Part 12 (1/2)
”Hey! Hey! Viva Che! Hey! Hey! Viva Che!”
Hippies in Halloween drag had chanted incantations to levitate the five-walled monster ten feet off its foundations, sprayed ”Lace” at U.S. marshals (it ”makes you want to take off your clothes, kiss people, and make love”), chanted ”Beat Army” as if they were at a homecoming game, and wrote mash notes to Ho Chi Minh on the walls.
Kid with bullhorn: ”We've given enough speeches! Let's rush them!” ”We've given enough speeches! Let's rush them!”
Military voice, over loudspeaker: ”Your permit has expired. If you do not leave this area, you will be arrested. All demonstrators are requested to leave the area at once. This is a recorded announcement.” ”Your permit has expired. If you do not leave this area, you will be arrested. All demonstrators are requested to leave the area at once. This is a recorded announcement.” Six thousand extra troops from the Eighty-second Airborne were in town from Fort Bragg. Some guarded the National Archives: ”They might go for the Const.i.tution,” a Pentagon official told Six thousand extra troops from the Eighty-second Airborne were in town from Fort Bragg. Some guarded the National Archives: ”They might go for the Const.i.tution,” a Pentagon official told Newsweek. Newsweek.
From the same window where he'd seen Norman Morrison immolate himself, Robert McNamara gazed down upon the scene. TV cameras doted on the not-inconsiderable number of young women, yielding the weapon of s.e.x. Some teasingly opened soldiers' flies. Others placed flowers in the barrels of their guns. On the surface, a gesture of sweetness. Deeper down, for a soldier steeled for grim conflict, just doing his duty, the most unmanning thing imaginable: you are slaves, and we are free. you are slaves, and we are free.
Marshals drew back their billy clubs. Some were ripped from their hands before they could bring them down. Laughter: flowers are falling from the brim of your helmet! flowers are falling from the brim of your helmet!
The peaceniks grew progressively more brazen. Giggling, some charged an unguarded door.
In the end, it all looked ”futile and inconclusive to outsiders,” Garry Wills of Esquire Esquire observed. He recorded a different conclusion among militants: they described ”with undisguised enjoyment the ma.s.sive retaliation into which our government had been prodded.” observed. He recorded a different conclusion among militants: they described ”with undisguised enjoyment the ma.s.sive retaliation into which our government had been prodded.”
The president was once again sure Moscow was behind the demonstration (when the CIA reported back, ”we see no significant evidence that would prove Communist control or direction,” Dean Rusk insisted they ”just hadn't looked hard enough”). McNamara reflected that if professionals had truly led the ragged insurrectionists, they could have shut the building down. He now thought Vietnam a colossal blunder. Dean Rusk, on the other hand, said abandoning the fight would put the U.S. mainland itself in ”mortal danger.”
Hip and square lived in separate mental worlds. Two contending sets of rumors circulated: that cleanup crews found ”nothing but bras and panties. You never saw so many.” And that two marchers had been dragged into the building and summarily executed. The next week at Indiana University, Dean Rusk was drowned out by hecklers crying ”Murderer!” and ”Fascist!” He begged for calm and got it, until a little old lady started whapping one of the bearded hecklers with her umbrella. A chant broke out from another quarter of the audience: ”Hit him again harder! Hit him harder!”; radicalization was breaking out all over. The Pentagon, Abbie Hoffman promised in the pages of the hippie rag The Realist, The Realist, was nothing: ”Get ready for a big event at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next August.” was nothing: ”Get ready for a big event at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next August.”
Meanwhile the nation's governors spent the third week of October on a cruise s.h.i.+p, dancing political dances, behaving the way politicians do, as if nothing had changed since the times of James Garfield.
The annual conference of the National a.s.sociation of Governors was where pols let their hair down in exotic locales, gossiped, jockeyed, sized up who was who, put on a show for reporters, flaunted their privileges as men who ran the world. This year the setting was the S.S. Independence, Independence, steaming to the Virgin Islands. Reporters chucklingly mutinied for better access, signing a ”Press Power” manifes...o...b..nning ”honky” governors from the media lounge, demanding busing from the lower to upper decks. Lobster was on the menu every day. steaming to the Virgin Islands. Reporters chucklingly mutinied for better access, signing a ”Press Power” manifes...o...b..nning ”honky” governors from the media lounge, demanding busing from the lower to upper decks. Lobster was on the menu every day.
One night state executives sashayed to the steel-band beat at a tropical-themed costume ball (though Lester Maddox limited himself the whole hot trip to a black suit and black tie). A reporter tapped the shoulder of the governor of Michigan mid-mambo with the wife of the governor of Was.h.i.+ngton. What did he make of this latest kerfuffle about the president?
(LBJ had posted a telegram to the s.h.i.+p, intended for his...o...b..ard a.s.signee, a former Democratic Texas governor. An incompetent in the mailroom delivered it to a Republican governor's stateroom by mistake. It contained instructions on which arms to twist to win a resolution praising Johnson's Vietnam policy.) Romney, dressed like Xavier Cugat and stepping lively on the floor (in his younger days he'd taken dancing lessons), said the ruse was typical Johnsonian ”news manipulation,” then deftly picked back up the beat. (No one feared the power of the president anymore; Esquire Esquire had recently run eight thousand words t.i.tled ”The Dark Side of LBJ,” exposing his every dirty trick, neurotic tic, and distasteful toilet habit.) had recently run eight thousand words t.i.tled ”The Dark Side of LBJ,” exposing his every dirty trick, neurotic tic, and distasteful toilet habit.) Nancy and Ronnie Reagan sipped cremes de menthe through straws at dance floor's edge. The journos plied him, too. He returned noncommittal aw-shucks pleasantries and pulled upon his pastel drink.
(They said that Reagan might be the third full-fledged Republican presidential aspirant. On the most recent cover of Time, Time, he was pictured alongside Nelson Rockefeller on an old-timey campaign poster, the sages who decided such things having declared Rocky-Reagan, or Reagan-Rocky, was the Republican dream ticket.) he was pictured alongside Nelson Rockefeller on an old-timey campaign poster, the sages who decided such things having declared Rocky-Reagan, or Reagan-Rocky, was the Republican dream ticket.) Nelson Rockefeller downed seasickness pills and said that while it was flattering to be on the cover of Time, Time, ”I'm not a candidate, I'm not going to be a candidate, and I don't want to be president.” ”I'm not a candidate, I'm not going to be a candidate, and I don't want to be president.”
(No one quite believed him. Since his 1959 inauguration, the oil heir was always drafting himself for president, then ostentatiously withdrawing himself from consideration, then drafting himself back in at the last minute.) Onboard, Rocky was seen everywhere huddling with Romney. Romney thought he'd received a pledge in blood from him that Rocky was out for good and had laid plans for an official candidacy announcement. But then, there were those polls: Rocky led LBJ by fourteen points while Nixon and Romney were ahead by only four. As the press corps had sung at the last Gridiron Dinner: ”His mouth tells you no! no! But there's yes! yes! in his eyes.”
(Maryland's new governor, Spiro Agnew, was running a one-man Rocky-for-President crusade. No one knew much about Agnew, except that he'd beaten a Democrat in November by running to his left on civil rights.) Outside the reach of the steel band's strains, Nixon agents quietly prowled, urging governors to stay uncommitted. Another onboard Johnson proxy, John Connally, governor of Texas, was locked in his cabin with aides, trying to figure out the next move for the president. It turned out to be a duck-out: canceling the ”spontaneous” presidential drop-in on the governors' final port of call. Johnson held terrible cards. An unprecedented movement was afoot on the left wing of the Democratic Party, led by an energetic young activist named Allard Lowenstein: ”Dump Johnson”-just as Republicans used to launch movements in the fifties to ”Dump Nixon.” On bad days the president moaned to his aides he'd prefer to take them up on the offer.
The soul of Johnson's problem was that Richard Nixon, on the campaign trail in 1966, had been right: the Democratic Party was splitting down the middle over Vietnam.
At the board meeting in September for Americans for Democratic Action, the group that had set the agenda for the Democratic Party's liberal wing since 1947, an unthinkable debate broke out: whether to withdraw support for the greatest presidential champion of liberalism since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One bloc said Vietnam betrayed everything ADA was supposed to stand for. Another bloc saw holding the line in Vietnam as honoring ADA's founding principle: liberal anticommunism.
This latter faction had a friend in high places: their cofounder, Hubert Humphrey, who as Minneapolis mayor marched into the 1948 Democratic National Convention and proclaimed that the party must break with segregation, risking his political future for liberal principle. Speaking to ADA in 1965, he had delivered the liberal-hawk case for Vietnam: ”This is the clearest lesson of our time. From Munich until today we have learned that to yield to aggression brings only greater threats.” He had repeated it again to the group's inner circle in April of 1967. Arthur Schlesinger had replied, ”Hubert, that's s.h.i.+t and you know it.” Hubert said he didn't remember Arthur saying that when he was working under JFK, when the commitment to Vietnam began.
This is what Vietnam was doing to the Democratic Party: people who agreed about 98 percent of everything else were throwing schoolyard taunts at one another.
At the ADA board meeting before the governors' conference, the youngest member, Allard Lowenstein, said that liberal principle demanded they join his Dump Johnson efforts. He was opposed by the old-guard labor leaders, who thought this was crazy talk. These men lived by negotiation, through give-and-take, storing power through patient inst.i.tution-building. That was how they had made made the world's first ma.s.s middle cla.s.s-their glory, their legacy, a human accomplishment more awesome than all the Seven Wonders of the World. Johnson was their partner in the endeavor, the man to take it to the next step. And these the world's first ma.s.s middle cla.s.s-their glory, their legacy, a human accomplishment more awesome than all the Seven Wonders of the World. Johnson was their partner in the endeavor, the man to take it to the next step. And these kids kids were willing to p.i.s.s it away, with their airy talk about idealism and revolt and Lyndon Johnson's ”evil.” Gus Tyler of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union said they were changing the whole point of liberal politics-”away from economics to ethics and aesthetics, to morality and culture”-and would thus throw America's poor ”to the Republican wolves.” Sure, LBJ was a son of a b.i.t.c.h. But he was were willing to p.i.s.s it away, with their airy talk about idealism and revolt and Lyndon Johnson's ”evil.” Gus Tyler of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union said they were changing the whole point of liberal politics-”away from economics to ethics and aesthetics, to morality and culture”-and would thus throw America's poor ”to the Republican wolves.” Sure, LBJ was a son of a b.i.t.c.h. But he was our our son of a b.i.t.c.h. And liberals had precious few son of a b.i.t.c.hes to triflingly throw away. son of a b.i.t.c.h. And liberals had precious few son of a b.i.t.c.hes to triflingly throw away.
Arthur Schlesinger and Kenneth Galbraith formulated a compromise that carried the meeting: ADA would advocate for an antiwar plank at the Democratic convention instead of the divisive distraction of taking on the power of the presidency. Lowenstein didn't sign on. He couldn't imagine how a movement of liberal ideals could countenance a colonial war. He couldn't understand how anyone saw a political future for the Democrats behind a war and a leader less popular by the day. He didn't understand how the Democrats could stake their fortunes on the old old way of doing things-governors brokering presidential nominations on cruise s.h.i.+ps-in a world where everything worthwhile was way of doing things-governors brokering presidential nominations on cruise s.h.i.+ps-in a world where everything worthwhile was new: new: where all authenticity and truth concentrated on the side of idealism, of revolt, of the anticolonial-of where all authenticity and truth concentrated on the side of idealism, of revolt, of the anticolonial-of youth. youth.
He spoke for a new Democratic mood: the idea that the insurgencies of the 1960s had rendered the old rules of power obsolete. ”One cannot speak of Black Power, or the riots or even Vietnam, in a departmentalized vacuum,” Jack Newfield wrote. ”They are all part of something larger. We have permitted political power in America to pa.s.s from the people to a technological elite.... Representational democracy has broken down.”
People such as Lowenstein and Jack Newfield called their movement to harness insurgent idealism within the two-party system the New Politics. It was defined by disgust with the business-as-usual political dances of the old politicians in a time of moral enormity, and by the belief that organizing youthful and not-so-youthful idealists to kick that elite and their son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h handmaidens clean out of power was no less than a prerequisite for national survival. ”If we have LBJ for another four years, there won't be much of a country left,” another young New York writer, Pete Hamill, wrote in a letter to Bobby Kennedy. And the Democrats ”will be a party that says to millions and millions of people that they don't count, that the decision of 2,000 hack pols does.”
They ran the Dump Johnson movement on a shoestring out of a D.C. hotel room. They built organizations in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California-states where Democratic reform clubs filled with earnest and bespectacled college professors and social welfare professionals had been fighting quixotic (and sometimes successful) battles against entrenched urban machines for decades. An ADA board member who ran a pizza parlor in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, declared himself sympathetic. But he said he'd be branded as unpatriotic in his small town if he signed up. He finally came around: ”Why am I in politics if they're going to take my boys and send them off to a war I don't believe in, and I can't do anything about it?”
The foot soldiers were mostly students. They knocked on doors, armed with idealism and intellectual arguments: that a Democratic house built on a foundation of Southern whites in an age of the Voting Rights Act, by a labor movement defending the Cold War status quo, overseen by a malodorous cla.s.s of D.C. power brokers, could not thrive in an America where the median age by 1970 would be 26.5. That the old order was built for a fearful era of scarcity, not this era of full employment and abundance. That the New Politics was the only way to save an idealistic but increasingly alienated generation from the violent snares of SDS-style nihilism. They canva.s.sed, too, armed with McLuhanite a.s.sumptions: that, enmeshed in the new tactile media world, people would prefer the ”new face” over the old one; the ”authentic” over the plastic; the happening happening instead of the instead of the happened. happened.
What they were not armed with, as 1968 approached, was a candidate.
The New Politics was flavored Kennedy. Everybody knew it. ”He's a Happening” was the t.i.tle of a 1966 profile of Bobby Kennedy by Andrew Kopkind, the New Republic New Republic's most radical young writer. The article luxuriated over Kennedy's pa.s.sion for ”sudden, spontaneous, half-understood acts of calculated risk,” his denouncing of ”easy solutions” (even more, he ”seems to dislike solutions in general”). Kennedy was always searching for new frontiers of meaning. ”Where does he look? Among the grape-pickers on strike in central California, in Cloth Market Square in Cracow, on the Ole Miss campus.... Maybe the poor know; he studies the condition of the urban ghettos. Is it in Latin America? He'll go and see. Is it in South Africa? Get him a visa. Whatever the object of his quest, Kennedy is unlikely to find it. He is looking not for a thing, but for a happening-what is happening to politics, to people.” Kennedy preferred speaking at schools rather than civic clubs. When the kids asked when he was running for president, he replied, ”When you're old enough to vote for me.” The rumor was that Bobby had sampled LSD. Wrote countercultural journalist Hunter S. Thompson, ”There is a strange psychic connection between Bobby Kennedy's voice and the sound of the Rolling Stones.”
The Happening released a book that fall, the kind that presidential aspirants put out before announcing their campaigns. The first chapter of To Seek a Newer World To Seek a Newer World was ent.i.tled ”Youth” and spoke of ”the white power structure,” ”the Establishment,” and Watts as a ”revolt against official indifference.” He complained we ”send people to jail for the possession of marijuana” and do nothing about cigarettes, which ”kill thousands of Americans each year,” then launched into an indictment of the phoniness of the old men that Holden Caulfield couldn't beat, of ”the terrible alienation of the best and bravest of our young” that existed ”hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.” was ent.i.tled ”Youth” and spoke of ”the white power structure,” ”the Establishment,” and Watts as a ”revolt against official indifference.” He complained we ”send people to jail for the possession of marijuana” and do nothing about cigarettes, which ”kill thousands of Americans each year,” then launched into an indictment of the phoniness of the old men that Holden Caulfield couldn't beat, of ”the terrible alienation of the best and bravest of our young” that existed ”hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.”
This Bobby Kennedy was the New Politics made flesh. Bobby Kennedy was the New Politics made flesh.
But there was another Bobby Kennedy. Who was one of the son of a b.i.t.c.hes.
This Bobby Kennedy was his brother's point man for the secret a.s.sa.s.sination attempts against Fidel Castro, was a staffer to Joe McCarthy, ran his brother's presidential campaign in a way that rendered ruthless ruthless a word that forevermore attached itself to him. Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party's eloquent minister of information, wrote of the time he met Bobby Kennedy: ”I sat up close and got a good look at his mug. I had seen that face so many times before-hard, bitter, scurvy-all those things I had seen in his face on the bodies of nighttime burglars who had been in prison for at least ten years.” This Bobby was at best a slightly left-of-usual pract.i.tioner of the malodorous old kind of politics, a man for the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, cutting smelly little deals about whom they'd let run the country while ghettos and peasant hamlets burned. This Bobby was visible in the Vietnam chapter of a word that forevermore attached itself to him. Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party's eloquent minister of information, wrote of the time he met Bobby Kennedy: ”I sat up close and got a good look at his mug. I had seen that face so many times before-hard, bitter, scurvy-all those things I had seen in his face on the bodies of nighttime burglars who had been in prison for at least ten years.” This Bobby was at best a slightly left-of-usual pract.i.tioner of the malodorous old kind of politics, a man for the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, cutting smelly little deals about whom they'd let run the country while ghettos and peasant hamlets burned. This Bobby was visible in the Vietnam chapter of To Seek a Newer World To Seek a Newer World-full of technicalities and legalistic half measures. Above all, this Bobby was a calculator: if he took on the president in 1968 as Allard Lowenstein was begging him to do, the tea leaves told him he might lose. This Bobby was greeted by placards at a Brooklyn College lecture in memory of JFK: BOBBY KENNEDY-HAWK, DOVE, OR CHICKEN? BOBBY KENNEDY-HAWK, DOVE, OR CHICKEN?
The older RFK advisers-JFK White House people-were all caution, watching the polls: the same ones that showed him beating LBJ 5232 in a head-to-head contest also showed that 50 percent more people ”intensely disliked” him as they did LBJ. The advisers knew a presidential run wouldn't be New Politics hearts and flowers: it was war against the power of an entrenched Establishment that knew how to draw blood, even against the brothers of martyrs. The young staffers in his Senate office simply didn't accept the argument. They were sure that such risk was his essence. essence. ”Those New Frontier cats were out of the fifties,” one of the young Turks told reporters. ”Don't forget that JFK campaigned in '60 on Quemoy and Matsu and all that Cold War c.r.a.p.” ”Those New Frontier cats were out of the fifties,” one of the young Turks told reporters. ”Don't forget that JFK campaigned in '60 on Quemoy and Matsu and all that Cold War c.r.a.p.”
It was a Georgetown soap opera for the ages. In March 1967, as Ethel Kennedy gave birth to the couple's tenth child, a columnist at Time Time told LBJ that Bobby was all but ”decided to get into the race”; then in April the magazine reported he'd submit sworn affidavits to keep his name off any primary ballot. Reports reverberated, too, across Was.h.i.+ngton of his tirades against the president: ”How can we possibly survive five more years of Lyndon Johnson? Five more years of a crazy man?” Then in June he made a florid toast to the president at a New York fund-raiser, praising ”the height of his aim, the breadth of his achievements, the record of his past, and the promise of his future.” told LBJ that Bobby was all but ”decided to get into the race”; then in April the magazine reported he'd submit sworn affidavits to keep his name off any primary ballot. Reports reverberated, too, across Was.h.i.+ngton of his tirades against the president: ”How can we possibly survive five more years of Lyndon Johnson? Five more years of a crazy man?” Then in June he made a florid toast to the president at a New York fund-raiser, praising ”the height of his aim, the breadth of his achievements, the record of his past, and the promise of his future.”
Lowenstein searched desperately for a second option. All the best antiwar senators had reelection fights in 1968-some, like George McGovern, tough ones. Senator Fulbright, the dove chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, who spoke of how ”the war in Vietnam is poisoning and brutalizing our domestic life,” was a Southern senator who voted down the line against desegregation. Lowenstein wrote them all letters nonetheless, begging them to stand in the gap.
Only Eugene McCarthy, the diffident, difficult senator from Minnesota, expressed any interest, proposing a meeting later in the year. The prospect hardly inspired. McCarthy was an odd duck. The small-town Minnesota native who'd turned himself into an intellectual at a tiny Catholic college had once considered entering the priesthood, even a monastery. When Richard Nixon entered the House of Representatives, he started a club for freshmen Republicans-a congressional branch of the Orthogonians. He gave them the hail-fellow-well-met moniker the Chowder and Marching Club. When McCarthy pulled together a like-minded cadre of young Midwestern liberals, on the other hand, he called it the Democratic Study Group. McCarthy liked liked to study. He wrote poetry in his spare time, difficult, modern stuff, inspired by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Not the sort you'd pick for a street fight with LBJ. to study. He wrote poetry in his spare time, difficult, modern stuff, inspired by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Not the sort you'd pick for a street fight with LBJ.
The tensions came out at the ADA board meeting on September 23. They came out, too, later that same night, at a council of war on Robert Kennedy's political future at his Virginia mansion. All the old Kennedy hands were there. The younger aides, the hotheads, were banished, their views represented by Allard Lowenstein and Village Voice Village Voice writer Jack Newfield. writer Jack Newfield.
The junior senator from New York moderated languidly from the sofa, wearing a sweater and a necklace of the style referred to as ”love beads,” evaluating the debating points.
Schlesinger peddled his ”peace plank” compromise. ”You're a historian, Arthur. When was the last time millions of people rallied behind a plank plank?” Senator Love Beads mocked.
Lowenstein, sitting cross-legged in stocking feet, launched into his Dump Johnson spiel: national redemption versus national suicide. The president was weak, weak, and Kennedy himself admitted he might well withdraw rather than risk a humiliating defeat. A lame duck, growing lamer by the day. And only he, Kennedy, could rescue America from this moral cretin-couldn't he and Kennedy himself admitted he might well withdraw rather than risk a humiliating defeat. A lame duck, growing lamer by the day. And only he, Kennedy, could rescue America from this moral cretin-couldn't he see see it? it?
The Kennedy of the cigar chompers replied how that would go down in the real world. ”People would say that I was splitting the party out of ambition and envy. No one would believe that I was doing it out of how I feel about Vietnam and poor people.”
He did, however, allow for a scenario in which he might might do it: ”I think Al is doing the right thing, but I think someone else will have to be the first.” do it: ”I think Al is doing the right thing, but I think someone else will have to be the first.”
The first. first. Coolly, calculatedly, Mr. Seek-a-Newer-World seemed to be proposing a sacrificial lamb to test out the Dump Johnson idea first with the power brokers-after which he could swoop in and cash in on the other man's risk. The idealist Lowenstein was livid: ”The people who think that the future and honor of this country are at stake because of Vietnam don't give a s.h.i.+t what Mayor Daley and Governor Y and Chairman Z think!” Coolly, calculatedly, Mr. Seek-a-Newer-World seemed to be proposing a sacrificial lamb to test out the Dump Johnson idea first with the power brokers-after which he could swoop in and cash in on the other man's risk. The idealist Lowenstein was livid: ”The people who think that the future and honor of this country are at stake because of Vietnam don't give a s.h.i.+t what Mayor Daley and Governor Y and Chairman Z think!”
But here, precisely, was the thing. Governor Y and Chairman Z, twirling each other's wives around on the dance floor of the governors' conference s.h.i.+p of Fools, for all their untoward old oldness, happened to harbor expertise at discerning what voters wanted-had some sense of how many how many ”people who think that the future and honor of this country are at stake because of Vietnam” there were. Which is to say they knew how to win elections-an achievement necessarily prior to seeking a newer world. ”people who think that the future and honor of this country are at stake because of Vietnam” there were. Which is to say they knew how to win elections-an achievement necessarily prior to seeking a newer world.
Here would be the New Politics' tragic flaw: everywhere it recognized only enthusiasms. It couldn't see, for instance, what Nixon did: that one wave of the political future was an ambivalent, reactionary rage.
Boston had a mayoral election that November of 1967. The liberal inc.u.mbent, Kevin White, faced a challenge from the antibusing hero of the Boston School Committee, Louise Day Hicks. ”I have guarded your children well,” she would say. ”I will continue to defend the neighborhood school as long as I have a breath left in my body.”
There were seventy thousand vacant desks in Boston's white neighborhoods. But for the city to bus them there, Hicks said, would create an ”unfair advantage” for black children. A couple of years before, black parents, exploiting an open-enrollment loophole that let them choose their children's schools if they provided the transportation, had put up funds to run their own private bus service. Hicks nastily put up bureaucratic roadblocks to stop Operation Exodus. Boston's Cardinal Cus.h.i.+ng told her he was considering joining the civil rights groups marching against her. ”Your Eminence,” she responded, ”if you had done that, I hope you would have marched right upstairs to my office on the third floor so that I could have handed you my resignation in person.” The cardinal expressed astonishment that she would resign from the school committee. She replied, ”No, Your Eminence. I didn't mean from the school committee. I mean my resignation from the Catholic Church.”
Hicks was helped when Newsweek Newsweek featured her on the cover in an article that was supposed to hurt her. They described her supporters as ”a comic strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls...the men queued up to give Louise their best, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g cigar b.u.t.ts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck.” Orthogonian-style, she featured the article in her advertis.e.m.e.nts. She came within a minuscule 12,249 votes of becoming the mayor of Boston. featured her on the cover in an article that was supposed to hurt her. They described her supporters as ”a comic strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls...the men queued up to give Louise their best, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g cigar b.u.t.ts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck.” Orthogonian-style, she featured the article in her advertis.e.m.e.nts. She came within a minuscule 12,249 votes of becoming the mayor of Boston.