In Washington all journalists dress like bank tellers – and those who don’t have problems. Mister Nixon’s press handlers, for instance, have made it ominously clear that I shall not be given White House press credentials. The first time I called, they said they’d never heard of Rolling Stone. ‘Rolling what?’ said the woman.
‘You’d better ask somebody a little younger,’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll do that.’ But the next obstacle up the line was the deputy White House press secretary, a faceless voice called Gerald Warren, who said Rolling Whatever didn’t need White House press credentials – despite the fact they had been issued in the past, without any hassle, to all manner of strange and obscure publications, including student papers like the George Washington University Hatchet.
The only people who seem genuinely interested in the ’72 elections are the actual participants – the various candidates, their paid staff people, the thousands of journalists, cameramen & other media-connected hustlers who will spend most of this year humping the campaign along … and of course all the sponsors, called ‘fat cats’ in the language of Now-Politics, who stand to gain hugely for at least the next four years if they can muscle their man down the homestretch just a hair ahead of the others.
The fat-cat action is still one of the most dramatic aspects of a presidential campaign, but even in this colorful area the tension is leaking away – primarily because most of the really serious fat cats figured out, a few years back, that they could beat the whole rap -along with the onus of going down the tube with some desperate loser – by ‘helping’ two candidates, instead of just one.
A good example of this, in 1972, will probably be Mrs. Rella Factor – ex-wife of ‘Jake the Barber’ and the largest single contributor to Hubert Humphrey’s campaign in ‘68. She didn’t get a hell of a lot of return for her investment last time around. But this year, using the new method, she can buy the total friendship of two, three, or perhaps even four presidential candidates, for the same price … by splitting up the nut, as discreetly as possible, between Hubert, Nixon, and maybe – just for the natural randy hell of it – a chunk to Gene McCarthy, who appears to be cranking up a genuinely weird campaign this time.
I have a peculiar affection for McCarthy; nothing serious or personal, but I recall standing next to him in the snow outside the ‘exit’ door of a shoe factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, in February of 1968 when the five o’clock whistle blew and he had to stand there in the midst of those workers rushing out to the parking lot. I will never forget the pain in McCarthy’s face as he stood there with his hand out, saying over and over again: ‘Shake hands with Senator McCarthy … shake hands with Senator McCarthy … shake hands with Senator McCarthy …’ a tense plastic smile on his face, stepping nervously toward anything friendly, ‘Shake hands with Senator McCarthy’ … but most of the crowd ignored him, refusing to even acknowledge his outstretched hand, staring straight ahead as they hurried out to their cars.
There was at least one network TV camera on hand that afternoon, but the scene was never aired. It was painful enough, just being there, but to have put that scene on national TV would have been an act of genuine cruelty. McCarthy was obviously suffering; not so much because nine out of ten people refused to shake his hand, but because he really hated being there in the first place. But his managers had told him it was necessary, and maybe it was …
Later, when his outlandish success in New Hampshire shocked Johnson into retirement, I half-expected McCarthy to quit the race himself, rather than suffer all the way to Chicago (like Castro in Cuba – after Batista fled) … and God only knows what kind of vengeful energy is driving him this time, but a lot of people who said he was suffering from brain bubbles when he first mentioned that he might run again in ’72 are beginning to take him seriously: not as a Democratic contender, but as an increasingly possible Fourth Party candidate with the power to put a candidate like Muskie through terrible changes between August and November.
To Democratic chairman Larry o’Brien, the specter of a McCarthy candidacy in ’72 must be something like hearing the Hound of the Baskervilles sniffing and pissing around on your porch every night. A left-bent Fourth Party candidate with a few serious grudges on his mind could easily take enough left/radical votes away from either Muskie or Humphrey to make the Democratic nomination all but worthless to either one of them.
Nobody seems to know what McCarthy has in mind this year, but the possibilities are ominous, and anybody who thought he was kidding got snapped around fast last week when McCarthy launched a brutish attack on Muskie within hours after the Maine Senator made his candidacy official.
The front page of the Washington Post carried photos of both men, along with a prominent headline and McCarthy’s harsh warning that he was going to hold Muskie ‘accountable’ for his hawkish stance on the war in Vietnam prior to 1968. McCarthy also accused Muskie of being ‘the most active representative of Johnson administration policy at the 1968 Convention.’
Muskie seemed genuinely shaken by this attack. He immediately called a press conference to admit that he’d been wrong about Vietnam in the past, but now ‘I’ve had reason to change my mind.’ His new position was an awkward thing to explain, but after admitting his ‘past mistakes’ he said that he now favored ‘as close to an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam as possible.’
McCarthy merely shrugged. He had done his gig for the day and Muskie was jolted. The Senator focused all his efforts on the question of his altered Vietnam stance, but he was probably far more disturbed by McCarthy’s ugly revenge-tainted reference to Muskie’s role in the ’68 Democratic Convention. This was obviously the main bone in McCarthy’s throat, but Muskie ignored it and nobody asked Gene what he really meant by the charge … probably because there is no way to understand what happened to McCarthy in Chicago unless you were there and saw it yourself.
I have never read anything that comes anywhere close to explaining the shock and intensity I felt at that convention … and although I was right in the middle of it the whole time, I have never been able to write about it myself. For two weeks afterwards, back in Colorado, I couldn’t even talk about it without starting to cry – for reasons I think I finally understand now, but I still can’t explain.
Because of this: because I went there as a journalist, with no real emotional attachment to any of the candidates and only the barest of illusions about the outcome … I was not personally involved in the thing, so there is no point in presuming to understand what kind of hellish effect Chicago must have had on Gene McCarthy.
I remember seeing him cross Michigan Avenue on Thursday night – several hours after Humphrey had made his acceptance speech out at the Stockyards – and then wandering into the crowd in Grant Park like a defeated general trying to mingle with his troops just after the Surrender. But McCarthy couldn’t mingle. He could barely talk. He acted like a man in deep shock. There was not much to say. The campaign was over.
McCarthy’s gig was finished. He had knocked off the President and then strung himself out on a fantastic six-month campaign that had seen the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Bobby Kennedy, and finally a bloody assault on his own campaign workers by Mayor Daley’s police, who burst into McCarthy’s private convention headquarters at the Chicago Hilton and began breaking heads. At dawn on Friday morning, his campaign manager, a seasoned old pro named Blair Clark, was still pacing up and down Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton in a state so close to hysteria that his friends were afraid to talk to him because every time he tried to say something his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to start pacing again.
Perhaps McCarthy has placed that whole scene in its proper historical and poetic perspective, but if he has I didn’t read it … or maybe he’s been hanging onto the manuscript until he can find a right ending. McCarthy has a sharp sense of drama, along with his kinky instinct for timing … but nobody appears to have noticed, until now, that he might also have