But not now. For the first and only time during the whole convention, the cops were clearly off balance. The vets could have closed all six lanes of Collins Avenue if they’d wanted to, and nobody would have argued. I have been covering anti-war demonstrations with depressing regularity since the winter of 1964, in cities all over the country, and I have never seen cops so intimidated by demonstrators as they were in front of the Fontainebleau hotel on that hot Tuesday afternoon in Miami Beach.
There was an awful tension in that silence. Not even that pack of rich sybarites out there on the foredeck of the Wild Rose could stay in their seats for this show. They were standing up at the rail, looking worried, getting very bad vibrations from whatever was happening over there in the street. Was something wrong with their gladiators? Were they spooked? And why was there no noise?
After five more minutes of harsh silence, one of the VVAW platoon leaders suddenly picked up a bullhorn and said: “We want to come inside.”
Nobody answered, but an almost visible shudder ran through the crowd. “Oh my God!” a man standing next to me muttered. I felt a strange tightness coming over me, and I reacted instinctively—for the first time in a long, long while—by slipping my notebook into my belt and reaching down to take off my watch. The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you’ve lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know when it’s time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket.
I can’t say for sure what I would have done if the Last Patrol had tried to crack the police line and seize control of the Fontainebleau—but I have a fair idea, based on instinct and rude experience, so the unexpected appearance of Congressman Pete McCloskey on that scene calmed my nerves considerably. He shoved his way through the police line and talked with a handful of the VVAW spokesmen long enough to convince them, apparently, that a frontal assault on the hotel would be suicidal.
One of the platoon leaders smiled faintly and assured McCloskey that they’d never had any intention of attacking the Fontainebleau. They didn’t even want to go in. The only reason they asked was to see if the Republicans would turn them away in front of network TV cameras—which they did, but very few cameras were on hand that afternoon to record it. All the network floor crews were down at the convention hall, and the ones who would normally have been on standby alert at the Fontainebleau were out at the airport filming Nixon’s arrival.
No doubt there were backup crews around somewhere—but I suspect they were up on the roof, using very long lenses; because in those first few moments when the vets began massing in front of the police line, there was no mistaking the potential for real violence . . . and it was easy enough to see, by scanning the faces behind those clear plastic riot masks, that the cream of the Florida State Highway Patrol had no appetite at all for a public crunch with 1,200 angry Vietnam veterans.
Whatever the outcome, it was a guaranteed nightmare situation for the police. Defeat would be bad enough, but victory would be intolerable. Every TV screen in the nation would show a small army of heavily armed Florida cops clubbing unarmed veterans—some on crutches and others in wheelchairs—whose only crime was trying to enter Republican Convention headquarters in Miami Beach. How could Nixon explain a thing like that? Could he slither out from under it?
Never in hell, I thought—and all it would take to make a thing like that happen, right now, would be for one or two vets to lose control of themselves and try to crash through the police line; just enough violence to make one cop use his riot stick. The rest would take care of itself.
Ah, nightmares, nightmares . . . Not even Sammy Davis Jr. could stomach that kind of outrage. He would flee the Nixon compound within moments after the first news bulletin, rejecting his newfound soul brother like a suckfish cutting loose from a mortally wounded shark . . . and the next day’s Washington Post would report that Sammy Davis Jr. had spent most of the previous night trying to ooze through the keyhole of George McGovern’s front door in suburban Maryland.
Right . . . but none of this happened. McCloskey’s appearance seemed to soothe both the crowd and the cops. The only violent act of the afternoon occurred moments later when a foul-mouthed twenty-year-old blonde girl named Debby Marshal tried to ram her way through the crowd on a 125 Honda. “Get out of my way!” she kept shouting. “This is ridiculous! These people should go back where they belong!”
The vets ignored her, but about halfway through the crowd she ran into a nest of press photographers, and that was as far as she went. An hour later she was still sitting there, biting her lips and whining about how “ridiculous” it all was. I was tempted to lean over and set her hair on fire with my Zippo, but by that time the confrontation had settled down to a series of bullhorn speeches by various vets. Not much of what was said could be heard more than fifteen feet from the bullhorn, however, because of two army helicopters that suddenly appeared overhead and filled the whole street with their noise. The only vet speaker who managed to make himself plainly understood above the chopper noise was an ex-marine sergeant from Massapequa named Ron Kovic, who spoke from a wheelchair because his legs are permanently paralyzed.
I would like to have a transcript or at least a tape of what Kovic said that day, because his words lashed the crowd like a wire whip. If Kovic had been allowed to speak from the convention hall podium, in front of network TV cameras, Nixon wouldn’t have had the balls to show up and accept the nomination.
No . . . I suspect that’s wishful thinking. Nothing in the realm of human possibility could have prevented Richard Nixon from accepting that nomination. If God himself had showed up in Miami and denounced Nixon from the podium, hired gunsels from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President would have quickly had him arrested for disturbing the peace.
Vietnam veterans like Ron Kovic are not welcome in Nixon’s White House. They tried to get in last year, but they could only get close enough to throw their war medals over the fence. That was perhaps the most eloquent anti-war statement ever made in this country, and that Silent March on the Fontainebleau on August 22 had the same ugly sting to it.
There is no anti-war or even anti-establishment group in America today with the psychic leverage of the VVAW. Not even those decadent swine on the foredeck of the Wild Rose can ignore the dues Ron Kovic and his buddies have paid. They are golems, come back to haunt us all—even Richard Nixon, who campaigned for the presidency in 1968 with a promise that he had “a secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam.
Which was true, as it turns out. The plan was to end the war just in time to get himself reelected in 1972.
Four more years.
The Campaign Trail: The Fat City Blues
October 26, 1972
Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race—small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
—Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the
Powder River Conference in 1877
If George McGovern had a speechwriter half as eloquent as Sitting Bull, he would be home free today—instead of 22 points behind and racing around the country with both feet in his mouth. The Powder River Conference ended ninety-five years ago, but the old chief’s baleful analysis of the White Man’s rape of the American continent was just as accurate then as it would be today if he came back from the dead and said it for the microphones on prime-time TV. The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time—and the only real difference now, with Election Day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.
Sitting Bull made no distinction between Democrats and Republicans—which was probably ju
st as well, in 1877 or any other year—but it’s also true that Sitting Bull never knew the degradation of traveling on Richard Nixon’s press plane; he never had the bilious pleasure of dealing with Ron Ziegler, and he never met John Mitchell, Nixon’s king fixer.
If the old Sioux Chief had ever done these things, I think—despite his angry contempt for the White Man and everything he stands for—he’d be working overtime for George McGovern today.
These past two weeks have not been calm ones for me. Immediately after the Republican Convention in Miami, I dragged myself back to the Rockies and tried to forget about politics for a while—just lie naked on the porch in the cool afternoon sun and watch the aspen trees turning gold on the hills around my house; mix up a huge cannister of gin and grapefruit juice, watch the horses nuzzling each other in the pasture across the road, big logs in the fireplace at night; Herbie Mann, John Prine, and Jesse Colin Young booming out of the speakers . . . zip off every once in a while for a fast run into town along a back road above the river: to the health center gym for some volleyball, then over to Benton’s gallery to get caught up on whatever treacheries the local greedheads rammed through while I was gone, watch the late TV news and curse McGovern for poking another hole in his own boat, then stop by the Jerome on the way out of town for a midnight beer with Solheim.
After two weeks on that peaceful human schedule, the last thing I wanted to think about was the grim, inescapable spectre of two more frenzied months on the campaign trail. Especially when it meant coming back here to Washington, to start laying the groundwork for a long and painful autopsy job on the McGovern campaign. What went wrong? Why had it failed? Who was to blame? And, finally, what next?
That was one project. The other was to somehow pass through the fine eye of the White House security camel and go out on the campaign trail with Richard Nixon, to watch him waltz in—if only to get the drift of his thinking, to watch his moves, his eyes. It is a nervous thing to consider: not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon’s last four years in politics—completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from any need to worry about who might or might not vote for him the next time around.
If he wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants . . . or maybe “wants” is too strong a word for right now. It conjures up images of Papa Doc, Batista, Somoza; jails full of bewildered “political prisoners” and the constant cold-sweat fear of jackboots suddenly kicking your door off its hinges at four in the morning.
There is no point in kidding ourselves about what Richard Nixon really wants for America. When he stands at his White House window and looks out on an anti-war demonstration, he doesn’t see “dissenters,” he sees criminals. Dangerous parasites, preparing to strike at the heart of the Great American System that put him where he is today.
There may not be much difference between Democrats and Republicans; I have made that argument myself—with considerable venom, as I recall—over the past ten months . . . But only a blind geek or a water-head could miss the difference between McGovern and Richard Nixon. Granted, they are both white men; and both are politicians—but the similarity ends right there, and from that point on the difference is so vast that anybody who can’t see it deserves whatever happens to them if Nixon gets reelected due to apathy, stupidity, and laziness on the part of potential McGovern voters.
The tragedy of this campaign is that McGovern and his staff wizards have not been able to dramatize what is really at stake on November 7. We are not looking at just another dim rerun of the ’68 Nixon-Humphrey trip, or the LBJ-Goldwater fiasco in ’64. Those were both useless drills. I voted for Dick Gregory in ’68, and for “No” in ’64 . . . but this one is different, and since McGovern is so goddamn maddeningly inept with the kind of words he needs to make people understand what he’s up to, it will save a lot of time here—and strain on my own weary head, to remember Bobby Kennedy’s ultimate characterization of Richard Nixon, in a speech at Vanderbilt University in the spring of ’68, not long before he was murdered.
“Richard Nixon,” he said, “represents the dark side of the American spirit.”
I don’t remember what else he said that day. I guess I could look it up in the New York Times speech morgue, but why bother? That one line says it all.
Anybody who doubts it should go out and catch the president’s act, the next time he swoops into the local airport. Watch the big silver-and-blue custom-built 707 come booming down the runway and roll up in front of the small but well-disciplined crowd of Nixon Youth cheerleaders singing the “Nixon Now” song, waving their freshly printed red-white-and-blue “Re-Elect the President” signs and then pausing, in perfect spontaneous unison, before intimidating every TV crew on the runway with the stylish “Four more years!” chant.
Watch the president emerge from the belly of the plane, holding hands with the aging Barbie doll known as his wife, and ooze down the rolling VIP stairway while the 105th Division Rolling Thunder Women & Children Classic Napalm U.S. Army Parade Band whips the crowd higher & higher with a big-beat rendition of “God Save the Freaks.”
See the generals strut down from the plane behind the president. Take a long look at the grinning “local dignitaries” who are ushered out, by armed guards, to greet him. See the White House press corps over there about two hundred yards away, herded into that small corral behind heavy ropes stretched around red-white-and-blue painted oil drums. Why are they smiling?
The McGovern campaign appears to be fucked, at this time. A spectacular Come From Behind win is still possible—on paper and given the right circumstances—but the underlying realities of the campaign itself would seem to preclude this. A cohesive, determined campaign with the same kind of multi-level morale that characterized the McGovern effort in the months preceding the Wisconsin primary might be a good bet to close a 20-point gap on Nixon in the last month of this grim presidential campaign.
As usual, Nixon has peaked too early—and now he is locked into what is essentially a Holding Action. Which would be disastrous in a close race, but—even by Pat Caddell’s (partisan) estimate—Nixon could blow 20 points off his lead in the next six weeks and still win. (Caddell’s figures seem in general agreement with those of the most recent Gallup poll, ten days ago, which showed that Nixon could blow 30 points off his lead and still win.)
My own rude estimate is that McGovern will steadily close the gap between now and November 7, but not enough. If I had to make book right now, I would try to get McGovern with 7 or 8 points, but I’d probably go with 5 or 6, if necessary. In other words, my guess at the moment is that McGovern will lose by a popular vote margin of 5.5 percent—and probably far worse in the electoral college.
The tragedy of this is that McGovern appeared to have a sure lock on the White House when the sun came up on Miami Beach on the morning of Thursday, July 13. Since then he has crippled himself with a series of almost unbelievable blunders—Eagleton, Salinger, O’Brien, etc.—that have understandably convinced huge chunks of the electorate, including at least half of McGovern’s own hard-core supporters, that the candidate is a gibbering dingbat. His behavior since Miami has made a piecemeal mockery of everything he seemed to stand for during the primaries.
Possibly I’m wrong on all this. It is still conceivable—to me, at least—that McGovern might actually win. In which case I won’t have to worry about my P.O. Box at the Woody Creek general store getting jammed up with dinner invitations from the White House. But what the hell? Mr. Nixon never invited me, and neither did Kennedy or LBJ.
I survived those years of shame, and I’m not especially worried about enduring four more. I have a feeling that my time is getting short anyway, and I can think of a hell of a lot of things I’d rather find in my mailbox than an invitation to dinner in the Servants’ Quarters.
Let those treacherous bastards eat by themselves. They deserve each other.
Terminal Campaign Bloat?
Ah, Jesus! The situation is out of hand again. The sun i
s up, the deal is down, and that evil bastard Mankiewicz just jerked the kingpin out of my finely crafted saga for this issue. How long, O Lord, how long? My brain has gone numb from this madness. After squatting for thirteen days in this scum-crusted room on the top floor of the Washington Hilton—writing feverishly, night after night, on the homestretch realities of this goddamn wretched campaign—I am beginning to wonder what in the name of Twisted Jesus ever possessed me to come here in the first place. What kind of madness lured me back to this stinking swamp of a town?
Am I turning into a politics junkie? It is not a happy thought—particularly when I see what it’s done to all the others. After two weeks in Woody Creek, getting back on the press plane was like going back to the cancer ward. Some of the best people in the press corps looked so physically ravaged that it was painful to even see them, much less stand around and make small talk.
Many appeared to be in the terminal stage of Campaign Bloat, a gruesome kind of false-fat condition that is said to be connected somehow with failing adrenaline glands. The swelling begins within twenty-four hours of that moment when the victim first begins to suspect that the campaign is essentially meaningless. At that point, the body’s entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generates will cause it to rise again . . . and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow smaller in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog’s throat . . . The brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.