But that high didn’t last long. The site of Saturday’s Caucus was the gym at Assumption College, across town, and the crowd over there was very different. The median age at the Caucus was more like thirty-three and the results of the first ballot were a staggering blow to McCarthy’s newborn crusade.
McGovern cleaned up, beating McCarthy almost three to one. When the final tally came in, after more than eight hours of infighting, McGovern’s quietly efficient grass-roots organizers had locked up 62 percent of the vote – leaving McCarthy to split the rest, more or less equally, with Shirley Chisholm. Both Muskie and Lindsay had tried to ignore the Caucus, claiming it was ‘stacked’ against them, and as a result neither one got enough votes to even mention.
The outcome of the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus was a shock to almost everybody except the busloads of McGovern supporters who had come there to flex their muscle in public for the first time. McCarthy – who had left early to fly back to Washington for an appearance the next day on Meet the Press – was seriously jolted by the loss. He showed it the next morning on TV when he looked like a ball of bad nerves caught in a crossfire of hostile questions from Roger Mudd and George Herman. He was clearly off-balance; a nervous shadow of the rising-tide, hammerhead spoiler he had been on Friday night for the rally at Holy Cross.
To make things worse, one of the main organizers of the Rad/ Lib Caucus was Jerry Grossman, a wealthy envelope manufacturer from Newton, in the Boston suburbs, and a key McCarthy fundraiser in the ’68 campaign … but after the Rad/Lib Caucus, Grossman went far out of his way, along with Mudd & Herman, to make sure McCarthy was done for.
He immediately endorsed McGovern, saying it was clear that ‘Massachusetts liberals no longer believe in McCarthy’s leadership quotient.’ What this meant, according to the unanimous translation by political pros and press wizards, was, ‘McCarthy won’t get any more of Grossman’s money.’
Grossman ignored the obvious fact that he and other pro-McCarthy heavies had been beaten stupid, on the grass-roots organizing level, by an unheralded ‘McGovern machine’ put together in Massachusetts by John Reuther – a nephew of Walter, late president of the UAW. I spent most of that afternoon wandering around the gym, listening to people talk and watching the action, and it was absolutely clear – once the voting started -that Reuther had everything wired.
Everywhere I went there was a local McGovern floor manager keeping people in line, telling them exactly what was happening and what would probably happen next … while the McCarthy forces – led by veteran Kennedy/Camelot field marshal Richard Goodwin – became more and more demoralized, caught in a fast–rising pincers movement between a surprisingly organized McGovern block on their Right, and a wild-eyed Chisholm uprising on the Left.
The Chisholm strength shocked everybody. She was one of twelve names on the ballot – which included almost every conceivable Democratic candidate from Hubert Humphrey to Patsy Mink, Wilbur Mills, and Sam Yorty – but after Muskie and Lindsay dropped out, the Caucus was billed far and wide as a test between McGovern and McCarthy. There was no mention in the press or anywhere else that some unknown black woman from Brooklyn might seriously challenge these famous liberal heavies on their own turf … but when the final vote came in, Shirley Chisholm had actually beaten Gene McCarthy, who finished a close third.
The Chisholm challenge was a last-minute idea and only half-organized, on the morning of the Caucus, by a handful of speedy young black politicos and Women’s Lib types – but by 6:00 that evening it had developed from a noisy idea into a solid power bloc. What began as a symbolic kind of challenge became a serious position after the first ballot – among this overwhelmingly white, liberal, affluent, well-educated, and over-thirty audience – when almost half of them refused to vote for George McGovern because he seemed ‘too conventional,’ as one long-haired kid in a ski parka told me.
They had nothing against McGovern; they agreed with almost everything he said – but they wanted more; and it is interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the same people who showed up at McCarthy’s Holy Cross rally on Friday night had come out to Assumption on Sunday.
There were not many Youth/Freak vote types at the Rad/Lib Caucus; perhaps one out of five, and probably not even that. The bulk of the crowd looked like professors and their wives from Amherst. One of the problems, according to a bushy young radical-talking non-student from Boston, was that you had to pay a ‘registration fee’ of two dollars before you got a vote.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t pay it myself, so I can’t vote.’ He shrugged. ‘But this Caucus doesn’t mean anything, anyway. This is just a bunch of old liberals getting their rocks off Manchester, New Hampshire, is a broken down mill town on the Merrimack River with an aggressive Chamber of Commerce and America’s worst newspaper. There is not much else to say for it, except that Manchester is a welcome change from Washington, D.C.
I checked into the Wayfarer just before dawn and tried to get some music on my high-powered waterproof Sony, but there was nothing worth listening to. Not even out of Boston or Cambridge. So I slept a few hours and then joined the McGovern caravan for a tour of the Booth Fisheries, in Portsmouth.
It was a wonderful experience. We stood near the time clock as the shifts changed & McGovern did his hand-grabbing thing. There was no way to avoid him, so the workers shuffled by and tried to be polite. McGovern was blocking the approach to the drinking fountain, above which hung a sign saying ‘Dip Hands in Hand Solution Before Returning to Work.’
The place was like a big aircraft hangar full of fish, with a strange cold gaseous haze hanging over everything – and a lot of hissing & humming from the fish-packing machines on the assembly line. I have always liked seafood, but after thirty minutes in that place I lost my appetite for it.
The next drill was the official opening of the new McGovern headquarters in Dover, where a large crowd of teenagers and middle-class liberals were gathered to meet the candidate. This age pattern seemed to prevail at every one of McGovern’s public appearances: The crowds were always a mix of people either under twenty or over forty. The meaning of this age gap didn’t hit me until I looked back on my notes and saw how consistent it was … even at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus, where I guessed the median age to be thirty-three, that figure was a rough mathematical compromise, rather than a physical description. In both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the McGovern/McCarthy crowds were noticeably barren of people between twenty-five & thirty-five.
After Dover, the next speech was scheduled for the main auditorium at the Exeter Academy for Boys, an exclusive prep school about twenty-five miles up the road. The schedule showed a two-hour break for dinner at the Exeter Inn, where the McGovern press party took over about half the dining room.
I can’t recommend the food at that place, because they wouldn’t let me eat. The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the Rolling Stone bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said – no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets – so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick, the famous crypto-nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender ‘Jim,’ which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as ‘Mr. Reynolds.’
Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. ‘My name’s not Reynolds, goddamnit! I’m James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Evening Star.’ Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.
The Exeter stop was not a happy one for McGovern, because word had just come in from Frank Mankiewicz, his ‘political director’ in Washington, that McGovern’s old friend and staunch liberal ally from Iowa – Senator Harold Hughes – had just announced he was endorsing Ed Muskie.
This news hit the campaign caravan like a dung-bomb. Hughes had been one of the few Senators that McGovern was counting on to hang tough. The Hughes/McGovern/Fred Harris (D-Okla.) axis has been the closest thing in the Senate to a Populist power bloc for the past two years. Even the Muskie endorsement-hustlers who were criss-crossing the