The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Nevertheless, reporters stalked them. They were news and had to be covered. Photographers were worse. One, an Italian, managed, with telephoto lenses, to get a picture of her sunbathing in the nude. But the greatest blow to her new role came not from the secular press but from the Vatican’s L’Osservatore della Domenica. Branding her “a public sinner,” it reported that she would be denied church rites. In Boston Cardinal Cushing protested that “Only God knows” who sins and who doesn’t; he pleaded for “love, mutual respect and esteem.” Nevertheless, the canon lawyers in the Vatican held fast. In sharing Onassis’s bed, they ruled, the wife of America’s first Catholic President was profane in the eyes of God.

  ***

  Richard Nixon’s second presidential campaign had begun the previous February in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he registered at a Howard Johnson motel as Mr. Benjamin Chapman. Shortly thereafter pseudonyms became impossible, for his picture was back on front pages, and when he received 79 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, he became the Republican front runner. Thereafter his campaign was one string of triumphs. George Romney was beaten early, after he had said he had been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War. Nelson Rockefeller dropped out, then came back after Johnson declared that he wouldn’t run again, but the only effect of Rockefeller’s in-out-in candidacy was to alienate an early supporter of his, Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland.

  Until Nixon chose him to share the ticket, Agnew was unknown outside his state. His name, as he conceded, was “not a household word.” A few hours after his name went before the convention a reporter stopped pedestrians in downtown Atlanta and said, “I’m going to mention two words to you. You tell me what they mean. The words are Spiro Agnew.” One Atlantan replied, “It’s some kind of disease.” Another said, “It’s some kind of egg,” and a third, a little closer to the mark, said, “He’s a Greek that owns that shipbuilding firm.”

  Agnew’s credentials, said Time, “are not convincing.” But they had impressed Nixon. He wanted a running mate who would take the low road and thus serve the purpose he had served for Eisenhower. It was hard to assess Agnew’s impact on the electorate, because his opposite number in the campaign turned out to be not the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, but a third-party candidate, Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Agnew denounced “phony intellectuals who don’t understand what we mean by hard work and patriotism”; Wallace attacked “pointy-headed” newspapermen, “scummy anarchists” and “pseudo-intellectuals.” Wallace said that if policemen “could run this country for about two years, they’d straighten it out.” At the same time, Agnew was saying in Detroit, “If you’ve seen one ghetto area, you’ve seen them all.” Agnew called a Nisei reporter a “fat Jap” and called Poles “Polacks.” His manner was so graceless that a picket greeted him with a placard reading: APOLOGIZE NOW, SPIRO. IT WILL SAVE TIME LATER. Other pickets met Wallace with: IF YOU LIKED HITLER, YOU’LL LOVE WALLACE and WALLACE IS ROSEMARY’S BABY.

  One reason the also-rans were so newsy in the early weeks of the campaign was the dreariness of the Republican convention, which came first. “Richard M. Nixon rode to victory,” the Associated Press commented, “in a tedious ritual at Miami Beach.” Theodore H. White wrote, “Boredom lay on the convention like a mattress.” Glee clubs sang. Bands played. John Wayne gave an inspirational reading on “Why I am proud to be an American.” Other celebrities supporting Nixon were equally dreary: Art Linkletter, Connie Francis, Pat Boone, Lawrence Welk. The arid speeches of the politicians seemed to go on forever. The only interesting moments came on the periphery of the convention. Senator Edward W. Brooke was reportedly barred from a reception because he was a Negro. Miami blacks rioted; the television commentators said that seventy policemen with shotguns entered the riot area, and the news later was that four Negroes had died. Nixon scribbled away a speech on the yellow legal-length pads which he soon would make famous. In it he called for a return to America’s “lift of a driving dream.”

  The AP reported that the Republicans’ security precautions were “the tightest in the memory of convention goers.” The second Kennedy assassination had scared the Secret Service, which Johnson at that time had made responsible for the protection of all serious candidates. Agents in helicopters hovered over the convention city. Other agents with rifles and binoculars scanned the crowd from rooftops. A thirty-man riot squad was held in reserve, and the 1,333 delegates had to submit all packages and purses to inspection each time they entered the convention. Some Democrats said it was overdone. Two weeks later their own delegates assembled in Chicago.

  The violence that lay ahead in Chicago was not inevitable, but all the ingredients were there. The Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an umbrella organization coordinating over eighty peace groups under David Dellinger, came to jeer at the Chicago police. Hippies, Yippies, peace pickets, McCarthy workers, disillusioned liberals—altogether, they predicted there would be 100,000 of them, and they would march on the convention in the International Amphitheater. Mayor Richard J. Daley took them seriously. He turned Chicago into an armed camp. Manholes around the amphitheater were sealed with tar. A chain link fence seven feet high, with barbed wire on top of it, was thrown around the hall. The city’s 11,500 policemen were put on twelve-hour shifts, 5,500 National Guardsmen were alerted, and 7,500 troops of the U.S. Army, airlifted from Fort Hood in Texas on White House orders, were ordered to stand by. Despite the extravagant forecasts, only about 10,000 to 12,000 demonstrators came to confront them.

  In the convention, the reason for all this, Humphrey was nominated on the first ballot; McCarthy and George McGovern of South Dakota lagged far behind him. The only real contest was over how the peace issue should be handled in the party platform. The administration plank, the more hawkish of the two, won with 1,567 3/4 to 1,041 1/4 for the dovish substitute plank. The figures reflected the depth of the division in the party on the war. Four years earlier Lyndon Johnson had been nominated by acclamation and had won in a landslide. The Chicago convention had been scheduled for the week of his sixtieth birthday, which came that Tuesday. Now he couldn’t even come. The Secret Service advised him that it was too risky.

  “Stop the war!” shouted the youths in the galleries. (The next day, in a ludicrous change, municipal employees took all the seats and waved banners reading WE LOVE DALEY.) But the most dramatic moment of the week was an outside echo of events inside the hall. Delegates were watching what was happening downtown on television screens, and Senator Abe Ribicoff, looking down from the rostrum on the Illinois delegation fifteen feet in front of him, condemned “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Daley and his aides were on their feet, shaking fists and yelling obscenities at him—lip-readers watching television could identify the oaths—and Ribicoff said calmly, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”

  The full truth about what was happening was complicated. If the policemen had matched the courage and discipline of the U.S. marshals on the Ole Miss campus, their record would have been clean. At the same time, it is fair to point out that some of them were provoked. Afterward they displayed over a hundred weapons they had taken from those they arrested: switchblade knives, studded golf balls, clubs with nails embedded in them, bats with razor blades in the ends, chunks of concrete, and plain rocks.

  The sequence of events which eventually erupted beneath the very hotel windows of the major candidates had begun on August 3, the Thursday before the convention, when the Youth International Party—the Yippies—arrived in Chicago with Pigasus, the 125-pound hog they announced they were going to nominate for President. Conspicuous in their beads, sandals, and beards, the Yippies and hippies settled down in Chicago’s 1,185-acre Lincoln Park on the North Side. Over the weekend they played guitars, read poetry, and gave speeches. At 11 P.M. Saturday, curfew time, a dozen were arrested. None resisted. Sunday there were 2,000 of them. At 5 P.M. they asked police for permission to take a truck into the park and use it as a
bandstand. The cops refused. They then arrested the Yippy leader Jerry Rubin. The crowd, incensed, chanted, “Hell, no, we won’t go,” “Oink, Oink!” and “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh.” Tom Hayden of the New Left explained to the officers that this last meant nothing; it was an international student chant which began in Germany. They ignored him. At curfew time they charged through the park swinging nightsticks. They did the same Monday night, except that this time they were tougher. The evicted demonstrators raced away through the North Side traffic.

  On Tuesday seventy priests and ministers erected a ten-foot cross. The demonstrators sang, “We Shall Overcome” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That evening three hundred policemen charged them with tear gas. Choking youths threw stones and bottles, shouting, “Shoot me, pig!” and “Hit me, pig!” The climax came on Wednesday. Demonstration leaders had announced that the protesters would march from the Grant Park band shell to the amphitheater as a show of the solidarity of their opposition to the war. “This is a nonviolent march,” Dellinger told an audience of eight thousand. “If you feel you can’t respond nonviolently, please leave us.” Many did. Nevertheless a Chicago official said, “There will be no march today.”

  And there wasn’t. Instead there was what an investigatory commission later called a “police riot.” Policemen with bullhorns shouted, “This is a final warning. Move out now.” The crowd did, to a narrow strip of Grant Park across Michigan Avenue from the Conrad Hilton. As they moved they mocked the police with “Oink! Oink!” “Sieg Heil!” and other rude chants. At the intersection of Michigan and Balboa avenues a double line of cops awaited them. The scene was brightly illuminated by TV lights on trucks and the eaves of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, headquarters for the three candidates. As the crowd tensed and then surged back and forth taunting the officers, daring them to attack, the police swooped down on them in two flying wedges, nightsticks swinging, dragging individual demonstrators toward waiting wagons. Hundreds of girls in the throng screamed. The mayhem continued for eighteen mad minutes. What was happening, in a very real sense, was a battle between the upper middle and lower middle class. A journalist said, “Those are our children in the streets, and the policemen are attacking them.” But of course the policemen had parents, too.

  Apart from the major encounters there were skirmishes all week between patrolmen and demonstrators, and some between patrolmen and nondemonstrators. On Monday evening alone twenty-one newspapermen were hurt. At various times spectators, clergymen, and at least one cripple were clubbed. Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, was walloped, and Mrs. Anne Kerr, a British Labourite, was Maced outside the Conrad Hilton and thrown into a cell. Hotel guests in the lobby were also beaten and jailed. The hotel’s air-conditioning shafts sucked up tear gas and wafted it into suite 2525A, where Hubert Humphrey was watching himself being nominated on television. On Friday policemen said they were being pelted by objects from windows above—sardines, herrings, beer cans, ashtrays, cocktail glasses, and ice cubes. They thought—they couldn’t tell—that the missiles were coming from the fifteenth floor, corner suite 1505A and 1506A: McCarthy’s command post. Without writ or warrant, they ran into the hotel, took elevators up, and clouted the occupants of the suite.

  Bloodshed might have been averted in Chicago if Mayor Daley had consented when the demonstrators asked permission to sleep in the meadows and glens of Lincoln Park. Then the policemen could have guarded the fringes of the park until the protesters got bored and left. As it was, by enforcing the curfew the mayor made confrontation inevitable, and under the worst possible circumstances. “The whole world is watching,” the youths had chanted at Michigan and Balboa. The world wasn’t, but most of the country was—an estimated 89 million, including, at Key Biscayne, an elated Richard Nixon.

  ***

  In Chicago, Theodore H. White had written in his notes at 8:05 P.M. Wednesday, “The Democrats are finished.” Certainly it looked like it, and when Humphrey’s campaign began with a sickening lurch his admirers despaired. Among his major handicaps were the alienation of Democrats whose hearts had been captured by McCarthy and who now wore blank campaign pins, lack of money, an inefficient organization, and his inability to free himself from the toils of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson wasn’t helping. His attitude toward Humphrey was scornful. He seemed to regard him as contemptible. Asked to comment on him, Johnson said curtly, “He cries too much.”

  In those early autumn weeks he had something to cry over. Inadequately prepared, Humphrey swung through New Jersey, Delaware, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California, speaking as often as nine times a day, a sign of his energy—and the lack of judgment on the part of his staff. Advance men served him poorly; crowds were small and tepid. In Philadelphia, Joey Bishop, a local boy accompanying Humphrey, got more applause than Humphrey. There were hecklers at virtually every stop. In Boston an antiwar crowd booed Humphrey and Edward Kennedy off a platform. Humphrey, said one of his workers, “went to Chicago with one albatross,” meaning Lyndon Johnson, “and came out with two,” meaning Johnson and Daley.

  His treasury was all but empty. His rhetoric, which could soar, was laced with bromides. At one point he actually said, “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is as American as apple pie.” Johnson seemed to be sabotaging him; when in September Humphrey said that the withdrawal of U.S. troops could begin at the end of the year, the President said that “no man can predict” when departure might start. Not counting Wallace votes, in August Gallup had Nixon leading by 16 points, and Harris put Nixon’s margin at 40 to 31. Even Humphrey was discouraged. He said, “I have pursued impossible dreams before and maybe I am now.”

  Nixon’s campaign was all the other way. He had plenty of money and exultant optimism. His schedule harmonized with deadlines of the network news programs, even allowing them plenty of time to develop their film. He dodged challenges to debate, and Republican senators filibustered a measure to allow public service TV debates without Wallace. He appealed to the “forgotten American”—the man who paid his taxes, didn’t riot or break the law, went to church and raised his children to be “good Americans” who would wear the country’s uniform with pride as “watchmen on the walls of freedom around the world.”

  Joe McGinniss described the advertising techniques used by the Nixon people in The Selling of the President 1968. One writer observed that to Nixon politics were “products… to be sold the public—this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the discounts and the state of the market.” Frank Shakespeare Jr., a Nixon aide, was tremendously excited by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. “What a break!” McGinniss quoted him as saying. “This Czech thing is perfect! It puts the soft-liners in a hell of a box!”

  Nixon said he had a plan to end the war; he couldn’t divulge it now because it might disturb the peace talks going on in Paris. He promised to restore law and order by appointing a new attorney general, and he attacked the Supreme Court for being “patently guilty” of freeing defendants on technicalities. He favored approval of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, but not now, because of Soviet treatment of the Czechs. Business would improve, he said, because he would give businessmen tax credits and other incentives which would create jobs and reduce the number of people on welfare. America, he said, became great, “not because of what government did for the people but because of what people did for themselves.”

  In October Humphrey began to gain.

  He had put Chicago behind him, and as he forgot it, so did his audiences. He dismissed his mockers as “damned fools,” introduced the clown, Emmett Kelly, as “Nixon’s economic adviser,” and accused Nixon of dodging issues. He backed the Supreme Court and the nonproliferation treaty. Union audiences were reminded of what Democratic administrations had done for them. Nixon was “Richard the chicken-hearted”; Wallace and General Curtis LeMay, his running mate, were the “bombsy twins.” Humphrey developed a technique of naming the Democratic presidential champions—Roosevelt, Tr
uman, Stevenson, Kennedy—and then, just as the applause started to build, slipping in the name of Lyndon Johnson. Meanwhile his running mate was savaging Agnew. Muskie would say, “Mr. Agnew tells us that we lack a sense of humor,” and add dryly: “I think he is doing his best to restore it.”

  Salt Lake City was a pivot. When Humphrey declared there that he would stop the bombing in Vietnam as “an acceptable risk for peace,” the tide started to turn. On October 21 Gallup reported that Humphrey had cut Nixon’s lead in half. Fading memories of Chicago was part of it. The habit of voting Democratic for a generation was another part. That June Gallup had found that 46 percent of the people considered themselves Democratic, 27 percent said they were independents, and 27 percent Republicans. (In 1940 it had been 42, 20, and 38 percent, and in 1950 45, 22, and 33.) Liberals who had yearned for Robert Kennedy or McCarthy awoke to the fact that the choice was between Humphrey and Nixon, their bogey for the past twenty years. McCarthy himself, who had been pouting on the Riviera, announced his support of the Democratic ticket five days before the election. Finally there was the difference between the demeanor of the two candidates. Humphrey was at the top of his form; Nixon had begun to sound uncannily like Thomas E. Dewey.

  On the afternoon before the election Gallup had 42 percent for Nixon, 40 for Humphrey, 14 percent for Wallace, with 4 percent undecided. Since September Humphrey had gained 12 percent to Nixon’s 1 percent, both at the expense of the fading Wallace. That same Monday Harris had Humphrey in the lead with 43 percent over Nixon’s 40 percent; Wallace had 14 percent and 4 percent were undecided.

  Tuesday night was a spellbinder. Nixon had asked the electorate for a “mandate to govern.” What he got was a surge of Humphrey votes which, in the opinion of many analysts, would have won the election if the campaign had lasted another day or two—as it would have, the Democrats reflected grimly, if they hadn’t postponed their convention so that it would coincide with the week of Lyndon Johnson’s birthday. The figures flashing on the networks’ electric scoreboards showed the lead changing hands several times. It seemed at one point that the two leaders were, as the Associated Press put it, “trading state for state.” Shortly after midnight Humphrey was leading by 33,000 votes. At dawn it appeared that although he couldn’t win in the electoral college, he might win in the popular vote, and there was a distinct possibility that he could thwart a Nixon majority in electoral votes, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, where the Democrats had a majority.