No other speaker at that convention was allowed to ignore the time limit laid out for him in the split-second script, but Goldwater was encouraged to rave and snarl at the cameras until he ran out of things to say. His speech set the tone for the whole convention, and his only real competition was Ronald Reagan. Compared to those two, both Agnew and Nixon sounded like bleeding-heart liberals.
The next step, on Tuesday, was a public whipping for GOP “liberals” like Illinois Senator Charles Percy who wanted to change some of the delegate selection rules so the large industrial (and usually more liberal) states would have more of a voice in the 1976 convention. But his proposal lost by a landslide, and the ’76 convention—at which Agnew is now expected to be the leading contender—will be dominated as usual by rural conservatives from the South and the West.1
At this point, thanks again to Rhythm logic, a blueprint begins to take shape:
Nixon returned from Miami with a commanding 60-30 lead over McGovern in the public opinion polls—but roughly half of that margin would disappear overnight if McGovern could somehow get the support of the Old Guard Democrats (the Jewish vote, the Humphrey vote, AFL-CIO unions still loyal to George Meany) who lost to McGovern in the primaries and now refuse to support him.
The reasons they give are generally too vague or unfounded to argue with: “too radical,” “anti-labor,” “anti-Semitic,” and they are not worth arguing about anyway; because the real reason why so many Old Guard Democrats are backing away from McGovern is a powerful desire to regain their control of the Democratic Party. The McGovern organization has only a tentative grip on the party machinery now, but a McGovern victory in November would give him at least four years to rebuild and revitalize the whole structure in his own image. To many professional Democrats—particularly the Big Fish in a Small Pond types who worked overtime for Humphrey or Jackson last spring—the prospect of a McGovern victory is far more frightening than another four years of Nixon.
Indeed, and Nixon has a keen understanding of these things. He has been a professional pol all his life, through many ups and downs. He understands that politics is a rotten, frequently degrading business that corrupts everybody who steps in it, but this knowledge no longer bothers him. Some say it never did, in fact—but that was the Old Nixon. We have seen many models since then, but now we are on the brink of coming to grips with The Real Nixon.
This campaign will almost certainly be his last, regardless of how it turns out. A win would retire him automatically, and a loss would probably shatter his personality along with his ego. That is one of the main keys to understanding the Real Nixon Strategy Analysis. A loss to McGovern would be such a shock to Nixon that he would probably change his name at once and emigrate to Rhodesia. Not even a narrow victory would make him happy; this time he wants to win big, and he intends to.
The intensity of his Big Sure Win obsession became apparent to Clark McGregor, his new campaign manager, even before I picked it up with Rhythm Logic. On the day after the convention, most of the talk among Nixon’s staff members was about “how to avoid complacency.” Their Doral Hotel fortress was rank with overconfidence. McGregor, sitting happy on a campaign war chest of “between $35 million and $38 million,” had just decided to use some of the cash to fight complacency by organizing Nixon volunteer groups in some of the states. Then he went downstairs to a meeting of the GOP financial committee and was surprised to hear Maurice Stans, Nixon’s chief fund-raiser, announce that the presidential campaign budget had just been boosted to $45 million—$15 million more than the 1968 Nixon campaign used in the tight race against Hubert Humphrey.
The President was not immediately available for comment on how he planned to spend his forty-five Big Ones, but Stans said he planned to safeguard the funds personally.
At that point, McGregor cracked Stans upside the head with a Gideon Bible and called him a “thieving little fart.” McGregor then began shoving the rest of us out of the room, but when Stans tried to leave, McGregor grabbed him by the neck and jerked him back inside. Then he slammed the door and threw the bolt…
Jesus, why do I write things like that? I must be getting sick, or maybe just tired of writing about these greasy Rotarian bastards. I think it’s time to move on to something else. But first I guess I should finish off that story about how Nixon sold his party down the river.
It was basically a straight-across trade: Agnew for McGovern. By welcoming all the right-wingers and yahoos back into the front ranks of the party—then watching silently as “liberals” fought vainly for a fair share of the delegate seats in ’76—Nixon aimed the party as far towards the Right as he could, while charting his own course straight down the center and opening wide his arms to all those poor homeless Democrats who got driven out of their own party by that jew-baiting, strike-busting, radical bastard George McGovern, “the Goldwater of the Left.”
Meanwhile, Barry Goldwater himself is riding high again in the GOP. The party is back in step with him now, and by the time the ’76 convention rolls around, Spiro Agnew is likely to find himself hooted off the podium—like Rockefeller in ’64—as a useless back-sliding liberal. That convention will want to nominate one of their own, and whoever emerges to carry the party colors will almost certainly be doomed from the start and mocked by all the Humphrey/Meany Democrats—who will have gone back home, by then—as “The McGovern of the Right.”
Nixon sees his margin of safety on November 7th in the number of anti-McGovern Democrats he can coax across the line to vote for him.2 Despite his huge lead in the polls, he knows better than to believe he’ll be thirty points ahead on election day. Sooner or later, McGovern’s top command will get bored with this brainless squabbling among themselves. They’ve been at it for more than a month now, like a bunch of winos locked in a small closet.
Gary Hart insists the “real work” of the campaign is going along just like it was in New Hampshire, or Wisconsin, or California—“but the press can’t see it now, just like they couldn’t see it back in the early primaries. Hell, our organizers don’t hold press conferences; nobody interviews our canvassers.
“I’d say we’re at the same stage now [September 1] that we were back in the third week of February. Stop worrying, Hunter, we’re doing fine.”
Well… maybe so. If it’s true, Nixon is going to need all the Humphrey/Meany Democrats he can get. Once his margin starts slipping he’ll get nervous, and if that Watergate case ever gets into court he might get very nervous.
But he has already bought his insurance policy. The Old Guard anti-McGovern Democrats might not be so willing to dump McGovern if they thought they might lose again in ’76. But Nixon appears to have taken care of that problem for them, quietly opening the way for a Kennedy vs. Agnew fiasco four years from now.
Compared to the Democratic Convention five weeks earlier, the Nixon celebration was an ugly, low-level trip that hovered somewhere in that grim indefinable limbo between dullness and obscenity—like a bad pornographic film that you want to walk out on, but sit through anyway and then leave the theater feeling depressed and vaguely embarrassed with yourself for ever having taken part in it, even as a spectator.
It was so bad, overall, that it is hard to even work up the energy to write about it. Not even the frenzied efforts of the TV news moguls could make the thing interesting. According to a Miami Herald reporter who monitored TV coverage from gavel to gavel, “at any given time, only about 15 percent of New York metropolitan households—where early returns are available—were tuned to network convention coverage.”
On the Sunday after the convention, Mike Wallace presided over a CBS-TV roundup “special” on what happened in Miami, and when he summed it all up in the end—after an hour’s worth of fantastically expensive film clips—he dismissed the whole thing as a useless bummer. Speaking for the CBS floor reporters, he said, “We labored mightily, and brought forth a mouse.”
Most of the linear press people seemed to feel the same way. Every midnight, at the
end of each session, the Poodle Lounge in the Fontainebleau filled up with sullen journalists who would spend the next three hours moaning at each other about what a goddamn rotten nightmare it all was. On Tuesday night I was sitting at a table in the Poodle with a clutch of New York heavies—Dick Reeves from New York Magazine, Russ Barnard from Harpers, Phil Tracy from the Village Voice, etc.—and when they started bitching about the music from the bandstand where a 1952 vintage nite-klub saxophone group was fouling the air, I said, “You bastards had better get used to that music; you’ll be hearing a hell of a lot of it for the next four years.”
Nobody laughed. I finished my double-tequila and went upstairs to my room to get hopelessly stoned by myself and pass out. It was that kind of a convention.
The pervasive sense of gloom among the press/media crowd in Miami was only slightly less obvious than the gung-ho, breast-beating arrogance of the Nixon delegates themselves. That was the real story of the convention: the strident, loutish confidence of the whole GOP machinery, from top to bottom. Looking back on that week, one of my clearest memories is that maddening “FOUR MORE YEARS!” chant from the Nixon Youth gallery in the convention hall. NBC’s John Chancellor compared the Nixon Youth cheering section to the Chicago “sewer workers” who were herded into the Stockyards convention hall in Chicago four years ago to cheer for Mayor Daley. The Nixon Youth people were not happy with Chancellor for making that remark on camera. They complained very bitterly about it, saying it was just another example of the “knee-jerk liberal” thinking that dominates the media.
But the truth is that Chancellor was absolutely right. Due to a strange set of circumstances, I spent two very tense hours right in the middle of that Nixon Youth mob on Tuesday night, and it gave me an opportunity to speak at considerable length with quite a few of them….
What happened, in a nut, was that I got lost in a maze of hallways in the back reaches of the convention hall on Tuesday night about an hour or so before the roll-call vote on Nixon’s chances of winning the GOP nomination again this year…. I had just come off the convention floor, the Secret Service lads chased me away from the First Family box where I was trying to hear what Charlton Heston was saying to Nelson Rockefeller, and in the nervous wake of an experience like that I felt a great thirst rising… so I tried to take a shortcut to the Railroad Lounge, where free beer was available to the press; but I blew it somewhere along the way and ended up in a big room jammed with Nixon Youth workers, getting themselves ready for a “spontaneous demonstration” at the moment of climax out there on the floor…. I was just idling around in the hallway, trying to go north for a beer, when I got swept up in a fast-moving mob of about two thousand people heading south at good speed, so instead of fighting the tide I let myself be carried along to wherever they were going….
WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
Which turned out to be the “Ready Room,” in a far corner of the hall, where a dozen or so people wearing red hats and looking like small-town high-school football coaches were yelling into bullhorns and trying to whip this herd of screaming sheep into shape for the spontaneous demonstration, scheduled for 10:33 P.M.
It was a very disciplined scene. The red-hatted men with the bullhorns did all the talking. Huge green plastic “refuse” sacks full of helium balloons were distributed, along with handfuls of New Year’s Eve party noisemakers and hundreds of big cardboard signs that said things like: “NIXON NOW!”… “FOUR MORE YEARS!”… “NO COMPROMISE!”
Most of the signs were freshly printed. They looked exactly like the “WE LOVE MAYOR DALEY” signs that Daley distributed to his sewer workers in Chicago in 1968: red and blue ink on a white background… but a few, here and there, were hand-lettered, and mine happened to be one of these. It said, “GARBAGE MEN DEMAND EQUAL TIME.” I had several choices, but this one seemed right for the occasion.
Actually, there was a long and active time lag between the moment when I was swept into the Ready Room and my decision to carry a sign in the spontaneous demonstration. I have a lot of on-the-spot notes about this, somewhere in my suitcase, but I can’t find them now and it’s 3:15 A.M. in Miami and I have to catch a plane for Chicago at noon—then change planes for Denver, then change again in Denver for the last plane to Aspen—so I’ll try to put some flesh on this scene when I get to Woody Creek and my own typewriter; this one is far too slow for good dialogue or fast-moving behavior.
Just to put a fast and tentative ending on it, however, what happened in that time lag was that they discovered me early on, and tried to throw me out—but I refused to go, and that’s when the dialogue started. For the first ten minutes or so I was getting very ominous Hells Angels flashbacks—all alone in a big crowd of hostile, cranked-up geeks in a mood to stomp somebody—but it soon became evident that these Nixon Youth people weren’t ready for that kind of madness.
Our first clash erupted when I looked up from where I was sitting on the floor against a wall in the back of the room and saw Ron Rosenbaum from the Village Voice coming at me in a knot of shouting Nixon Youth wranglers. “No press allowed!” they were screaming. “Get out of here! You can’t stay!”
They had nailed Rosenbaum at the door—but, instead of turning back and giving up, he plunged into the crowded room and made a beeline for the back wall, where he’d already spotted me sitting in peaceful anonymity. By the time he reached me he was gasping for breath and about six fraternity/jock types were clawing at his arms. “They’re trying to throw me out!” he shouted.
I looked up and shuddered, knowing my cover was blown. Within seconds, they were screaming at me, too. “You crazy bastard,” I shouted at Rosenbaum. “You fingered me! Look what you’ve done!”
“No press!” they were shouting. “OUT! Both of you!”
I stood up quickly and put my back to the wall, still cursing Rosenbaum. “That’s right!” I yelled. “Get that bastard out of here! No press allowed!”
Rosenbaum stared at me. There was shock and repugnance in his eyes—as if he had just recognized me as a lineal descendant of Judas Iscariot. As they muscled him away, I began explaining to my accusers that I was really more of a political observer than a journalist. “Have you run for office?” I snapped at one of them. “No! I thought not, goddamnit! You don’t have the look of a man who’s been to the well. I can see it in your face!”
He was taken aback by this charge. His mouth flapped for a few seconds, then he blurted out: “What about you? What office did you run for?”
I smiled gently. “Sheriff, my friend. I ran for Sheriff, out in Colorado—and I lost by just a hair. Because the liberals put the screws to me! Right! Are you surprised?”
He was definitely off balance.
“That’s why I came here as an observer,” I continued. “I wanted to see what it was like on the inside of a winning campaign.”
It was just about then that somebody noticed my “press” tag was attached to my shirt by a blue and white MCGOVERN button. I’d been wearing it for three days, provoking occasional rude comments from hotheads on the convention floor and in various hotel lobbies—but this was the first time I’d felt called upon to explain myself. It was, after all, the only visible MCGOVERN button in Miami Beach that week—in Flamingo Park or anywhere else—and now I was trying to join a spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration that was about to spill out onto the floor of the very convention that had just nominated Richard Nixon for re-election, against McGovern.
They seemed to feel I was mocking their efforts in some way… and at that point the argument became so complex and disjointed that I can’t possibly run it all down here. It is enough, for now, to say that we finally compromised: If I refused to leave without violence, then I was damn well going to have to carry a sign in the spontaneous demonstration—and also wear a plastic red, white, and blue Nixon hat. They never came right out and said it, but I could see they were uncomfortable at the prospect of all three network TV cameras looking down on their spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration and zeroing i
n—for their own perverse reasons—on a weird-looking, thirty-five-year-old speed freak with half his hair burned off from overindulgence, wearing a big blue MCGOVERN button on his chest, carrying a tall cup of “Old Milwaukee” and shaking his fist at John Chancellor up in the NBC booth—screaming: “You dirty bastard! You’ll pay for this, by God! We’ll rip your goddamn teeth out! KILL! KILL! Your number just came up, you communist son of a bitch!”
I politely dismissed all suggestions that I remove my MCGOVERN button, but I agreed to carry a sign and wear a plastic hat like everybody else. “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “You’ll be proud of me. There’s a lot of bad blood between me and John Chancellor. He put acid in my drink last month at the Democratic Convention, then he tried to humiliate me in public.”
“Acid? Golly, that’s terrible! What kind of acid?”
“It felt like Sunshine,” I said.
“Sunshine?”
“Yeah. He denied it, of course—But hell, he always denies it.”
“Why?” a girl asked.