“Well, Senator,” said the reporter—he was trying to become sufficiently presumptuous to say, “if you could make a speech like that on the war in Vietnam tonight when the peace plank is debated ...”
But McCarthy cut him off. “That was then. We don’t retain all our abilities necessarily. Once the ability leaves you, how do you regain it?” It was impossible to tell if he was mocking the reporter or mocking himself. “I used to be angry then,” he said across the table with an evil look of amusement, as if recording these remarks for posterity as well, his yellow eyes gleaming in the light, “but I can’t seem to get angry again. It’s a gift to get angry when you wish to get angry, Mailer.”
“A grace I would say, sir.”
If the table had been laughing at McCarthy’s sallies, they chuckled now with his. The Senator’s friends looked tough and were tough-minded, but they were obviously open to wit from any corner.
“Then you also want to ask yourself if you should get people angry.” McCarthy went on in a voice of the hardest-tempered irony. “Once you get them angry, you’ve got to get them quieted down. That’s not so easy. Lyndon, for instance, has never understood the problem. He thinks politicians are cattle, whereas in fact most politicians are pigs. Now, Norman, there’s a little difference between cattle and pigs which most people don’t know. Lyndon doesn’t know it. You see, to get cattle started, you make just a little noise, and then when they begin to run, you have to make more noise, and then you keep driving them with more and more noise. But pigs are different. You have to start pigs running with a great deal of noise, in fact the best way to start them is by reciting Latin, very loudly, that’ll get them running—then you have to quiet your voice bit by bit and they’ll keep moving. Lyndon has never understood this.”
These gnomic remarks now concluded, the reporter had no idea precisely what the Senator was talking about. He had been expanding a metaphor, and images of the stock-yards, the convention, the war on the streets, the expression on the face of Humphrey delegates and McCarthy delegates, and some tidal wave of contempt at the filthy polluted plumbing of things was in the remark. In the laughter which followed, the reporter was silent.
“It’s a funny thing about pigs,” McCarthy went on. “They have an odd way of keeping warm in winter if they find themselves outside. You see, pigs don’t know if they’re cold, provided their nose is warm. So they stand around in a circle with their nose between the hind legs of the pig in front of them. Wouldn’t you call that a curious relationship?”
“Oh, Senator, I would call that a Satanic relationship.”
McCarthy joined in the laughter. Hard was his face, hard as the bones and scourged flesh of incorruptibility, hard as the cold stone floor of a monastery in the North Woods at five in the morning. The reporter leaned forward to talk into his ear.
“You see, sir,” he said, “the tragedy of the whole business is that you should never have had to run for President. You would have been perfect for the Cabinet.” A keen look back from McCarthy’s eye gave the sanction to continue. “Yessir,” said the reporter, “you’d have made a perfect chief for the F.B.I!” and they looked at each other and McCarthy smiled and said, “Of course, you’re absolutely right.”
The reporter looked across the table into one of the hardest, cleanest expressions he had ever seen, all the subtle hints of puffiness and doubt sometimes visible in the Senator’s expression now gone, no, the face that looked back belonged to a tough man, tough as the harder alloys of steel, a merciless face and very just, the sort of black Irish face which could have belonged to one of the hanging judges in a true court of Heaven, or to the proper commissioner of a police force too honest ever to have existed.
The reporter left. But the memory of McCarthy at this table persisted. And the memory of his presence, harder than the hardest alloys of steel. But not unjust. What iron it must have taken to be annealed in Lyndon’s volcanic breath. Yes, the reporter had met many candidates, but McCarthy was the first who felt like a President, or at least felt like a President in that hard hour after he had relinquished the very last of his hopes, and so was enjoying his dinner.
10
We have been present until now at an account of the Democratic Convention of 1968. It has not, however, been a description of the event. The event was a convention which took place during a continuing five-day battle in the streets and parks of Chicago between some of the minions of the high established, and some of the nihilistic of the young. But if we had begun with a description of this superb battle, it might not have been automatic to transfer interest to the convention, since the greatest excitement in the Amphitheatre was often a reflection of the war without.
Yet, let us hesitate for one last patriot’s cry before slogging to the front. It is from the speech of Governor Lester G. Maddox of Georgia which announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination on August 17, 1968. Since we will see the Governor but once again, and he is a fellow of pithy comment, let us describe him pithily: Governor Maddox has the face of a three-month-old infant who is mean and bald and wears eyeglasses.
From our Governor’s speech:
I am proud to be an American. Aren’t you?
I love my country and its flag and I regard defending them as a privilege as well as a duty. Don’t you?
I ... when I sing God Bless America, I mean it with all of my heart.
... the problems which confront us are the direct result of our failure to insist that our leaders put first things first ... the safety of law-abiding citizens ahead of the safety of law-defying citizens....
Politics is property; property relations are law-abiding. Even seizure of property can be accomplished legally. So the history of a convention must concern itself with law-abiding citizens; conversely, a study of law-defying citizens who protested the deliberations of this convention in the street ought to find them propertyless, therefore not in politics. In fact, it does not. Not quite. There were two groups to the army of young people who assembled in Chicago; one could divide them conveniently as socialists and existentialists. The socialists, you can be certain, believed in every variety of social and revolutionary idea but membership in the Socialist Party, which of course, being young people, they detested; for the most part they were students of the New Left who belonged to SDS, the Resistance (a movement of confirmed draft resisters) and a dozen or more peace organizations. While their holdings were almost entirely in moral property, it would take a strong country mind to claim that socialists have no property relations in their own politics, since indeed there are ideologies among these sissies, Governor Maddox, which have passed down like a family trust through the generations, and the war for control of a radical committee will often revolve around the established seat of the Chairman.
Emphasis, however, on the New Left is directed away from power struggles; the old Marxist splinter groups reduced all too many old radical admirals to command of leaking rowboats, or, to maintain our corporate metaphor of property, squires in command of chicken coops. The New Left was interested for the most part in altering society (and being conceivably altered themselves—they were nothing if not Romantic) by the activity of working for a new kind of life out in the ghettoes, the campuses, and the anti-war movement. If one would still refer to them generically as socialists, it is because the product of their labor was finally, one must fear, ideological: their experience would shape their ideas, and ideally these ideas would serve to clarify the experience of others and so bring them closer to the radical movement. While they detested almost to a man the repressive, obsessive and finally—they were modern minds—the anally compulsive oppressions of Russian Communism (as much as they detested the anally retentive ideologies of the corporation) there were many among them who were all for the Czechoslovakian Communists, for Che Guevara, for Castro, for Tito up to a point, for Rumania, and for the North Vietnamese. Some of them even made a point of carrying the flags of the NLF in meetings and marches. A number, devoted to the memory o
f Che, were elevated as well to militant ideals of revolution. A few had come to Chicago ready to fight the police. (We can be certain that their counterparts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet were being attacked and imprisoned by all the Russian bureaucrats who look like Spiro Agnew, Dick Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey.)
First organized for this action in Chicago back on March 23 in a YMCA camp in Lake Villa, Illinois, in a conference of about one hundred anti-war groups, the project had then seemed a direct action capable of attracting large numbers, for Johnson was still in office, and the war in Vietnam showed no sign of ending. Plans, more or less under the aegis of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (the same clearing house organization which had led the march on the Pentagon) were made for mass demonstrations to protest the nomination of Lyndon Johnson. Since the President was to announce a week later that he would not run again, and the start of the Paris peace talks soon followed, many of the members of the anti-war groups were distracted, and efforts for this huge mobilization under the leadership of David Dellinger, editor of Liberation and chief architect of the march on the Pentagon, Rennie Davis, who headed the Center for Radical Research, and Vernon Grizzard, a Boston draft-resistance leader, were lost in the move of many of the younger workers to the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns. The dream of a broad front of radical groups to meet in Chicago seemed no longer practical. So more modest plans were consolidated between Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, perhaps the outstanding young leader of the New Left now that Jerry Rubin was a Yippie and Mario Savio was relatively quiescent. Between Hayden, Davis, and Dellinger, the Mobilization would function. Where aims were similar to the Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner—editor of The Realist—and Jerry Rubin there would even be cooperation. Rubin, a former associate of Dellinger on the march to the Pentagon, had been working since December 1967 with a vision of bringing one hundred thousand kids to Chicago to hold a Youth Festival which by a sheer mixture of music, witchcraft, and happy spontaneous disruption would so exacerbate the anxiety of the Establishment that Johnson would have to be nominated under armed guard and real Texas guns. Needless to say, plans of the Yippies had also suffered from Johnson’s withdrawal.
Nonetheless, by mid-summer, the wings of the MOB and Yippie army were more or less ready. On one flank was the New Left, still generically socialist, believing in a politics of confrontation, intelligent programmatic warriors, Positivists in philosophy, educational in method, ideological in their focus—which is to say a man’s personality was less significant than his ideas; on the other flank, Yippies, devoted to a politics of ecstasy (we will avoid comparisons with Hubert Humphrey’s politics of joy) programmatic about drug-taking, Dionysiacs, propagandists by example, mystical in focus. (Rubin had once burned some money in a debate with a Trotskyist.) By the summer of 1968 each group had however so influenced the other on campus, via street activity and in demonstrations, that their differences were no longer significant. Indeed under the impact of Rubin’s ideas, the emphasis was much on a politics of confrontation which searched to dramatize the revolution as theater.
But let them speak for themselves. Here is a quotation from Tom Hayden of the New Left:
... The overdevelopment of bureaucracy and technology can lead to a breakdown. A clock can be wound too tight. The super-carrier Forrestal was destroyed by one of its own rockets. In Chicago this week, the military and security machinery ... might devour its mother the Democratic Party....
Consider the dilemmas facing those administering the ... apparatus. They are centralized, suited to confront (or negotiate with) a centralized opposition, but poorly prepared for spontaneous waves of action.... They cannot distinguish “straight” radicals from newspapermen or observers from delegates.... They cannot distinguish rumors about demonstrations from the real thing. They cannot be certain whether bomb threats are serious no matter how much they have “sanitized” the hotels and Amphitheatre...
We always knew that storming or physically disrupting the convention, or conducting guerrilla war in strange territory, was insane. The perspective has been to show the unrepresentative character of the political system by exposing its essentially repressive response to human need and protest....
... Twenty-five thousand troops are being brought here not to stop “disrupters”—no amount of security can stop an assassin or bomber—but because the rulers ... are relying on coercion.... We are forced into a military style not because we are “destructive” and “nihilistic” but because our normal rights are insecure....
Here is a quotation from Ed Sanders, characteristic of the visionary aspects of Hippie prose:
Gentlemen, joy, nooky, circle groups, laughing, dancing, sharing, grass, magic, meditation, music, theatre, and weirdo mutant-jissomed chromosome-damaged ape-chortles have always been my concern for Lincoln Park.
Yours for the power of the lob-throb.
The more practical—by Abbie Hoffman in The Realist:
A Constitutional Convention is being planned ... visionary mind-benders who will for five long days and nights address themselves to the task of formulating the goals and means of the New Society.
It will be a blend of technologists and poets, of artists and community organizers, of anyone who has a vision. We will try to develop a Community of Consciousness.
There will be a huge rock-folk festival for free ... theater groups from all over the country are pledged to come. They are an integral part of the activities....
Workshops in a variety of subjects such as draft resistance, drugs, commune development, guerrilla theater and underground media will be set up....
There will probably be a huge march across town to haunt the Democrats.
People coming to Chicago should begin preparations for five days of energy-exchange. Do not come prepared to sit down and watch and be fed and cared for.... If you don’t have a thing to do, stay home, you’ll only get in the way.
All of these plans are contingent on our getting a permit, and it is toward that goal that we have been working. A permit is a definite contradiction in philosophy since we do not recognize the authority of the old order, but tactically it is a necessity.
We are negotiating, with the Chicago city government, a six-day treaty. All of the Chicago newspapers as well as various pressure groups have urged the city of Chicago to grant the permit. They recognize full well the huge social problem they face if we are forced to use the streets of Chicago for our action.... We have had several meetings, principally with David Stahl, Deputy Mayor of Chicago, and it remains but to iron out the terms of the treaty—suspension of curfew laws, regulations pertaining to sleeping on the beach, etc.—for us to have a bona fide permit on our hands.
The possibility of violence will be greatly reduced. There is no guarantee that it will be entirely eliminated. This is the United States, 1968, remember. If you are afraid of violence you shouldn’t have crossed the border.
This matter of a permit is a cat-and-mouse game. The Chicago authorities do not wish to grant it too early, knowing this would increase the number of people that descend on the city. They can ill afford to wait too late, for that will inhibit planning on our part and create more chaos.
It is not our wish to take on superior armed troops who outnumber us on unfamiliar enemy territory. It is not their wish to have a Democrat nominated amidst a major bloodbath. The treaty will work for both sides.
The Yippies like the Hippies were famous for their optimism. The permit was not granted by Stahl or Daley. In turn, an offer by Daley on August 21 to allow a march from 1 pm to 4 pm in a part of Chicago miles away from the convention was rejected by the Mobilization. Hayden said that marchers coming to Chicago “by the tens of thousands” preferred to be at the Amphitheatre. So the city got ready for a week of disorders its newspapers had advised it to avoid. One can only divine the expression on Daley’s face when he read literature like the following—it comes from a throwaway in Lincoln Park, given out on Sunday afternoon August 25:
YIPPIE!
Lincoln Park
VOTE PIG IN 68
Free Motel
“come sleep with us”
REVOLUTION TOWARDS A FREE SOCIETY: YIPPIE!
By A. Yippie
An immediate end to the War in Vietnam....
Immediate freedom for Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and all other black people. Adoption of the community control concept in our ghetto areas....
The legalization of marihuana and all other psychedelic drugs....
A prison system based on the concept of rehabilitation rather than punishment.
... abolition of all laws related to crimes without victims. That is, retention only of laws relating to crimes in which there is an unwilling injured party, i.e. murder, rape, assault.
The total disarmament of all the people beginning with the police. This includes not only guns, but such brutal devices as tear gas, MACE, electric prods, blackjacks, billy clubs, and the like.
The Abolition of Money. The abolition of pay housing, pay media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help, and pay toilets.
A society which works toward and actively promotes the concept of “full unemployment.” A society in which people are free from the drudgery of work. Adoption of the concept “Let the Machines do it.”
... elimination of pollution from our air and water.
... incentives for the decentralization of our crowded cities ... encourage rural living.
... free birth control information ... abortions when desired.
A restructured educational system which provides the student power to determine his course of study and allows for student participation in over-all policy planning....
Open and free use of media ... cable television as a method of increasing the selection of channels available to the viewer.