There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck – and beaten once again – with some tried and half-true hack like Humphrey, Jackson, or Muskie … and George McGovern, the only candidate in either party worth voting for, is hung in a frustrated limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington Press Corps. ‘He’d be a fine President,’ they say, ‘but of course he can’t possibly win.’
Why not?
Well … the wizards haven’t bothered to explain that, but their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern President – that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists & dazed dropouts -won’t even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on election day.
Maybe so … but it is hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called ‘The McGovern Vote’ to the polls if they actually represented it.
It sure as hell wasn’t the AFL/CIO that ran LBJ out of the White House in 1968; and it wasn’t Gene McCarthy either. It was the people who voted for McCarthy in New Hampshire that beat Johnson … and it wasn’t George Meany who got shot with Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles; it was a renegade ‘radical’ organizer from the UAW.
It wasn’t the big-time ‘Democratic bosses’ who won the California primary for Bobby – but thousands of Niggers and Spics and white Peace Freaks who were tired of being gassed for not agreeing with The Man in the White House. Nobody had to drag them to the polls in November to beat Nixon.
But there was, of course, The Murder – and then the Convention in Chicago, and finally a turnip called Humphrey. He appealed to ‘respectable’ Democrats, then and now – and if Humphrey or any of his greasy ilk runs in ’72, it will be another debacle like the Eisenhower/Stevenson wipeout in 1956.
The people who turned out for Bobby are still around – along with several million others who’ll be voting for the first time – but they won’t turn out for Humphrey, or Jackson, or Muskie, or any other neo-Nixon hack. They will not even come out for McGovern if the national press wizards keep calling him a Noble Loser …
According to the Gallup Polls, however, the Underculture vote is building up a fearful head of steam behind Ted Kennedy; and this drift has begun to cause genuine alarm among Bigwigs and ‘pros’ in both parties. The mere mention of Kennedy’s name is said to give Nixon bad cramps all over his body, such as it is. His thugs are already starting to lash Kennedy with vicious denunciations – calling him a ‘liar’ and a ‘coward’ and a ‘cheater.’
And this is only December of 1971; the election is still ten months away.
The only person more nervous than Nixon about Kennedy’s recent surge in the polls seems to be Kennedy himself. He won’t even admit that it’s happening – at least not for the record – and his top-level staffers, like Jim Flug, find themselves walking a public tightrope. They can see the thing coming – too soon, perhaps, but there’s nothing they can do about that either. With the boss hunkered down, insisting he’s not a candidate, his lieutenants try to keep their minds off the storm by working feverishly on Projects.
When I called Flug the other night at the office he was working late on a doomed effort to prevent Earl Butz from being confirmed by the Senate as Nixon’s new Secretary of Agriculture.
‘To hell with Butz,’ I said, ‘what about Rehnquist? Are they actually going to put a swine like that on the Supreme Court?’
‘They have the votes,’ he replied.
‘Jesus,’ I muttered, ‘is he as bad as all the rotten stuff I’ve read about him?’
‘Worse,’ Flug said. ‘But I think he’s in. We tried, but we can’t get the votes.’
Jim Flug and I are not close friends in any long-standing personal sense. I met him a few years ago when I went to Washington to do a lot of complicated research for an article about Gun Control Laws for Esquire – an article that finally died in a blaze of niggling between me and the editors about how to cut my ‘final version’ down from 30,000 words to a size that would fit in the magazine.
Flug had gone far out of his way to help me with that research. We talked in the dreary cafeteria in the Old Senate Office Building where we sat down elbow to elbow with Senator Roman Hruska, the statesman from Nebraska, and various other heavies whose names I forget now.
We idled through the line with our trays and then took our plastic-wrapped tunafish sandwiches and coffee in styrofoam cups over to a small formica table. Flug talked about the problems he was having with the Gun Control Bill – trying to put it into some form that might possibly pass the Senate. I listened, glancing up now and then toward the food-bar, half-expecting to see somebody like Robert Kennedy pushing his tray through the line … until I suddenly remembered that Robert Kennedy was dead.
Meanwhile, Flug was outlining every angle and aspect of the Gun Control argument with the buzz-saw precision of a trial lawyer. He was totally into it: crouched there in his seat, wearing a blue pin-striped suit with a vest and oxblood cordovans – a swarthy, bright-eyed little man about thirty years old, mercilessly shredding every argument the National Rifle Association had ever mounted against federal gun laws. Later, when I learned he really was a lawyer, it occurred to me that I would never under any circumstances want to tangle with a person like Flug in a courtroom … and I was careful not to tell him, even in jest, about my .44 magnum fetish.
After lunch that day we went back to his office and he gave me an armload of fact sheets and statistics to back up his arguments. Then I left, feeling very much impressed with Flug’s trip – and I was not surprised, a year later, when I heard he had been the prime mover behind the seemingly impossible challenge to the Carswell Supreme Court nomination, one of the most impressive long-shot political victories since McCarthy sent Lyndon back to the ranch.
Coming on the heels of Judge Haynesworth’s rejection by the Senate, Carswell had seemed like a shoo-in … but a hard-core group of Senate staffers, led by Flug and Birch Bayh’s assistants, had managed to dump Carswell, too.
Now, with Nixon trying to fill two more Court vacancies, Flug said there was not a chance in hell of beating either one of them.
‘Not even Rehnquist?’ I asked. ‘Christ, that’s like Lyndon Johnson trying to put Bobby Baker on the Court.’
‘I know,’ said Flug. ‘Next time you want to think about appealing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, just remember who’ll be up there.’
‘You mean down there,’ I said. ‘Along with all the rest of us,’ I laughed. ‘Well, there’s always smack …’
Flug didn’t laugh. He and a lot of others have worked too hard for the past three years to derail the kind of nightmare that the Nixon/Mitchell team is ready to ram down our throats. There is not much satisfaction in beating Haynesworth & Carswell, then having to swallow a third-rate yoyo like Powell and a vengeful geek like Rehnquist. What Nixon and Mitchell have done in three years – despite the best efforts of the sharpest and meanest young turks the Democratic opposition can call on – is reduce the U.S. Supreme Court to the level of a piss-poor bowling team in Memphis – and this disastrous, nazi-bent shift of the federal government’s Final Decision-making powers won’t even begin to take effect until the spring of ’72.
The effects of this takeover are potentially so disastrous – in terms of personal freedom and police power – that there is no point even speculating on the fate of some poor, misguided geek who might want to take his ‘Illegal Search & Seizure’ case all the way up to the top.
A helpful hint, however, might be found in the case of the Tallahassee newspaper reporter who went to Canada in 1967 to avoid the draft – and returned to find