At length, the moment came for Humphrey’s acceptance speech. Tonight, he looked good—which is to say he looked good for Humphrey. Indeed if a man could not look good on the night he accepted the nomination of his party for President, then his prospects of longevity must certainly be odd. Humphrey, of course, had been looking terrible for years. His defeat in West Virginia in 1960 by Jack Kennedy seemed to have done something of a permanent nature, perhaps had dissolved some last core of idealism—it was a cruel campaign: if one would dislike the Kennedys, West Virginia was the place to look. Since then, Humphrey had had a face which was as dependent upon cosmetics as the protagonist of a coffin. The results were about as dynamic. Make-up on Hubert’s face somehow suggested that the flesh beneath was the color of putty—it gave him the shaky put-together look of a sales manager in a small corporation who takes a drink to get up in the morning, and another drink after he has made his intercom calls: the sort of man who is not proud of drinking; and so in the coffee break, he goes to the john and throws a sen-sen down his throat. All day he exudes odors all over; sen-sen, limewater, pomade, bay rum, deodorant, talcum, garlic, a whiff of the medicinal, the odor of Scotch on a nervous tum, rubbing alcohol! This resemblance Hubert had to a sales manager probably appeared most on those average days when he was making political commercials to be run as spots all over the land—in such hours he must have felt like a pure case of the hollows, a disease reserved usually for semi-retired leading men. They have been actors so long they must be filled with something—lines of a script, a surprise bouquet of attention, a recitation of Shakespeare, a bottle of booze, an interview. Something! Don’t leave them alone. They’re hollow. That was how Humphrey must have looked on average days, if his commercials were evidence.
Tonight, however, he was not hollow but full. He had a large audience, and his actor’s gifts for believing a role. Tonight he was the bachelor uncle who would take over a family (left him by Great-Uncle Baines) and through kindness, simple courtesy, funds of true emotional compassion, and stimulating sternness upon occasion of the sort only a bachelor uncle could comprehend—“... rioting, burning, sniping, mugging, traffic in narcotics, and disregard for law are the advance guard of anarchy, and they must and they will be stopped ...” he would bring back that old-fashioned harmony to his ravaged folks. Since he was now up on the podium, the crowd was cheering, and the gallery on signal from Daley roared like a touchdown just scored. Hubert Humphrey was warm; he could believe in victory in the fall. He smiled and waved his hands and beamed, and the delegates, loosened by the film on Bobby Kennedy (their treachery spent in revolt against the Chair) demonstrated for Humphrey. The twenty years in Washington had become this night property to harvest; politicians who didn’t even like him, could think fondly of Hubert at this instant, he was part of their memory of genteel glamour at Washington parties, part of the dividend of having done their exercise in politics with him for twenty years, for having talked to him ten times, shaken his hand forty, corresponded personally twice, got drunk with him once—small property glows in memory, our burning glass! These Humphrey politicians and delegates, two-thirds of all this convention, had lived their lives in the shadow of Washington’s Establishment, that eminence of Perle Mesta parties and Democratic high science, they had lived with nibbles of society, and gossip about it, clumps of grass from Hubert’s own grounds; but it was their life, or a big part of it, and it was leaving now—they all sensed that. The grand Establishment of the Democratic Party and its society life in Washington would soon be shattered—the world was shattering it. So they rose to cheer Humphrey. He was the end of the line, a sweet guy in personal relations so far as he was able—and besides the acceptance speech at a convention was pure rite. In such ceremonies you were required to feel love even if you didn’t like him. Politicians, being property holders, could feel requisite emotions at proper ceremonies. Now they gave proper love to Humphrey, two-thirds of them did. They would only have to give it for an hour. Everybody knew he would lose. The poor abstract bugger.
He gave his speech out of that bolt of cloth he had been weaving for all his life, that springless rhetoric so suited to the organ pipes of his sweet voice, for it enabled him to hold any note on any word, and he could cut from the sorrows of a sigh to the injunctions of a wheeze. He was a holy Harry Truman. Let us not quote him except where we must, for the ideas in his speech have already entered the boundless deep of yesterday’s Fourth of July, and “... once again we give our testament to America ... each and every one of us in our own way should once again reaffirm to ourselves and our posterity that we love this nation, we love America!” If sentiment made the voter vote, and it did! and sentiment was a button one could still prick by a word, then Humphrey was still in property business because he had pushed “Testament” for button, “America” for button, “each and every one of us in our own way”—in our own way—what a sweet button is that! and “reaffirm”—pure compost for any man’s rhetoric, “our posterity,” speaks to old emotion from the land of the covered loins, “we love this nation”—pure constipation is now relieved—“we love America.” The last was not exactly property but rather a reminder to pay the dues. Not every last bit of politics was property—some portion consisted of dunning the ghost-haunted property of others. Nobody had to tell HH. One could deduce the emotional holdings and debts of the most mediocre Americans by studying HH in the art of political speaking—he showed you how to catalogue your possessions: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, winner! John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson—there were sudden boos. Lyndon Johnson, he repeated, and got the cheers from the medicine balls and gallery ding-dongs for Daley. “And tonight to you, Mr. President, I say thank you. Thank you, Mr. President.” His presumption was that Lyndon Johnson was necessarily listening.
Humphrey went on to speak of the new day. That would be his real-estate development for the campaign—New Day Homes. The doors would stick, the dishwashers would break down, the vinyl floor would crack with the extra sand in the concrete foundation, but the signs might be all right.
Then he called for Peace in Vietnam, and the crowd roared and the band played Dianas as if he had made a glorious pass. Peace in Vietnam was now the property of all politicians; Peace in Vietnam was the girl who had gone to bed with a thousand different guys, but always took a bath, and so was virgin. Hubert felt like a virgin every time he talked of Peace in Vietnam. He spoke with the innocent satisfaction of a drop of oil sliding down a scallion.
Of course, Hubert was no vegetable. He was the drugstore liberal. You had better believe it. He knew who had asthma and who had crabs. It is important to locate him in the pharmacopoeia. Back of that drop of oil, he was an emollifacient, a fifty-gallon drum of lanolin—’’We are and we must be one nation, united by liberty and justice for all, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This is our America.” He was like honey from which the sugar had been removed and the saccharine added, he was a bar of margarine the color of make-up. He had the voice of a weeper, a sob in every arch corner and cavern of his sweet, his oversweet heart; he was pious with a crooning invocation of all the property of sentiment, he was all the bad faith of twenty years of the Democratic Party’s promises and gravy and evasion and empty hollers. He was the hog caller of the mountain and the pigs had put him in—he would promise pig pie in the sky. “... With the help of that vast, unfrightened, dedicated, faithful majority of Americans, I say to this great convention tonight, and to this great nation of ours, I am ready to lead our country!” And he ended, and the rite of love went up to its conclusion, and the band played, and the simple common people, and the villainous faces, and the whores with beehive head-dresses in on passes, and the boys and the Southern pols stomped around and were happy, because their man was in, which meant they had won this game, this game, anyway, and happiness consisted of thinking of no future. And Hubert looked shining up on the stage, and made jokes with photographers, and jumped in the air to be tall as Edmund Muskie f
or one still shot—Humphrey would be a sport at a party—and McGovern came up to the podium and Hubert took him in, and his eyes were bright with light and love and tears. It is not every man who can run for President after four long years as towel boy in Unca Baines’ old haw-house with Madame Rusk. He turned to greet others, and from the back had the look of a squat little Mafioso of middle rank, a guy who might run a bookie shop and be scared of many things, but big with his barber, and the manicurist would have Miami hots for him. Let us give the day to Hubert. He had always seen himself as such a long shot and out.
26
“Have a Whopping Double Burger,
“Fingerlicking good!”
This sign had been glimpsed on a hash-house past the stockyards along the road to Midway for the McCarthy rally back so long ago as Sunday. The sign spoke of a millennium when every hash-house owner would be poet to his own promotion, and the stardust of this thought made the reporter sad enough to smile. He was drinking again in the bar where he had had four bourbons last night; but tonight was different. At 3 a.m. the cocktail lounge was full; some of the boys were on the town to celebrate that HH oratory!
Our reporter was not a bigot about the Mafia; or maybe he was—some of his best friends were in the Mafia. (Mafia stands for Mothers-and-Friends-in-America.) A nice joke for a quiet drink; in fact, if one had to choose between the Maf running America and the military-industrial complex, where was one to choose? The corporation might build the airports, but they could never conceive of Las Vegas. On the other hand, a reasonably intelligent President working for the corporation was not to be altogether despised, not at least when the Mafia was receiving its blessing from the little bishop now installed—our reporter’s thoughts were flavorless to him this night.
Punches did not often hurt in a fight, but there came a point in following hours when you descended into your punishment. Pain would begin; a slow exploration of the damage done. His ineffective effort to get two hundred delegates had left him with no good view of his own size; as news had come of two marches on the Amphitheatre turned back, and one group tear-gassed, he knew he was buried once again in those endless ledgers he kept of the balance between honor and shame, yes, on the way to the Amphitheatre tonight, driving south on a street parallel to Michigan Avenue, he had passed a gas station where many National Guard were standing about, and the odor of tear gas was prevalent. There had been a suggestion to stop and investigate, but he had refused. Perhaps it had been his fatigue, but he had been feeling undeniably timorous. He spent time reassuring himself that he had made an honest effort, and by an honest effort had he lost. There had been no need to go out on these last marches. By the terms of his speech, it made no sense to scuffle along with a token number of delegates who could be easily arrested and as easily look foolish—of that, he was still convinced he was correct. No sense therefore to poke one’s nose into a scene of tear-gassing a block away. These arguments were no good: all the while he drank he knew he was floundering in bad conscience. He had an early plane in the morning, he was done, the job was done but for the writing. The reporter knew he had much to write about, but could he now enjoy writing it?
Sometimes he thought that the rate of one’s ability to do good writing day after day was a function of good conscience. A professional could always push a work by an exercise of will, yet was writing himself right out of his liver if the work was obliged to protect the man. Sipping a drink he consulted his liver, and drank some more. The night was spiritless. Depression hung over his friends.
They tried to talk of the future, of how the party system might finally be dead. For by brute fact there were six or seven parties in America now; the Right, or the party of Wallace and Reagan—they were essentially the same, but for class, the lower and upper classes of the Wild Wasp—and then there was the party of hard-core Republicans—Nixon, we know, was doubtless perfect; next some huge government trough of the Caesarian center where the liberal spenders ought to have a home—Rockefeller and Humphrey might run with Teddy Kennedy here. (They could even use the same speeches.) That made a total of three parties, and Gene McCarthy ought to compose a fourth, a very pure party since his followers would be virtually a sect, although numerous as Volkswagens with their understated sell. Then on the Left was another party, or two or three. The Peace and Freedom Party with Eldridge Cleaver, the talented Black writer and convicted rapist, was one; the Yippies might yet be another. It did not seem so bad an idea for America to have many parties. Everyone would at least be present, and politics could function through coalitions; they would shift from issue to issue. One would learn the shape of the time by the shift. And the parties would be obliged to stay alert. It was an interesting future to discuss. It was actually the sort of thing reporters could talk about late at night. Of course, the reporters also gossiped; they considered the fact Eugene McCarthy had gone over to Grant Park on Thursday at three in the afternoon to speak to the demonstrators—Get-Clean-with-Gene had gone over to talk to America’s dirtiest—the Yippies. And the reporters argued mildly whether McCarthy indeed was hitherto not too clean—how much better it might have been if the peace candidate had been willing to get his hands dirty just a little. “It isn’t getting your hands dirty that hurts,” said one of the journalists, “It’s the asses you have to kiss.” They laughed. They were unwinding. The job was done.
From time to time, the reporter thought again of matters which did not balance him. He thought of the fear Bobby Kennedy must have known. This was a thought he had been trying to avoid all night—it gave eyes to the darkness of his own fear—that fear which came from knowing some of them were implacable, Them! All the bad cops, U.S. marshals, generals, corporation executives, high government bureaucrats, rednecks, insane Black militants, half-crazy provocateurs, Right-wing faggots, Right-wing high-strung geniuses, J. Edgar Hoover, and the worst of the rich surrounding every seat of Establishment in America.
Yet his own side—his own side as of last night—made jokes about putting LSD in drinking water. They believed in drugs and he did not. They talked of burning money—he thought money was the last sanity for a Romantic (and part of the game). They believed in taking the pill and going bare-ass in the park—he had decided by now that the best things in life were most difficult to reach, for they protected themselves, so beware of finding your true love in a night. (For it could be true love, or the disaster of your life.) Or perhaps he was too old for orgies on the green. Still, these white children were his troops. (And all the Left-wing Blacks would be his polemical associates—the Lord protect him!) The children were crazy, but they developed honor every year, they had a vision not void of beauty; the other side had no vision, only a nightmare of smashing a brain with a brick. The fear came back again. His own brain would not be reserved necessarily for the last brick. Of course, a lot of people were going to be living with some such fear over the next few years.
Now it was after four, and the last drinks were on the table, were being consumed. The waitresses were closing up. So they talked of going to the Playboy mansion. A party had been going on there all week. While they debated, the reporter was having psychic artillery battles with the Mafia at the next table. (One might take a look at An American Dream, Chap. IV.)
Mafia, of course, was a generic word to him. A crooked politician with a tell-tale jowl was Mafia; so was a guy with a bad cigar, so a crooked judge. They were not real Mafia—real Mafia was subtle and had its own kind of class. (The reporter was sentimental about real Mafia, he gave dispensation the way Lenin in secret preferred Hapsburgs to Romanoffs.) The conservative in his nature admired the wisdom of real Maf! But petty Mafia (which is what he generally meant when he used the word) were half of what was wrong with America. (The other half was obviously The Corporation.) Petty Mafia would not know how to get into a fight if the odds for them were less than two to one. So he entered a psychic artillery battle with a nearby foe—a short fat evil-looking type who had a confidence about the blank space he carried between
his eyes, a glistening confidence sufficient to suggest he carried a gun. Petty Mafia gun sent curses their way. The reporter received them, sent them back. If the thoughts you sent back were sadistic enough, you could see the other man move. Now the other man moved, looked up, uneasily gathered his curse and took a drink. Here came the return. The reporter felt something unpleasant enter his system—a bona fide and very tricky curse. But he was careful to look unconcerned. That was part of this game: to keep the other from knowing he had had any perceptible effect. Done well, the opponent would worry he had gone into the brink. Now his opponent was leaving. It had been a successful war.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago Page 24