Hazardous Road to Miami
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Washington-USA HAZARDOUS ROAD TO MIAMI BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington Once, at a news conference, President Kennedy attempted to justify the criteria under which his Administration drafted young...
...Until he was shot, the other George was conducting an arriviste campaign to see what he could get out of it...
...In any event, under the new convention rules Kennedy probably could not get nominated even if he wanted to, since a minimum of 50 pledged delegates are needed to get the nomination speeches rolling...
...In this respect, the attitude of the pols toward McGovern is similar to that toward Barry Goldwater in 1964, when the Republican establishment threw Nelson Rockefeller and then William Scranton in against the conservative outsider...
...This essentially correct image, aided by Charles Guggenheim's clever commercials ("McGovern: Right From the Start"), has succeeded in muting the underlying class rivalries which his candidacy evokes...
...In the primaries, what happens is less important than what the press thinks happened, and Muskie wound up as a two-time loser...
...Muskie may still get another roll of the dice, but right now he's had it...
...HHH will surely benefit from the professionals' deep antipathy toward McGovern...
...All the Democratic Presidential candidates I've met in 1972 have come to feel this way...
...Yes, governor, to get the Presidency they would...
...McGovern thinks if he can reach that mark, such party leaders as National Chairman Larry O'Brien, who privately favors Humphrey, could not launch a credible effort to deny him the nomination...
...In mid-May, the boutique was having a going-out-of-business sale...
...Indeed, given his inherent un-acceptability to the Democratic power structure, McGovern must have the nomination all but sewn up before he arrives at the convention hall to have any chance at all...
...While that would not prevent a delegate from voting for Teddy, it does not make it easy for him to do so...
...Oh my God," Hubert Humphrey said when they told him George Wallace had been shot...
...But none of the pros can abide the fact that McGovern's run for the Presidency lies beyond their system...
...Not that the sole surviving Kennedy brother doesn't have a point: Politics has become a far less civil affair since John was campaigning for the White House from the family-owned DC-3...
...As of now, he does not see it coming together for him, so he can hang back and think about the possible attempts on his life should he be the Democratic candidate...
...But Humphrey and his fellow candidates realize that as matters stand political fortunes can ride on the accuracy of a deranged assassin's bullets...
...Muskie is bitter because he believes the press politically bankrupted his candidacy through systematically unfair reporting??setting one standard of success for him and a less demanding one for everybody else...
...Beyond his inner circle, the Muskie support comes from people who are shopping around for another candidate and are determined to make a more judicious selection this time...
...This will make it all the more difficult for his people to get a bandwagon going...
...It's getting so you don't know what is going to happen in our country any more in politics...
...Washington-USA HAZARDOUS ROAD TO MIAMI BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington Once, at a news conference, President Kennedy attempted to justify the criteria under which his Administration drafted young men into the Army...
...At one time his campaign headquarters spread over all seven floors of a downtown Washington office building...
...Life is unfair to George McGovern because whether or not he wins that state's 271 delegate votes, Hubert Humphrey or Teddy Kennedy may still be nominated at Miami Beach...
...So the notion of being Humphrey's running mate, which should have repelled him in theory, attracted him in practice...
...All I can say is that it is a sad business...
...How can life be said to be fair when one Presidential candidate dies in a Los Angeles hospital, the victim of a political assassination, while another candidate may recover from his wounds sufficiently to be hailed as a living martyr for his cause...
...The professionals find it far easier to accept McGovern's positions on key issues than to swallow his neo-Jacksonian candidacy...
...Now it has been chopped down to a floor and a half...
...Gee, you really think they might do that...
...There is a certain element of truth in Muskie's complaints...
...His collapse is worth examining in this light because George McGovern is being set up for much the same deadly game in the June 6 California primary...
...In New Hampshire, where it all began, the press backed him into a no-win situation...
...Had the senator received 80 per cent of the vote, news accounts of the primary would undoubtedly have noted that New Hampshire borders on Maine and that Muskie must still prove himself in Florida...
...But the Massachusetts senator is not going to allow himself to be nominated as the emotional favorite, the way Stevenson was in 1960...
...A man who did not would probably be too much of a saint to govern the country...
...The pros accept McGovern's Jacobin logic even more readily than does McGovern, and for that reason they are arming themselves to stop his advance...
...That is why he cannot afford to arrive in Miami Beach with an anemic following of delegates...
...In His position, Humphrey must be willing to make deals to win broader delegate support...
...Somewhere along the campaign trail, before he became a "serious" candidate, McGovern said that if he were President there would be no more demonstrations in front of the White House because the demonstrators would be inside the mansion eating dinner with him...
...What he has to offer, mainly, is the Vice Presidential nomination, important positions in his campaign structure and, if all goes well, in his Administration...
...McGovem comes over as a plodding, blue-plate prairie reformer, an anticandidate with Liberace vocal cords...
...Humphrey called him dean of the "Texas School of Public Affairs...
...Edmund Muskie is a case in point...
...Still, if Kennedy thinks he can be nominated and elected, he will run...
...He wanted to beat Nixon in 1972 until Chappa-quiddick disqualified him from making the challenge...
...Wallace asked a friend of mine who approached him about this in an unguarded moment...
...Life has been unfair to Teddy Kennedy, too, of course...
...So far, none of this has made an impact on the voters...
...Only if McGovern's delegate strength falls short or Humphrey's combinations fail to materialize will the convention turn to Teddy Kennedy...
...This raises the possibility of a Humphrey-Wallace combination aimed at stopping McGovern...
...This means he needs a bare minimum of 1,200 delegate votes on the first ballot, only 309 less than a majority...
...He probably will not be able, however, to be very selective in his choice of buyers...
...In private talks with McGovern, Humphrey, Muskie, or Wallace, a bitter quality emerges that is totally in keeping with the mean spirit I have generally encountered among potential voters around the country...
...Meanwhile, the press has dropped him...
...Now they hope that McGovern will bawl on TV so they can be rid of him too...
...The pros admire McGovern in the same way a high-powered alumnus who buys cheap and sells dear might admire his former professor of Greek philosophy...
...But the pros will dump him, too, if they think they have another Muskie on their hands...
...They feel that with McGovern bearing the Democratic standard (or, God forbid, in the White House), the "old-boy network" that put up Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson, and Humphrey would be ruptured, allowing new and potentially dangerous forms of political life to pollute the party mainstream...
...Since Muskie does not believe, as some do, that the press invented his candidacy to begin with, he and his loyal advisers find themselves totally uncompensated...
...Like Nixon, he feels he deserves another crack, when he would not make the mistakes he made the first time around...
...The idea is certainly farfetched, yet so was a Kennedy-Johnson ticket before the 1960 Democratic convention...
...Some of the pros even believe that in a McLuhanesque era in which "cool" candidates do well, no matter what they say or what is said about them, McGovern could give Nixon a fair tussle, especially if Nixon's Vietnam moves backfire...
...Once, the senator introduced to a labor audience John A. Gronouski, a former ambassador to Poland who is currently dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in Austin...
...The enormity of the prize keeps the candidates going, yet in putting themselves before the electorate week after week they cannot help but become bitter...
...Only after he made his case did Kennedy get down to the real nub of the matter...
...Although the press has at long last discovered McGovern as "a serious candidate," most professionals in the Democratic party are appalled that the primaries have allowed this to happen...
...yet they remain...
...Around the date that Muskie, in his capacity as frontrunner, made the cover of Life, Henry Fonda came over to help formally open a fund-raising boutique on the ground floor...
...One of Humphrey's most appealing characteristics was his fidelity to his friends, even though it always got him into political trouble...
...Humphrey believes he was denied the Presidency in 1968 because the press confused his policies with the discredited ones of Lyndon Johnson...
...Life," he said, "is unfair...
...Those free and easy Caroline days are gone forever...
...Nevertheless, McGovern cannot afford to lose the contest if he is to remain in contention...
...Now the Happy Warrior stashes the Johnson years in the same dark closet where he keeps his narrow ties and slim cuffed trousers...
...During the Wisconsin primary, Humphrey's desire to blot out parts of his political past led to some funny scenes...
Vol. 55 • May 1972 • No. 11
