So he’d written his memoir—Six Crises—and waited for the next opening. He thought he saw it in California in ’62, but when he went back home, he realized quickly it had been a dreadful mistake. He’d had no business running for governor—hell, he couldn’t have cared less about budgets for roads and schools; his mind was fixed on Khrushchev and Castro, Mao and Nehru, the world and its complex geopolitical forces. He’d lost by a quarter of a million votes, and on the morning after Election Night, he’d shaken off his aides, stormed into the pressroom at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and told the stunned press corps, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Five days later, ABC News broadcast “A Political Obituary.” And whom did they invite to be one of the happy mourners? Alger Hiss, a goddamn Communist traitor!
Now, more than five and a half years later, he was on an easy path to the Republican Presidential nomination. It had been a combination of fate, luck, and the kind of dogged perseverance that had characterized his life from his first days as the child of a financial failure. Michigan Governor George Romney, the favorite of the Rockefellers and the Scrantons and the Eastern elitists, had imploded, withdrawing from the field even before the voters of New Hampshire could punish him for his stupendously dumb comment that he had been subjected to “the greatest brainwashing ever” on Vietnam. Rockefeller had given every indication that he would jump in, then held a press conference in April to say . . . no, he wasn’t going to run. (Ted Agnew, the governor of Maryland who was a big Rockefeller fan, had gathered friends and supporters to watch the announcement. He was blindsided, furious enough to reach out to Nixon and say, I’m with you, now.) Three weeks later, Rockefeller said, on second thought, yes, I’m in, but he had more than enough enemies in the party to make his nomination almost impossible.
There was Ronald Reagan, of course, the self-described “citizen-politician” who’d made a powerful speech for Goldwater in ’64, had been recruited by a gaggle of California millionaires to run for governor, had used the hippies and the campus radicals and the criminals as targets of opportunity, and had beaten Governor Brown, the man who’d defeated Nixon in ’62, beaten him by almost a million votes. Reagan would have leapt right into the Presidential contest, but a scandal involving homosexual members of his staff had sidelined him, and now Reagan’s only hope was to conspire with Rockefeller to deprive Nixon of an early-ballot win, and then let the two survivors battle for the spoils. And with Senators Strom Thurmond and John Tower firmly in Nixon’s corner, he had a firewall against a conservative defection to Reagan.
As for November . . . Richard Nixon was perfectly positioned as the alternative to President Johnson: the experienced, tested leader who would restore traditional American values to the White House, who would blend strength and diplomacy to achieve peace with honor in Vietnam, who would put the authority of the President on the side of the police, not the criminals, who would simply not permit chaos in the streets and stalemate a half a world away. The billboards in the primary states proclaimed the theme with admirable concision: “Feel Safer with Nixon.” And there he was, in white shirt, tie, and suit jacket, gazing thoughtfully into an open briefcase. He need risk nothing specific about his plans: as the alternative to a President who had lost the confidence of the country, that was more than enough.
Now Johnson was gone, leaving the battlefield just as the trumpets were sounding. And now there was Bobby Kennedy, making a real contest of the Democratic nomination. There was no way to challenge his experience, hell, he’d been in effect the Assistant President of the United States for nearly three years, had been there during the most dangerous thirteen days in American history, that Cuban Missile Crisis. (Yes, he and his brother had blundered into it, with Jack’s timidity at the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev and all those comic-opera CIA plots to kill Castro, but there was no way to make that case in public.) And as for change? Well, you couldn’t exactly link Bobby to LBJ when the two hated each other as much as any two men can, when Bobby had run against his own party’s President.
And there was something else, something Nixon found impossible to admit to anyone, and almost impossible to admit to himself: the Kennedys spooked him. Maybe it was their money, or their ease with perfect strangers, or the effortless charm (too bad nobody seemed able to show just how charmed the women around Jack—and maybe Bobby—had been, but the press wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole). When Bobby campaigned in Indiana and Nebraska and California, he never missed a chance to tweak Nixon.
“Have you seen those billboards?” he would ask the crowds. “What’s in that briefcase? Maybe it’s his seventh crisis.” (Curious that Bobby would pick up on the briefcase as a symbol of the stuffed-shirt bureaucrat, just as George Wallace would mock the “pointy-headed bureaucrats” who carried around their bologna sandwich lunches in their briefcases.)
The longer the Democratic nomination remained unresolved, the more complicated Nixon’s strategy became. If he were running against Humphrey, he could still run as the candidate of undefined change. If Bobby were the nominee, he would run as the candidate of reassurance, of bedrock American values, speaking to what one of his speechwriters, Ray Price, had labeled “a country caught in this terrible complex of fear, unstructured fear, amorphous fear . . . you will be the candidate of dynamic stability.” And there was another possibility: what if Bobby lost the nomination, but joined Humphrey’s ticket as his running mate? It was far from impossible; Nixon had been told that one of Bobby’s key aides, Fred Dutton, had said, “Of course he’d take the Vice Presidency. Bobby’s a Roman; he’ll go where the power is.”
And so the specter of Robert Kennedy on the ticket weighed powerfully on the choice he had to make in the next several hours—the choice of a running mate. Left to his own devices, he would have chosen Robert Finch, the lieutenant governor of California, who had served Nixon’s political operations for more than decade. But Finch said no, it would smack of cronyism, and besides, he simply wasn’t ready for a post that might propel him into the Presidency at a moment’s notice. There was Spiro Agnew, “Ted” everyone called him, the sleek, silver-haired governor of Maryland, who’d put Nixon’s name in nomination earlier that evening. Agnew had won the governorship in 1966 with crucial backing from the state’s independents and Democrats, who recoiled at the right-wing Democratic nominee’s blatant appeal to racial fears. More recently, though, Agnew had become a conservative hero; after much of Baltimore went up in flames when King was murdered, Agnew had called out the National Guard, slapped a curfew on the city, summoned black leaders to a meeting where he’d denounced militant blacks as “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting, caterwauling, riot-inciting, ‘burn America down’ type of leaders.” “I call on you to publicly repudiate black racists,” he said. “Thus far, you have not done so.” It was the kind of in-your-face push back that Nixon admired, and that could play just fine among the working-class and lower-middle-class whites his campaign was working to pull away from the Democratic Party of their fathers, and from the third-party campaign of Governor George Wallace.
More and more, though, Richard Nixon had begun to conclude that his running mate had to act as a rebuttal to Robert Kennedy. He had to be young, energetic, with credible connections to the cities, to balance Nixon’s strength among voters who at root wished that urban America might be walled off from the rest of the country. He had to have the ability to connect with Negroes, without the driven intensity Bobby possessed that made suburban voters uneasy. And that was how he had come to the jaw-dropping conclusion that his running mate might just have to be . . . New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
Had Nixon not been convinced that Bobby Kennedy was going to wind up on the Democratic ticket, the idea of Lindsay would have been ludicrous. The forty-eight-year-old Lindsay was a walking, breathing symbol of WASP aristocracy: tall, lean, with cheekbones angular enough to slit open an envelope, and a thousand-megawatt smile. He’d fit fine as the congressman from
Manhattan’s wealthy East Side—the so-called silk stocking district—but he was miscast as the Mayor of a city ripe with ethnic and tribal clans that had warred with and against each other for a century. It was a city where even Republicans had to honor the custom of a municipal ticket featuring an Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew (hence, the immortal 1961 Republican jingle: “You’ll be safe in the park / every night after dark / with Lefkowitz, Fino and Gilhooley”). Only massive disaffection with New York’s rising crime rate and its burgeoning municipal scandals had enabled Lindsay, running on a “fusion” ticket, to win a narrow victory in 1965.
By one measure, he was a fish out of water as a mayor; he had no feel for the grievances and frustrations of the white working class, the cops, the firefighters, the sanitation workers, the lower-middle-class homeowners of Brooklyn and Queens. His stiff-necked posturing had helped trigger a crippling bus and subway strike in the first minutes of his administration, while his love of the cultural splendor and bright lights of Manhattan did not endear him to the residents of Fresh Pond Road and Bay Ridge.
By another measure, he was by mid-1968 the nationally recognized champion of urban America. Along with Robert Kennedy, Lindsay was one of the only white politicians who could reach the ghetto, who could convincingly argue that he meant not just to hear their grievances, but to act on them. On the night Martin Luther King was killed, while Kennedy was quoting Aeschylus to the blacks of Indianapolis, Lindsay was walking the streets of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and he was there again the next night and the night after; and while dozens of cities burned, New York was not one of them.
There was also a tensile toughness about Lindsay. Just as Nixon admired the way Ted Agnew had called out the National Guard, and called out the Negro leaders of Baltimore, Nixon liked the way Lindsay had said no to the powerful municipal unions of New York, the way he’d pushed back against the sanitation workers earlier in the year, getting in Governor Rockefeller’s face, demanding the Guard be called out to clear the streets of garbage. There was a touch of Calvin Coolidge in that move, Coolidge who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1920, had crushed a police strike, declaring, “There is no right to strike against the public safety anytime, anyplace.” (Come to think of it, that’s how Coolidge wound up on the ticket with Warren Harding in 1920.)
It was no easy task to persuade the power brokers he met with that night to accept the idea. The liberal Republicans loved it, of course: Percy, Hatfield, Scranton. And the House Republicans had already signaled their overwhelming backing of Lindsay. One of his law partners, Len Garment, raised a Constitutional problem; since both Nixon and Lindsay were legal residents of New York, the Republican electors from New York would not be permitted to vote for both men in the unlikely event that the Nixon- Lindsay ticket carried New York. (That problem was easily solved when Nixon changed his voter registration back to California.) As for the conservatives who’d stood with him against the Reagan challenge—Strom Thurmond, John Tower, Barry Goldwater—it was Robert Kennedy who turned out to be Nixon’s ace in the hole.
“Look,” he said to the group after the venting had settled down. “I happen to think it’s a fifty-fifty shot that Bobby’s the nominee, and a near certainty that he’ll be on the ticket. You think he’ll decline on principle? For God’s sake, he did everything he could four years ago to be Johnson’s running mate, and you all know how much he despises Lyndon. So what does that mean?” he asked rhetorically. “First: the places where Lindsay might hurt us most—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas—are exactly the places where white voters will flee from Bobby like the plague. In fact,” he chuckled, “I’m sure that the President and Governor Connally will go all out in Texas to help make sure a ticket with Bobby on it will crash and burn. The Deep South? Forget it, that’s Wallace country. Worst case, Lindsay means Wallace takes South Carolina. But second”—he held up two fingers—“if Lindsay can help us keep the black margins down in Detroit, Philly, Cleveland, Newark, even Chicago, and he’s as gangbusters in the suburbs as I think he’ll be, he adds up to a plus with a hundred electoral votes. Maybe he can force the Democrats to spend some time and money in New York—wouldn’t that be a hell of a bonus?”
“Have you considered the risk of a floor fight?” Barry Goldwater asked. “You’re talking about a guy who’s totally against the war, totally for civil rights, wants to spend billions of dollars—”
“Look,” Nixon said sharply. “Did the liberals keep Johnson off the ticket in ’60 once Kennedy picked him? Besides, I happen to know something about the Vice Presidency. I can promise you—John may think he’s going to be the champion of the cities; he even sent Teddy White to me with a note explaining how if I picked him he’d feel free to speak out on any issue he wanted. Well, if John Lindsay thinks he can use the Vice President’s office to attack his President, he’s going to have to take public transportation to do it. I need him to win, not to govern. I owe you one promise: not to die in office.
“Also,” he added, “just imagine the grief this is going to cost the New York Times.”
They grumbled, they protested, but in the end, they gave their grudging consent. “My ‘Bobby’ insurance,” he called it. What he didn’t share with the power brokers was a growing feeling that Bobby’s presence on the ticket would provide him with another source of significant support—from the man now living at the same house he planned to occupy in January.
“MY GOD, it’s a war zone!”
It wasn’t one delegate, or alternate, or reporter, or TV technician who said it; it was just about everyone—campaign staffer, TV producer, curious passerby—who had the chance to check out Chicago’s International Amphitheater in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention. The thirty-four-year-old, 255,000-square-foot structure on Halsted and 43rd Street, right next to the Union Stock Yards, had hosted everything from cattle auctions to the Ringling Brothers Circus to Elvis (he first wore his gold-lamé suit here) to the Beatles to four earlier national nominating conventions. It was here, at the fractious Pier Six brawl that was the ’52 Republican convention, where Senator Everett Dirksen, battling on behalf of the conservative hero Robert Taft, pointed his finger at New York Governor Tom Dewey, champion of the Eisenhower liberals, and thundered, “We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat!” Never, however, had convention participants seen a venue like this one. The arena was surrounded by a seven-foot-high chain-link fence, and, inside, a catwalk ninety-five feet above the Convention floor had been built to accommodate police with walkie-talkies and rifles to patrol the proceedings. Across the city, 7,500 armed soldiers had been mobilized to join nearly 12,000 cops and the 300-man Cook County riot squad; the mayor of one of America’s great metropolitan cities was taking seriously the threat of a confrontation that would throw a huge shadow over whoever emerged as the Democratic nominee.
The convention wasn’t even supposed to be in Chicago in the first place. The Republicans had chosen Miami Beach for their ’68 gathering, and there was a lot of sentiment for putting the Democratic convention in the same city. That sentiment was particularly strong among the TV networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—who would each save a few million dollars in production expenses if they could wire one hall instead of moving the miles of cables, the $40 million worth of equipment, the hundreds of workers 1,379 miles—half a continent—away. But then, in early 1967 Mayor Daley had chatted up President Johnson at a White House meeting, explaining that Democrats had done badly in the midterm elections because the faithful had stayed home, explaining what a powerful encouragement it would be to the party if the convention were to be held in Chicago, where President Johnson would be guaranteed a rapturous reception when he came to be renominated. Little more than a year later, the whole idea of a Chicago convention had turned into a logistical and political nightmare. The telephone workers were on strike, so the candidates and the press would be without most of their communication tools; the taxicab drivers were on strike, so the whole transpo
rtation network of Chicago would slow to a crawl. The restaurants and nightclubs in Chicago were six miles from the convention site; without cabs, the free-spending pols and their financial benefactors would be far less likely to enrich the city’s economy.
Those problems, though, were dwarfed by the threats of disruptions that no convention of either party had ever faced. Months earlier, with President Johnson certain to be the party’s 1968 nominee, protesters of all persuasions were planning huge demonstrations during the convention, including the promise (or threat) to march on the convention site itself. On March 23, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War had met outside Chicago to coordinate the protests; more than a hundred groups, left and right—more precisely, left and far left—had attended. At the same time, the Youth International Party—the “Yippies”—proclaimed that they would bring 100,000 followers to Chicago. Their front men, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, were Marxists who owed more to Groucho and Harpo than to Karl. They threatened, among other things, to taint the city’s water supply with LSD, turning millions of people and a few thousand convention delegates into hallucinating freaks, and to set thousands of nubile young women to baring their bodies, the better to lure delegates into compromising positions. Among those who took these threats seriously was Mayor Daley, who dispatched whole platoons of cops to patrol the city’s reservoirs. But it was Daley himself who acted as a magnet for demonstrators. When Chicago exploded after King’s death, and he ordered his police to “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters, it was a red flag not just to the folks who preferred to march under a red flag, but to more mainstream activists as well. (Daley himself—with his jowls, his scowl, his clumsy mauling of the English language—was a walking cartoon of Thuggish Authority.)
Then Everything Changed Page 21