Which more or less makes the point, I think. And if it doesn’t, well… political analysis was never my game, anyway. All I do is wander around and make bets with people, and so far I’ve done pretty well.
As for betting on the chance that Mankiewicz is right and that McGovern will actually win on the first ballot in Miami… I think I’d like some odds on that one, and at this stage of the campaign they should be pretty easy to get. McGovern right now is the only one of the Democratic candidates with any chance at all of getting the nomination… and if anybody wants to put money on Muskie, Humphrey or Wallace, get in touch with me immediately.
If McGovern wins California and New York—and Mankiewicz says they have both of those already wired—he will go to Miami with enough delegates to come very close to winning on the first ballot. If not… well… God only knows what kind of treachery and madness will erupt in Miami if they have to start bargaining. Whatever happens at that point will have to include George Wallace—who has already said he’ll take second place on a ticket with anybody who’ll let him write the party platform.
A deadlocked convention would be faced with a choice between bargaining with George Wallace or trying to draft Ted Kennedy, in order to save the party. What Kennedy would do under those circumstances is impossible to say right now… but it’s worth noting that the only one of the candidates who has presumably given any thought to running second on a Kennedy ticket is George McGovern, and McGovern is the only candidate whom Ted Kennedy would be likely to help over the hump prior to Miami Beach.
I am feeling a little desperate about getting out of this hotel. Eight days in the Sheraton-Schroeder is like three months in the Cook County jail. The place is run by old Germans. The whole staff is German. Most of them speak enough English to make themselves understood in a garbled, menacing sort of way… and they are especially full of hate this week because the hotel has just been sold and the whole staff seems to think they’ll be fired just as soon as the election crowd leaves.
So they are doing everything possible to make sure that nobody unfortunate enough to be trapped here this week will ever forget the experience. The room radiators are uncontrollable, the tubs won’t drain, the elevators go haywire every night, the phones ring for no reason at all hours of the night, the coffee shop is almost never open, and about three days before the election the bar ran out of beer. The manager explained that they were “running oud ze inventory”—selling off everything in stock, including all the booze and almost every item on the menu except things like cabbage and sauerbrauten. The first wave of complaints were turned aside with a hiss and a chop of the hand, but after two days and nights of this Prussian madness the manager was apparently caused to know pressure from forces beyond his control. By Friday the bar was stocked with beer again, and it was once more possible to get things like prime rib and sheep’s head in the dining room.
But the root ambience of the place never changed. Dick Tuck, the legendary Kennedy advance man now working for McGovern, has stayed here several times in the past and calls it “the worst hotel in the world.”
Ah yes… I can hear the Mojo Wire humming frantically across the room. Crouse is stuffing page after page of gibberish into it. Greg Jackson, the ABC correspondent, had been handling it most of the day and whipping us along like Bear Bryant, but he had to catch a plane for New York and now we are left on our own.
The pressure is building up. The copy no longer makes sense. Huge chunks are either missing or too scrambled to follow from one sentence to another. Crouse just fed two consecutive pages into the machine upside-down, provoking a burst of angry yelling from whoever is operating the receiver out there on the Coast.
And now the bastard is beeping… beeping… beeping, which means it is hungry for this final page, which means I no longer have time to crank out any real wisdom on the meaning of the Wisconsin primary. But that can wait, I think. We have a three-week rest now before the next one of these goddamn nightmares… which gives me a bit of time to think about what happened here. Meanwhile, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that George McGovern is no longer the hopelessly decent loser that he has looked like up to now.
The real surprise of this campaign, according to Theodore White on CBS-TV last night, is that “George McGovern has turned out to be one of the great field organizers of American politics.”
But Crouse is dealing with that story, and the wire is beeping again. So this page will have to go, for good or ill… and the minute it finishes we will flee this hotel, like rats from a burning ship.
[Author’s Note]
Actually there was nothing mysterious about McGovern’s “stunning” victory in Wisconsin. The most surprising thing about it was that the national press wizards, including me, had somehow overlooked the existence of one of the most impressive grass-roots political organizations in the history of American politics. Gene Pokorny, McGovern’s twenty-five-year-old national manager for Wisconsin, had seen no special reason to inform the press about it. When the truth finally dawned on us several days before the election, I was too physically and mentally broken to cope with anything that intricate. As the deadline hour approached, I spent more and more time locked in the back bathroom of our National Affairs Suite in Bleak House, waving distractedly and yelling at Crouse to call the doctor for more drugs. When it finally became apparent that I was hopelessly out of control, Crouse went out and lashed the story together on his own:
MILWAUKEE, WISC.—The George McGovern field organization has become a legend. Gene Pokorny has been hailed as the “best young political organizer in the history of this country,” and people have begun talking about the volunteers in tones usually reserved for the guys who were in the hills with Castro.
A bunch of beautiful, euphoric, slightly drunk, very young McGovern volunteers were having a completely informal victory party in a block-long two-story brick warehouse, formerly used to store toys. They had been living there for two weeks, sleeping on the linoleum floor of the cavernous rooms.
They had all worked in the Fourth District, the Polish South Side of Milwaukee, a section that even the McGovern staff crossed off as the inviolable turf of Muskie, Wallace, and Humphrey. McGovern had not only won the district but beat Wallace by eight thousand votes. At the warehouse at 3:30 in the morning, nine or ten of the volunteers got up from a sleepy poker game and gathered around to talk.
“Tell everybody we really love George McGovern,” said a blonde girl.
“I was in charge of the Wauwatosa-West Allis office in the Fourth,” said a skinny young man wearing a T-shirt embroidered with a butterfly. “The Downtown office used to send volunteers out to us saying we couldn’t win the Fourth, which was a pretty shitty thing to do. They wouldn’t give us bumper stickers or buttons, we had to go down there and rip them off. Downtown was fucked. They sat around there and watched TV while we were putting out mailings until two in the morning.”
Gene Pokorny. STUART BRATESMAN
“The district coordinator we had was really great,” said a plump black girl. “He’d yell at us. Every time you came back he’d say, ‘I know you’ll go out one more time.’ But he worked later than anybody. And he had a great way of getting little thirteen-year-old kids to work so they wouldn’t just hang around the office.”
“I had to pay to come out from Utah,” said a girl who was resting her head on a boy’s chest. “I want to see Nixon get the hell beaten out of him.”
“We came from Springfield, Illinois,” said another girl, who was dressed in overalls. “They sent a school bus from Nebraska to bring us up here. The guy in charge was a teacher from Nebraska who just happened to have a bus driver’s license and was for McGovern. He kept singing and talking and he drove off the road twice in a snowstorm.”
“When we canvassed we thought a lot of people were against us. We got really discouraged, it was freezing cold. You’d get a whole bunch of uncommitteds and then you’d hit three favorables in a row and it was an amazing up. T
he people were good to us, they were impressed that we were out in the cold and they let us come in to get warm. They were impressed I had come from Michigan to do this.”
“A Wallace lady followed me up one block. She picked up all the literature I had left and put hers there,” said a thin girl who was nursing a bottle of wine. “So I went back and picked hers up and put ours down.”
“Some of these people were weird,” said another girl. “I asked one guy, ‘What do you think of McGovern?’ and he said, ‘I’d vote for him if he’d turn Christian.’ A couple of them said, ‘McGovern? He’s for dope.’”
“I got a lady who liked George because she said he knew how to tie his tie right,” said the black girl. “Gloria Steinem showed him how to tie it. You should have seen how he tied it before that.”
“I think you should know that in our office we had twenty states represented among the volunteers,” said the office manager. “All kinds of people haven’t slept in a bed and have gone hungry. We had three hundred volunteers here in the warehouse some nights.”
“They promised us room and board but they didn’t feed us half the time,” said one of the girls. The rest of the group shouted her down.
“One lady fed this whole warehouse for two and a half weeks,” said an older woman who seemed to be in charge. “She said she and her husband didn’t pay their bills for the month so that they could feed us. She would come home from her job as a teacher and start to cook and then bring the food over. That kind of thing makes you feel good.”
“When you write your article,” said one of the boys, “tell them that we’re all young kids and that they need a band at the next victory party. There was no band at the Pfister tonight. And tell them that we want to see George more.”
“I have to crash,” the girl from Utah said with a long yawn. “But I have to tell you something first. I’ve been here less than a week and yet I know so many people here well, ’cause they’re beautiful people. Even if we’d lost, we’d have won so much.”
A year and a half ago, George McGovern set out to be President of the United States of America with little money, no media, chronic five percent showing in the polls, and a face that was recognizable to nobody but a handful of liberals and South Dakota farmers. His only prayer was to build a crack political organization. Last week, that organization made him the front-runner in the Democratic primary race. It was indisputably the best organization in the state of Wisconsin, and it moved one McGovern volunteer, a New York Teamsters boss, to marvel: “I’m not kidding. This is better than Tammany Hall.”
“This is the old politics,” says Joel Swerdlow, the twenty-six-year-old who ran McGovern’s operation in the North half of Milwaukee. “We have precinct captains, ward leaders, car captains, the whole bit. That’s the only way you win. But instead of patronage bosses and sewer commissioners, we’ve got young people who work because they’re interested in the issues.”
Political organization is basically a matter of list-keeping. You canvass a state by foot and by phone to find out who is for you, who is against you, and who is uncommitted. Once you have the list, you cross off the ones against you, barrage the uncommitted with pleas and information, and make sure your supporters get to the polls.
Not so long ago, the Party Organization that kept the best list and had the patronage clout to keep the listees in line could deliver an election. Today even Mayor Daley’s fabled machine is showing signs of breakdown, and if a candidate wants an organization he can count on, he has to build it himself.
Muskie has made countless bungles; one of the earliest was his decision to depend entirely on the Party Organization to come through with the vote in the key Democratic city of Manchester, N.H. The local organization turned out to be a group of hacks led by a mayor who had won by only four hundred votes. “I wouldn’t run for ward committee with the organization they have up there,” said Providence’s Mayor Joseph A. Doorley, who was called in at the last moment to rescue votes for Muskie. Meanwhile, McGovern’s organization ran a classic operation in Manchester, canvassing almost every precinct two times, and winning ethnic sections that no one believed they could capture. The McGovern organization was superior in both numbers and fervor. The McGovern people canvassed the city so thoroughly that by election night they were able to predict the vote in most Manchester wards with deadly accuracy.
After the excellent showing in low-income districts in Manchester, the McGovern organization generals made a crucial decision; they decided that the main strategic aim of the campaign would be to prove that the bulk of their candidate’s support actually came from working men, not from students and suburbanites.
“I’ve always thought that the blue-collar vote had to be a source of his strength,” said Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s main strategist. “It always seemed to me that McGovern—not as the anti-war candidate but as the ‘change’ candidate—would appeal more to Middle America than he would to any other group. They’re the ones with the most to gain from change and they’re the ones who get screwed by the way we do business in this country.”
Wisconsin was the perfect state for McGovern’s first big bid for blue-collar votes. The major issue was property tax, and McGovern could hammer relentlessly away for tax reform, which is one of his favorite themes. All he needed was a spectacular organization that could tell the working class district who he was.
Last year, McGovern’s campaign manager, a young Coloradan named Gary Hart, who looks like a ski instructor and worked for Bobby Kennedy, was setting up local organizations in key primary states. In November, 1970, he recruited a former McCarthy worker named Gene Pokorny to oversee the Wisconsin operation. Pokorny, who grew up on a feed-grains farm in Nebraska, started at once to line up workers using the old McCarthy lists. “It’s tough starting a year and a half in advance,” he said. “But just as long as you can find something useful for volunteers to do, you’re OK. So we did lists, rummage sales, parties, petition drives, fund-raising. We had county leadership meetings and statewide workshops to show people how to canvass and how to set up storefronts.” The lists were all-important. The McGovern workers sent special-interest mailings to every group they could pin down: ecologists, feminists, university faculties, high-school teachers, lawyers, and businessmen. To get at the farm vote they sent McGovern literature to every rural boxholder in the western districts of Wisconsin.
A shy man, Pokorny has adopted a protective official posture; sitting behind his immaculate metal desk, he comes on suspicious and tightlipped as a loan officer. The sight of the press begging for predictions drives him crazy. “I’m a perennial pessimist, gentlemen,” he says. “It’s a congenital disease of the spirit.” However, he has the directness, energy, and conviction that make a good organizer. When the national McGovern staff—the advance men, schedulers, media men, pollsters, and strategists—arrived in Milwaukee two weeks before the election, Pokorny presented them with 10,000 volunteers, 35 local offices, and a clear appraisal of the situation. According to Pokorny, McGovern would probably lose the Third and Seventh Districts—solid farmland on the Minnesota border. In those districts Hubert, with his perfect agricultural record of twenty years’ running and his absolute fluency in farm talk, rates as a Third Senator; they would be his preserve. The Fourth District—the heavily Polish South Side of Milwaukee, was the property of Muskie and Wallace. McGovern could do well in the Farm-Labor Ninth, Sixth, and Eighth Districts. The Second, which contains the University town of Madison, was his for the asking. The First and Fifth, both heavy Labor districts, were tossups. As it turned out, Pokorny’s estimates were characteristically pessimistic.
The consensus of the staff, national and local, was that McGovern should blitz the Fifth, Milwaukee especially. North Milwaukee looks like Archie Bunker’s street drawn out to infinity; a large proportion of Wisconsin’s population lives there. (It also encompasses the downtown area, with every big TV station, radio station, and newspaper in the state.) A mixture of carefully segregated
blacks and white labor, the district serves as a textbook example of the Roosevelt Democractic Coalition. By rights, it should go to that dogeared textbook Democrat, Hubert Humphrey. “If Humphrey doesn’t win,” said Pokorny, “that means the union can’t deliver the rank and file to anybody anymore.”
In the McGovern hierarchy, the task of bringing in the Fifth District belonged to Joel Swerdlow. On the Friday morning before the election, he was standing over two high-school girls in his tiny storefront headquarters, explaining how to send out a last-minute mailing. Having forfeited sleep for two nights, he had taken on a faint greenish tint and looked as if he might rise on Easter if not securely moored.
“I’m a political hack,” he says. “I’m here because this is where I got the highest bid. Guys like me, we like to think we only go with candidates who can win.” Despite his bluff, he is deeply committed to McGovern.
Swerdlow’s boxcar-sized storefront headquarters contained the usual depressing welter of folders, envelopes, and brochures—all the standard paraphernalia for pestering apathetic citizens until they crack and agree to vote for your man. Fourteen-year-olds were running around on errands, out-of-state college kids were stuffing envelopes, and a radio was blaring. Swerdlow started on a tour of inspection.
The walls of the office were papered with printout lists of all the voters in the district. “In most states, you’d find a little R or D by each name,” said Swerdlow. “Not here—there’s no prior registration in their state. So we have to phone or go see them all and about one-fifth are for Nixon, which means a tremendous waste of energy.”
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