GENE MCCARTHY'S WINNING OF WISCONSIN

...President Johnson had begun his drive in Wisconsin with all the structural advantages, including the endorsement of nearly all the Democratic Party functionaries and most of the Democrats in the state legislature...

...As state organization director of the McCarthy for President Committee, I was both a participant in and an informed witness to these developments...

...Here was a twisted piece of reporting, similar to the much earlier Newsweek item which took one of my figures— showing that in a few weeks we had already organized the thirteen most populous counties in the state—and announced it as if it were a weakness that we had "only organized in the most populous counties...

...To one working on the inside of a campaign, the reporting by national news correspondents, and the observations of columnists and electronic commentators, seemed to have a Never-Never Land quality, divorced from the realities...

...Was it laziness, or just the ingrained habit of talking to the political Establishment, whether in Washington or anywhere else, that confined them to the same old sources of political information even though something radically new—the McCarthy challenge—had been added to the 1968 political scene...

...In the latter state there was a heavy and early investment of money and manpower, and, most important, a considerable number of days of campaigning by Senator McCarthy...

...What happened in Milwaukee's fourth and fifth districts, the only two Congressional districts in the state carried by the President, demonstrated that there was no strong surge for anybody—not President Johnson, not McCarthy, who received 64,133 votes in the two districts combined, and certainly not Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had only 5,547 write-in votes...

...The probability is that if Mr...

...His leaders in Milwaukee were urging a sympathy vote for him right down to the wire...

...White, I would like to suggest that the Wisconsin experience demonstrates how much strength there is in the people when the issues are meaningful and leadership emerges that is both articulate and courageous...

...They were polite...

...Possibly as many as 4,000 students came across the borders (not the 13,000 reported in one Chicago newspaper) for the final big push that "The real story, which nearly all of the correspondents missed, was the way in which the McCarthy campaign closed 'the generational gap.' " followed so many weeks of hard work by the resident volunteers...

...The canvassing, literature distribution, and other activities carried on during the last two weekends before the Wisconsin primary by out-of-state students played an important part in Senator McCarthy's victory...

...At long last, he took out his notebook and asked me a few questions...

...In the early weeks, Mr...

...Johnson had not withdrawn, McCarthy's vote would have been about sixty per cent...

...Not only the quantity but the quality improved...

...For example, early in the campaign, when such, party regulars as Democratic National Committeeman David Carley of Wisconsin were proclaiming that McCarthy would be clobbered by Mr...

...The intensive canvassing in Madison, in surrounding Dane County, and the rest of the Second Congressional District, paid off handsomely...

...Some of the facts, observations, and events of the campaign described in the following fragments may, therefore, be worth a footnote or two in your next history of the quadrennial contest...

...The voting results later demonstrated' that this was not extravagant language...

...But no matter what the outcome, this much can be said by those who know the facts and are not misled by the myths about what took place in Wisconsin: There was a wave of political protest here, born of bitterness over the endless war in Vietnam, that set some new high-water marks in the state, and possibly the nation...

...they said they would "think about it," but it was "unlikely" they could spare a man to make the trip...

...In Wisconsin, fortunately, that did not happen this spring, and the people at the grass roots won for McCarthy...

...In New Hampshire, neither polls nor political pundits forecast more than thirty per cent of the vote for McCarthy...

...In Wisconsin, a Newsweek poll two weeks before the primary estimated forty per cent for McCarthy, forty per cent for Johnson, sixteen per cent for Kennedy...

...White, there had been a cause called Peace, and a Senator named Eugene McCarthy...

...Since McCarthy eventually won 56.2 per cent of the vote in the Democratic column, their influence on Wisconsin voters obviously was minimal...

...In Wisconsin, in the early days, we agreed with the "go for broke" gamble in New Hampshire, but it meant that there would be little help coming to us from the national organization for many weeks...

...He achieved forty-two per cent...

...It sounds trite but it was true...

...In the last two and a half weeks of the campaign they spent about a quarter-million dollars on television, radio, brochures and flyers, a tabloid insert in Sunday newspapers, and the opening of many short-term headquarters around the state in addition to the score previously run by the Wisconsin organization...

...At that time a secret poll (which, mercifully, I did not learn about until months later) reported that McCarthy had the support of only eight per cent of the state's Democratic voters...

...Johnson, I telephoned representatives of several nationally known newspapers, as a countermeasure, to suggest they assign a reporter to take a look at the anti-Johnson storm then developing at the grass roots in Wisconsin...

...Oddly, this was the magic percentage that NBC's political sages said he should have attained if his victory were to be rated meaningful—by them...

...Growth reports coming to Madison headquarters could not keep up with the real figures...

...Kinder than some, with its reference to a past triumph, is the opinion of Tom Wicker of The New York Times who holds that "his impressive victory in Wisconsin probably was the high-water mark of Eugene McCarthy's Presidential campaign...

...For a moment he seemed to be contemplating the prospect with awe: "There is no telling where this thing might end," he said somberly...

...It divided the Democrats and deeply troubled many independents and Republicans...

...Of all the post-primary commentaries written, one that collapses most readily under examination is the opinion of columnists Evans and Novak that the results of the voting in Milwaukee prove Senator McCarthy has no appeal for blue-collar workers...

...I took the liberty of updating your description when I introduced Eugene McCarthy, on the morning of February 23, to a crowd of volunteers at state headquarters...

...After that, new McCarthy chapters began to spring up overnight...

...When a few early bird reporters from the East drifted into Wisconsin, they went to Carley, or to Richard Cudahy, the pro-Johnson state chairman of the Democratic Party, for a reading on the progress and probable outcome of the Johnson-McCarthy contest...

...would get only thirty-five per cent...

...Two facts dramatize what the Wisconsin campaigners for McCarthy were up against: In the first 105 days of the Senator's candidacy he campaigned in Wisconsin only three days...

...Their ingenuity, dedication, and exemplary behavior won the admiration of Wisconsin volunteers and other residents...

...In the last three weeks of the campaign, dipping into its much more limited resources, the state group spent about $40,000 on advertising in weekly and daily newspapers, and in some modest use of television and radio...

...the one exception was Milwaukee...

...Huntley had suddenly raised the bar on the high jump, while McCarthy was in mid-air...

...In thirteen weeks the ripple from the grass roots became a stiff breeze that blew into a gale which crumpled the facade of the Johnson-Humphrey structure in Wisconsin...

...The real story, which nearly all of the correspondents missed, was the way in which the McCarthy campaign closed "the generational gap...

...It was a highly successful "firing-up" and training session...

...While a huge Democratic vote was being cast in this spring's primary in the other eight districts of the state, Milwaukee's two central city districts reacted sluggishly to the excitement...

...The "Children's Crusade" aspect of the campaign tended to blind some of the headline-hungry national correspondents to other facets of "the people's movement" for McCarthy...

...White, that in all those weeks I had no more than five minutes of private conversation with Senator McCarthy...

...The Wisconsin campaign proved that volunteers can defeat political professionals...

...Meanwhile, George Romney was being followed across New Hampshire by seventy-five reporters who crowded around to pick up his exchanges with voters, including the most meaningless small talk...

...The President withdrew, in the face of warnings from his ablest advisers that he faced disastrous defeat, only thirty-six hours before the polls opened...

...I said that at that point, McCarthy could win about thirty-five per cent of the Wisconsin Democratic vote, a highly creditable showing for that stage of the campaign...

...He later reported in his paper that a McCarthy leader had "conceded" the Senator ". . . the people at the grass roots won for McCarthy...

...The pressures of New Hampshire, and his need to engage in fund raising all over the country, kept him out of Wisconsin—except for these three one-day stands—until the closing two weeks of the Wisconsin campaign...

...By the beginning of March, with the primary a month away, we were able to bring together McCarthy campaign leaders from the thirty most populous counties to a statewide meeting at Wausau in mid-Wisconsin...

...In concluding this open letter to you, Mr...

...A few days before the New Hampshire primary, there was a marked pickup of visiting reporters...

...Meanwhile, state headquarters at Madison, on its own, raised an additional $100,000 (nearly half of that from The Progressive's subscribers) and the Milwaukee office of the McCarthy campaign took in about $70,000 more...

...But later the cause and McCarthy were inseparable, a rallying point for all generations...

...organized coffee hours and rallies, handed out literature, wrote letters to newspapers, made telephone calls, and performed dozens of other chores...

...He opened with a lengthy preamble on President Johnson's Vietnam problems, pointing out how difficult it was to disengage the United States from Southeast Asia, I was willing to concede the difficulty, but he cut me off...

...Meanwhile, such columnists as Joseph Alsop, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, and William S. White were downgrading McCarthy's chances with monotonous regularity...

...McCarthy defeated President Johnson in this district by 57,564 to 21,854...

...One day in early March a Washington correspondent did turn up to talk to me about McCarthy's prospects, or so I believed...

...On the night of February 22, we did have the briefest of conversations...

...However, his advertising in the media continued until the end...

...For the most part, they continue to follow the methods of news coverage and inquiry that apply to the normal patterns of politics...

...But when McCarthy captured fifty-six per cent Chet Huntley told the nation the Senator had not really accomplished anything important...

...we estimated that Wisconsin's "home-grown" McCarthy organization finally numbered 4,000 non-student volunteers and more than 3,000 students resident on twenty campuses in the state...

...Campaign circumstances made him about as accessible as the Grand Lama of Tibet...

...But on February 23, few would have forecast that McCarthy would sweep seventy-one of the seventy-two counties, carry eight of the ten Congressional Districts, losing only the two in Milwaukee, and would capture forty-nine of fifty-nine delegates...

...Sincerely, Arnold Serwer...

...President Johnson's total vote in the two districts was 83,145 compared to 127,000 cast in 1964 for then Governor John Reynolds, the Johnson stand-in whose challenger, George Wallace, drew 70,000 votes...

...What we had here, Mr...

...Johnson's dilemma...

...I have great hope that Senator McCarthy's campaign will survive and prosper...

...In The Making of the President: 1960, you referred to Madison that year as "the Stevenson capital of the United States...

...White, as one local newsman expressed it, was "a real people's movement, a grass roots protest...

...Second, the national organization was able to contribute only $12,000 to help keep the state organization going...

...By late March our weekly packets of materials and instructions were being mailed to nearly 3,000 non-student volunteers...

...There were secondary issues —the Johnson Administration's credibility gap, its watering down of urgent domestic legislation, and, in Milwaukee, racial conflict—but it was the war issue that brought out the volunteers, of all ages and in every part of the state, who eventually won the primary for McCarthy so impressively...

...At Madison headquarters and elsewhere one was likely to see a crew of matrons addressing envelopes while students folded circulars and a grandfather operated a mimeograph machine...

...To Wisconsin voters, the war in Vietnam was the transcending issue...

...Our mailings, publicity, and field efforts mobilized the scattered segments of war protesters into a unified, effective force supporting Senator McCarthy's campaign...

...Apparently Newsweek believed the place to begin was in the least populous counties...

...There were thousands of volunteers who have not been in school for years who stuffed envelopes, raised funds...

...When the mass media are confronted with surprising events in Presidential politics, they do not seem to know how to cope with them...

...By late January, with about 1,400 volunteers organized in thirteen counties which account for sixty per cent of Wisconsin's population, I estimated for the state press that if the election were held then McCarthy would receive thirty per cent of the vote in the Democratic column...

...On the night of April 3, when it was clear—at least to the people of Wisconsin—that Eugene McCarthy had won a smashing victory, NBC's Chet Huntley asserted that none of the April 2 primary vote meant much because Mr...

...But they did influence other Washington columnists and commentators who tend toward Groupthink as much less troublesome than getting off their chairs and digging out the truth...

...In my opinion, there is no surer way to "turn off" a people's movement than to overload it with "political pros" who do not understand the explosive power of an appeal to the people on the issues that concern them...

...White: Leading political analysts are once again writing off Senator Eugene McCarthy's chances of making it to the White House...

...He continued to review Mr...

...Members of the national McCarthy committee staff arrived in Wisconsin in mid-March and set up headquarters in Milwaukee...

...It was an oddity of my campaign experience, Mr...

...The Wisconsin story had little resemblance to what happened in New Hampshire...

...The truth is that McCarthy carried seventy-one of the state's seventy-two counties, including thirteen of Wisconsin's fourteen industrial centers...

...I told him that every day saw new McCarthy county committees organized and that if this rate of growth was maintained he could carry the state —an outcome regarded as unthinkable at the time...

...After giving the original quotation and its source, I said: "Senator McCarthy, meet the most wonderful volunteers in the world—and welcome to Madison, the McCarthy capital of the United States...

...This was an incredibly false reading of the history of the Wisconsin campaign...

...They did not bother to drop in at the McCarthy headquarters to get another viewpoint...

...Johnson had withdrawn...

...In early January, when Senator McCarthy's candidacy was only five or six weeks old and his national organization just coming to life, the McCarthy forces in Wisconsin consisted of units only in Madison and Milwaukee...