Miami Beach: 2. The Democrats

Hubert Humphrey was nominated for President by the Democratic National Convention in 1968 at the sour mercy of three men: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Daley, and John Connally. Johnson found it not to his choosing to attend the 1972 convention, Daley found it not within his power, and Connally had, as it were, a prior commitment. The leading candidate got himself nominated beholden to none of the traditional brokerage houses of power. The contrast with what happened in 1968 was extraordinarily complete. The convention itself, so manifestly the product of delegate selection democratization, was a kind of promise that the spirit of reform in politics, bankrupted for some seasons now, was back in business. Unbossed, George McGovern now has the one asset Humphrey lacked in 1968: control of his own campaign, autonomy. But he lacks the one asset that almost pulled Humphrey through then: organized labor’s determined, complete support.

The proposition that McGovern’s chances in November are better than the party professionals rate them, no matter what the leaders of organized labor do or fail to do, is based on a sense of the positive spirit at Miami Beach. Representing the minority of those present were the Democratic pros, who spoke of their party’s choice of McGovern in metaphors having to do with ending one’s life by one’s own hand: the words that flew around were “suicide,” “self-destruction,” and “hara-kiri.” Vindication of this view rests on the re-election of Richard Nixon. In the meantime, the terminology can be tossed back at the professionals, and another Japanese term, “kamikaze,” added. Who hurt the party’s fortunes more, the man who legitimately won the lion’s share of the delegates, or those who tried to thwart his nomination? People who commit suicide often want to be stopped. If, as is arguable, the antiMcGovern coalition behaved as “suicidally” as they said the party did in nominating McGovern, the worst that can be said of the nominee is that he did not try harder, earlier, to reach out to his enemies, to calm their fears and furies. Before his nomination, he communicated either unproductively or not at all with Mayor Daley, labor leaders, Southern governors, and an individual readier than most of the others to play middleman, Wilbur Mills.

At the same time, he was alert to the danger that such contact could lead to entrapment in one of the subplots of the convention: if McGovern’s delegate count could not be pulled down, perhaps his strength could be made to work against him (to revert to Japanese, “jujitsu” was the word for this ploy). First let him be shown to be a divisive “rule or ruin” force in a convention neither side could carry, a candidate feared by men and women seeking lesser office who must run with him at the top of the ticket. Then orchestrate a turn to “peacemaker” Edward Kennedy. Wilbur Mills worked hardest at the scenario. According to conspiracy theories, Daley was independently interested in it. Those close to Mills say that members of the Kennedy family and entourage flirted, on again, off again. Because the scenario was common knowledge around the convention, because of the set of compelling reasons why Kennedy did not openly seek nomination and his sequence of statements about them, the only way the scenario could begin was if the convention blew up. The only way it was going to blow up was if McGovern showed weakness; Humphrey and Muskie were spent. So he stood aloof, at the price of preballoting “unity.”

Odds

The one attempt at compromise was over the Illinois delegate dispute, and it blew up in everyone’s face. “They’re trying to jam it down our throats,” an anti-Daleyite said on the convention floor of the effort to give half of the contested Chicago seats to Daley and the other half to his challengers. By “they” this insurgent meant not the Daley forces but the McGovern staff. But Daley wasn’t buying, and the McGovern staff bumped into a parliamentary situation that required an unattainable two-thirds vote to put the compromise through. Thus, an irony: McGovern’s one major reverse at Miami Beach was the result of an effort (some say wholehearted, some say halfhearted) not to shut his enemies out but to let them in.

In such matters of larger significance, the 1972 Democratic National Convention was as day to night for those who were at Chicago four years ago. There were small differences, too, but suggestive ones. An example: in 1968, some meticulous minds in the field of “security” devised a system for admission to the convention hall involving formidable-looking plastic cards worn around the neck. One had to do a partial stoop to get the card into an electronic thingamajig manned by vigilant attendants. This time, a simple, old-fashioned set of manilla cards with tear-off stubs sufficed (though the guards also stamped one’s hand with invisible “twenty-four-hour” ink on the first and last nights of the convention). It was one of the countless signs that “security” was not thought of as a crisis at Miami Beach, and that it did not become one.

George McGovern left Miami Beach with his most angry adversaries unappeased. Some of the drawing together came faster than was expected when the anger was deep. Mayor Daley was the first to deal himself back in, albeit poker-faced. Daley had never put much stock in Humphrey, Muskie, Jackson; his interest was in Kennedy. But labor fought hard for the other candidates. Beyond George Meany and friends’ grudges against McGovern and disagreement with him over issues, beyond the question of which McGovern reforms union members like and which they fear, there is the fact that McGovern owed the embittered leaders of organized labor no more at Miami Beach than he owed Wall Street. Those who opposed him dictated nothing at the convention; they had no veto and not even, as in 1968, a candidate for Vice President. That is a long fall from FDR’s command twenty-eight years ago to “clear” political decisions with the late Sidney Hillman, and it hurt.

McGovern left Miami Beach, too, with the Las Vegas odds quoted at 2 to 1 and 4 to 1 against him. But wait. A Southern businessman who supported McGovern from the start happened to be in Las Vegas in January when the odds were 100 to 1 against a McGovern nomination. He put up $1000. On the steamy July night when McGovern went over the top in Miami Beach, this gentleman cleared $100,000 from Las Vegas. He is giving most of it to McGovern.

-MICHAEL JANEWAY