He spoke to the people and his appearances generated the old Kennedy magic. The hands reached out for him, stretching and grasping, seeking just to touch him, and some of them started calling him “President Kennedy.”
And while the excitement began to swell, Kennedy quietly solidified relationships with some of the country’s most powerful politicians—Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), Sen. Ernest ‘Fritz’ Hollings (D-S.C.) and Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.). Even though he continues to insist he is not a candidate, it is clear to many observers that a campaign of sorts is under way.
Of sorts.
And it may be true. It is hard to imagine anybody flying around the country to visit socially with people like that unless he had some kind of very powerful ulterior motive in mind. The WWD article went on to describe Mills as “A conservative who has voted against every major civil rights bill and has never voiced opposition to the war in Southeast Asia…” And also: “According to one high-ranking Democratic finance committeeman, it was Rose Kennedy [Teddy’s mother] who donated ‘most, if not all’ of the funds for Mills’ New Hampshire primary campaign.”
Mills got badly stomped in New Hampshire, running neck in neck for the booby prize with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and Edward T. Coll, the anti-rat candidate… but he refused to comment on the rumor that Rose Kennedy had financed his New Hampshire campaign, and it remained for Mills’ brother, Roger, to salvage the story by explaining that “He [Kennedy] is the only Democrat Wallace could support.”
This is probably a remark worth remembering. The Democratic Convention in Miami begins on July 10th, and the only major political event between now and then is the California primary on June 6th. If Humphrey loses in California—and he will, I think—his only hope for the nomination will be to make a deal with Wallace, who will come to Miami with something like 350 delegates, and he’ll be looking around for somebody to bargain with.
The logical bargainee, as it were, is Hubert Humphrey, who has been running a sort of left-handed, stupid-coy flirtation with Wallace ever since the Florida primary, where he did everything possible to co-opt Wallace’s position on busing without actually agreeing with it. Humphrey even went so far as to agree, momentarily, with Nixon on busing—blurting out “Oh, thank goodness!” when he heard of Nixon’s proposal for a “moratorium,” which amounted to a presidential edict to suspend all busing until the White House could figure out some way to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court.
When somebody called Hubert’s attention to this aspect of the problem and reminded him that he had always been known as a staunch foe of racial segregation, he quickly changed his mind and rushed up to Wisconsin to nail down the Black Vote by denouncing Wallace as a racist demagogue, and Nixon as a cynical opportunist for saying almost exactly the same things about busing that Humphrey himself had been saying in Florida.
There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you’ve followed him around for a while on the campaign trail. The double-standard realities of campaign journalism, however, make it difficult for even the best of the “straight/objective” reporters to write what they actually think and feel about a candidate.
Hubert Humphrey, for one, would go crazy with rage and attempt to strangle his press secretary if he ever saw in print what most reporters say about him during midnight conversations around barroom tables in all those Hiltons and Sheratons where the candidates make their headquarters when they swoop into places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis.
And some of these reporters are stepping out of the closet and beginning to describe Humphrey in print as the bag of PR gimmicks that he is. The other day one of the Washington Post regulars nailed him:
“Humphrey has used the campaign slogans of John Kennedy (‘let’s get this country moving again’) and of Wallace (‘stand up for America’) and some of his literature proclaims that 1972 is ‘the year of the people,’ a title used by Eugene McCarthy for a book about his 1968 campaign.”
Enroute from Columbia to La Guardia airport I stopped off in the midtown Rolling Stone office to borrow some money for cabfare and heard that Wallace had just been shot. But the first report was a ten-second radio bulletin, and when I tried to call Washington every news-media phone in the city was busy… and by the time the details began coming through on the radio it was 4:30 in Manhattan, the start of the evening Rush Hour. No way to make the airport until 6:00 or maybe 6:30.
Tim Crouse called from Boston, 250 miles north, saying he had a straight shot to Logan airport up there and would probably make it to Washington before I got out of Manhattan.
Which he did, spending most of Monday night and half of Tuesday in the eye of the media-chaos around Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland—where Wallace had been taken by ambulance for five hours of surgery. While Wallace was under the knife and in the recovery room, Crouse waited with about two hundred reporters to glean tid-bits from announcements by surgeons, police chiefs, and Wallace staffers. The next night, when Wallace had been pronounced out of danger, Crouse changed into a suit and tie and went to the election-night gathering of Maryland Wallace workers at the North Holiday Inn in Baltimore. Wallace was winning big that night in the Maryland primary. Crouse’s reports from both places follow:
SILVER SPRING, MD.—In the late night hours after the Wallace shooting, the Press had only one man to interview: Dr. Joseph Schanno, the pale vascular surgeon with bombed-out eyes who had been picking bullets out of George Wallace. The Press, sweltering in the cinderblock gym of the Silver Spring Boys Club, waiting for the doctor, was crazy with hunger for copy.
“Is he a viable candidate?” a reporter kept shouting at Schanno from the middle of the sweating, shoving mass that surrounded the table where he sat.
“He’s a very viable person,” said Schanno.
Schanno was the first one to speak the unspeakable, but a lot of us had already entertained the horrifying possibility that this country might be in for another wheelchair Democrat. The doctor was blithely predicting that Wallace might be going home inside of a week, which meant that he might be on the loose again within the month. When he resumes campaigning, he’s going to have a lot going for him: increased coverage, or as one reporter was saying last night, “Jesus, this is the biggest break George ever got.”
If Wallace loses the use of the lower half of his body it will make him, in one fell swoop: (a) less of a monster; and (b) more of a superman, the only assassin’s target of the last ten years who has been blessed enough and strong enough to survive.
Wallace’s handlers were holed up downstairs in the “pastoral services” sector of the hospital, a corridor decorated with plaster madonnas and crucifixes. George Mangum, the tall, boisterous Baptist preacher who warms up the crowds at Wallace rallies (“And now, ’cause we’re in Milwaukee, the boys are gonna do their best to play a polka for ya”), was roaming around looking pale and murderous. A skinny woman, straight from a Walker Evans picture, was quietly weeping. A young lean and blond man was uncontrollably sobbing. He was some sort of assistant press officer, wearing a fire-engine red campaign blazer with the WALLACE ’72 crest on his breast pocket.
He was being hugged and consoled by… I had to look twice, but it was a Negro, a huge Pullman porter type, balding with a little grey goatee, and dressed in an elegant blue pinstripe with WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT buttons pinned to each lapel. He was consoling the boy in a beautiful, deep, rolling Paul Robeson bass voice.
I waited a decent interval and then approached him to find out what the hell he was doing on the Wallace campaign. He turned out to be none other than Norman E. Jones, the Chairman of the National Black Citizens for Wallace, Inc., and by conventional Press estimate, the biggest jiveass in all of Campaign ’72, a man who can run bullshit circles around even Hubert Humphrey.
“Mr. Wallace is the only hope of the little man,” Norman said in a voice so resonant that it set the crucifix trembling. I asked him how many bl
acks he had signed up for Wallace.
“You want numbers,” he replied accusingly. “I have no numbers. As fast as I’m traveling now, I just can’t keep up with the thousands of letters coming in every day. The greater majority wish to remain anonymous, for fear of economic and social reprisal.”
This is the man who was challenged by the Wall Street Journal to come up with the name and address of a single Black Citizen for Wallace, and who couldn’t do it. He bills himself as a former journalist and public relations man. Now he unwrapped a fat cigar, lit it, and glowered through the smoke. “How’s McGovern’s Indians getting along?” he challenged me. “How’s Humphrey’s Indians?”
Laurel, Maryland, May 16, 1972. WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
“What Indians?” I said.
“Why all them Indians that live up in the Dakotas and are starving. There ain’t no black that would live up there in Dakota.” With that he walked away in a huff. Which was too bad, because I wanted to ask him about the reaction of the Wallace crowd at the Laurel Shopping Center. When the five shots spit out, a large part of the crowd had immediately turned its attention to four young blacks who had been heckling Wallace from the rear. One of them sported an Afro and a dashiki. The crowd rounded on them, ready to beat them to shit. They started shouting, “No, no, no, no, it wasn’t us, we didn’t shoot him!” But the Prince George’s County police stepped in between them and the crowd split unscathed. The Wallace crowd was ready for a reflexive lynching.
There were some Wallace supporters, though, who talked like men of peace, and it was easy to feel sympathetic with them. A short, grey-haired county chairman for Wallace in Florida softly asked me why the media had it in for Wallace. I answered that, first of all, it was because Wallace was for segregation.
“You’re thinking of the old George Wallace, the man in the schoolhouse door,” he said. “He’s for integration now, ’cause it’s the law of the land, ain’t it? He just wants those Northern cities to integrate too.” There is no one harder to argue with than a Wallacite who happens to be a Southern gentleman. They’ll make you feel hypocritical every time, without one nasty word.
The next afternoon I called up Frank Mankiewicz to find out how the shooting would affect the McGovern campaign. The smart money had McGovern getting beaten in both Maryland and Michigan, but there had been other bets. Ham Davis, the bureau chief of the Providence Journal, who has one of the most sensitive political guts in the National Press Building, had felt, for no particular reason, that McGovern had been building a victory in Maryland before the assassination attempt. But that depended largely on one of McGovern’s last minute get-out-the-vote blitzes, which was called off in the wake of the shooting.
“I thought we might have won Michigan,” said Mankiewicz. “Our polls there showed us within the range of statistical error. It was within two or three points, so it could have gone either way. But the shooting screws this afternoon’s results. I don’t think that it hurts McGovern more than anyone else, except that McGovern has traditionally been the second choice of a lot of Wallace voters, and we probably won’t get the benefit of that now.”
As for Wallace’s future effect on the primaries, Mankiewicz said, “Wallace is at his high-water mark right now. He had nowhere to go but home after today anyway. Even if the shooting had never taken place his campaign is over, he has no more delegates to get anywhere. He isn’t going to win any in Oregon or California or New York.
“He’s got his 300 or 350 delegates and they’re indigestible. He just has to go on with the convention around him. Most of his delegates aren’t going to break for anybody—that’s why I say they’re indigestible.”
I asked him if he feared for McGovern in California. “I shouldn’t allow my peculiarities to prevail,” he said, “but I’m very nervous on the West Coast. It’s the random violence capital of the world. But there’s no way of knowing. They hit Bobby the first time he didn’t go through a crowd. I always felt very safe in the crowds.”
Last night, Senator Ribicoff told a McGovern fund-raising dinner in California that the Wallace incident would help McGovern because it increased people’s feeling that they “needed a quiet man.”
In Maryland, Wallace’s election-night party took place in an oven of a meeting room in the basement of a Baltimore Holiday Inn—long and low-ceilinged, more like a bunker than a ballroom. Wallace parties inevitably take place in Holiday Inns, usually without such standard election-night paraphernalia as blackboards and TV sets, but almost always with a hillbilly band.
But there was no band tonight. The room was too crowded with TV crews, color TV cameras, a blackboard, and TV sets, over which was coming news of the Wallace landslide. At every fresh set of returns, war whoops.
“Ya wanna hear an Alabama hog call?” asked Zeke Calhoun, who looked like a Kentucky colonel and was a friend of the Wallace family. An Alabaman hog call pierced through the acoustic tiles.
Zeke Calhoun, like most of the men in the room, had on a cheap red silk tie with WALLACE painted on it vertically in white letters. Zeke said he owned a country store that doubled as a Wallace headquarters at Mitchell Springs, Alabama—“just across from Ft. Benning.”
“Everytime a soldier is shippin’ out for Vietnam or goin’ home,” Zeke said in his smoked Virginia accent, “I load ’em down with Wallace stickers, and they’re glad to take ’em. I was heartsick yesterday after hearin’ the news. My wife was afraid I’d have another heart attack. Today I couldn’t be still ’til I made a plane up here. The Chief was in trouble and I had to be near him.”
Off in a corner three old Wallace workers were having a reunion—a middle-aged rake with a pencil moustache who was “in construction”; a man in glasses and a styrofoam Wallace “straw” hat who was an automobile dealer; and a burly gas-station attendant. “Boys, we been together since May 1, 1964—that’s when George Wallace came to the Lord Baltimore Hotel,” said the man in construction. “Madeleine Murray’s son climbed up a fence and tried to take our flag away from us, remember?”
“And remember, that Commie from New York wrapped himself in a flag and gave you a hard time?” the auto dealer reminisced.
“We might get our country back,” said the construction man, stirred. “I feel like I lost it. I feel like I been lost in it all this time.”
“I’ve been lost too,” said the gas-station operator. “I’ve been trying to find somebody I can understand to vote for. This is one of the happiest days of my life.”
“One thing puzzling the press is why there weren’t more Wallace stickers on cars,” the auto dealer told me. “It’s fear. Fear of retaliation from blacks. Of getting bricks thrown at your car.”
“You didn’t have any problems down in that black section did you?” asked the construction man.
“A few. Just a few,” said the auto dealer.
“I think it’s just a small group of black revolutionaries cause the trouble,” the construction man said.
Everyone in the room was drunk on victory and quite sure George Wallace was going to win the nomination. Every so often they would cheerfully scoff at a TV commentator who attributed the Wallace victory to a “sympathy vote.”
“A sympathy vote? Definitely not. We never had any doubts he was gonna run away with it in Maryland.”
“I don’t want a sympathy vote for George. I want people to vote for him out of outrage.”
Charles Snyder, the National Campaign Manager, was making a statement to the cameras. Snyder, short, neatly groomed, the kind of man who reads Playboy. In real life, a general contractor. Which provokes smirks from every political reporter who has ever witnessed that special and beautiful relationship a contractor and a politician can have when highways and public works are involved. “Probably the biggest bagman in the state of Alabama,” pronounced a reporter, with absolutely no evidence.
The Governor, said Snyder, had been informed of his two victories. “They got a big smile out of him and a nod of his head.”
—Ti
m Crouse
“I predict regretfully that you in California will see one of the dirtiest campaigns in the history of this state—and you have had some of the dirtiest.”
—Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, speaking in San Francisco
No hope for this section. Crouse is caving in downstairs; they have him on two phones at once and even from up here I can hear the conversation turning ugly… so there is not much time for anything except maybe a flash roundup on the outlook for California and beyond.
George Wallace himself will not be a factor in the California primary. His handlers are talking about a last-minute write-in campaign, but he has no delegates—and the California ballot doesn’t list candidates; only delegates pledged to candidates.
Wallace is not even likely now to have much bargaining power at the Convention. Even before he was shot—and before he won Michigan and Maryland—his only hope for real leverage in Miami depended on Humphrey coming into the convention with enough delegates of his own (something like seven to eight hundred) to bargain with Wallace from strength. But as things stand now Humphrey and Wallace between them will not have 1000 delegates on the first ballot—and McGovern is a pretty good bet, today, to go down to Miami with almost 1300.
Humphrey’s last chance for leverage now is to win California, and although the polls still show him ahead I doubt if even Hubert believes it. Even before his weak showings in Michigan and Maryland, one of Humphrey’s main strategists—Kenny O’Donnell—was quietly leaking word to the press that Hubert didn’t really need California to get the nomination.
This is an interesting notion—particularly after Humphrey himself had de-emphasized the importance of winning the New York primary a few days earlier. He understood, even then, that there was no point even thinking about New York unless he could win in California.
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