“What about Mississippi?”
“I hear it’s beautiful this time of year,” someone said. A glance from Kennedy—whose “steely blues” had the power to freeze the blood—silenced the chuckles. Then he explained:
Four years earlier, during the coronation of Lyndon Johnson at the ’64 convention in Atlantic City, the only controversy involved the composition of the Mississippi delegation, an all-white collection of segregationists, white supremacists, and other worthies who made no secret of their intention to abandon the national ticket that fall. An insurgent multiracial delegation had challenged the official delegation; one of its members, a thirty-seven-year-old heavyset black woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, mesmerized the credentials committee—and a national TV audience—with accounts of the beatings and jailings she suffered for attempting to register to vote. The conflict infuriated President Johnson, who feared losing Southern white voters, and he dispatched Hubert Humphrey to resolve the dispute; it was, in effect, Humphrey’s Vice Presidential audition. After an acrimonious debate, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was offered two non-voting seats, and a promise that in the future, only racially representative delegations would be seated.
Now, in 1968, Mississippi was coming to the convention with a delegation that included all of one black delegate and one black alternate. Its leaders were the staunchly segregationist Senator John Stennis, and the blatantly white-supremacist Governor John Bell Williams, who made no secret of their intentions this time around to support the third-party Presidential bid of Alabama’s George Wallace. This time, a “loyalist” delegation, half black and half white, was challenging the regulars. And this time, Robert Kennedy was asking, wouldn’t a frontal assault on the Mississippi regulars raise some other possibilities?
“You know,” Dave Hackett said, “it’s not just Mississippi. There’s a good chance that if the credentials committee takes a look, they’ll find that Alabama and Georgia and maybe some others are out of compliance with the rules. If Humphrey has his people back the challenges, we have a real shot at picking up some of those delegates. If he has his people vote with the regulars—”
“He burns his bridges with whatever friends he has left with the blacks and liberals,” O’Brien said. “And how can Meany have his labor people vote with the segregationists? I mean, he’s no friends of the blacks, but he did put a hell of a lot of money into the March on Washington.” O’Brien grinned as he shook his head.
“It’ll drive Lyndon absolutely crazy.”
“Call it a side benefit,” O’Donnell said.
David Hackett held up a cautionary finger.
“I’m not sure it would be enough to turn things around—not as long as those states have the unit rule. Hell, they could put twenty blacks on the Georgia delegation who’d all vote for us, and they’d still wind up counting every vote for Humphrey.” He paused for a second. “Of course,” he said, “we could take on the whole idea of the unit rule. ‘Let every vote count,’ that sort of thing.”
“Um, David,” Larry O’Brien said. “Don’t we have a small problem with the California delegation? You know, Bobby got 46 percent of the vote, and 100 percent of the delegates. We can’t afford to lose one of them.”
“Maybe we won’t have to,” Kennedy said.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, KENNEDY called a press conference at his Washington headquarters. “I am asking those delegates who support me to seat the loyalist Mississippi delegation at the convention, and to weigh carefully the challenges to other delegations as well. We cannot claim to be ‘the party of the people’ if we permit those who speak in our name to deny representation to Democrats based on the color of their skin.
“I am also asking my supporters to vote to abolish the unit rule at this convention. By requiring every member of a delegation to vote the same way as a majority, it undermines the foundation of free choice—it mandates that delegates vote against their consciences. That may be the way things are done in Moscow; it should not be the way things are done at the most important gathering of the Democratic Party. In the interests of consistency, I am releasing my California delegates, chosen in a “winner take all” primary, from their legal commitments to me. If they choose to vote for Vice President Humphrey or another candidate, they should feel free to do so.”
(“Weren’t you worried that you’d lose some delegates?” a reporter asked him later.
“Not with Rosey Grier in the delegation!” he replied.)
“Twenty years ago,” Kennedy concluded, “Hubert Humphrey became a national hero by calling on Democrats to ‘walk out of the shadows of states’ rights, into the bright sunlight of human rights.’ I call upon him to step out of the shadows of closed-door politics, into the bright sunshine of free choice and fair representation. While we compete for the nomination of our party, let us walk together in the name of fairness and justice.”
The nature of the trap Kennedy had laid for Humphrey became evident within forty-eight hours. The Humphrey campaign had long planned to back the integrated Mississippi slate challenging the regulars; the “official” delegation was packed with segregationists who’d be standing side by side with George Wallace’s third-party campaign in November. But the logic behind throwing out the Mississippi delegation extended to other states: Alabama, maybe Georgia. (A twenty-eight-year-old Georgia state senator, Julian Bond, who’d been expelled from the legislature for his anti-war views, only to be put back in office by a unanimous Supreme Court, was raising serious questions about the delegation, in particular, its governor, Lester Maddox, whose claim to fame was his threat as a restaurant owner to use an ax handle on Negroes seeking service. Bond, in turn, drew the ire of more traditional Georgia Democrats, including a state senator from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.) And deposing those official delegations could be costly to the Vice President: the official delegations were lined up solidly with Humphrey; the challengers were likely to have in their ranks a lot more Kennedy backers.
As for the unit rule, it was as fundamental to Southern Democrats as grits and Friday night high school football. It was the mechanism by which Southern delegations exercised power out of all proportion to their numbers, the device that kept them as players after Democrats had thrown out the “two-thirds to nominate a candidate” rule in 1932. By coming to the convention with a united slate, a state guaranteed that its voice would be heard on matters ranging from platform plans to potential Cabinet posts. So it was hardly surprising that by four p.m. on the day Bobby announced his challenge to the rule, a telegram arrived at Humphrey headquarters signed by eight Southern governors, stating flatly: “If You Want Us to Stand with You, Stand with Us on Unit Rule.” It was duly noted that one of the signers was Texas Governor John Connally, one of President Johnson’s closest political allies. It was not exactly a major leap of intuition to see Lyndon Johnson’s fine hand in the pressure coming down on the Vice President.
Unfortunately for Hubert Humphrey, it was not just Southern states that saw fundamental issues at stake in these looming credentials and rules fights. For Democrats in the North and the industrial Midwest, anything that raised the specter of a civil rights issue stirred the blood. The party had been split as far back as 1924, when a platform plank denouncing the Ku Klux Klan had divided the emerging big-city Catholic Democrats from the Protestant Southern wing of the party. The civil rights plank Hubert Humphrey had championed in ’48 had driven hundreds of Southern delegates to walk out of the convention and fall in behind the white supremacist third-party campaign of South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond (now a U.S. senator and a Republican). The Civil Rights Act of 1964, sponsored by John Kennedy and guided into law by President Johnson, was a key reason why five Southern states, once reliably Democratic, had given their electoral votes to Barry Goldwater that year, and why the independent Presidential campaign of George Wallace was threatening to win enough electoral votes from the South to throw the choice for President into the House of Representatives.
Beyond poli
tics, civil rights was the issue that had brought countless young people into politics in the first place; until the escalation of the war in Vietnam, it was for liberals the most emotionally compelling of all political causes. More than a few of the men and women now beginning to move into public and party offices had been foot soldiers for civil rights. They’d gone South to help register blacks; they’d picketed Woolworth stores in support of the sit-ins. Whoever these delegates preferred for President, they were not about to sit back and give their sanction to a segregationist delegation from Mississippi or anywhere else—especially when they’d made an explicit promise at the last convention to bar any such delegation. Given their bedrock distrust of Southern political machinations, it was a small step to convince them that the unit rule was just another device to perpetuate the power of the reactionary whites.
On principle alone, then, liberal-minded Democrats would have brought heavy pressure on the Humphrey campaign. There was also some not-so-subtle political maneuvering at work. All through the spring and early summer, supporters of Robert Kennedy had been at work in the big non-primary states, trying to find fault lines in Hubert Humphrey’s support. In Michigan, United Auto Workers chief Walter Reuther, officially neutral, had been staging a rearguard action, pushing back against strong support within his own union for Humphrey: the dependable liberal, the longtime friend of labor. Now, with a new convention battle brewing, Reuther saw a target of opportunity. His union’s executive council, proud of its longtime financial support for the civil rights cause, and well aware of the growing number of blacks within its ranks, unanimously backed Reuther’s proposal to let the Humphrey campaign know its mind.
“We are confident,” the union’s press release said, “that Vice President Humphrey will not turn his back on twenty years of courageous fights for civil rights and fair representation. No temporary political advantage could possibly be worth the damage to his reputation, and to the Democratic Party’s principles.” A strikingly similar statement came from a joint statement signed by 175 of the 200+ black delegates who would be attending the Chicago convention, many of them from states whose leaders had committed themselves to Humphrey. (“It’s a nightmare,” one pro-Humphrey governor told a New York Times reporter. “If we don’t get 90 percent of the black vote, we lose every election. Hell, if the black vote even stays home in any significant number, we lose. So how the hell do I vote with the same redneck bastards who sicc’ed police dogs on people who were trying to register? But if I stand against them, if I vote to seat the insurgents, that means forty, fifty, who the hell knows how many delegates for Bobby on the first ballot. That could mean no first ballot nomination for Hubert, and after that . . . who the hell knows what?”)
All through late July and August, the Kennedy and Humphrey campaigns struggled for every tactical advantage, every uncommitted delegate, using every weapon in their political arsenals. In late July, Kennedy forces staged a “mock primary” in Pennsylvania, hoping to prove to the political machines in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that their support for the Vice President did not reflect the sentiments of rank-and-file Democrats. Instead of dismissing the mock primary as a “cheap political stunt,” the Humphrey forces almost pulled off a coup: the Steelworkers Union, along with the organizations controlled by Philadelphia Mayor Tate and Pittsburgh Mayor Barr, fired up their Election Day machinery and sent tens of thousands of their troops to flood the polling places. Only a huge turnout from the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia and a big Kennedy vote from smaller towns in Pennsylvania turned the primary into a dead heat. (“Fine with us,” said Kennedy spokesman Pierre Salinger. “We’ll settle for half the delegation.” “It’s a deal,” replied Humphrey co-chair Walter Mondale. “As long as you settle for the 46 percent of the California delegation you won instead of the 100 percent you got under the rules.”)
Another Kennedy stratagem was more successful. For weeks, the campaign had been planning a summer trip abroad, to demonstrate that Robert Kennedy already had the stature of a world leader, and to suggest that his election would improve America’s battered international prestige. When the State Department—and by inference, the President—made it clear that they did not want to see Europe turned into a staging area for a Presidential campaign, Moscow, Berlin, and London all turned down the proposed visits. The New York Times editorial page agreed, condemning “Senator Kennedy’s single-minded and self-interested intention to sacrifice diplomatic tradition to his boundless ambition.” Kennedy did manage a thirty-six-hour trip that took him to two nations: first to Czechoslovakia, where 500,000 cheered him as he spoke from the steps of Hradčany Castle, praising the liberal reforms of “Prague Spring” as the reformist leader, Alexander Dubček, stood by his side; then he flew to Warsaw, where he paid a visit to the new young Cardinal Karol Wojtila. In both cities, his message was the same: “Every great power—whether it be my own country or the Soviet Union—must respect the desire for freedom and independence that is the birthright of every citizen. Freedom,” he said, “is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to the world.” (This last comment brought a sharp rejoinder from a young Texas congressman, George Herbert Walker Bush, for “injecting religion into the sensitive arena of international relations.”) Others asked about the political implications of the visit: when reporters noted that a large number of Polish-Americans lived in Milwaukee, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and Grand Rapids, a campaign aide responded: “No kidding. I guess you learn something new every day.”
Both campaigns played their strongest assets: Humphrey appeared before union-organized rallies, hammering home his argument that he was the only candidate devoted to the cause of organized labor. (“I don’t support right-to-work laws like George Wallace does; I didn’t vote for Taft-Hartley like Richard Nixon did; and I don’t think you help the poor with child labor schemes!”) The Kennedy campaign staged a series of receptions at the family compound in Hyannis, where delegates met in small groups with Bobby, while their wives were guests at teas hosted by the Kennedy women. (Bobby’s mother, Rose, regaled them with tales of Bobby’s mischievous behavior as a young boy.) Yet for all the struggles within the Democratic Party, the most significant midsummer impact on Robert Kennedy’s campaign would come from the Republicans.
IT WAS LATE on the night of Wednesday, August 7, in the sixteenth-floor Penthouse Suite of Miami’s Hilton-Plaza Hotel. Richard Nixon finished his supper—cheese omelet, milk, ice cream—and dispatched a message to the two dozen men who had just engineered his first-ballot Presidential nomination.
“I would appreciate it,” he wrote, “if you could meet with me tonight in my room . . .” He was summoning them to hear them out about his running mate. In fact, he had already made up his mind. And what he was going to tell them would require every ounce of his persuasive ability. It was Bobby Kennedy who had pushed him to this decision; and it was Bobby Kennedy who was his best hope of convincing Republicans that he simply had to do what he was about to do—because Robert Kennedy was emerging as a clear threat to the central premise of one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history.
From his first days in public life, Richard Nixon had embodied the idea that he was the spokesman for “the forgotten American.” “Nixon is one of us,” proclaimed his first campaign ad for Congress in 1946. When George Wallace was a freshman legislator in Alabama sounding moderate notes on the race issue, when Ronald Reagan was an enthusiastic New Deal Democrat looking to salvage a fading acting career, Richard Nixon was winning office by tapping into the grievances of what came to be called middle America. He was speaking for the GI just home from World War II looking to start a small business, but entangled by the red tape of Washington bureaucracy, for the young couple unable to drive their new car for the gas rationing that still governed the land, for the college-bound veteran whose GI Bill money was stuck somewhere in the file cabinets of the Capitol.
He’d saved his political career in 1952 by going on TV to talk directly to the
country about charges he was living high on the hog off a secret “rich man’s trust.” No, he’d told his audience, here’s what I’ve saved, here’s what my mortgage costs me, here’s how much insurance I have. He’d stuck it to Stevenson—“I believe that it’s fine that a man like Governor Stevenson, who inherited a fortune from his father, can run for President”—and yes, at the end, he’d described another gift: “It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate . . . sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”
Oh, the eggheads and the liberals had gone nuts about that line, but the telegrams and phone calls had come into the Republican National Committee, they’d come from his people, shopkeepers and insurance salesmen, real-estate brokers and middle managers, the Rotarians, Kiwanis, the vets from the Legion and the VFW, the people who played by the rules, kept the lawns in their suburban tracts neat, and they’d said, We believe him, this is our guy, don’t you dare kick him off the ticket, and at age thirty-nine he was Vice President of the United States. For eight years he’d stood loyally by the side of Ike, the national hero, the beloved father figure who never extended a hand to him, barely stirred himself to campaign for him, and so he lost by the narrowest margin in history, one-tenth of one goddamn percent, and he knew as surely as he knew the sun rose in the East, that the Kennedys, with their money and their pull and their friends in the Mob, had stolen those votes in Chicago while Lyndon’s people stole those votes in Texas, and stole his Presidency right out from under him.
Then Everything Changed Page 20