Part 17 (2/2)

”We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad.

”We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.

”And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish.

”Did we come all this way for this?

”Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?

”Listen to the answer to those questions. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans-the nonshouters; the nondemonstrators.

”They are not racist or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.”

That word-sick-was used advisedly. That America was a ”sick society” was a cliche of the age-a staple of gloomy conservatism (the serial killer of nurses, Richard Speck, was ”symptomatic of the deep sickness in society,” said the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune); the cry of black militants such as Eldridge Cleaver (”There is no end to the ghastly deeds of which this people are guilty. GUILTY”); even the cry of the pope, in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progresso: Populorum Progresso: ”The world is sick. The poor nations remain poor while the rich ones become still richer.” Three British journalists writing a book on the 1968 elections noted in America ”a hysterical form of social hypochondria,” a morbidly self-conscious sense of ”being torn apart by the war and the cities.” And here was Richard Nixon to say the ”The world is sick. The poor nations remain poor while the rich ones become still richer.” Three British journalists writing a book on the 1968 elections noted in America ”a hysterical form of social hypochondria,” a morbidly self-conscious sense of ”being torn apart by the war and the cities.” And here was Richard Nixon to say the majority, majority, at least, weren't sick: at least, weren't sick: ”They give drive to the spirit of America. They give lift to the American dream. They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.”

Then he drew the contrast: government by Democrats, unequal to this forgotten majority.

”When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight; ”When the richest nation in the world can't manage its own economy; ”When the nation that has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence; ”And when the president of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration-then it's time for new leaders.h.i.+p for the United States of America....

”For five years hardly a day has gone by when we haven't read or heard a report of the American flag being spit on; an emba.s.sy being stoned; a library being burned; or an amba.s.sador being insulted some place in the world. And each incident reduced respect for the United States until the ultimate insult inevitably occurred.

”And I say to you tonight that when respect for the United States of America falls so low that a fourth-rate miltiary power, like North Korea, will seize an American naval vessel on the high seas, it is time for new leaders.h.i.+p to restore respect for the United States of America. My friends, America is a great nation. And it is time we started to act like a great nation around the world.”

The longest section was on crime and poverty; that crime wasn't caused by poverty. ”Tonight, it is time for some honest talk about the problem of order in the United States...the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.” Then he personified the problem: ”We are going to have a new Attorney General of the United States of America.”

Making Ramsey Clark the bull's-eye, the civil-liberties-loving attorney general who the right-leaning Was.h.i.+ngton Star Was.h.i.+ngton Star said wanted to fight crime ”with speeches at twenty paces,” was a brilliant move: the nation might be able to elect a new Democratic president, he was saying. But they wouldn't be electing a new said wanted to fight crime ”with speeches at twenty paces,” was a brilliant move: the nation might be able to elect a new Democratic president, he was saying. But they wouldn't be electing a new administration. administration. Nixon knew LBJ; knew he would never grant his vice president the charity of letting him announce preemptively that he would be making any changes in the cabinet. That tied Humphrey, through Ramsey Clark, to every rape, murder, and a.s.sault in the country, without ever having to mention Humphrey's name. It also abrogated any need for Nixon to come up with any actual Nixon knew LBJ; knew he would never grant his vice president the charity of letting him announce preemptively that he would be making any changes in the cabinet. That tied Humphrey, through Ramsey Clark, to every rape, murder, and a.s.sault in the country, without ever having to mention Humphrey's name. It also abrogated any need for Nixon to come up with any actual program program to cut down crime. A brilliant move, empty and effective: he'd repeat it in the upcoming months almost as often as he drew breath. It always got an enormous ovation. to cut down crime. A brilliant move, empty and effective: he'd repeat it in the upcoming months almost as often as he drew breath. It always got an enormous ovation.

It was a conservative speech-surely more conservative than he could have imagined it being, dreaming this moment in 1965, when Republican conservatism was supposed to have been dead and buried. That, however, was before 1966-and the rise of Ronald Reagan, whose ideas Nixon seemed to be cribbing: ”For the past five years we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed; programs for the cities; programs for the poor. And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence, and failure across the land.”

The speech ended with a homily: ”Tonight, I see the face of a child.

”He sleeps the sleep of childhood and he dreams the dreams of a child.

”And yet when he awakens, he awakens to a living nightmare of poverty, neglect, and despair.

”He fails in school.

”He ends up on welfare.”

But for the poor, Nixon concluded, there was also a better way than welfare. For once Richard Nixon was poor.

”I see another child tonight.

”He hears the train go by at night and he dreams of faraway places where he'd like to go.

”It seems like an impossible dream.

”But he is helped on his journey through life.

”A father who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade, sacrificed everything he had so that his sons could go to college.

”A gentle, Quaker mother, with a pa.s.sionate concern for peace, quietly wept when he went to war but she understood why he had to go.

”A great teacher, a remarkable football coach, an inspirational minister, encouraged him on his way.

”A courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and also defeat.

”And in his chosen profession of politics, first there were scores, then hundreds, then thousands, and finally millions worked for his success.

”And tonight he stands before you-nominated for president of the United States of America.... The time has come for us to leave the vale of despair and climb the mountain so that we may see the glory of the dawn-a new day for America, and a new dawn for peace and freedom in the world.”

The balloons dropped, d.i.c.k arm in arm with Pat, who was arm in arm with Spiro's wife, their clean-cut kids smiling and clapping behind them.

Nixon was pleased with his performance. He told Bill Safire, ”They call me 'intelligent, cool, with no sincerity'-and it kills them when I show 'em I know how people feel. I'd like to see Rocky or Romney or Lindsay do a moving thing like that 'impossible dream' part, where I changed my voice. Reagan's an actor, but I'd like to see him do that.”

More sincere than Reagan, and a better actor, to boot; after all, he was the one who had won. won.

The most fateful decision for the Democrats was made the Thursday prior to their convention, not by a politician but by a federal district court judge. William Lynch, Mayor Daley's former law partner, withheld marching permits for the Mobe and sleeping permits for the Yippies. Mayor Daley's pleased reaction was recorded in a Tribune Tribune article headlined ”Daley Blasts Suppression of the Czechs”: ”We don't permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why should we let anyone from outside the city sleep in the park?” (Actually they did let ”their own” people sleep in the park, if they were Boy Scouts out on jamboree or National Guardsmen on weekend training.) ”We don't permit our own people to march at night, so why should we let a lot of people do snake dances at night through the neighborhoods?” article headlined ”Daley Blasts Suppression of the Czechs”: ”We don't permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why should we let anyone from outside the city sleep in the park?” (Actually they did let ”their own” people sleep in the park, if they were Boy Scouts out on jamboree or National Guardsmen on weekend training.) ”We don't permit our own people to march at night, so why should we let a lot of people do snake dances at night through the neighborhoods?”

”Snake dancing” was a maneuver Tokyo students had used to break through police lines and shut down the universities that summer. In Lincoln Park, several miles north of downtown, hapless Mobe ”marshals” struggled to teach it to one another, but couldn't even break through their own lines. TV crew members outnumbered the snake dancers: ”Wa'shoi! Wa' Wa'shoi!” they chanted every time a producer asked. Downtown in Civic Center Plaza, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and folksinger Phil Ochs literally unleashed the Youth International Party's presidential candidate-Pigasus, a greased and ornery insult on four legs with a curly tail. Officers chased the animal around the plaza for a half hour, cameramen scurrying, cops greedily fingering their service revolvers, Abbie Hoffman crying, ”Our candidate! Don't shoot our candidate!”

Thursday night at 11 p.m. in Lincoln Park, the same thing happened that had been happening at 11 p.m. all week: obediently, the drum circles broke up, the political bull sessions ceased, guitars were returned to cases, litter bagged and packed out. The protesters had shown goodwill against the glaring stares of the blue-s.h.i.+rted constabulary in the expectation that the 11 p.m. curfew would eventually be suspended, even though now they felt they'd been double-crossed: a freak named Dean Johnson had just been shot to death. Many feared the next cop bullet would be for them.

Contentious hearings drew to a close at the headquarters hotel, the gigantic redbrick Conrad Hilton at Michigan and Balbo. Committee members fanned themselves furiously against the failure of the air-conditioning system under the stress of too many bodies. At the Rules Committee, the McCarthy insurgents introduced a motion to disallow the unit rule as the antidemocratic tool of bosses. Southern regulars said over their dead bodies-thus confirming the New Politics insurgents in their conviction that boss-ridden Dixiecrats weren't interested in democracy in the first place. The controversy before the Credentials Committee was over the right of Dixiecrats to be present at all. The settlement of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party controversy in 1964 in Atlantic City banned future segregated delegations. Insurgents were fighting to get the all-white Mississippi and Georgia delegations unseated. It was a way to dramatize the illegitimacy of Hubert Humphrey's imminent nomination: he hadn't entered a single primary. The lion's share of his supporters were ”delegates at large,” officeholders automatically appointed to the convention-the kind of people who made their decisions in between turns around the dance floor on cruise s.h.i.+ps.

In Georgia, Governor Maddox had appointed most of the delegates. Maddox himself hadn't been elected by the Georgia citizenry; when no candidate in 1966 won 50 percent, the Democratic legislature elevated him to the governors.h.i.+p in a move of dubious const.i.tutionality. He spent a busy week in Chicago exploring then abandoning a presidential run, endorsing George Wallace, and clearing up for the press that he had chased Negroes off his property in 1964 not with ”ax handles,” but with ”pick handles.” Now in the Hilton's muggy Imperial Ballroom, brilliant, young Ivy Leaguetrained legal minds delivered themselves of brilliant arguments about why his regular delegation should not be seated. The regulars-”slow, florid, insistent men, Southern party hacks,” one reporter described them, ”accustomed to delivering mechanical rhetoric to courts that want nothing else”-drawled about the way things had always been done. Chairman Richard Hughes of New Jersey made the Solomonic choice, awarding half the seats to the regulars and half to the insurgents, and the insurgents' leader, Julian Bond, who had gone all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right to sit in the Georgia legislature with these men, expressed appreciation at the half loaf. ”So now we can't trust Julian Bond anymore,” a New Leftist immediately responded-a crux of the New Politics: compromises were always suspect.

At the Platform Committee-chaired by one of those florid, insistent regulars, Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana-debate raged over where the Democratic Party would stand on the war that Democrats had started. The Humphrey people's Vietnam War plank avowed, ”We reject as unacceptable a unilateral withdrawal.” It said bombing could stop only ”when the action would not endanger the lives of our troops. This action should take into account the response from Hanoi.” That enraged the peace forces because it framed them as quislings indifferent to the safety of American troops. Their opposing minority report called for ”an unconditional end to all bombings in North Vietnam” and negotiations for ”mutual withdrawal of all United States forces and all North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam...over a relatively short period of time.” It also encouraged ”our South Vietnamese allies to negotiate a political reconciliation with the National Liberation Front”-recognizing the Vietcong as a legitimate political ent.i.ty where Cold War orthodoxy saw them as puppets of North Vietnam, which in turn was a puppet of Moscow and/or Peking. This war had consumed twenty-seven thousand young American lives over four years, was costing America $82 million a day. What did that mean for America? The Democratic Party was split clean down the middle over the answer.

One of the minority's witnesses was a last-minute dark-horse entrant for the nomination. Senator George Stanley McGovern of South Dakota had punted away his first chance to enter the presidential race when approached in 1967 by Allard Lowenstein. ”Do it,” political a.s.sociates advised him, ”and kiss the Senate seat good-bye.” He changed his mind as a favor for a grieving family: he would be the candidate for the delegates Robert F. Kennedy had won in tough state fights against Gene McCarthy. McGovern entered the race three days after the Republican convention in the same Senate Caucus Room where JFK and RFK had announced before him. Though the frumpy, quiet senator, who used the same tone of voice discussing corn yields with South Dakota farmers as he did haranguing his colleagues on the evils of Vietnam, was anything but Kennedyesque. The first time the glamorous Manhattan journalist Gloria Steinem arranged to interview him, she thought she had been stood up: ”I was looking around for a man who looked like a senator.” The a.s.sumption of the pundits was that McGovern was there to step aside for the younger brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, when the right moment came along.

McGovern introduced himself to the Platform Committee by pointing to his writings: the intellectual history Agricultural Thought in the Twentieth Century; Agricultural Thought in the Twentieth Century; his account of the Food for Peace program under President Kennedy, his account of the Food for Peace program under President Kennedy, War Against Want; War Against Want; his Northwestern University doctoral dissertation on the Ludlow ma.s.sacre of 1914. His proposal was radical: withdraw 300,000 troops from Vietnam in sixty days and move the remaining 250,000 into safe coastal enclaves. his Northwestern University doctoral dissertation on the Ludlow ma.s.sacre of 1914. His proposal was radical: withdraw 300,000 troops from Vietnam in sixty days and move the remaining 250,000 into safe coastal enclaves.

John Connally, another slow, florid, insistent regular, rose to testify. He was asked, deadpan, by a South Carolina delegate, ”Have you ever written a book, Governor?”

”No,” the Texas governor replied, grinning, to rollicking laughter and applause. Then he gave a speech on national honor and the flag.

Michael Harrington, the newspaper columnist and old-line socialist leader, tried but failed to win similar laughs by beginning, ”I'm afraid I have published a few books.” In the middle of Harrington's testimony, Hale Boggs rudely got up from his seat to chat with friends in the front row.

The debate would be taken to the full convention on Wednesday afternoon, August 28. It was what Richard Nixon had been fantasizing about since 1966, when he bellowed that LBJ was ”the first president in history who has failed to unite his own party in a time of war.” Nixon knew the opposing party's Achilles' heel. Now they would have to display it in the open, in a televised spectacle.

The Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. Young Czech citizens stood around the tanks and soldiers and asked, ”Why are you here?” By Friday, young American citizens in Lincoln Park, itching for confrontation, asked Chicago cops the same thing. ”Czechago” cops answered, the protesters self-righteously thought, just like Brezhnev's jackbooted thugs: ”This is my job.” Ralph Yarborough, the liberal Texas congressman and John Connally's great rival, speaking for the Texas challenge delegation before the Credentials Committee, pleaded with Mayor Daley not to crush the ”idealism of the young” with ”political power” as the Russians crushed the Czechs with ”military power.” But the Soviet invasion also provided a moral template for the self-righteousness of the regulars: it showed what would happen if we didn't stand up to the enemy in Vietnam. ”You people got no right to wave a Communist flag in the United States of America!” yelled one of the solid citizens who circled the park, taunting and gawking at hippies. ”Because they got a right to cut you down, just like in Doctor Zhivago Doctor Zhivago! Get out of this country!”

Sat.u.r.day night, Yippies were only convinced to leave Lincoln Park at curfew time on the moral authority of Allen Ginsberg, who pied-pipered them into the adjacent Old Town neighborhood with a soothing Buddhist chant: Ommmmmmmm. Ommmmmmmm. Cops arrested and beat a few nonetheless. Sunday morning, Yippies drove a flatbed truck onto a swath of gra.s.s between the park lagoon and the Outer Drive lakeside freeway for their Festival of Life concert. Cops arrested a presumed ringleader, dragging him bodily through the crowd as an example. Kids started screaming insults. Cops waded in and started clubbing indiscriminately. Kids started wondering whether next time they should just sit and take it. Cops arrested and beat a few nonetheless. Sunday morning, Yippies drove a flatbed truck onto a swath of gra.s.s between the park lagoon and the Outer Drive lakeside freeway for their Festival of Life concert. Cops arrested a presumed ringleader, dragging him bodily through the crowd as an example. Kids started screaming insults. Cops waded in and started clubbing indiscriminately. Kids started wondering whether next time they should just sit and take it.

Eugene McCarthy arrived at Midway Airport. He didn't have any politicians with him as he descended the stairs. He did, however, have a poet, Robert Lowell, and a novelist, William Styron. The reporter for the countercultural Evergreen Review Evergreen Review was convinced McCarthy was the only candidate in Chicago with enough charisma to get a.s.sa.s.sinated. Certainly not Hubert Humphrey; he was ”a man with doldrums between his eyes.” Unless Teddy Kennedy entered the race. The boom for him was peaking: Mayor Daley, presumed to be in the bag for Humphrey, had called a caucus of the Illinois delegation and announced that he wouldn't commit their votes for another forty-eight hours ”to see if something develops.” When Gene McCarthy emerged from the windswept, insecure tarmac unscathed, the was convinced McCarthy was the only candidate in Chicago with enough charisma to get a.s.sa.s.sinated. Certainly not Hubert Humphrey; he was ”a man with doldrums between his eyes.” Unless Teddy Kennedy entered the race. The boom for him was peaking: Mayor Daley, presumed to be in the bag for Humphrey, had called a caucus of the Illinois delegation and announced that he wouldn't commit their votes for another forty-eight hours ”to see if something develops.” When Gene McCarthy emerged from the windswept, insecure tarmac unscathed, the Evergreen Review Evergreen Review's man drew a political conclusion: ”the fact that McCarthy was still alive must have meant that he didn't have a chance in the convention.”

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