by no other accounts but the campaign. The November Group wrote, printed, controlled all pamphlet material and literature—material stored in four regional warehouses, each warehouse with incoming WATS line to serve state and local campaigners; orders computerized, checked out, triple-manifolded. Unlike a commercial agency which spurs more and more advertising because each new slice of advertising earns the agency a 15-percent commission, the ad hoc November Group could caution restraint on television spending.
“We’re the nay-sayers,” said Peter Dailey, the forty-one-year-old friend of Haldeman who directed the November Group. “We don’t need a silver bullet to win this election.” There had been no television expenditure by the November Group in the primary campaigns. There was to be none in August. The Democrats started television nationally on September 10th; the Republicans—not until September 25th. “Never has so much talent been put together for so little output,” said Dailey in mid-September as he resisted pressure to go on air. Dailey had a quite clear idea of what his instructions were all about, for he was one of the few who could talk to Haldeman directly. He had taken over as head of the advertising group in January of 1972, when all Republican minds had been haunted by the nemesis figure of 43 percent. Good times, bad times, success or failure, Nixon rode at 43 percent in all the polls. The turn had come in the spring, and now Nixon, in the fall, was riding at 60 percent plus. McGovern had kicked away his core Democratic voters, thought Dailey. “Anything we do,” he continued, “that makes their crossover decision to Nixon difficult is wrong—like trying to get a Republican Congress. This is not a campaign of Republicans against Democrats, it’s Richard Nixon against George McGovern. If we harden them on party lines—that could go wrong. There’s one President and one candidate, and we’re going to do nothing to bring our man down from the level of the President to the level of the candidate. We aren’t ever going to get caught in the trap where the evening news shows say, ‘And now on the road, let’s look at the candidates today.’” Dailey was to end up spending only $4,000,000 on all national air media, only 63 percent of the sum spent on the Nixon campaign in 1968, and substantially less than the $6,200,000 that McGovern’s media people spent. The local TV advertising might vary from place to place as the computers and polls defined the varying concerns of the twenty major media markets in whose framework advertising was placed—the aerospace issue was hot in California, the property tax in Wisconsin, the busing issue in Michigan. But the national message, when it was launched September 25th, was sharp-cut: national defense (a hand wiping out half the Navy, a third of the divisions, most of the Air Force); the work ethic (a hard-hat, high on a girder, talking about people who work for a living and McGovern’s welfare proposals); and McGovern’s face on a weathervane, revolving in the wind.
Another man who could speak directly to Haldeman was Robert M. Teeter, thirty-three, the head of the Committee’s polling operation, budgeted at $1,300,000. The White House had come to rely on the public polls (Harris, Gallup, Sindlinger) for its head-to-head gross counts. Teeter conducted only three large national polling operations for the Committee during the year—a sampling of 1,500 on January 1st, another on June 1st, another just after Labor Day. These, however, were buttressed by in-depth surveys of fifteen to nineteen key states each time, and further supplemented by precision questions on issues, suggested either by Teeter or by the White House. As, for example, a testing of feeling on “amnesty,” or Watergate. (By September, Teeter reported, 70 percent of those polled were aware of the Watergate scandal, but only 6 percent thought that Richard Nixon had anything to do with it; the rest of those aware of the matter thought it was the work of CREEP.)
Teeter, too, had begun the year haunted by the bedrock Nixon rating of 43 to 44 percent in the American public mind. The Nixon figure had begun to move only after the California debates—”that was when Nixon moved up from 44 percent approval to 52/53,” said Teeter. “It was Hubert Humphrey who put McGovern away; no other Democrat could have done it to him like Hubert. Not only did Hubert give it to him, but that was the first time McGovern got adversary treatment.” From then on, as the Democratic convention reached the viewers, and then the Eagleton affair, then the Salinger affair, the cutting edge, in Teeter’s mind, had become clear—it was not what the voters thought of Richard Nixon, as it had been early in 1972, but what they thought of George McGovern.
By September, Teeter had set up for the Committee, as Pat Caddell had set up for McGovern headquarters, a daily sampling of 500 people by long lines across the country, rotating from state to state each day. By October, Teeter was fully confident. By his analysis, 58 or 59 percent of all American voters were now committed to Nixon against McGovern, and the undecided would bring a few more. “Each week,” he said in October, “as the undecided come down for a candidate, we pick up one and McGovern picks up two. McGovern is picking them up from the hard-core low end of the income scale of the working class—or from the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old undecideds. We’re picking up ours from the high-end income scale of skilled workers.” With the ease and largeness that a comfortable seat on the winning side affords, Teeter’s pre-election thoughts were graphic. “In the last ten years,” said Teeter, “the quality of dynamism seems to have less and less impact on the voters. Five years ago when I was polling in Michigan and Minnesota, the characteristic of ‘youth’ was about fourth or fifth in importance to a voter. Now, ‘youth’ ranks about tenth in good qualities. And ‘maturity’ is usually first or second. What McGovern represents in issues, people are afraid of; his positions bomb out the older working people. Permissiveness isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a mind set. What you have in this election is the movement of an entire social class, the man who works for a living. The old ticket-splitter was suburban—but now the ticket-splitter is the workingman. There are two kinds of ticket-splitters—the man who’s just plain independent, and the guy who’s on his way, leaving his own past. McGovern’s driven the workingman there ten years earlier than he would have got there otherwise.”
There were, in effect, two levels to the Nixon campaign. The critically important level was the White House level. Nixon’s ideas about how his nation worked and what its groups sought, matched against George McGovern’s ideas, would have won, Watergate or no Watergate, organization or no organization, in 1972. Then there was the second, or CREEP, level, of manipulation, organization and mobilization of votes, far less important—but occasionally, at the CREEP level, as intriguing to a reporter as a science-fiction preview of future politics. And the science-fiction view climaxed in the Situation Room of the Committee to Re-Elect.
The Situation Room was on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the Committee’s headquarters. It was always security-tight, so I joined John Ehrlichman, eleven days before the election of 1972, to watch Fred Malek demonstrate visually to the White House man’s inspection how the Committee read the political state of the nation.
The room was windowless, and might have been sunk deep in the ground, as is the Pentagon’s subterranean triple-depth war room. It glistened in the brilliant overhead lights. Fifty-three glassined panels, seven feet high, bordered in red-white-and-blue, swung on their hinges from high ceiling posts, so that one could turn them with a touch of a finger as one walked down the U-loop circuit. Each state had one panel, except for Texas, which, with 254 counties, had two; there was a panel for the District of Columbia; and a summary panel for the entire nation made the total of 53.
The panel for each individual state listed all the state’s counties on their own lines and then was vertically cross-cut with canvassing, telephone and polling results. The Committee could, in sum, report to the White House that some direct personal contact had reached 15,932,000 American households—by phone or visit. States were listed by priority counties—all 3,000-plus counties in the United States, with the precise percentage of the total households in each county already visited. More people, we were told, had been reached in these households than actually voted for the President in 1968. The households were now coded as to (1) those which would surely vote for the President, (2) those inclined but not sure to vote for him and (3) those which needed just a bit more urging, contact or a mailgram to tip them to the President. The practice of voter identification was, to be sure, exactly the same as that of McGovern’s army in the spring primaries. But CREEP had far outdistanced the McGoverns in reach. Each of the 2,000 Malek storefronts was calling in on a direct line to change the postings every Monday or Tuesday; and they hoped to rack up between two or three million more calls in the next week. The Election Day effort was already, on this day, Friday, October 27th, moving, as Malek’s military D-Day plan took over—the briefings of get-out-the-vote teams were under way; final check-off lists were being prepared; each storefront was ready to check off on Election Day its first list of voters by one o’clock, then again at two, at three, and at 6:30. “You’ve got to know where your ducks are, in order to bring them in,” said someone, and as one sauntered down the aisles, finger-flipping the gleaming charts, the ducks had all been identified in their counties and coveys, from Alabama to Wyoming. These people took their politics seriously, just as seriously as the McGovern people, although with much less music. As I left, I noticed the large panel that hung over the center of the room: “WINNING IN POLITICS ISN’T EVERYTHING,” it said, “IT’S THE ONLY THING.”
1 See Chapter Eleven.
2 1 know of no complete list of all the voter blocs separately managed out of the Committee to Re-Elect. But they included: the Hairdressers Committee for the Re-Election of the President, the Funeral Directors Committee, the Motorcyclists Committee, the Aviators Committee, the Veterinarians Committee, the Optometrists Committee, the Indians-Aleuts-and-Eskimos Committee, the Volunteer Firemen’s Committee, the Travel Agents Committee and on and on and on, as well as the traditional committees for lawyers, insurance agents, architects, bankers, savings-and-loan officials, doctors, etc.